My, what a repressed lot the inter-war British were, or so film-makers born decades later would have us believe. Well, in this movie here they are again being more repressed than ever - and the ones that aren't repressed are slightly batty, reckless and self-indulgent. Overall the film affects great seriousness, but cannot escape the melodramatic and contrived nature of its source material (a pot-boiler-ish novel by Rosamund Lehman dating from the 1960s). Bonham-Carter reprises roles she'd done before with ease. Williams is rather wooden, even allowing for the (you guesses it) repressed nature of her character. Bettany has done better, but carries off his role believably. But this is not enough to lift the film out of a rather unsatisfying gray area between melodrama and serious/historical period drama.
Review of The Heart of Me
