A ravishing young Swiss governess lowers herself to the job of baby-maker, a broodmare for a British blueblood of concealed identity ("I have a reputation to protect"), so as to liberate her father from debtors' prison. A baby is produced on schedule, a girl, to be spirited away as if by fairies and never to be seen or heard of again. That's the agreement. But seven years later the governess secures a job in her proper line of work, without the knowledge and approval of the master of the house, as governess to her own daughter! The directing debut of screenwriter William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Nell, First Knight), who also authored the script at hand, awakens thoughts of an old-fashioned Bette Davis soap opera. Or at any rate it awakens these in bare-bones synopsis. The fleshed-out reality puts them straight to bed without supper. The plodding and obvious exposition leaves nothing to the imagination, though no imagination was required. And at the first plot point that cries out for some explanation — how the mother managed to track down the nameless daughter — none is provided. Where's the plod when we want it? The scope of the drama is stiflingly narrow. We never meet the governess's father who needed the rescue from debt, and it is difficult to believe in the oppressive pressure of Society when the aristocrat prefers to live in complete seclusion from it, and when his sole contact with it comes in the unwelcome form of his thoroughly debauched father and entourage of fellow revelers. Stephen Dillane, an actor who lays everything out in plain sight, is poorly equipped for repression in any event. Sophie Marceau, although no Bette Davis, possesses a quiet intensity and dignity, and her covert emotional connections to her unacknowledged offspring (as, for instance, in her first sight of the seven-year-old across the water through a dirty window) remind us of the premise's possibilities for soapsuds. Nicholson has neither the vitality nor the nerve to play it that way. He pumps it up instead with the stuffy, tragic, grandiose air of an overawed adaptation of Thomas Hardy, a pretension that deflates in a hurry at the Happily-Ever-After ending: too tidy, too easy, too lazy, and too oblivious. Dominique Belcourt, Kevin Anderson, Joss Ackland, Lia Williams. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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