The Naked Truth

I recently watched the movie The Calendar Girls. For those of you who are not aware of its subject matter, it is about a group of proper British matrons “of a certain age” who belong to the Rylstone Women’s Institute, a “ladies group” (you know the type) whose meetings always begin with the hymn Jerusalem, and feature speakers whose topics range from “the many uses of broccoli” to “slides from our recent holiday”. Helen Mirren plays one of the younger members, Chris, whose participation was essentially “bequeathed” to her when her mother passed away, and who, along with her friend Annie (played by Julie Walters) is bored with the stodgy, pedestrian activities of the club. Being on the rebellious side, when participating in the annual bake sale at the club’s annual fair, she enters a sponge cake purchased from a local bake shop. When she wins “first prize”, Chris attributes her mother’s baking instructions, and then states, “...and if it’s something really important, buy it from [a bake shop].” All the women assume it is a joke. But when Annie’s husband John, an Assistant National Park Officer with the Yorkshire Dales and a lover of flowers—especially sunflowers, passes away from leukemia, Chris and Annie decide to raise money for a memorial in John’s name. In the film, this was to be a couch to replace the one in the hospital’s waiting room, whose discomfort added insult to injury as Annie and Chris spent time together during the final, painful hours of John’s life. Since the Women’s Institute published a fund-raising calendar every year to raise money for some charitable purpose, Chris thought this would be a fitting opportunity. But the couch was quite expensive, and the calendar, whose subject matter was generally rather pedestrian scenes from the Yorkshire dales, actually raised very little money. John had once said, “The flowers of Yorkshire are like the women of Yorkshire...the last stage of their growth is the most glorious.” Of course, he followed up his statement with wry, British humor, saying, “Then they go to seed.” John’s observation had not been lost on Chris, however, who, when she heard that the subject of that year’s calendar was ostensibly “fresh vegetables”, had said in an aside to Annie, “Thank God. For a minute I thought it would be boring.” Chris proposed an alternative calendar to Annie, featuring the true “flowers” of the Yorkshire dales, the women of the Yorkshire dales—in the nude! And the rest, as they say, is history.

This movie is, in fact, based on a true incident. The story of the “Baker’s Half-Dozen”, and the calendar that made them international “celebrities” is told at the Movie-O (MovieOrigins.com). Much was “fictionalized” for the sake of the movie, but the substance of the story was, in fact, quite accurate, and the movie itself is delightful. Now you might wonder how it is that a Christian determined to watch a movie that had been billed as the British women’s answer to The Full Monty, a movie about a group of men who decide to put on a sort of Chippendale’s show featuring local men who dance and strip to raise money. The “full monty”, of course, refers to the point at which they “drop trou’” as it were, and give a “full frontal” display. Actually, the movies could not be more different. The Full Monty was the typical British “nudge, nudge...wink, wink”, a movie whose actual story line seemed incidental to the, well, climax. It seemed tawdry, with an eye to the prurient, and the inevitable, “politically correct” film depiction of a homosexual encounter. The Full Monty was no worse than Benny Hill’s humor, and certainly not as extreme as the BBC’s Graham Norton Effect. But it was, at best, a guilty pleasure that left one with the feeling they had accidentally wondered into a “peep” show, and had stayed to watch. The Calendar Girls could not have been more different. In fact, far less was depicted than in most television shows on cable nowadays. The “nudity” was handled in a far more tasteful manner (here are links to the original calendar, and the new calendar), discrete and almost prudish by today’s standards. If anyone rents the DVD thinking that they will be entertained by a “skin flick”, they will be sorely disappointed. The “nudity” in The Calendar Girls is, in many ways, almost incidental to the story line. Like the calendar itself, the movie is not salacious. It is rather a story told with warmth about the courage of a group of British women, whose selfless actions succeeded in raising more than £450,000 (comfortably over a million U.S. dollars) to fund cutting-edge research into lymphoma and leukemia at the University of Leeds in Great Britain.

Of course, on must wonder to what extent The Calendar Girls is an allegory for our times. Perhaps it reminded us what is the true source of beauty. It is something that flows naturally from the heart, and is not affected by “gravity” and the ravages of time. How strange that we would need to be reminded of this again. After all, this is the era of women’s liberation. Women are no longer “slaves” to the “drudgery” of the household and of child-rearing. They are no longer sex objects. They work in factories and offices—they even serve in the military. One would think that, with the exception of equality of wages with their male counterparts, women had reached a virtual Nirvana of self-respect and freedom of expression. Why then does it seem that, if anything, our society has become obsessed with youth, and feminine images which result in anorexia, bulimia, and a lifetime of “nip” and “tuck”? No longer the “earth shoe” generation, many women suffer to look like the cast of Sex in the City, with cosmetics and skin treatments enough to start a small pharmacy, clothing styles designed for waifs, and shoes designed for maximum discomfort, with spike heels that must be a chiropractor’s dream and narrow toes that are reminiscent of the “foot binding” that was common in China generations ago, until it was outlawed. If anything, women, who sought freedom from the “oppressive” gender roles bequeathed to them from Victorian England, are now more slaves to their gender than ever. And the National Organization of Women, having become an activist voice for gay and lesbian rights, remains amazingly silent. They could not bring themselves to even offer moral support to those women who, during the administration of President Clinton, claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the then “groper-in-chief”.

Annie Baker’s husband loved the sunflower, which was not native to the Yorkshire dales, but is very familiar to many of us from the United States—especially to me, as a native Kansan (Kansas being the “sunflower” state). He had mused about how the face of the sunflower followed the sun across the sky, from its rising to its setting (which is, in fact, how it got its name). And the sunflower appeared prominently in the calendar. These women, most glorious in the “last stages” of their growth, like the sunflower, kept their faces to the sun and a displayed their beauty, without pretense, for all to admire—for those willing to truly “see”.