The fundamental strength of a period piece is that it is ageless. Looking back with some reverence and attention-to-detail on a time long past means that audiences will absorb your message intact, from any future period. Normally, films age as well as the fads and trends depicted in them, but period pieces have the luxury of a substantial remove, generally showing the most iconic elements of a time and leaving out (unless for affect) the most foppish. Enchanted April takes place in post-war (that's WWI, not The Big One) England and Italy and follows the exploits of four women that are living very different lives but are bound by a common narrative. That narrative is largely about the place of women during the early years of 20th Century England, plus several other timeless themes.
Several of the actors and actresses in Enchanted April have gone on to do well in other films, notably Miranda Richardson ("Rose Arbuthnot"), Joan Plowright ("Mrs. Fisher), Jim Broadbent ("Frederick Arbuthnot"), and Alfred Molina ("Mellersh Wilkins"). Richardson and Plowright each earned a Golden Globe for Enchanted April, and Plowright a nomination for an Academy Award. Probably the most enchanting character in the film was played by an actress that went on to do very little other film work. Ironically, Josie Lawrence ("Lottie Wilkins") was and is at least as recognizable in the U.K. as her Enchanted April counterparts, for having been a regular cast member of the show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? for over a decade. Lawrence plays Lottie as a repressed and quirky woman who arranges a trip to Italy with three other women. The trip contains plenty of magic, although there isn't anything overtly "enchanted" apart from the film's final scene. What magic does come through is the transformational quality of good friends and empowerment, especially where those have been missing. Enchanted April isn't really a large ensemble film as much as a series of interconnected vignettes.
Additional magic is worked in the direction of the film so that there are no unsympathetic characters. By the end of Enchanted April, it is clear that everyone was doing his or her best to work through a uniformly depressing war, in a country known more for stiff upper lips than emotive fluency. Nothing terribly dramatic takes place - these aren't people that would let that happen, after all - but there are subtle touches that speak to real change taking place between the women and with the men in their lives. There are movies from the early '90s that now seem worn and barely worth watching, but Newell's vision for Enchanted April is as fun to watch on screen today as it was then, and we expect it will feel this way for a long time to come.
