When we meet her, Clarice Cliff is a young, ambitious pottery worker who flits from company to company in order to gain as much experience within different departments as possible - at the time it was not unusual for someone to specialise one particular task for their entire working life. Clarice is ambitious and talented, but her talent has yet to be discovered.
Claire McCarthy's, The Colour Room is the story of the rise of Clarice and her struggle to have her talent recognised.
She is ably played by Phoebe Dynevor, best known as one of the main characters in the Netflix hit, Bridgerton. Dynevor imbues Clarice with vivacity, wit and charm, and her ambition is portrayed as enthusiasm and passion.
Opposite her, Matthew Goode gives us his generic but still very watchable posh chap in the part of factory owner and lover, Colley Short.
Solid support comes from Kerry Fox as Clarice's mother and David Morrissey, rather underused as the company's art director who takes Clarice under his wing.
The screenplay is by Claire Peate who takes some liberties with the story - five of Clarice's six siblings seem to have evaporated and the success of her first range of pottery, the famous 'Bizarre' ware, central to this story, was pretty much instant rather than the uphill struggle we see. However, Peate gives the story contemporary relevance by emphasising the struggle of a woman trying to break into man's world - one co-worker who is suspicious of her being brought in to apprentice in the all-male modelling department voices his misgivings with "What if she's one of them suffragettes?". This could be the story of any woman trying to break through the glass, or in this case, ceramic ceiling.
Elsewhere, the adulterous nature of Clarice's relationship with Colley is rather played down, with Colley's wife scarcely making an appearance in case, one assumes, we start to develop any sympathies for her.
The cinematography and art direction are attractive with Clarice presaging her later ceramics in the colours of her clothes. However, the CGI scenes of ranks of bottle kilns belching smoke into the sky are somewhat unconvincing.
Undemanding, but with enough to keep the audience engaged, this straightforward biopic earns a respectable seven and makes for a decent, Sunday night movie to round off a weekend.
