“You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. It’s your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. […]”. With all the hate speech circulating on and offline at all times in the last years, for today’s spectators these accusations are ridiculously funny and creative. Once upon a time, however, around the 1920s, those lines sparked a national scandal in the UK, known as the Littlehampton libels. This series of letters, containing obscenities and accusations, circulating in the southern English town of Littlehampton, are central to the movie Wicked Little Letters. Directed by Thea Sharrock, with Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, and Anjana Vasan, this historical dark comedy crime premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and is now nominated to the Golden Globes.
Rose (Jessie Buckley) is an Irish single mother living with a black man. She drinks, she curses, and lives as she pleases. Rose is a very easy target for the small conservative community she has recently become part of. A society still recovering from the First World War and now shaken by the suffragette movement. Most men feel threatened by Rose and what she represents for patriarchy. Many women are envious. Edith (Olivia Colman) is a pious, obedient, and devoted unmarried woman living with her parents. The two women, almost specular archetypes, live next door and share a toilet shad and the laundry. A hearted friendship rapidly turns into open animosity. The two women seem to be played out against each other by the system, totally under male control. Edith, pressured by her conservative and abusive father, accuses Rose of sending her infamous wicked little letters. This leads to Rose’s immediate arrest. “Policewomen Gladys” is the only law enforcement not buying into Edith’s accusations. Therefore, she decides to take on proper investigations, despite her colleague’s and boss’ obstructionism. As only helpers, some other independent women of the community, are ready to risk it all in the name of female solidarity. The revelation is that the two main characters, Rose and Edith, are only apparently opposite, they are two faces of the same medal and their role-playing becomes key to the solution to the mystery of the wicked little letters.
Wicked Little Letters is a sarcastic comment on the possible, still not yet, fall of patriarchy, all packaged in a traditional British comedy. While the photography, setting, costumes, and soundtrack are pretty conformist and foreseeable, the characters, plot twists, and dialogues uphold the spectator’s attention. It goes without saying that the three exceptional leading actresses, Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, and Anjana Vasan vitalize the characters in a way that makes them pop out of the too-obvious stereotypes. Director Sharrock bet everything on them and rightly so. The blink of an eye by Jessie Buckley, a subtle evil laugh by Olivia Colman, straight from The Favourite (2018), and a sudden silence by Anjana Vasan, are the real pearls of this movie. Unfortunately, it is often buried under too many jokes and artificial banters stuffing Jonny Sweet’s screenplay.
The couple Coleman-Buckley is back on the screen together after the sodality of The Lost Daughter (2021) the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal. In that adaptation of a novel by Elena Ferrante, Buckley plays the young Leda, a woman in her late 50s, interpreted by Coleman, who tries to come to terms with her motherhood. A central theme also in Wicked Little Letters is how Rose’s capability of being a good mother is always questioned in the background of the movie. Also, Edith’s “spinsterness” and lack of progeny are on everyone’s lips. In Wicked Little Letters, and still today, women are rarely just women in the eyes of society, but rather “daughter of”, “mother of”, “lover of”, and “widow of” … While sexism is widely exposed in the movie, racism seems to be non-existing in the small prude community of Littlehampton. Many of the movie’s characters are indeed of color, but how this impacts their daily life is never touched upon. However, especially after the First World War, a wave of antagonism against Asian and African ex-servicemen and seafarers erupted in many port cities. If on the one hand, addressing both issues might have been too much for a comedy, its colorblindness contributes to an artificial aftertaste to this other well-conceived comedy.
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