Love and Wartime

An atmospheric British tragicomedy set amid some of the last century’s greatest traumas and turmoil finds unexpected resonances with current events and preoccupations—along with more timelessechoes of love and laughter. By Ben Dickinson

- Ben Dickinson

At first glance, the deceptively twisty British dramedy Their Finest, directed by Danish-born Lone (rhymes with “Mona”) Scherfig (who also made 2009’s marvelous Oscar-nominated An Education, starring Carey Mulligan), might seem quaintly nostalgic, merely a diverting tonic for our troubled times: It’s a savvy, sassy fiction about plucky Brits making a feature film for the Ministry of Information to buck up national morale during the darkest days of World War II—the Blitz, when tens of thousands of civilians were killed or injured at random in relentless nightly bombardments by Germany’s Luftwaffe. But Scherfig, speaking in January from the