The Winter Guest

For his debut as a film director, Alan Rickman has chosen material with which he is very familiar. The Winter Guest is a play he commissioned and directed on the stage before adapting it for the screen in collaboration with playwright Sharman Macdonald. Rickman's familiarity with the material and his considerable experience of working in front of the camera seem to have prepared him well for the making of an exceptional film.

Emma Thompson plays Frances, a photographer whose husband has recently died after a long illness, leaving her to raise a teenaged son. Frances and Alex are visited by Elspeth, Frances' mother (played by Thompson's mother, Phyllida Law). Frances cannot find direction in her life and has surrounded herself with the photographic record of her husband and his illness. Elspeth, whose health is failing, cannot rely on the support of a daughter who is unable even to care for herself. Alex is caught between memories of his father and an emotionally absent mother. On the coldest day in memory, the sea around this remote Scottish village, like the lives of Frances and those she loves, has frozen as far as the eye can see.

Together, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and production designer Robin Cameron Don, have created an environment for the story which mirrors the desolate emotional world in which the characters find themselves. The colours are muted to the point that the film sometimes seems to have been shot in black and white, with only tones of grey to give it texture. Some shots are composed with a rigid symmetry, others with a sweeping, aerial freedom. This contrast is timed to echo the themes of dependency between parent and child, the purpose of Death and grieving, and the tension between the emotion and the intellect.

Rickman uses cinematic devices like a veteran. His symbols and recurring motifs of water, fire, and even fur, are used to considerable effect throughout. So too, does he use narrative techniques. Two truant school boys, not originally connected with Frances and her mother, are drawn into their story and used as contrast. In their narcissistic search for pleasure and adventure, they depict the base side of life against Frances' cold intellectual remoteness. Nita, a young woman with romantic designs on Alex, is almost able to draw him out with her passionate attitudes and her aggressive, juvenile, almost animalistic desires. Chloe and Lily, two elderly women of the village whom we meet as they wait for a bus to take them to a funeral, demonstrate the constant presence of death and how it can be embraced and normalised. They pore over obituaries and discuss the rituals of death with a mundane, child-like preoccupation. Their closeness further develops the themes of dependency and need.

Some may find the restraint of the film difficult to endure. Characters seem ever on the edge of lashing out or breaking down. There is a contained energy at work which is only seldom evident in their actions. This restraint is deliberate. It becomes the central motif in the film's construction. The story is about the frictions which exist between what we need and what we can give, between parent and child, between passion and logic, life and death. The performances are tight and restrained because the characters, in their efforts to understand and adapt, must be also.

The Winter Guest is an excellent film. Rickman uses visual, auditory and narrative techniques like a veteran. There are tremendous performances by all; especially Law (Elspeth) , Arlene Cockburn (Nita) and Sean Biggerstaff (Tom). A wonderful capture of atmosphere and production design is enhanced by exemplary cinematography and held together by an intelligent, controlled and dramatically charged script.

This film was not at all what I expected. There are four seemingly unrelated storylines all going on at once. I could have seen more of Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law (Thompson's mother both on and off screen -- terrific performance!), but that's a small quibble. This is one of those movies where you're not sure if you like it or not, but days later, when you're STILL thinking about it, you figure that there must have been SOMETHING to it after all...

Like any great film, this is close to the essence of life. In four poetic,

hearthwarming scenes, different generations of characters are entangled in a

longing for protection and affection. Two woman wait at a bus stop for a day out to a funeral, but behind their apparent, casual view on death lies a hidden fear for their own end. A new girl in town chases after a local boy, both search

through their mutual attraction towards each other. Two schoolboys are playing near the frozen sea and talk about their future. And all this is bound by the main story of a mother-daughter relationship. From the first flight over the seascape, to the final scene with one of the boys walking into the mist, everything is filmed and directed with the same sense for intense images and esthetic realism. And when on the tones of Liz Fraser, lovingly singing the end-credits, the film

ends.....and there's a certain sadness that one already has to leave this beautiful universe behind. "The Winter guest" is again (if their ever was doubt) the prove how superior European cinema is compared to the Hollywood-counterpart. I rest my case.

Four interconnecting stories: The main one being a woman argues with her elderly, busybody mum about a possible move to Australia for her and her son after the untimely death of her hubby. Meanwhile, said teen has his first sexual experience with a girl who's been stalking him for months. Also on the agenda are two boys adventures while playing truant from school, and a couple of old friends taking a coach ride to attend a funeral. All this is set in the template of a very wintry Scotland, where even the sea has frozen over.

A slow burning meditation on life among different generations, it manages to be quietly moving without having to resort to overdramatising. All of these people FEEL real, and their segments are each satisfying in their own way, even interlinking at certain points. As a demonstration in acting its a masterclass, with special honours reserved for Phyllida Law as the overbearing, interfering mother from Hell. Probably not a classic, but gratifying enough. And the beautiful white landscape is a star all by itself.. 6/10

First of all, the exquisite beauty of this film is mute evidence of the artistic background of the director, Alan Rickman, who was a graphics designer before he became an actor. The iciness and vastness of the frozen Scottish sea coast made me shiver in summer when I first saw it. The kids' conversation about genitalia was funny, and having had 5 children, I never knew they dropped.

Emma Thompson and her mother had a great interaction.which is so appropriate, as it shows both the love and the friction that goes on between mother and daughter who are so much alike. This is the major story line, with the subtexts occurring between the boys and between the old ladies intent on attending funerals, as they approach their own 'going away party'.

It is an unusually visually attractive film and certainly not a formulaic dialogue. I recommend it to anyone with a brain and an eye for beauty. Alice Copeland Brown