Starring: Helena Bergstrom, Elizabeth Spriggs, Lorcan Cranitch
Director: and written by Colin Nutley
Rated: M15+
SET in England during and after World War II, The Queen of Sheba’s Pearls is a period drama about an English schoolboy who discovers that those we love never truly die.
While seemingly a platitude, this becomes apparent only with time, and it is a tribute to Colin Nutley’s considerable skill as a writer-director that he conveys this profound truth without triteness or sentimentality.
The film begins in 1944 when Jack Bradley (Rollo Weeks) is sent to his grandmother’s mansion in the country to celebrate his eighth birthday.
His young mother Emily (Helena Bergstrom) farewells him at the station, blowing him a kiss and telling him he is the ‘best boy in the world’.
But by the time Jack arrives at his destination, Emily has been killed by a crashing Spitfire.
For Jack, his grieving father Harry (Lorcan Cranitch), his grandmother Laura (Elizabeth Spriggs), and his aunts Audrey (Lindsay Duncan) and Peggy (Natasha Little), nothing will ever be the same again.
Nothing, that is, until the arrival at Laura’s house, on the same day eight years later, of Nancy Ackerman (Helena Bergstrom), an exotic, beautiful stranger from Sweden who looks identical to Jack’s mother, and is destined to create havoc within the extended family, who all live together under the same capacious roof.
The patriarch of the family is not Jack’s father Harry, an ex-British Marine who, having lost his wife, seems to have lost his way in life as well, but Jack’s great-uncle Edward.
Played by Peter Vaughan (Remains of the Day and TV’s Heartbeat), he is a cantankerous old man who runs an undertaking business from the family’s home.
Elizabeth Spriggs (Paradise Road, Pride and Prejudice) is superbly understated as Jack’s wise grandmother Laura who has secrets of her own.
The Queen of Sheba’s Pearls, which is named for both a string of pearls belonging to Jack’s mother Emily and an explorative ‘kissing game’ Jack plays later as a teenager, is Nutley’s 12th feature film, and the first to be made in his native country.
Helena Bergstrom, who plays the dual role of Emily and the Swedish bombshell Nancy, is Nutley’s wife in real life and a leading Swedish actress, and it is this sense of England being observed with an outsider’s fresh eye that makes the film so interesting and rewarding.
However, it is Nutley’s deft use of magical realism as a tool for expressing emotional truths that makes The Queen of Sheba’s Pearls such a memorable and affecting film, demonstrating the power of love to be carried forward into the future like pearls on a string.
