One of the more peculiar and at the same time fascinating films in recent months is the British-produced Cold Comfort Farm. In many ways, this is a slight work that could have degenerated into a repetitive one-joke structure, but it does not. Instead, it stands as a small comic masterpiece all the more effective for its rendering of a certain British tone of incongruity and refusal to be made uncomfortable in the face of sheer lunacy.
Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker refers first to the 1932 novel on which the film is based, a well-known novel in England but one not so widely read in the United States. Rafferty refers to it as "a shotgun marriage of Thomas Hardy and P.G. Wodehouse" (Rafferty 99), and the film does indeed offer this sort of combination. The Hardy element comes from the rural world in which the story is set, a world not unlike the Wessex countryside of Thomas Hardy. The Wodehouse comes from the comic actions of the characters and from the way the bizarre is made to seem perfectly normal in this world.
The very title of the film creates a sense of comic doom, with a farm named Cold Comfort, and so hardly a place that anyone would want to live. Rafferty rightly notes the way this farm and its life are depicted in the film: "This is obviously a rather grim view of the agrarian life" (Rafferty 99). It is a view that does not daunt the heroine, however, for from the first, the heroine is what would once have been called "plucky" in fiction, though a less kindly view might be that she is simply blind to all the perils into which she is thrusting herself as she seeks a relative to provide her with a place to live now that she is an orphan. Rafferty finds strength in her apparent willingness to face down all oddities in life as if they were only minor annoyances:
The great joke of Cold Comfort Farm is that the heroine absolutely refuses to acknowledge the power of her relatives' glum, suffocating imagin...