Biddy

A meticulously realised, perfectly nostalgic picture whose subject is a Victorian nurserymaid. Biddy's voice, decorated equally with passages from English literature and pithy homilies, runs on and on (all other voices are surreal noises-off) marshalling the forces of the nursery and the pattern of her charges' lives. She revels, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle-like, in mending, clean linen and the laying of tea, happiest when 'everything is in its proper place, everything is in order'. But even as this spare, deliberately wrought film so carefully points and extolls the virtues of Biddy and those many others like her, it is apparent that what is really being celebrated is the paraphernalia of these lives. The sewing-boxes, the button-hooks, the pieces of treen and piles of handworked lace, these are the real stars of the film.