Enchanted April
Short description
Enchanted April follows two married British women, Lottie Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot, who each long for a change from their daily lives and the company of their husbands. Answering an advertisement offering a castle in Italy for a month, the pair recruit two companions: Caroline Dester, a young woman from fashionable society, and Mrs Fisher, an older aristocratic widow. The four travel to the Italian coast, where the unfamiliar surroundings and the garden and sea views gradually alter how each of them sees herself and her future.
Mike Newell directed the film, working from a screenplay by Peter Barnes, with Ann Scott producing. It came early in Newell's run of features, several years before Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco. Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson play the two women who arrange the trip, with Polly Walker and Joan Plowright completing the household. Alfred Molina appears as Lottie's husband, Mellersh Wilkins, and Michael Kitchen plays George Briggs.
The film is a British production, released in late 1991, and it reached about 13 million dollars at the worldwide box office, a solid return for a modest costume drama. On IMDb it holds 7.3 from roughly 7,700 votes. A critics' rating of 6.9 from 33 reviews sits close to the audience scores, indicating a warm but not unanimous response on both sides.
What's left behind the scenes
- The scenes in Italy were filmed in Portofino (a small fishing town in the province of Genoa), in the same castle where Elizabeth von Arnim (1886-1941) lived in the 1920s while working on the novel of the same name, which served as the literary basis for the script.
- In Italy, the film was shot in a castle located high above the harbor, and there was no normal road to it. Every morning, the actors and crew members had to climb more than a kilometer up the mountainside – and with filming equipment – and descend in the evenings. There was only one lift available, but it was permitted for use by only one lady, Joan Plourait.
- Of the entire cast and crew of the film, only Alfred Molina spoke Italian, and consequently, during the filming in Italy, only he could freely communicate with Italian actors and locals. The result was that he became the translator for the entire creative team of the film.
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