here’s a hilariously awful review of The Heart of Me on the BBC website, which I’m going to quote: “Once upon a time, in those long, dark days before Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels came to deliver us from boredom, the British film industry survived on a bread and water diet of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas... [The Heart Of Me is] like a party guest who's turned up so late, they've become a complete embarrassment.” Fairly standard for the BBC, really, seemingly aimed at The Youth Of Today and written in a style that not even the most clueless twelve year olds would feel treated them with respect. (And fans of irony will be thrilled to know that the movie was financed and produced by BBC Films.) But this is the most enjoyably appalling manifestation I’ve yet seen of a general trend towards the apparent remarketing of the UK as not stuffy and repressed and old-fashioned, but as Young and Hip and Happening. (Incidentally, just look at those films heralded as the pride of Britain: a likeable romantic comedy, a charmless Tarantino rip-off, and... well, I loved Trainspotting, but saw it long enough ago that I can’t be sure I still would.) This claim that anything set in The Past (or, indeed, made in the past) should be a retrograde embarrassment is an annoyingly widespread one amongst British media, and the BBC review would be more disheartening if it were less laughable. Which makes it somewhat infuriating that The Heart of Me is no more than a standard, competent, predictable period drama.


The movie is set in upper-middle-class London, spanning the passage of time from 1934 to 1946. Its source is, predictably, a novel; not, say, E.M. Forster or Henry James, but instead the apparently more middlebrow "The Echoing Grove" by Rosamund Lehmann. It starts in 1934 (obviously), where we’re introduced to the two main characters at their father’s funeral. Madeleine, played by Olivia Williams, stands blankly and formally, showing no hint of emotion, like everyone else there. By contrast, her sister, Dinah – played, naturally, by Helena Bonham Carter, great mainstay of these sorts of films – is visibly distraught. Increasingly unsubtle characterisation continues. Madeleine is dutiful and respectable, with a solid marriage to aspiring solicitor Rickie. Dinah, contrastingly, is free-spirited, somewhat bohemian, loves poetry, paints, and wears colourful and ill-fitting clothes. No, really. Madeleine regards her sister with a mixture of explicit disapproval and repressed jealousy. When her mother says that Dinah “has passions”, she spits, “She collects passions”. At this point the film depicts a social occasion where Madeleine attempts to find a man for her tempestuous sister; a difficult task, she believes, claiming that “She is tenacious and puts people off”. But Dinah ignores this manipulative meddling, her eyes meeting those of Rickie.

Madeline (Olivia Williams) in a lost scene from American Beauty


So obviously, Rickie and Dinah begin an affair. But the movie barely provides any evidence of why. It’s possible to construct plausible motivation for Rickie. He is essentially trapped in an efficient, purposeful but loveless marriage. Madeleine herself says, “It takes more than love to sustain a marriage”, seemingly implying that she finds love to not be necessary at all. The independent, free-spirited Dinah (but more on this later) could well seem wildly appealing to such a man. But there’s minimal reason provided for Dinah’s attraction to Rickie; he’s an unassertive, weak-willed, pusillanimous mouse of a man, who I can’t imagine would appear anything other than deeply uninteresting. What’s more, there’s barely any reason given for how or why the affair starts. Their eyes meet at the party; Rickie goes to fetch Dinah as she stands in the pouring rain, and... that’s about it. This is all before the supposedly passionate affair leads to profoundly tedious sex scenes that fail to communicate even the idea of passion or lust or love, or whatever is supposed to be the motivating force behind this ill-defined excursion into infidelity.


The Heart of Me has been compared to Neil Jordan’s film of The End of the Affair; this makes some sense as regards to plot and setting, but absolutely none as regards to directorial style or, well, anything beyond plot and setting, really. Jordan’s film is dreamlike, the camera drifting flowingly around the sets, dialogue whispered and poetic; it was artistic both self-consciously and genuinely. Dialogue in The Heart of Me, however, is frequently laughable; so you have Madeleine telling Dinah “Has it occurred to you I actually worry about you?”, and Dinah exclaiming “I’m more than happy – I’m in a state of hope”, and worst of all, Madeleine’s line on discovery of the affair, “One's own sister – it does seem a little... out of the ordinary”. It’s set in a world where respectable people speak with a kind of mannered bluntness, where no expression of emotion is permitted save disapproval and irritability. As ever with this genre, shots and images are generally well composed, if admittedly excessively uniform; there’s a surfeit of drab, dour sets and lighting, to an extent that a glimpse of sunshine is (deliberately) a great shock. Unfortunately, camera placement and movement are both utterly useless, making everything seem rushed and blunt. This effect is exacerbated by the intrusive score, its faux-classical style detracting from the movie rather than adding to it.



Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter) wondering why she likes Rickie


Interestingly, though, there is great improvement in the last half hour. The plot until then has been fairly ineptly handled. About half an hour in, with the characters hurriedly introduced and the affair begun and Dinah pregnant and some more incidental plot and everything feeling ridiculously crammed together, there’s suddenly a caption “Ten Years Later”, where Dinah ends up on Madeleine’s doorstep and they go over their past. The rest of the film is a mix of flashbacks continuing the story, and their new post-war life, where Madeleine’s house is constantly suffused with blue light, her furniture covered with sheets, and where a pub lunch is something special. Towards the end, the movie finds a new lease of life. Rickie’s predicament is brought to life; this is a man married to a woman obsessed by reputation and decency, in love with another woman less free-spirited than randomly impetuous and possibly manic-depressive, and held down by general repressive society. This repression is increasingly represented by Dinah and Madeleine’s mother, brilliantly played by Eleanor Bron, who engineers the situation “so that a tragedy be prevented”. One electrifying scene near the end expresses powerfully the life-destroying climate that the three main characters are trapped in, where the outward appearance of respectability is pursued at all costs, but especially personal tragedy.


This improvement is thankfully facilitated by a generally high standard of acting. Helena Bonham Carter may be as tedious as ever, her characteristically expressionless performance and petulant delivery serving to make her already unsympathetic character even more dislikeable. But Paul Bettany is excellent as Rickie, perfectly capturing his constant heartbreak, and Bron is near-perfect as the sinister, scheming mother. Best of all is Olivia Williams; her performance presents an irritable, superficial woman, but imbues her with humanity. In the 1946 scenes, her subtly changed body language, as well as excellent make-up, demonstrate the effect that the years have had on Madeleine, and makes that character perhaps the most sympathetic in the movie. It’s because of this high standard that characters written as barely more than spiteful caricatures become interesting and subtle. It’s enough to make The Heart of Me perfectly watchable. But that’s about all.