Calendar Girls

After five years of mostly poor imitations, The Full Monty finally has a successor as champion movie of the underdog. British cinema has been busting a gut to emulate that film's combination of pathos, pluck and earthy humour, either by offering another yard of confused masculinity (Lucky Break) or else sporting the Monty colours in the form of some dire sports flick (Up'n'Under, The Match). Calendar Girls, adapted from the real-life story of the Yorkshire women who posed nude for a Women's Institute calendar to help raise money for a local hospital, not only matches the camaraderie of Monty's unemployed steelworkers but cheekily doffs its hat to their bold initiative: stripping off in public.

"Enlightenment, fun and friendship" are the watchwords of the Knapely branch of the Women's Institute, though the "fun" part for free-spirited members Annie (Julie Walters) and Chris (Helen Mirren) resides in giggling like schoolgirls through another interminable talk on carpet-weaving or broccoli. Chris in particular likes to poke fun at the absurd inconsequence of the group, entering a WI competition for the best sponge cake with one she secretly bought from Marks and Spencer. It wins, of course. Contented boredom turns to heartbreak, however, when Annie's beloved husband (John Alderton) dies of cancer. One of his valedictory reflections - "the last stage of the flower is the most glorious" - solaces Annie and then plants an idea in Chris's head: how about a calendar picturing the ladies pursuing traditional pastimes such as knitting and jam-making, only, you know, in the buff?

"Not naked - nude", Chris insists, on the grounds that it sounds more like art. Their WI friends are initially doubtful, dismayed or outraged, though soon enough they're breaking into joyous cackles as they realise both the shock potential of the stunt and the possibility that this could be their one and only chance to strut their stuff. Penelope Wilton, Annette Crosbie, Celia Imrie and Linda Bassett play their chief allies in the enterprise (one can only assume that Brenda Blethyn was otherwise engaged) and perhaps they too sensed it as a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity: middle-aged actors are often allowed, even expected, to get raunchy in the raw, but middle-aged actresses hardly ever. I reckon Kathy Bates finally broke the taboo on nudity for the older (and larger) woman earlier this year when she unselfconsciously stripped off for a hot tub scene with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt.

So three cheers for the women, particularly Julie Walters as the grieving yet warm-hearted widow. Loath as I am to rain on the parade, however, especially one built on an act of charity, I found the movie they were starring in frequently unbearable. Calendar Girls is your basic British comedy of embarrassment in which anything mildly risqué - nudity, swearing, sexual innuendo - is either greeted with behind-the-hand sniggering or else boldly embraced as proof of one's liberal thinking. "You're nude in today's Telegraph, dear", says Annette Crosbie's husband over the breakfast table, before asking her to pass the bacon. (Indeed, only one of the women's husbands is actively hostile to the calendar, and he turns out to be an adulterous weasel). What grates is the easy route to laughs which the script (by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi) invariably takes. Too often it goes for cheap incongruity, such as the prim middle-class matron who talks of "front-bottoms"; tries to end a scene with some deflating prosaic remark ("Who's for chips?"); and cranks up the bluff northernisms ("I 'ate plum jam").

The writers also overplay the bogus setbacks, those occasions when the wheels seem to come off a masterplan but are in fact a prelude to an even greater triumph. There's the moment when Chris and Annie turn up to their first press conference and find the place empty - all that hard work apparently gone for nothing - only to be told that they've entered by the wrong door and find an excited media waiting to overwhelm them in the next room. The trick is repeated when the ladies, now celebrities on their way to Hollywood, are turned back at the airport check-in desk after a long queue. Oh no! But not to worry, they're actually being upgraded on the flight, thus providing a rather nauseating plugola for Virgin Upper Class. (Was this for charity too?) Unbelievably, they trot it out again when Annie is conducted around a suite with huge picture windows overlooking LA, then asks the concierge if she could go to her own room now because she needs a lie down. But madam, says the concierge, this is your room - the bedroom is just upstairs. Good grief.

The whole of the Hollywood section, in truth, feels misjudged, as the calendar girls become playthings of commerce and the friendship between Annie and Chris suffers serious turbulence. Whether this was based on real events or invented by the scriptwriters, the moral recriminations that fly back and forth are draggy and in any case opaque. Is Annie indulging a Mother Teresa complex now that hundreds of women are writing to her about their bereavement? Has Chris lost sight of the original charity in making a beeline for the loot? We don't know enough about either of them to tell, and this isn't the movie to help us decide. Let's at least be grateful that at no point does "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves" ring out on the soundtrack. Calendar Girls already carries enough buzz to make it a hit, not of Monty proportions but probably bigger than any other homegrown movie this year. No underdog will yap around your ankles quite so eagerly, or waggle its paws in the air begging to be stroked. I just found myself able to resist the temptation.