AS chance would have it, Charles Dance came across William J Locke's short story Ladies In Lavender in a book being used to dress the set of a film he was making in Prague.

Dance set about adapting the story of symbiotic spinster sisters in a Cornish fishing village, and decided he would direct it too. Maybe his pedigree for period drama helped, but a first-time writer-director is a first-time director and so he must have thought all his Christmases had come at once when those dames of stage and screen, Maggie Smith and (York's very own) Judi Dench agreed to take the title roles.

If you could have predicted whose names would come up in the opening credits for a film called Ladies In Lavender, it would surely be Smith & Dench, and theirs is a partnership that has all the veteran glow of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond.

This is a small, undemonstrative and delightfully subtle film, with small home truths, in which nothing more violent happens than a storm damaging the sisters' buddleias. That storm also sweeps a young Pole (Daniel Bruhl) on to the beach below their house. Suddenly, life is turned on its head for the old girls and their home help (a rumbustious, blunt Miriam Margoyles).

Taking in the handsome Polish castaway, who can't speak a word of English but can make a violin sing like an angel, they nurture him back to health, triggering long dormant feelings of lust. They develop petty jealousies not only for each other - Dench, gentle, besotted and crushed; Smith, caustic, even cruel - but also for the young, mysterious Russian artist next door (Natasha McElhone). You can sense their heartache in every glance.

Updated: 16:16 Thursday, November 11, 2004