Their Finest review – sharp wartime romance

London, 1940. Catrin (Gemma Arterton) is scurrying home through the blitzed streets at dusk. Without warning, she is sideswiped by a bomb blast. Blinking grit from her eyes, she stumbles into a pile of broken bodies. Her initial horror tips into laughter when she realises that they are shop mannequins. Then she notices that one of them is bleeding – a salesgirl lies amid the wreckage of the window display. While the dust and death is still clearing from the air, Catrin vomits from shock, silhouetted in a yawning archway.

The scene elegantly combines twin themes in this bracing second world war romance from Lone Scherfig. It captures the savage uncertainty of life during wartime; and, in a nod to the film’s movie industry backdrop, it deftly peels back layers of reality and artifice.

This film, adapted from Lissa Evans’s novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half, is a pleasing fit for the peppy, playful approach of An Education director Scherfig. And like An Education, Their Finest combines storytelling as enveloping as an eiderdown with sudden prickly burrs of discomfort.

Arterton brings a grace and dignity to the role, which suggests reserves of courage in her character that the screenplay only hints at. Catrin left her home in the Welsh valleys for love. Her artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston) specialises in self-important daubs depicting industrial blight. His canvases are a tough sell. Which is why, when – for reasons that could have been more persuasively developed – Catrin is offered a job at the Ministry of Information’s film division, she jumps at the chance.

Swiftly graduating from Mr Cholmondley-Warner-style informationals, she finds herself chipping in with the female angle on a propaganda film about twin girls who filched their father’s boat to help with the evacuation of Dunkirk. Scherfig and her team take inspiration from crisp, morale-boosting tales of ordinary folk like Millions Like Us (1943), The Gentle Sex (1943) and Went the Day Well? (1942). And in making the director a documentary film-maker, there’s a nod to the seminal wartime work of Humphrey Jennings (Listen To Britain, Fires Were Started).

The film-within-a-film structure is a neat device, which mirrors the tea-swilling stoicism of the blitz spirit in the brisk pulled-together professionalism of the movie set. It takes in the quiet revolution in wartime sexual politics – the key female characters are in their jobs because the chaps are otherwise engaged, but for the most part, the women have no intention of going “back into their boxes” once the war is over. It also acknowledges the dismissive, tweedy sexism of the era by having even the most sympathetic of the male characters, sarcastic bespectacled screenwriter Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), blithely dismiss women’s dialogue in a movie as “slop”.

There’s a rattling, screwball rhythm to the banter that Catrin and Tom bat back and forth. And while it falls short of the staccato comic assault of something like His Girl Friday, there’s a pleasingly sharp-witted astringency to their bickering. It is Tom who explains that the appeal of movies, particularly during wartime, is that they impose an order and a logic that is absent from the arbitrary chaos of real life. Perhaps the boldest decision here is to allow one such random tragedy to rob the audience of an outcome we are expecting in a way that nobody sees coming.

The humour is fortified by sterling work from Bill Nighy, deliciously vain as ageing star Ambrose Hilliard and gloriously hammy in character as boozy Uncle Frank. A handsome wintry palette of slate blue, charcoal grey and cream incorporates everything from Ambrose’s dapper wardrobe to Ellis’s glum paintings. Effective use of CGI carves a battle-scarred London backdrop. But even as it affectionately embraces the film-making cliches of the time, the picture falls victim to a few of its own. An awkwardly contrived second-act argument played out under a “bomber’s moon” on a beach uses up the film’s entire cheese ration in one go. Were it not for the unexpected turn of events shortly afterwards, the script could have torpedoed itself with predictability. Still, of the many second world war films poised for release this year – among them Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk; Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour and Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill – it’s hard to imagine any will match Their Finest for its big-hearted swell of warmth and its unstuffy empathy.