A quiet and an unassuming but superbly polished British 'whodunnit' with charming and most effective performances, this engaging entertainment, concerning the loss of an elderly lady's kitten and the bitter - but mercifully balmed - consequences of that small tragedy, will completely bore and baffle anyone under the age of about fifty.
Unless your tastes were informed by an older and now almost entirely extinct set of cultural values - as were my own - this little cinematic treat will convey little beyond the sort of tedium small children bridle at when forced to listen to adult conversation. Every generation is a degeneration of the human spirit. Bright minds and good works there still are, and thank goodness for them; nevertheless, the general quality of life becomes ever nastier. This is because there is more - of everything, naturally, which of course includes also more that is bad.
What there is of human fineness is consequently ever more thinly spread across an ever vaster and more insatiable range of need. So it is that between this little Island of Britain and the looming masses of burgeoning China an impassable historical gulf is being set, which is euthanising the nostalgia of a World, our little world, which is still so familiar to some of us, and yet which is ever more faintly perceived - - - as if phantoms were flickering into their final oblivion over the cosy hearth of their dying memories, as the storm of change rages outside. This sense is a sure sign of the future's totalitarian intolerance of the past, and it's radical aversion to it. In an age of relentless global progress many delicate survivals will be vaporised by the great air-brush of history, and it will be as if they and their antediluvian world never were.
The survival of the Young chiefly depends upon the extinction of the Old: therefore such revenants must be impatiently and summarily swept away - for this is the hygiene of an era of Pandemics that sweeps away all the baffling contradictions of contrary old ways, so that the New World can pretend to it's own brief authority over the same fundamentally unruly Nature. Hence the impatience of many with what they see as a morbid interest in old dead things, like sentimentalised kittens and the frail passions of a powerless past; hence also humanity's equally morbid haste to assimilate itself to the indifferent future that is being brought upon us all.
The cat is dead; long live the cat.
