American Friends (1991)
Francis Ashby, a senior Oxford don on holiday alone in the Alps, meets holidaying American Caroline and her companion Elinor, the blossoming Irish-American girl she adopted many years before. Ashby finds he enjoys their company, particularly that of Elinor, and both the women are drawn to him. Back at Oxford he is nevertheless taken aback when they arrive unannounced. Women are not allowed in the College grounds, let alone the rooms. Indeed any liaison, however innocent, is frowned on by the upstanding Fellows.
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This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place
One of my all time favorites.
Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
It was actually painful to watch this because it was as if many of the elements for success had been carefully gathered together but then spectacularly botched in assembly.It's the cubic zirconium version of a Merchant/Ivory production.The production design and the location cinematography were wonderful but they were sabotaged by everything else.The tone of the film was relentlessly morose and the pace too slow for something so little charged. I usually hate Alfred Molina (for no good reason) but his character here (although a villain) actually became the most welcome presence on the screen because Molina, at least, brought some spark and energy and vibrancy to his part.The others seemed to be walking through a field of molasses. The casting was atrocious, at least in my opinion. There was no one to root for. Palin is usually very likable but his approach to this part was wooden and monotonous. No shading at all. Not to mention that Michael Palin apparently thought that transforming his normal attractiveness into big-screen unsightly was somehow more "authentic" and "artsy." And if the audience is expected to care about his character's depicted "romance," how about casting an actress with some charisma, some ability to enthrall and enchant. To make the filmed version of the true-life story believable. Or at least watchable.All in all it was a missed opportunity to make a good film. This one was, in my opinion, not worth watching. The back story is much more interesting than the film itself.
Set about one hundred years ago, in Europe and England, this tale of repressed love initially feels like a re-working of 'A Room with a View', with the list of who fell for whom slightly re-arranged. But its portrait of Victorian England seems deliberately exaggerated: a woman can't speak to a college fellow without ruining his reputation, it seems, or talk to a man after dark without being arrested as a whore. Yet there's a charm here that grows on you, in spite of its obviousness. What is perhaps a shame is the missed opportunity presented by the fact that there hero's opponent (in a college election) is an advocate of evolution, which by implication the hero opposes: but the film does not force its favourite to defend his creed. I liked odd bits of casting: Alfred Molina playing sexy, for example, and Roger Lloyd-Peck (Trigger in 'Only Fools and Horses') playing posh. But the script itself, though cute, could have done with some of the same originality.
I confess that I've never found Michael Palin very funny. His desperate mugging in "A Fish Called Wanda" marked a particular low. And his many, many travel documentaries have at times stretched to breaking point his ability to say something interesting about his journeys. But, and against type, his finest work as performer and writer is "American Friends" and it is very fine indeed. Based on the true story of his great grandfather, it is a wonderful, gently comic evocation of the claustrophobic lives - and obligatory bachelorhood - of 1860's Oxford University academics (the repressive world which spawned Lewis Carrol). A wonderfully rich, gently comic performance too by veteran Robert Eddison as the dying head of the college, surrounded at the end simply by his college fellows. Entirely devoted to academic excellence and religiosity, only occasional male horseplay for some ever interrupted their high-minded bachelor lives. The natural candidate to take over as head of the college, the Palin character, thus seemed fated to live and die within its confines just as had his predecessor. Reluctantly persuaded to take a short walking summer holiday alone in the (beautifully filmed) Swiss Alps, suddenly into his late bachelor life comes Womanhood, Beauty - and Love - in the shapes of a middle-aged American lady and her young ward. Again a wonderful poignant dignified performance by Connie Booth; her young ward's youth and beauty making her suddenly aware that her own looks and prospects are now both very much on the downward slope.An inauthentic jarring note was Alfred Molina's portrayal of Palin's academic rival; so openly leering, crude and dissolute, it was difficult to imagine that he could have coexisted with his high-minded fellows - unless they were so very unworldly that they failed to understand him.Curiously very reminiscent indeed of "Goodbye Mr Chips" (1935), arguably American Friends is a far better film; subtle, gentle and beautiful. Palin was a student at Oxford and there is affection, respect and an intense attention to period feel in his portrayal of the character and the place.
A lovely, thoughtful look at love between a professor and a young woman. Has a nice sense of period without stuffiness or artifice, good humorous observations, nice subtle acting. A great alternative to those overstuffed, melodramatic Merchant-Ivory type films. Also check out Palin's "The Missionary"; it's a little more broad but quite funny, and Maggie Smith is a treasure.