European Films

Marianne Faithfull becomes a self-described wanking widow in Sam Garbarski’s endearing and surprisingly funny Irina Palm. The director’s follow-up to his debut Les tango des Rashevski is a winning feature about a 50-year-old widow who starts working in the Soho sex trade to finance a costly operation abroad for her grandson. Never lurid or vulgar despite its setting, Irina Palm wears its big heart right up it sleeve thanks in major part to a matronly performance from Faithfull and a low-key script for which Garbarski finds exactly the right tone. Though the film’s frank treatment of its subject will exclude younger teenage viewers, Irina Palm could be a mid-size hit at arthouses, with possible crossover potential to the mainstream.

 

On the surface Irina Palm could be mistaken for a sibling of the bittersweet UK comedies of the "sex saves the day if you’re in money trouble" variety such as The Full Monty and Calendar Girls. Instead, the collaboration between Iranian-born Belgian screenwriter Philippe Blasband and the German-born Belgian writer-director has a more continental feel in that the characters’ weary melancholy has a firm place and the film’s gentle humour is used only when appropriate. Garbarski does not want to make the audience laugh every two seconds and thus allows the characters and their dilemmas to peep through between the jokes, making the film a surprisingly resonant whole.

 

Through a sombre opening that explains all the problems of Faithfull’s Maggie and how she needs the money for the hospitalised only child (Corey Burke) of her son Tom (Kevin Bishop, from L’auberge espagnole), Garbarski immediately signals the importance of his characters. Only after Maggie is at wit’s end after being refused at banks and employment agencies and she learns from her future boss Mikky (Miki Manojlovic) what being a hostess in his establishment really entails do the laughs start coming. "Do you know what a euphemism is?" Mikky asks Maggie during her job interview. "Neither did I until my lawyer told me".

 

Maggie soon learns what being a hostess in Sexy World really entails and hesitatingly starts working after a quick introductory course by a colleague that is one of the film’s comedic highlights. Diligently applying herself, she is soon rebaptised Irina Palm (after Mikky’s first love and Maggie's soft hands and only working tools) and starts to almost feel at home behind the partition wall that, save for the necessary hole, separates her from her customers who start to queue around the block to be in her hands and which even attracts rival competitors.  

 

The secret behind Irina Palm is that Garbarski finds the right tone and adjusts it only slightly from one scene to the next, whether it be comedy or drama. The film never gets sleazy or exploitative and even the humour is of the "laugh with" rather than the "laugh at the characters" variety. Faithfull is absolutely believable as a widow of 7 years who has remained faithful to her husband’s memory and some of her facial expressions, finely calibrated and never overdone, are priceless.