Like some others, I discovered this film while surfing one day at home, and fortunately it was near the beginning because the unusual love context (for films these days) and slowly developing drama were absorbing for me. Jean Simmons has been one of my all-time favorite actresses (especially in Elmer Gantry and Guys and Dolls) and it was wonderful to recognize her as a widowed woman in an English retirement home with a wry and gentle comic touch. As a guy who visited his mother for 10 years in a retirement home, it was moving and poignant to recognize the sweet and sometimes awkward interaction among the residents, and then to see Jean Simmons's character and Joss Ackland slowly and hesitantly gravitate to each other. Nobody's life is ever over until the casket is closed, and it's inspiring to see oldsters risk their emotions in their final years, tentatively at first and then with more assurance. Near the end, the ex-stockbroker Joss Ackland's character renders investment advice to the residents about moving from "blue-chip" stocks to riskier investments with the promise of greater returns, and then goes on to use that as an apt metaphor for being able to risk exposing our emotional vulnerabilities for the promise, and reward, of love, however fleeting and temporal.
Poor, gravelly-voiced Joss.....when he finds cinematic love in his older years, while it's sweetness is probably enhanced by its fleeting nature (from health issues), it can still be a bittersweet experience for him, similar to what he experienced with Claire Bloom in the BBC version of C.S. Lewis's Shadowlands produced 10 years before Daisies.
Poor, gravelly-voiced Joss.....when he finds cinematic love in his older years, while it's sweetness is probably enhanced by its fleeting nature (from health issues), it can still be a bittersweet experience for him, similar to what he experienced with Claire Bloom in the BBC version of C.S. Lewis's Shadowlands produced 10 years before Daisies.