Against the odds, sentimentality becomes ‘Irina’

“Irina Palm,” a sentimental film with a raunchy premise, uses the world’s oldest profession as a hook to generate interest in some equally venerable movie conventions. Genially preposterous and pleasantly diverting, it balances calculation against humanity and generally comes out on top.

A key reason for “Irina Palm’s” success is the actress who plays the title role. That would be the British singer and performer Marianne Faithfull, more than 40 years past her pop-charts debut with the classic “As Tears Go By,” who against some odds has found something involving in this role.

The odds are great because Faithfull, whose life, including a much-publicized relationship with Mick Jagger, has been eventful enough to inspire two memoirs, is called on to play an Englishwoman who starts out as dowdiness and timidity personified.

Seven years a widow and a self-described “middle-aged frump,” Maggie is introduced as someone who has so focused her life around her seriously ill grandson, going so far as selling her suburban house to help pay for his treatment, that she’s unnerved her son Tom, the boy’s father (Kevin Bishop), and alienated the young lad’s mother (Siobhan Hewlett).

When it turns out that the only thing that might save her grandson is a new treatment available only in Australia, Maggie is determined to raise the money for that as well.

A trip to nearby London to seek employment is so disheartening that Maggie hardly knows what she’s doing when she stumbles into an establishment with a “Hostess Wanted” sign pasted on the window.

That establishment turns out to be called Sexy World and the job, as explained by urbane, cosmopolitan owner Miki (veteran Yugoslavian actor Miki Manojlovic, a favorite of director Emir Kusturica), is decidedly more hands-on than clearing away tea cups.

“Men come here to be touched by women,” Miki tells her and, wouldn’t you know it, Maggie has just the kind of soft hands that drive men wild.

Of course, it takes more than one chat with Miki to turn dowdy Maggie into Irina Palm, “the best right hand in London.” She needs training from colleague Luisa (Dorka Gryllus) as well as a near-miraculous change of attitude that enables her to see this kind of work as acceptable given her family’s desperate need for money.

Faithfull, recently seen as Austrian empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” seems to have been truly tickled to play a part so removed from her image, and she is earnestness herself as a woman who so applies herself to the task that she develops a bad case of what’s described as “penis elbow.”

On one level, “Irina Palm” plays a bit like a distant relative of “Lars and the Real Girl.” As written by Martin Herron and Philippe Blasband, however, it is at once more conventionally sentimental than the Nancy Oliver-scripted film but also more sexually involved, at least in terms of dialogue and the sounds of disembodied passion.

Because, as directed by Sam Garbarski, an award-winning commercials director, “Irina Palm” never shows us anything untoward. We see the room Maggie works in, as well as the wall with its strategically placed opening that keeps her from having to look her customers in the eye, but that’s as far as it goes.

That level of shrewdness is characteristic of “Irina Palm,” a film that has no problem at all with contrivances and can’t resist taking easy potshots at the conventional hypocrites who people Maggie’s world. If that makes “Irina Palm” somewhat of a set-up job, Marianne Faithfull’s performance pulls us back and helps us believe.

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kenneth.turan@latimes.com

“Irina Palm.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.