The other night my baby boy (15) offered to look after his baby sister (9) so that Tony and I could go to the pictures. And when a teenager offers it’s better not to let go, as it does not happen very often! Tony wished to see last James Bond’s movie but they won’t seen me dead in a James Bond with a muppet playing the main role! Anyway, I eventually managed to drag him to see “Brideshead Revisited” as I knew how much he liked the 80’s TV series.
I won’t trouble you too much with the plot. The movie, based on a very successful novel by Evelyn Waugh published in 1945, tells an evocative story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in pre-WWII England. It begins in 1925 at Oxford where Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is befriended by the flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, son of Lord and Lady Marchmain (Michael Gambon and Academy Award-winner Emma Thompson). Charles is quickly seduced by his friend’s opulent and glamorous world and thrilled by an invitation to ‘Brideshead’, the Marchmain’s magnificent ancestral home. Totally fascinated by his surroundings, Charles becomes infatuated with Sebastian’s beautiful sister, Julia, but as his emotional attachment to the young Marchmains grows, Charles finds himself increasingly at odds with the family’s strongest bond: a deep and abiding Catholic faith.
(in Venice, another marvellous setting)Although the movie does not match the charm and opulence of the TV series, the cinematography is splendid and all in all it is an entertaining and pleasant experience. The casting is fine, the playing excellent, the period setting is handsomely recreated. The main male characters do not live up to the marvelous performance of Jeremy Irons and above all Anthony Andrews, but Emma Thompson steals the screen playing the role of Lady Marchmain, the strict matriarch who has forced her Catholic beliefs upon her children to such degree that their lives are more or less destroyed.
But the real star of the movie, even more now than 20 years ago, is the splendid setting of Castle Howard (which “plays” the role of Brideshead), 15 miles north of York, one of Britain's finest historic houses in Britain and still home to the Howard family who conceived, designed, and built it over three centuries ago.
