Overlooked DVD of the month - IMPROMPTU

Afflicted with a summer cold, I spent a day convalescing. While waiting for the Euro 2008 matches to begin I stumbled upon the new iTunes video rental feature. The prices are high and the choice limited, but I was a captive market. The only movie I hadn't seen and was mildly intrigued by was the early 1990s Chopin-George Sand biopic, IMPROMPTU. I rented the movie because I'm a sucker for period romance but also because George Sand is an intriguing figure. A radical feminist in the mid nineteenth century, her fiction may be of mixed quality but her importance cannot be denied. She flouted conventions by wearing men's clothes and loving "strongly, exclusively and steadfastly" a number of the key artists of her time - not least Frederic Chopin and Alfred de Musset. An added inducement to watching the film was the fact that Judy Davis - a brilliantly talented actress - was playing the lead. I was less enamoured of the prospect of seeing Hugh Grant play Chopin.

The first half of the film passes as something of a bedroom farce, with Liszt, Musset, Delacroix, and Sand house guests of some country aristos eager to look civilised. All of Sand's lovers quarrel and Sand pursues Chopin - a provincial, prudish blushing near-virgin. It's all rather light and funny and reminded me a little of Woody Allen's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY. As the artists disperse we get to the true business of Sand wooing Chopin and we leave them as they depart for Mallorca. Here the film has a more serious, more straightforwardly romantic tone.

Judy Davis is superb as Sand. She embodies her energy, passion, opennenss and intelligence but also her vulnerability. You truly understand why men would be drawn to such an unconventional woman. Davis is surrounded, for the most part, a sterling supporting cast. Bernadette Peters gives a great performance as Franz Liszt's mistress Marie d'Agoult. She is a monster, but crucially, one with whom we can empathise. Mandy Patinkin is hysterical as Musset. Emma Thompson displays her gift for comedy as the Duchess d'Antan. Anna Massey is captivating in her cameo role. Indeed, the only bum note is struck by Julian Sands as Liszt - an utterly thin performance.

The real surprise, however, is Hugh Grant! He pulls off the accent, the provincial outrage, and finally the hesitant declaration of love. He's never looked more beautiful and it was a courageous role for a young actor - to appear so thoroughly emasculated on screen. I am thoroughly impressed!

IMPROMPTU was released in 1991 and is available on iTunes.

THE OXFORD MURDERS - beware of grad students bearing spaghetti

THE OXFORD MURDERS is a tremendously silly murder mystery that fails on every level despite having a decent cast. Despite beng set in the picturesque quads of the University of Oxford, this film is a largely Spanish production which may explain some of the more stilted dialogue but not the fact that the script that has a feeble solution, a killer that no-one cares about and one of the most excruciating sex scenes I've ever seen.

John Hurt and Elijah Wood star as Maths professor, Arthur Seldom, and grad student, Martin. They are on the hunt for a serial killer who's trying to prove a neat mathematical point to Seldom, and so chooses victims who are already on the brink of death (so that's okay then!) The movie throws up a bunch of suspects who are odd but neither sinister nor threatening. Burn Gorman, who was so brilliant as Guppy in the recent BBC adaptation of BLEAK HOUSE, was particularly disappointing as Russian mathmo Podorov - just what was that accent he was attempting?! The final solution to the murders is disappointing both in terms of its mathematical content and because by that point I really didn't care a fig.

As far as it goes, THE OXFORD MURDERS might have been suitably condensed into a 1hr TV detective show - a more forgiving format. As a feature film it fails on every level. Where it tries to be sinister, it's banal. Where it tries to be sexy, it's causes genuine embarassment. Where it tries to be clever, it's obvious.

THE OXFORD MURDERS was released earlier this year in Spain, France and Italy. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Argentina on May 1st.

Another pantheon movie - ANOTHER COUNTRY

In the 1930s, five young men of rank and privilege decided to systematically betray their country and their class by spying for the Soviet Union. What drives men to such actions? Partly it was an entirely admirable reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism. Partly it was an insider's view of how brutal life in the class system was - even when you were destined to be top of the pile. But some have made another, psychological, explanation: that for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, their experience of having to hide their homosexuality in a bigoted society alienated them from the very establishment they were supposed to be members of. Certainly Miranda Carter, in her excellent recent biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, miserable partly because of his homosexuality, helped foster a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination - insecurity and moral superiority - fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses. Well, were they so very different from the colonial dictators they so despised?

Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were exposed in the 50s and defected to Russia, but Anthony Blunt escaped public exposure until 1979. The fact that a traitor could have ascended so high in British society (Blunt was Director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute as well as being Surveyor of the King's Pictures) was profoundly shocking. The shock prompted a re-consideration of the motives of the Cambridge Spies. Julian Mitchell's play ANOTHER COUNTRY, and the following cinema adaptation, was part of that process.

The movie opens with a seedy old man in a dingy Russian apartment. His true origin is betrayed by the sepia photographs of schoolfriends in Eton dress. An interviewer asks how he could have betrayed his class. He preceeds to relate a story that will show it to have been as despicable as it was delightful. We flash back to Eton in the 1930s. A young schoolboy is caught by a master having homosexual sex: the shame of exposure will lead him to commit suicide. Fearful of the school's reputation, the self-elected elite pupils ("Gods", closely modelled on "Pop") decide to crack down on homosexual activity. Note that it is not the practice they object to so much as exposure. And wrapped around the events are the frantic manoeuvrings surrounding election to the Gods next term.

ANOTHER COUNTRY is essentially about a young homosexual student called Guy becomes disillusioned with these ridiculous and yet deadly serious manoeuvrings. Guy is desperate to become a God, but is also desperate to love another young boy called Harcourt. Love leads him to indiscretion, exposure and exclusion from the fulfilment of his ambition. At such a point, he becomes radicalised and a fellow traveller of his best friend Judd - an intellectually committed Communist.

The radical idea behind ANOTHER COUNTRY is portray the road to betrayal as starting in a very personal, emotional crisis, rather than in a purely intellectual attraction. The other radical idea is to portray the traitor as the victim. In this, director Marek Kanievska is spot on in photographing the classic English boarding school in soft dappled light and to make it look as superficially delightful as we could imagine it to be. He's also fortunate to have the quite shockingly beautiful and youthful Rupert Everett as his leading man. Everett is perfectly cast as Guy - he is mischevious, intelligent, clearly in love, nervous around his lover, and altogether sympathetic. What could be more tragic than seeing him crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? Guy was being bred to rule the colonies through force - as foreshadowed by the military drills for corps. He was being bred to inflict rule in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled. ANOTHER COUNTRY challenges you to judge him for it.

ANOTHER COUNTRY played Cannes, where DP Peter Biziou won Best Artistic Contribtuion, and Toronto 1984. It was released in the UK that year. It is available on DVD.