The story, from the David Hare stage play, concerns a representative British subject named Susan Traherne, whose life peaks early in her term of service to the French Resistance in World War II, and whose inability ever to match that experience, and whose discontentment with mere "plenty," will make the rest of her life a small hell for those who share it. The strength of the conception is the breadth of the thing, the expanse of time, the changing stages of life, rather than the minutiae of the immediate moment; and indeed the basic narrative structure, with its sudden long leaps forward in time, tends to excite impatience for the next big leap and to foster a sort of mental drumming of one's fingers during the layovers betweentimes, especially early while the thematic groundwork is still being laid. For all the chronological (and geographical) ground covered, the movie is essentially rather static, a series of insufficiently varied variations on a theme. And the theme itself is compounded of insufficiently dressed-up platitudes: the heightened emotions of war, the coldness of the English, the inevitable erosion of youthful ideals. What keeps this from going stale is that the ideals in question, though noble enough, are treated not as products of lofty rationality but as those of borderline psychosis, or if not as direct products of it, at least as inseparable from it. Susan Traherne is a specific character and not a disembodied voice of reason. Meryl Streep, Charles Dance, Tracey Ullman, John Gielgud, and Sting; directed by Fred Schepisi. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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