The picnic at the Castello San Salvatore in Portofino’s vicinity is a happy fairy tale. * Saint Salvatore suggests salvation for the four women, all suffering from emotional depression and finding friendship and renewal of love.
Mike Newell’s Enchanted April eliminates the definite article of Von Arnim’s novel The Enchanted April. Deciding von Arnim’s lack of a delightful picnic manner to leave Portofino, Newell invents one.
The picnic is one of the ongoing events illustrating the reversal of mood among the women and men who arrive at San Salvatore cranky and are about to leave happy. Under an awning, Lottie Wilkins, her husband Mellersh, Rose Arbuthnot, Caroline Dester, Mrs. Fisher, and Briggs, the villa’s owner, engage in pleasantries. George Briggs tells the tale of how an oleander branch “magically” grew into a tree: Well, my father…uh, many years ago. . . stuck his cherry-wood walking stick into. . . uh. . . that spot, and said to the head gardener,
“This is where we’ll have an oleander. “And he left it there as a reminder, and, uh, after a while, uh, quite how long nobody can be sure, it the stick began to sprout. And it was. . . an oleander.”
“Is that true?” asks Mellersh.
“It doesn’t matter,” replies Rose, “It’s such a pretty story.”
Mrs. Fisher sees herself in a new light: “I’ve been thinking. Isn’t it better to feel young somewhere than old everywhere? Time enough to feel old again when we have to leave this beautiful place.” 
Relationships change for the better. When the picnickers leave the enchanted castello, “on the first of May, everybody went away, even after they had got to the bottom of the hill and passed through the iron gates out into the village, they still could smell the acacias.”
The cast: Joan Plowright as Mrs. Fisher; Michael Kitchen as George Briggs; Alfred Molina as Mellersh Wilkins; Josie Lawrence as Lottie Wilkins; Miranda Richardson as Rose Arbuthnot; Polly Walker as Caroline Dester; Jim Broadbent as Frederick Arbuthnot.
*For authenticity, he filmed on location at Castello Brown, the villa where Von Arnim wrote the novel.
See Mike Newell. ˆ (1992). The screenplay is by Peter Barnes; Harry Beaumont. Enchanted April (1935). The screenplay is by Samuel Hoffenstein and Ray Harris and is based on Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel and play by Kane Campbell (1925), Elizabeth Von Arnim. The Enchanted April. New York: Doubleday, 1923. Neither Campbell’s nor Matthew Barber’s 2003 stage version has picnic scenes.