This film has finally been released in the UK, a year after France and the US. In many ways, it is an old-fashioned film, though its subject matter is contemporary enough. I hesitate to refer to the 1940s/50s Ealing Comedies but it does offer some of the same pleasures as those films (and to more recent films like those of Nigel Cole such as Saving Grace (2000)). My puzzlement as to where the film came from creatively lasted until I realised that its director and co-producer Jonathan Goldschmidt is a UK TV drama veteran who has not made a feature for the cinema since the Julie Walters comedy She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas in 1985. I’m not sure what he has been doing in the meantime, but his production company Viva Films co-produced this film with Hungarian partners and the interior scenes were shot in Hungary. Goldschmidt was a major figure in UK television and set up links between Granada and NDR in Hamburg. Later he worked on various EU audio-visual initiatives. The most pertinent connection for this comedy is probably his work with the great writer Jack Rosenthal.
The plot is very familiar. Nat (Jonathan Pryce), an ageing East End baker, is struggling to keep open his shop in the face of competition from a local supermarket chain owned by Sam Cotton (Phil Davis) and when he loses his apprentice to Cotton’s (who want to attract custom from Jewish residents) it looks like the end is near. In a desperate step he takes on a new ‘lad’, Aayash (Jerome Holder), the son of the shop’s cleaner, an African refugee from Sudan. Nat is becoming estranged from his own son, now too ‘respectable’ to support his father and he reluctantly begins to accept his new Muslim apprentice in his traditional Jewish bakery. But Aayash has his own problems – he is locked into an arrangement to deal cannabis for a local ‘hard man’ (Ian Hart). By accident, he stumbles across a possible solution to everyone’s problem and suddenly the baker’s shop is doing a roaring trade. You can probably guess what has happened and the narrative follows a familiar course.
The script is witty and the cast are very good. As well as the three veterans listed above, Pauline Collins plays Nat’s landlady. Jerome Holder is also very good. The audience in the French cinema in which I saw the film last year laughed in all the right places, some of them seemingly ahead of the subtitles. Other than that, the most striking aspect of the film for me was the inclusion of scenes set in a synagogue – relatively unusual I think in British cinema. Jonathan Pryce has been playing Shylock in the US I think – and he has also starred in Game of Thrones. I’m not sure why the film took so long to get a UK release – I would have thought it would sell well to older audiences. This weekend my assumption proved correct, ScreenDaily reports that Dough was released on 19 screens (mostly in London I suspect) and achieved a very respectable £2,700 per screen over the weekend. Again, I suspect a strong Jewish vote of confidence. If it does turn up near you, give it a go for the performances and some decent laughs.
The Case for Global Film 