A Handful of Dust (1988)

Fantastic!

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

In one sense this is two films in one, always difficult to pull off and more so when the contrast is so startling; for two thirds of the running time we're comfortably ensconced in the thirties and living the privileged life vicariously largely via the Lasts (James Wilby and Kristin Scott-Thomas) who rattle around with their small son in a Gothic pile except when Brenda (Scott-Thomas) is up in Town banging her sponging lover (Rupert Graves). The main problem here is that there is insufficient contrast between Wilby and Graves to convince us why Scott-Thomas elected him as a lover (I'm speaking of course merely about external appearance and outward behaviour; Beaver may well have been exceptional in bed but nothing about him hinted at excitement, in fact he and Wilby could easily have passed for brothers, and in those days Brenda would have no other yardstick). There's also a symbolic element which tends to be heavy-handed; having encountered an eccentric named Dr Messenger (geddit) Wilby decides more or less on the spot to underwrite the Dr's expedition to South America and go along himself for the ride so that the heavy-handed point being made is that he is leaving a moral jungle for a tangible one. The last third of the film finds him in the jungle, stricken with fever, left alone by Messenger who is never able to get the help he went in search of, and 'saved' by Tod (German for 'death') a white man gone native played by Alec Guinness, who cynically keeps him a prisoner in all but name. As we might expect with actors of this calibre the acting is first class as is the period feel and if you can accept the wrench from Shires to Jungle you may well enjoy it.

I decided to watch this purely on account of the magnificent cast, not realising it was another Evelyn Waugh adaptation. Maybe if I'd known, I wouldn't have bothered because I absolutely HATED Brideshead Revisited, also directed by Charles Sturridge. Perhaps the necessary compactness of a film adaptation compared to the lumbering drawn-out length of the Brideshead TV-series is what made it work for me.What a magnificent film this is: sensitively directed, beautifully shot and the amazing cast absolutely spot-on. The understated performances of James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas as the two doomed main characters are just perfect to make this strange story come to life. The stellar supporting cast all add up to a feast of fine acting.In my opinion, AN UNDERRATED MASTERPIECE.

"A Handful of Dust" is a period film (circa 1935 approx) which tells of a woman (K Scott Thomas) who becomes restless rattling around in a huge English mansion with her family and servants and decides to take a flat in London for he purposes of a liaison with a handsome young man of dubious character. Her affair results in an upheaval which sees her husband going off on an Amazon expedition while she stays and frets about her divorce settlement. The film doesn't end so much as it just quits with many dangling loose ends. There are no highs or lows of emotions in this very well crafted bit of nothingness and the story is so bland and uneventful there's little reason to recommend it. A knock-off of a story by Evelyn Waugh who penned the wonderful "Brideshead Revisited", this film seems to have needed much more time to tell its abruptly truncated tale. Passable with no CC or subtitles on the DVD I watched. (C+)

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.