Une poignée de cendre

A story that raises many questions, even good ones, but gives only a few answers. A great cast, James Wilby is for example excellent as Tony Last, goes to work in this beautifully filmed melodrama set in the early thirties i UK and Brazil. The period feeling is great and so are the settings. The story is built up around a doomed marriage, but it is hard to really understand why. There is a lot of smoke here but no real fire until the late and great Sir Alec Guiness comes to work in the last 30 minutes creating a frightening illiterate fan of Charles Dickens. But superb acting on all hands and high class camera-work is not enough although the film is worth watching especially if you have a love for British culture and history, and don't we all...

but well worth the time. The actors are perfection while the story is allowed to tell itself with crushing realism. This isn't a movie that is going to make you smile much but it will probably make you think.

An 18th-century English writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, once wrote (putting Alexander Pope in his place): "Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen". This is exactly what Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful Of Dust does and the film, in my view, fully does the novel justice. Waugh's satire here is very underplayed, very understated and very funny, but none the less utterly lethal for all that. Charles Sturridge and his fellow screenwriter's have, as far as I can see, stuck extremely close to the novel, which is no bad thing as Waugh was an extremely economical writer and there would be little point in trying to gild the lily. Although Waugh wrote his novel as a young man, his thorough dislike of modernity - which he regarded as insincere cant - in every shape or form is already apparent and he mercilessly sends up its more vicious aspects. But Waugh was too intelligent just to hate for hate's sake: it was the loss of admirable qualities in favour of 'progress' which upset him. So in the novel and film Tony Last behaves well to everyone despite a great many people, not least his 'modern' wife Brenda, treating him appallingly badly. He is loyal, values tradition, honest, accommodating and indulgent and in return loses everything. Brenda is conventionally sweet but is simply a self-centred monster who lives without a thought for anyone, and always gains what she wants. One reviewer here complained that 'nothing' happens in the film. Not a bit of it. A great deal happens but everyone is so polite and well-brought up that no one, not even Tony, questions the huge injustice of it all. If you are reading these reviews while considering whether to see this film, bear in mind the quotation with which I started my contribution: Satire that's 'scarcely felt or seen'. That will give you the key to enjoying a very good film indeed. (NB The full quotation putting down Pope runs: "Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen. Thine is an oyster knife, that hacks and hews, the rage but not the talent to abuse.")

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER

Evelyn Waugh was one of the most stylish writers of his generation and the deceptively simple prose of his early mordant satires ('Decline and Fall', 'Vile Bodies') stands up very well today. 'A Handful of Dust,' written during the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardiner ('She-Evelyn') is more personal and less comic, and more concerned with the consequences of the characters' lack of personal morality. This film version by Charles Sturridge, who was earlier jointly responsible for a fine TV version of 'Brideshead Revisited,' is a worthy attempt to do justice to the novel, but perhaps he need not have bothered.

The film follows the novel as published in England – a US edition had a different, happy ending - though for space reasons some incidents are omitted (eg the drunken night at the sleazy 'Old Hundredth' club). Tony Last (James Wilby) is a pleasant young dim Tory gentleman, the proud owner of Hetton Abbey, a pile of Victorian Gothic bombast, and the attentive but slightly baffled husband of Lady Brenda (Kristen Scott-Thomas), elegant, aristocratic, and bored to death after seven years of country life. They have a cute six-year old son, John Andrew (Jackson Kyle), who seems to relate better to his nanny and riding instructor than to his parents, who are equally awkward with him. A young man called John Beaver (Rupert Graves) invites himself to stay, and Brenda, despite Beaver's vacuity, decides to have an affair with him, renting a small flat in Mayfair from Beaver's mother (Judi Dench) for the purpose.

Then an accident occurs which prompts Brenda to reveal her affair to Tony (almost everyone else in their circle knows of it already) and leave him. Tony, having met an explorer named Messinger, sets off with him to Guyana, South America, in search of a lost city, but the expedition falls apart and Tony is rescued by Todd (Alec Guinness), a part-white man living with the Indians. Todd wants someone to read him Dickens, and Tony finds himself a prisoner.

The re-creation of life at Hetton; mists over the park, the huge, overdecorated house (Carlton Towers, Yorkshire, is a perfect match for the fictional Hetton Abbey), the attentive servants, the elegant meals, house parties, Sunday morning at church, the ritual of foxhunting etc, is all beautifully done. We see why Brenda is bored (even if Anjelica Huston's character does drop in by plane), but it is not so easy to see why Brenda takes after Beaver. Jock (a wooden Pip Torrens), young MP, friend of the family and an old boyfriend of Brenda's, seems a much more likely choice, obsessed as he is with the politics of pig-farming. Kristen Scott-Thomas is fine in the role of Brenda but the script lets her down a little. As Tony, James Wilby projects just the right air of amiable, good-natured dimness. We feel sorry for him even as his unlikely fate assumes an air of inevitability. A youthful Rupert Graves gives us a callow and colourless Beaver, egged on by his ambitious mother.

The change of scene from England to Guyana is somewhat abrupt, though signalled in the script, and it's almost as if we are watching a different movie. This is not necessarily the filmmaker's fault as Waugh backed an earlier short story of his 'The Man Who Loved Dickens' into the first two-thirds of the novel, which is a kind of prequel to the short story. Yet the events of the whole novel bear close correspondence to Waugh's own experiences, his marriage break-up mentioned above, and a journalistic trip he made to Guyana as a kind of therapy. Unlike the unlucky Tony, Waugh returned from the jungle to tell this, and several other mordant tales.

Here the film-makers were not able to give visual expression to Waugh's mood. Perhaps different music might have helped – the theme for 'Brideshead' was perfect. For the most part the actors were well-cast, but they were pinned down by the close adherence of the scriptwriters to the novel's dialogue.

At the end of this film, one wants to wash one's hands of the unmitigated cruelty pervading the atmosphere. The deliberate pace of the thirties setting (beautifully portrayed using the right houses, and suitable sets and costumes) ensures that every nuance of behaviour is clearly understood by the audience, and this is the great strength of the film. As I haven't read the book, but believe this is a faithful adaptation, I can commend both Charles Sturridge and the superb actors for translating what must be a difficult, but brilliant, novel by Evelyn Waugh, not only into an impressive film, but one that conveys thirties morals and social privilege in a way that rings true for today's 21st century attitudes.

I think this is the best performance I have ever seen by James Wilby. Cuckolded by his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas in a fantastic debut performance), suffering from the death of his only son, he turns from a kind and gentle husband to one who wreaks revenge on his wife by cutting off all financial support. His agony over his son is exactly restrained in the manner of the period, his embarrassment over setting up the grounds for divorce by being caught in flagrante, his bewilderment when one would think he should be released from torment but is trapped by a vindictive eccentric (Alec Guinness, as usual, quite amazing) in the middle of the jungle, after nearly dying of fever, is a tour de force. This is his film, but Kristin Scott-Thomas (who was the original reason I watched this film in the first place), is simply delightful as the spoil, bored wife who can't resist Rupert Graves's boyish charm and dilettante lifestyle. No wonder Robert Altman chose her for Gosford Park; she is made for these roles. Her character's brittle insouciance, total selfishness and insensitivity, her lack of concern for her husband and son while she pursues alleviation from boredom with Rupert Graves, is reminiscent of Daisy Buchanan's behaviour in The Great Gatsby. Kristin Scott-Thomas shows a sophistication and acting aplomb which is breathtaking.

Rupert Graves is convincing as the shallow man-about-town sponging off others but seducing charming to the ladies; Judi Dench gives a lovely cameo as his bourgeois mother; Cathryn Harrison is good as Millie, who is supposed to provide the evidence for the divorce; and Alec Guinness in one of his final roles, is chillingly menacing.

I recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys a good story well told, excellent acting, and a period setting.