Peake performance

Two films about women this week. One, Funny Cow, is about a woman who daringly takes on men at their own game while the other, Let the Sunshine In, is dressed up in French art-house garb but basically has Juliette Binoche tirelessly running round Paris in thrall to every fella she encounters. I certainly know which I preferred. However, if you look at review aggregate sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see Sunshine achieves the far higher score. But then most film critics are male and probably wouldn’t mind Juliette Binoche tirelessly chasing them round Paris, or anywhere else. (I have just asked a man if this is so and he has confirmed: ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. And it could be Bournemouth.’)

Funny Cow, which is set in the 1970s, is loosely based on the life of Marti Caine, the Sheffield comic who worked the northern working men’s clubs for 15 years before winning New Faces and becoming a household name. I remember her, and can’t recall being a fan especially, but can now see she was fantastically heroic. The film has its shortcomings, it pains me to say, but it also has Maxine Peake, who is a wonder, and more than holds it all together. She doesn’t so much act as burn. She burns with intelligence, burns with anger, burns with a fierce, blistering energy. I kept expecting the screen to go up — whoosh! — like a firework.

Directed by Adrian Shergold (Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman and for TV Holding On, Persuasion, Dirty Filthy Love), and scripted by actor Tony Pitts, who makes his screenwriting debut, the narrative is episodic and hops about in time. But essentially we follow Funny Cow (she is never awarded a name) from the childhood beatings inflicted by her violent father (Stephen Graham) through to her marriage to an abusive man (played by Tony Pitts) and then on to the comedy that will eventually lead to stardom.