Review: CHALET GIRL - Clean, Simple, Feel-Good Fun

rating: 3.5

Chalet Girl is an against-all-odds film in just about every sense imaginable. It's not just that the protagonist, Kim (Felicity Jones) is a former skateboarding prodigy reduced to working menial jobs to support her depressed dad (Bill Bailey) following the death of her mother. Nor that she then manages to get a well-paid job tending Chalets in the Alps despite not being a posh girl called Petronella. Nor even that she then learns to snowboard and starts a budding romance with a rich investment banker (Ed Westwick). Nope, the overcoming of odds runs deep within this film's DNA. For a start, who would have thought a film about an ordinary London lass becoming a chalet girl (for those of you who don't know, a chalet girl is a maid in fancy skiing lodges, or chalets) could get funded and made? Especially since the plot hinges on a series of obstacles so archetypal that they could have been autogenerated by Hollywood Scriptbot 1000 (OK, that doesn't exist... yet). Then let's take into account how you turn this into an upbeat, light and fluffy rom-com. It's essentially about a group of snobs who shun a bereaved young girl. Surely that makes for cringes, winces and the hurling of popcorn at the nasty toffs rather than a blissfully evening of feel-good fare? Well, somehow, director Phil Traill, writer Tom Williams and their cast of second-tier British talent work together to produce a story that is so relentlessly cheerful and populated with such fundamentally good and decent characters that it is impossible not to have good will for it. The start of the success is that the script never tries to be cleverer than it is. Tom Williams liberally spatters his dialogue with witty banter and silly humour, Phill Traill glosses over every hackneyed plot twist quickly and skillfully to avoid the wrath of bilious, 'i've-seen-it-all-before' cynics like me, and the cast of toffs never allow their negative attitudes to turn them into grubby villains for us to heckle. Ed Westwick and Tamsin Egerton are especially impressive as the privileged youngsters who gradually warm to outsider Kim, as they smoothly switch from whimsical class privilege (it never gets preachy) to likable chums who don't care for cash half as much as we first thought. Holding it all together is Felicity Jones, who handles the role of Kim brilliantly. She is dramatic enough to build our sympathy for a girl who has suffered more than her share of setbacks, but plucky enough that we are never allowed to wallow. On top of that, she can switch between plain and sexy in a heartbeat. To top it all off, the pace is boosted with a selection of mountain scenery to dazzle even the most avid of ski-fans. It's archetypal feel-good fluff at it's best. Bright, buzzing with energy and refusing to languish for long in genre conventions. If you want a cute, brainless date movie then this is the film for you. Chalet Girl is released in the U.K. on Wednesday March 16th.