Salmon, of course, are not found in the Yemen. There is one species of salmon in the Atlantic, and six in the Pacific, but none in the Indian Ocean, and all are found in temperate waters. The film concerns the (fictitious) efforts of a wealthy Yemeni sheikh to establish a salmon fishing industry in his country in order to boost its tourist trade.
The main characters, apart from the sheikh, are his British financial adviser Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and Alfred Jones, an ichthyologist employed by the British government. Alfred initially dismisses the sheikh's proposal as crazy, but he is pressured into assisting him by the Foreign Office and by the Prime Minister's press secretary Patricia Maxwell, who believes that a story about co-operation between Britain and the Islamic world is necessary to improve the country's international image.
The film is a rather uneasy mixture of romantic comedy and political satire. I have not read the novel by Paul Torday upon which the film was based, but I understand that it concentrated much more on satire than on romance. In the film the balance is the other way round with much more attention being paid to the growing romance between Alfred and Harriet as they work together on the project. Actually, I would have preferred it if the film had been made more as a satire, as I liked Kristin Scott Thomas's Patricia, a ruthless and cynical spin doctor who would have been at home in television comedies like "Yes, Minister" or "The Thick of It".
The sheikh is in some ways Patricia's complete opposite, portrayed as an idealistic soul who not only wants to benefit his country financially but also sees fishing as a gentle, peaceful pursuit, beneficial to its practitioners. (He himself is a keen fly fisherman and owns a home near a salmon river in the Scottish highlands).
I wasn't, however, particularly taken with the romance between Ewan McGregor's stiff, awkward Alfred and Emily Blunt's rather colourless Harriet. The film ends with the conventional "happy ending", although it is only happy for Alfred and Harriet, and not for his wife Mary, from whom he is separated, and even less so for Harriet's soldier boyfriend Robert, who returns from being "missing action" in Afghanistan only to find that his girlfriend is leaving him for another man. Ever since the likes of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill" in the nineties we Brits have tended to pride ourselves on how well we do romantic comedy, but "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" is a rather mediocre example of the genre. 5/10.
The main characters, apart from the sheikh, are his British financial adviser Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and Alfred Jones, an ichthyologist employed by the British government. Alfred initially dismisses the sheikh's proposal as crazy, but he is pressured into assisting him by the Foreign Office and by the Prime Minister's press secretary Patricia Maxwell, who believes that a story about co-operation between Britain and the Islamic world is necessary to improve the country's international image.
The film is a rather uneasy mixture of romantic comedy and political satire. I have not read the novel by Paul Torday upon which the film was based, but I understand that it concentrated much more on satire than on romance. In the film the balance is the other way round with much more attention being paid to the growing romance between Alfred and Harriet as they work together on the project. Actually, I would have preferred it if the film had been made more as a satire, as I liked Kristin Scott Thomas's Patricia, a ruthless and cynical spin doctor who would have been at home in television comedies like "Yes, Minister" or "The Thick of It".
The sheikh is in some ways Patricia's complete opposite, portrayed as an idealistic soul who not only wants to benefit his country financially but also sees fishing as a gentle, peaceful pursuit, beneficial to its practitioners. (He himself is a keen fly fisherman and owns a home near a salmon river in the Scottish highlands).
I wasn't, however, particularly taken with the romance between Ewan McGregor's stiff, awkward Alfred and Emily Blunt's rather colourless Harriet. The film ends with the conventional "happy ending", although it is only happy for Alfred and Harriet, and not for his wife Mary, from whom he is separated, and even less so for Harriet's soldier boyfriend Robert, who returns from being "missing action" in Afghanistan only to find that his girlfriend is leaving him for another man. Ever since the likes of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill" in the nineties we Brits have tended to pride ourselves on how well we do romantic comedy, but "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" is a rather mediocre example of the genre. 5/10.
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