User Reviews

The film is fascinating for its background detail (of Wales during the miners' strike of the 1980s, as well as the 1960s cinema trivia visible in the interior of the Rex, and the original-vintage projection equipment) but it does betray its origins. The script was written in English and only translated into Welsh in order to gain funding, the intermittent bursts of background music and of a uniform standard fade between shots struck me as somewhat amateurish, some of the cast didn't seem entirely comfortable in Welsh, and all in all it felt like a TV production of the era rather than a feature film. A curiosity rather than a classic piece of entertainment.

It's not bad, and there are both humorous and moving moments. Comparisons with "The Smallest Show on Earth" and with Ealing comedy are inevitable, but "Coming up Roses" doesn't follow the plucky-underdog blueprint for pictures of that era; there's a sort of sense of depression hanging over the film from the start (not helped, I confess, by the revelation just before the screening began that the bid to save the real-life Rex cinema failed and that the building seen here was duly demolished!) and I wasn't entirely surprised by the downbeat ending. I didn't find this a totally satisfying experience, however -- perhaps we have been too conditioned to expect the outcomes of the 1950s to be able to enjoy the concerns of the 1980s. The director insisted: "the devastated valley communities... won't be put down and they are extremely resourceful, but we didn't want to have a happy ending because that's just not the way it is in 1980s Britain."

The era during which the picture is set had me somewhat confused. It comes across as taking place in the 1960s (the rock group, the films advertised) but also appears to be set in the 1980s (the closed pit, economic hardship, video recorders).