Emily Mortimer & The Love of Books #book2movies

 “Books are definitely something that I like to hold and spill my tea on, and drop in the bath and have as little mementoes of periods in one’s life. I like how a book goes through a few weeks of your life with you and becomes swollen with grime and life, and then sits on your bookshelf as a marker to what was happening in your life when you were reading that particular book.” Emily Mortimer

Emily Mortimer shared her thoughts on books with The Independent while promoting The Bookshop making its debut at the Berlin Film Festival last Friday. There’ve been some additional countries with listed release dates since we first learned about The Bookshop back in December, but still no release date here in the U.S.

In the film—which also stars Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson—based on the book by Penelope Fitzgerald, Mortimer plays Florence, a widow who opens a bookshop in 1950s Suffolk, to “polite but ruthless opposition.’’

“I love the way that she (Florence the bookshop owner) is very considered about Lolita. She reads it very carefully, and goes off to consult her friends as she tries to decide whether or not she should sell it. To sell Lolita to the masses at that time was a pretty cool, badass thing to do. I think about that book in the context of today and I wonder if that book would even be published. Here is a book about a middle-aged man in a physical relationship with a very underage girl. I think it is important to think that books can sometimes be morally ambiguous, threatening, dangerous and transgressive. That’s an important part of what literature offers.”

The film has also just screened at the Dublin Jameson International Film Festival and is set for release in Germany on May 10th and the Netherlands on June 7th. 

Oh Lordy, I hope The Bookshop comes to our movie screens here in the states! How about you?