Love Sarah tells the story of a young woman’s dream to fulfil her dead mother’s dream of opening up her own bakery. To do this, she enlists the help of her mother’s best friend and her grandmother.
Life hasn’t been the same since Sarah (Candice Brown) passed away. Her daughter Clarissa (Shannon Tarbet) has broken up with her boyfriend and she has nowhere to stay. In a moment of desperation, she breaks into the shop that would have been her mother’s abandoned bakery. The following day she is discovered by her mother’s best friend Isabella (Shelley Conn) who was going to open the bakery with Sarah before her untimely death. With still nowhere to go, Clarissa decides to stay with her grandmother Mimi (Celia Imrie), a stubborn old lady who is upset because her and Sarah had a falling out before she passed away.
Isabella is in the process of selling the shop to become a wine bar as she can’t afford it, but Clarissa comes up with the idea of opening the shop as a bakery, like her mother wanted. Clarissa and Isabella can’t afford to do it themselves, so they enlist the help of Mimi for financial support and the three of them get to work turning the store into a bakery. With the store almost ready to open, they need to hire a baker. After several unsuccessful applicants they have one last applicant named Matthew (Rupert Penry-Jones) who is an old flame of Sarah‘s, which causes Isabella to reluctant to hire him, but with Matthew being such a good baker she is outvoted.
Business is slow when the bakery opens, but Mimi notices all the different cultures in the area and comes up with the idea of including baked sweets from other countries that aren’t easy to find in London. Soon the bakery starts to become successful and they even have special requests for particular sweets. Eventually, Clarissa begins to suspect that Matthew is her father and Isabella starts to question why Matthew wants to work at the bakery, while Mimi has an admirer from a local who lives across the street.
I really enjoyed the three leading ladies in the film, but particularly enjoyed Shelley Conn as Isabella because at the beginning to the film she had lost her best friend and business partner, but as the film progresses and the bakery is up and running, Isabella becomes an important part of the bakery’s success. Celia Imrie also plays Mimi, the stubborn old lady very well. At times she can appear very uptight, but every now and again, she will show a more playful side which is enjoyable to see and her stubbornness is crucial to the success of the bakery. Finally, Shannon Tarbet as Clarissa was enjoyable because her naivety is integral in bringing the girls together to open the bakery. You can relate to each character, as they are going through their own problems but still all find some happiness through the bakery that Sarah wanted to originally open.
Although the three women in the film decide to open the bakery to fulfil the wishes of a woman that meant a lot to them, the film very rarely gets too emotional and is fairly light-hearted. I also thoroughly enjoyed seeing the process of the bakery being transformed from an abandoned shop into a functioning bakery. It was also interesting to see the different baked goods from the different countries in the bakery. I admit, seeing all the delicious food did make me a bit hungry in the process, all while watching an emotional story unfold.
Love Sarah will be released in Australia on July 2.