Nonureva Really Surprised!

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

treeline1 The story opens in 1932, in the magnificent country estate of Tony and Brenda Last (James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas). Tony loves puttering around the old manor, while Brenda longs for the party life in London. Out of sheer boredom, she begins an affair with a social-climbing mama's boy (Rupert Graves).As the title indicates, this is a grim story, the first part being a rather typical domestic drama focusing on the stuffy, idle rich. No one plays the snobby aristocrat better than Thomas, and she is so wonderfully convincing, you'll hate her. Wilby is well-cast as the dull but loyal lord of the manor who dotes on his young son. Graves is handsome and suitably innocuous. This section of the film exaggerates the stiff-upper-lip, passionless lives of the upper classes in contrast to the end, which takes us halfway around the world to a primitive land. This part was very creepy and left me cringing.I love period pieces set in posh locations, so I really enjoyed this movie. It's beautifully photographed at the exquisite Carlton Towers estate. The acting is excellent and the odd turn at the end may leave one a bit depressed but still satisfied. Recommended.

Framescourer The hammerblow of human cruelty dressed in the velvet glove of pre-war hoch-Englishness. It's distressing that terrible things happen to the pathetic yet likable protagonist Tony (James Wilby) - even more so that they are delivered in the slow drip of self-interested scheming rather than in galvanising dramatic confrontations.Actually, Wilby is one of the two weak links of this film. He's not quite got the richness or range to suggest a redemptive development to his character. He's not sympathetic enough. The other might be Sturridge's peculiar, impressionistic direction that can fail to give the story enough propulsion.What the film does have are a number of fine performances from a top-drawer supporting cast. One fears Alec Guiness may be a final-frame cameo, but his contribution is in fact at least as substantial as Brando's in Apocalypse Now. Kristin Scott Thomas is quite excellent, at once endearing and blindly self-interested. And I also liked very much Pip Torrens, a really sharp study of a new sort of British gent - modern and knowing, but no cad. 6/10

writers_reign In one sense this is two films in one, always difficult to pull off and more so when the contrast is so startling; for two thirds of the running time we're comfortably ensconced in the thirties and living the privileged life vicariously largely via the Lasts (James Wilby and Kristin Scott-Thomas) who rattle around with their small son in a Gothic pile except when Brenda (Scott-Thomas) is up in Town banging her sponging lover (Rupert Graves). The main problem here is that there is insufficient contrast between Wilby and Graves to convince us why Scott-Thomas elected him as a lover (I'm speaking of course merely about external appearance and outward behaviour; Beaver may well have been exceptional in bed but nothing about him hinted at excitement, in fact he and Wilby could easily have passed for brothers, and in those days Brenda would have no other yardstick). There's also a symbolic element which tends to be heavy-handed; having encountered an eccentric named Dr Messenger (geddit) Wilby decides more or less on the spot to underwrite the Dr's expedition to South America and go along himself for the ride so that the heavy-handed point being made is that he is leaving a moral jungle for a tangible one. The last third of the film finds him in the jungle, stricken with fever, left alone by Messenger who is never able to get the help he went in search of, and 'saved' by Tod (German for 'death') a white man gone native played by Alec Guinness, who cynically keeps him a prisoner in all but name. As we might expect with actors of this calibre the acting is first class as is the period feel and if you can accept the wrench from Shires to Jungle you may well enjoy it.

George Parker "A Handful of Dust" is a period film (circa 1935 approx) which tells of a woman (K Scott Thomas) who becomes restless rattling around in a huge English mansion with her family and servants and decides to take a flat in London for he purposes of a liaison with a handsome young man of dubious character. Her affair results in an upheaval which sees her husband going off on an Amazon expedition while she stays and frets about her divorce settlement. The film doesn't end so much as it just quits with many dangling loose ends. There are no highs or lows of emotions in this very well crafted bit of nothingness and the story is so bland and uneventful there's little reason to recommend it. A knock-off of a story by Evelyn Waugh who penned the wonderful "Brideshead Revisited", this film seems to have needed much more time to tell its abruptly truncated tale. Passable with no CC or subtitles on the DVD I watched. (C+)