Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991)

Touches You

Powerful

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

About love and disillusion. About different worlds and small gestures. A movie about few British characters and some Italian drops. In final, flavor of old letters. A adaptation with a seductive Helen Mirren and same Bonham Carter. Rupert Graves - piece of same play, childish, fragile and gray. So, nothing new. A E. M. Forster at right place, with usual ingredients and known recipes. But it is correct. For public, for lost emotions, for circle of silence and nice hour. Than, not a surprise. Only game for need to discover warm colors, lessons of life in tender sauce, words of a feeling and same traces of our time in the respiration of sentiments in a space - material for ordinary dreams.

'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' said Alexander Pope, which helpfully explains the subject of the title. The fools are an absurd English party looking to 'rescue' a baby from its Italian father (the party bound to its mother by the tenuous association of inheritance and acquaintance).'Foolishness' also becomes a euphemism for repression in this disarmingly light period drama, a repression buried almost beyond scrutiny by the impressive Rupert Graves. His is the key, poignant role although his character is matched in script and execution by Helena Bonham Carter's slow-burning Caroline Abbott and the outstandingly dysfunctional Judy Davis. Helen Mirren is miscast, but luckily is little more than a trope - Giovanni Guidelli is also alien to this company but actually that's rather more to the point.The film is described in a number of reviews as being 'sumputously filmed', or the like. This is not the case: it's rather simply filmed but in taking in the beautiful Tuscan town of San Gimignano both at a distance and close up cannot fail to seduce the characters and viewer alike. It also has one of the most succinct yet comprehensive sequences about the true nature of opera in a movie. 7/10

Where Angels Fear To Tread, a fine novel in its own right, is transferred to the big screen with wit and a painter's eye by the masterful Charles Sturridge. Against a backdrop rich in Edwardian England's own brand of stuffy propriety, we watch cultures and mores clash, with poignant, and occasionally hilarious results. Judy Davis delivers one of my top ten moments on film, a snit of epic self-righteousness, in a memorable scene at the opera. The beauty of the film lies in its fluid and compassionate depiction of the wrongheadedness and confusion which ensue when foreign travelers pack their own narrow values next to the toothpaste, granting themselves permission to brandish them in the face of every long-suffering local along the way. Luckily for us, the film is populated by a believable group of finely drawn characters, played by actors who simply could not be better cast.

The first time I watched this movie I kept saying to myself.. this movie seems so familiar.. Then I realized that I had read the book the summer before.. This is a great credit to the screenwriter and director as the story is followed precisely and each page is brought to life on the screen.. A must for Forester fans, Anglophiles or those who want to enjoy a true tale of human souls intertwined. The prejudices and self importance of the English upper class are superbly charactered by all.. You'll laugh , cry and wonder at their actions.. You will become part of them... This is definitely one that I will be adding to my "Sunday Night Movie and Tea" collection.