David Leland's gentle romantic
drama delves intimately into the lives of three young women serving England during World
War II as members of the nearly forgotten Women's Land Army. The real Land Girls, as they
were called, made up an estimable female force called to farming and domestic labors to
offset the loss of men to the war effort. Leland, adapting Angela Huth's novel, has made a
sweet, poignant romance with underpinnings of wartime upheaval. Set in the sodden
farmlands of Dorset during the winter of 1941, the film stars Catherine McCormack, Rachel
Weisz, Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh. Wistful but not precious, »The Land Girls«
takes a bit of acclimatizing, but Leland makes his leisurely pacing an attribute. The film
sinks into the green, serene countryside, a place where emotions echo big.
City women Stella, Ag and Prue arrive at a tiny village train station ready to serve their
country. They milk cows, tend chickens and plow hilly fields on a farm owned by John
Lawrence. Stella, the oldest, wonderfully played by McCormack, is willing to lose herself
in labor to fill the painful days apart from her upper-crust beau, a Royal Navy officer.
For Ag, a brainy Cambridge graduate, the farm is an adventure, and for Prue, a brazen
working-class hairdresser, it's an opportunity to explore. For all three Land Girls, the
most interesting wrinkle is a guy named Joe, the motorcycle-riding, mud-splattered
farmer's son. Joe is the character to watch -- the gangly Mackintosh plays him with
heartrending reticence but a half smile of warmth. Tied to the land and putting off going
to war, Joe is a healthy man suddenly surrounded by three beautiful women. He simply can't
resist the charm they bring to his middle-of-nowhere life. He knows that he should not
climb into the hayloft with any of them, yet in one of the film's most endearing scenes he
is nearly undone for doing so. Each woman loves Joe in her own way, and while the movie
overreaches in trying to build on their relationships with him, it is ultimately romance
that takes center stage. A war that has seemed remote is brought home chillingly when the
farm folk witness the eerie glow of bombs dropped on an England that seems far away. And
the horror arrives point-blank when a disabled German fighter crashes on a pasture where
the girls are working - one of many reminders of loss that drives the film far deeper than
its scenic surfaces.
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