Finding Your Feet

Audience Award Winner for Best Narrative Feature at the 2018 Palm Springs International Film Festival, this charming British comedy is specifically aimed at senior citizens. When snobbish, straitlaced “Lady” Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton) discovers that her soon-to-retire police commissioner husband (John Sessions) has been having an affair with her best friend, she flees from social humiliation in suburban Surrey and seeks refuge with her estranged, older sister Elizabeth (Celia Imrie), known as Bif. Showing little sympathy for Sandra’s self-absorbed moping around her cluttered East London flat, eccentric activist Bif urges her to join a dance class at the local community center. Here, Sandra meets Charlie (Timothy Spall), a cheery Cockney furniture restorer who lives on a houseboat, having sold his home to pay for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife’s care in a posh nursing home. Recalling her childhood love of dancing, Sandra joins other class members (Joanna Lumley, David Hayman) for a charity-related, flash-mob performance in Piccadilly Circus, which leads to an invitation to perform in Rome, where a coin tossed in the Trevi Fountain brings all sorts of complications. Director Richard Loncraine relies on his cast of veterans to find more in their nebulously sketched characters than is on the written page and they do not disappoint. Thanks to sassy and solid performances, Finding Your Feet is high-spirited fun. Recommended. (S. Granger)