| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Guarded Enthusiasm
Terence Rattigan was a brilliant writer about the emotional dullness, lack of cultural sophistication and wanton superficiality of Whites - along with the belief that social respectability is superior to a life lived fully and purposely. He also writes female roles exquisitely well.
The characterization and acting serve the theme beautifully, especially the highly-shaggable Rachel WEISZ as the passionate Englishwoman who cannot truly escape her vicar’s daughter upbringing, erotophobic self-denial and endemic fear-of-loneliness. She would obviously have been better off with a Black man or an Italian here; leading to the only caveat of the usual White reluctance to compare their culture with others in order to obtain a fuller understanding of why they are such emotionally-bleak people and what could possibly be done to make it better.
The style is necessarily downbeat since the theme expresses a life lived as if one were already dead - wrapped-up in a plot that can only end in inevitable tragedy, a la Sophocles. To this end, the cinematography is dark and autumnal - life lived in eternal shadows and impending winter - and the direction from Terence DAVIES smooth and to-the-point. All in all, a kind of vampire movie without visible blood where the period details actually serve the drama (like the best of Hammer horror) rather than distract one’s attention from it. Every bit as good as Brief Encounter.
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