Yet Another Rainy Day

The film stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley plus a whole host of well known British actors, and it has recently been added to Netflix.

I enjoyed the film in itself and (spoiler alert) the lengths the women go to in order to prove person accused of sending the poison pen letters did not actually do it. The sweary content and random insults in the letters were also pretty funny.

But the film got me thinking about the portrayal of male characters in fiction. The film was based on a true story, but if this account in the Radio Times of the actual events that inspired the story is to be believed, a fair bit of artistic licence has been taken.

It would seem to me that some of that has been to make the film more feminist, to show the female characters having to stand up for themselves in the face of poor behaviour from the men. And pretty much all of the men in the film are either basically abusive or incompetent.

At the risk of sounding a bit “not all men”, I wonder that there should be more positive male characters in film. But perhaps that is not the point of fiction, which is only to create a world for us to inhabit briefly that takes us away from our everyday lives. Or maybe it would not make for the most compelling storylines in the eyes of film producers.