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A Reel Life film section
Issue: Spring 2020
Enola Holmes (2020) movie review
An Alternative History of Detection
Re-writing Reality, Fun or Fakery?
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Mystery runs in the family
The younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft escapes their plan to have her taught proper female behaviour. She uses the training of an eccentric suffragette mother to find said missing mother.
England, 1884 -- a world on the brink of change. On the morning of her 16th birthday, Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) wakes to find that her mother (Helena Bonham Carter) has disappeared, leaving behind an odd assortment of gifts but no apparent clue as to where she's gone or why.
After a free-spirited childhood, Enola suddenly finds herself under the care of her brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin), both set on sending her away to a finishing school for "proper" young ladies.
Refusing to follow their wishes, Enola escapes to search for her mother in London. But when her journey finds her entangled in a mystery surrounding a young runaway Lord (Louis Partridge), Enola becomes a super-sleuth in her own right, outwitting her famous brother as she unravels a conspiracy that threatens to set back the course of history.
Based on the book series by Nancy Springer, ENOLA HOLMES introduces the world's greatest detective to his fiercest competition yet: his teenage sister. The game is afoot. (source: Netflix)
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Millie Bobby Brown and Helena Bonham Carter in Enola Holmes (c) 2020 Legendary
Taken as an alternative history, ENOLA HOLMES is a fair enough girl's own adventure. It does have some annoying awkwardness, such as the Holmes men decrying feminism as an embarassment and the sign of a decaying civilisation. Suffragettes were fighting at a more fundamental level, in a world where men could simply send inconvenient wives to insane asylums, and where women had no rights, no access to 'their own' money, few choices in occupation, and those badly paid and very despised.
ENOLA HOLMES could be interesting and fun set in an alternative world where it does not pretend that women could determine their own lives if they had enough gumption. Instead ENOLA HOLMES is like fake stories about Jane Austen, they are revisionist. They deny the women who worked in terrible conditions, who went starved in prison, who even died, to get the vote. Decades later feminists had to struggle and be decried as hairy-underarmed women's libbers for fighting to get bank accounts and credit cards in their own names.
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Henry Cavill (Sherlock), Millie Bobby Brown (Enola) and Sam Claflin (Mycroft) in Enola Holmes (c) 2020 Robert Viglaski Legendary
For all that Enola is faced with prejudice and unfairness, this is still a rosy-glassed view of what women's lives were really like. So many young women are disrespectful of the terrible conditions, the snipes, the back-biting, the daily struggle to live in "a man's world" that previous generations of women suffered. It is not fantasy, it is not fiction, it is a blatant act of disrespect to those on whose shoulders we totter today.
Three words, Nancy Springer: shame, shame, shame.
I am all for supersmart female heroes, let's have more ladies battling adversity with mind and deed and great fighting skills, but don't do it by spitting on women's history.
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2022-11-01
Ali Kayn is a freelance photojournalist and the founding editor of Festivale Online Magazine. Festivale was founded in October, 1996 to promote Melbourne and Victoria, provide mentorship to developing writers, an outlet for talented fans, and a test bed for software and hardware under review. She lives in Melbourne, Victoria with a garden full of birds.
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Due for Australian release 23 Sep, 2020 (2020-09-23) |
Just the facts:Title: Enola Holmes (2020) The Players: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, David Thewlis, Helena Bonham Carter, Official website: IMDb entry For scheduled release dates, see the coming attractions section. For more information about this movie, check out the internet movie database. |
Published in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 
Filed: 01-Sep-2020
