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...

A really good book cannot be entirely simulated adequately on screen. There is too much going on underneath, too many subplots, too much conversation and description to undertake in two hours. Choices made by production folk determine which direction the film will go, generally accenting one plot line of or other and allowing the rest to fall to the wayside. HOD does a fine job with the route it takes, darkly stating the consequences of empty lives which rely on artifice for sustenance. These creatures were not creating their lives so much as feeding their idea of existence without exploration. The result is tragedy but the tragedy was already in existence. The actions of the trapped subjects simply began to reflect their emptiness. This doesn't make for a happy movie but it is instructive if one chooses to see the lessons. And as art, the acting, direction and cinematography are quite fine.

The hammerblow of human cruelty dressed in the velvet glove of pre-war hoch-Englishness. It's distressing that terrible things happen to the pathetic yet likable protagonist Tony (James Wilby) - even more so that they are delivered in the slow drip of self-interested scheming rather than in galvanising dramatic confrontations.Actually, Wilby is one of the two weak links of this film. He's not quite got the richness or range to suggest a redemptive development to his character. He's not sympathetic enough. The other might be Sturridge's peculiar, impressionistic direction that can fail to give the story enough propulsion.What the film does have are a number of fine performances from a top-drawer supporting cast. One fears Alec Guiness may be a final-frame cameo, but his contribution is in fact at least as substantial as Brando's in Apocalypse Now. Kristin Scott Thomas is quite excellent, at once endearing and blindly self-interested. And I also liked very much Pip Torrens, a really sharp study of a new sort of British gent - modern and knowing, but no cad. 6/10

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.