I am taking a sick day today because this allergy attack is the worst!  So this will be very short.

Ladies in Lavender is a slight wistful film filled with yearning, jealousy and regret.  Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith give tender nuanced performances filled with love and longing. The film is firmly in the Power of Idealism camp.

Ladies in Lavender is set at the end of an era, right before World War II changes the world forever.  The two spinster ladies, still living in the family home perched high on the Cornwall Cliffs, find a young man washed on shore.  He is a talented violinist, on his way to America, before being swept off board.  They nurse him back to health.

His presence disrupts the two sisters’ peaceful lives and disrupts the tight knit fishing community in which they live.  His unique gifts, and his second language German, set off building envy and suspicion.  A younger woman, a painter, spirits him off to London (“like a witch in a fairy tale” one sister says). There he finds fame and fortune as a violinist and has one last brief encounter with the two sisters.

This is a lovely period film with fine strong female performances–  Just what the doctor ordered!