Irina Palm (2007)

Directed by: Sam Garbarski | 103 minutes | drama | Actors: Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic, Kevin Bishop, Siobhan Hewlett, Dorka Gryllus, Jenny Agutter, Corey Burke, Meg Wynn Owen, Susan Hitch, Flip Webster, Tony O’Brien, Jules Werner, Ann Queensberry, June Bailey, Jonathan Coyne

Anyone looking at the plot of the international co-production ‘Irina Palm’ will expect little more than a melodrama. At first, the story even feels a bit 19th-century. A sick child who can only be saved if the family can cough up the necessary money for an operation within six weeks. To finance the running costs, Grandma Maggie has already sold her house and borrowed money from the entire neighborhood community. In order not to let her grandchild die, she then takes a job that does not really suit her social status and background. For the first time in her life she has to roll up her sleeves, in a sex club with the unimaginative name Sexy World. But will Maggie earn enough to save her grandchild?

Against all odds, ‘Irina Palm’ remains miles away from melodrama. The film is a tragicomedy that also has something sensible to say about hypocrisy, shame and sacrifice. Despite the characters and locations being purely English, the film has a more ‘European’ feel to it. The humor is always modest and there is hardly any dramatization. Even when Maggie’s secret life is discovered, it only leads to a single emotional outlier.

The blossoming romance with the surly and human sex club owner Mikky (nice role by Miki Manojlovic) also always remains in emotionally calm waters. It makes ‘Irina Palm’ come across as equanimous and nuanced, despite the intense subject. The sex that you would expect in such a film hardly plays a role here. Explicit sex is certainly not done at all. It is Maggie’s job to give the male genitalia that are inserted through a hole in a cabin a stimulating massage (with HP). We don’t get to see anything from those genitals, from Maggie all the more. Dressed in a Ma Flodder apron, thermos flask and lunch box within reach, she treats her customers like a farmer’s wife milking her cows.

The contrast between the unbothered Maggie and the moans and groans of her customers is as sad as it is hilarious. Unfortunately, not everything is equally successful with ‘Irina Palm’. The acting is erratic and the characters are not always believable. For example, the development of the beautiful Luisa, from indifferent colleague to best friend to enemy, is perfectly understandable on paper, but it doesn’t work on celluloid. Yet they are only minor blemishes. What remains is a sympathetic film about a sympathetic person in a not too unsympathetic world. No feel-good, but it really doesn’t matter much.