A well-to-do English widow (Helen Mirren), touring Italy, flouts convention and marries a much-younger local (Giovanni Guidelli, looking like the young John Derek), a dentist's son who turns out to be far more conventional than his bride ("This is Italy! Married women do not go wandering around alone!"). This interesting situation is short-lived when the wife dies in childbirth, giving place to a different and less complicated situation: the dead woman's in-laws (Rupert Graves, Judy Davis), disapproving all along, now want custody of the surviving child. The plot, lifted from E.M. Forster, never quite wriggles out from under the theme (Italian vitality vis-à-vis British inhibition), never quite takes on a life and logic of its own. And then, too, the treatment leans a bit heavily on the knowingness, the mockingness, the condescension of self-congratulatory moderns gazing down their noses at their forebears. The director, Charles Sturridge, had been busy with Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited), and might consequently have been predisposed to seek out the satire. In the circumstances, Judy Davis's limitless capacity for subtlety goes totally untapped (the dim lighting, dull color, doubtful focus don't help), though she's undeniably very funny in the role of the xenophobic Englishwoman abroad (e.g., trying to shush the ovation for a visiting diva at the provincial opera house). The tragic turn of events at the finish shines a harsh light on the frivolity of what came before. With Helena Bonham Carter. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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