Plot
A true tale of love, liberty and scandal amongst the Edwardian artists' colony in Cornwall
Release Year: 2013
Rating: 5.7/10 (754 voted)
Director:Christopher Menaul
Storyline
The Newlyn School of artists flourished at the beginning of the 20th Century and the film focuses on the wild and bohemian Lamorna Group, which included Alfred Munnings and Laura and Harold Knight. The incendiary anti-Modernist Munnings, now regarded as one of Britain's most sought-after artists, is at the centre of the complex love triangle, involving aspiring artist Florence Carter-Wood and Gilbert Evans, the land agent in charge of the Lamorna Valley estate. True - and deeply moving - the story is played out against the timeless beauty of the Cornish coast, in the approaching shadow of The Great War.
Filming Locations: Lamorna Cove, Lamorna, Cornwall, England, UK
Box Office Details
Budget: £5,000,000
(estimated)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Did You Know?
Trivia: Ophelia Lovibond was originally cast in the lead role. She dropped out and was replaced by Emily Browning. See more »
Goofs:
Whenever Florence is modeling for Munnings on the horse her coat is up to the horse's withers, but in the painting the coat is back exposing her thigh. See more »
User Review
Author:
Rating: 7/10
I went to this blind, as it were, not having read any reviews on here -
I think this is probably the first - nor any of the critic reviews in
the papers. I am a little surprised that it is showing so low on the
star rating as, for myself and my wife, it was a throughly entertaining
evening at the cinema. I knew very little about the Newlyn artistic set
before but it would appear to have been as incestuous and fraught with
failed and doomed relationships as the Bloomsbury literary group of a
couple of decades later. Enter Florence, fresh from an overbearing
father in London, to visit her brother who was already part of the set.
Her beauty turns more than a few heads and A.J.Munnings, a wild and
poetry-spouting bohemian, persuades her to sit as a model - and
attempts to teach her the rudiments of drawing. Gilbert, in some ways
the major-domo of the group but not an artist himself, also falls for
Florence but she sees in him many of the traits of her strait-laced
father and when Munnings proposes to her she accepts. Tragedy, as we
will have garnered from what has gone before, will inevitably follow.
The photography and cinematography is a pleasure to the eye and the
producer has taken pains to get the period correct. Where it slightly
falls down is in the character of Florence who, I have since learnt,
was already unsettled and a depressive before she arrived at Lamorna.
This would account for her later actions but we get no sense of her
instability in the first half of the film. There may be an
over-emphasis on "all down the pub for a jolly good drink and a
sing-along and pay the landlord with a quick 10 second sketch for the
bill" but overall we felt sufficiently interested in the history
portrayed by the movie to do some subsequent research on the real
characters portrayed.
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