Judy and Punch

#StokerScore 8/10

Close your eyes and imagine a sea whose gently rolling waves are reaching the golden sand of a horseshoe-shaped beach. On a hill to the left, overlooking the beach, is a ruined castle while to the right, looking down on the scene, are caravans with light glinting from their bright white paneling. The sun is shining in a celestial blue sky that is sparsely populated with white clouds too high to even hint at rain and crying seagulls hang on the breeze, ever vigilant for morsels of food. 

The beach itself is filled with a variety of noisy life and different activities. There are families gathered behind striped windbreakers that have been pushed into the sand to form barriers against the occasional gusts that whip up the sand. Mums and Dads are laying out picnics or occupying their small charges by making sandcastles with plastic buckets and spades that have been bought from sellers scattered along a promenade that separates the beach from road. Amid the neon-glow and scattered sounds of popular music are the facades of amusement arcades and ice-cream parlours, fish and chip shops, and thrift bazaars which sell cheap souvenirs like snow globes (I understand the irony of this), key-rings and colourful, hand-held windmills that draw in the children but don't put too much of a dent into a parent's pocket. 

Elsewhere along the beach, children in swim suits and adults wearing more are playing cricket or hunting for shells or being led along the beach on a line of donkeys whose saddles are adorned with coloured ribbons. In the sea, old and young alike are caught in the dilemma of whether to just dip in the toes and paddle or to brace oneself  and actually swim in the less than hospitable waters of the Yorkshire coastline. 

This might give you an idea of a typical day out to the seaside, a pastime more popular in the pre-economy airline days that saw families spend a whole week or more enjoying the beach on the days that it didn't actually rain.

The activity that is missing from my list is the Punch and Judy Show. This puppet extravaganza, housed in a tall, gaudily-striped box-like structure, had an open window that occupied the top twenty-five percent of the fascia that allowed the puppeteers to stand inside, unseen by their young audience and move and voice their characters as the story necessitated. As with the likes of old Tex Avery and Hanna Barbera cartoons, these shows were violent to a fault but where Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote were anthropomorphic characters who ensured that being hit by a train or being blown to smithereens by a bomb remained funny rather than Grand Guignol gory, Punch and Judy presented a husband and wife dynamic in which the wife was continually beaten by her husband with his cudgel to anarchic cries of "That's the way to do it!".

Other characters would appear at random including a dog who stole Mr. Punch's sausages, an ineffective police constable and, for reasons that still escape me, a crocodile. I remember being enthralled and gladly joined in with the puppeteers as they cajoled us into repeating their phrases or speculating on what might  happen next. I don't clearly remember what happened at the end of these stories. Whether Mr. Punch received his comeuppance, whether the dog became fat and lazy, or whether Judy ever received medical attention for multiple concussions.

This movie, then, whose inverted title immediately informs the direction it will take, is an absolute pleasure. It contains all of the characters that I previously mentioned, setting the action in a wonderfully made up and over the top medieval town aptly called Seaside. I won’t spoil the story but will say that Alice in Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska and Damon Herriman (who viewers of the Virginia-set TV show Justified will recognise as the doomed-to-failure Dewey Crowe) did an excellent job of visualising the lead characters. There are bits where the story seems to wash over important information, such as the fate of key figures. Then, there are other characters who could do with more fleshing out so as better to understand their motivations. But, these are small potatoes in the greater scheme of a wonderful meal and if you like fairy tales with an edge (think original Grimm stories) then I think you're in for a treat.