posted to FoF 4/8/2005

If you want to share this article, please direct people to this url.

Thank you.

[Review published around the time of release of the film in an unindentifed (UK) film magazine - 
? probably Films and Filming.]

Another Country

A Virgin Films Release in association with Twentieth Century Fox through UK Film Distributors Ltd. Colour. 90 mins. Cert. 15.

Guy Bennett, RUPERT EVERETT; Tommy Judd, COLIN FIRTH; Barclay, MICHAEL JENN; Delahay, ROBERT ADDIE; Devenish, RUPERT WAINWRIGHT; Fowler, TRISTAN OLIVER; Harcourt, CARY ELWES; Menzies, FREDERICK ALEXANDER; Wharton, ADRIAN ROSS-MAGENTY; Yevgeni, GEOFFREY BATEMAN; Martineau, PHILIP DUPUY; Head Boy, GUY HENRY; Arthur, JEFFERY WICKHAM: Best Man, JOHN LINE; Trafford, GIDEON BOULTING; ANNA MASSEY as Imogen Bennett; BETSY BRANTLEY as Julie Schofield.

THE PERIOD is early in the 1930s, and at one of the foremost English public schools (by which is meant private and fee-paying schools), Guy Bennett, who is in his mid-teens, witty, wealthy, and congenitally untidy, discovers within himself a sympathy for the communist ethos. This sympathy is slow to develop because Bennett, like the majority of the schoolboys, is inclined to scoff at one of their number, Tommy Judd, who occupies every possible spare minute by perusing Das Kapital in translation, and whose conversation is larded with enthusiasm for the precepts of Marx and Lenin.

Bennett is not the most political of animals. His change of heart about communism is a reaction to the rigours of the society to which he was born, and which is examplified in the rituals of the school. Homosexuality is the norm rather than the exception among these cloistered boys and the system decrees that this is in order so long as it is recognised as a passing phase and, more importantly, so long as nobody is officially 'found out'; a state of affairs deplored by Guy who has found in a slightly younger boy the love of his life, as he fervently believes.

As an indication of the perilous atmosphere in which these boys exist, one of a pair who have been 'found out' is so appalled at the thought of the consequences that he hangs himself. Guy is of sterner stuff for all his cultivated hot-house charisma and, in the long run, it would appear that he will do what he can to bring down the entire social structure
of his country, which is reflected and perhaps magnified, in the regulations and disciplines of the school.

Guy Bennett is based upon Guy  Burgess (one of the most publicised defectors from  England to Russia); but 'based' is very much the operative word. Julian Mitchell, author of the original stage play Another Country, as well as the present screenplay has said, 'The characters are very much my own. I don't think Burgess was like Bennett. What I've tried to  suggest is that this may have been  the motivation for some of these  people. I think such decisions are  made on emotional rather than  rational grounds, particularly by  the young'.

In terms of dramatisation, the  story of this movie is rather  turgid, as Mitchell's play would also have been no doubt were it not for the saving grace of its rapier-thrust humour. Seeing the play was a sophisticated experience whereas the film, except for the occasional comic relief, takes things solemnly and, like Guy Bennett himself, romantically. This latter ploy is chiefly evident in the scenes between Guy and the object of his gentle but earnest affection, Harcourt, a character only spoken of in the play but never seen. The decision to include him in the movie having been taken is justified by the estimable acting of Rupert Everett as Guy Bennett and Cary Elwes as Harcourt, and the carefully judged love scenes are a credit as well to the director of the film, Marek Kanievska.

This director comes from television, and he is of Polish parentage but was educated in  England (at a comprehensive school). He brings to Another Country, to some extent, an  outsider's eye which can be beneficial; but he has said that he was not so much concerned with a realistic representation of English public school life in the 1930s than with creating an impression of what it would have felt like to be caught up in that environment (an attitude earier for an audience to grasp in such a heightened movie as Ken Russell's  Valentino, for example, than in the present case where realism never seems at much of a  remove).

It was Kanievska's idea as well to minimise the humour which apparently irritated him when he saw the play. This seems to me a pity. So does the inclusion of a prologue and epilogue showing Guy in his old age in Moscow being interviewed by a bright young American girl, to whom we are presumably meant to believe he tells everything we are  shown in the long flashback that constitutes the bulk of the film. Wrinkled beyond recognition and adopting a piping voice, Rupert Everett is equal to his brief excursions into overt character acting, but there is to my mind a falseness about the concept of those scenes and, although Mitchell is said to have written them in the first place for the stage version, I think that whoever decided to omit them in the live theatre made a wise decision.

I miss, on the other hand, the older character of Cunningham a visiting celebrity entertained by the boys in the play. His subtle rapport with Guy Bennett gave a certain foreknowledge of the way Guy's future might be shaped, between school and defection.

All of the acting in the movie is fine. Rupert Everett having proven his worth in this same role on the stage underplays intelligently for the camera; and among the others Colin Firth is especially notable as the Marx-orientated Judd, just a shade heartier in demeanour than anybody else in sight. The anonymous school is shrewdly suggested by locations at Oxford and in and around Apethorpe in Northamptonshire: the cinematography (often very beautiful) is by Peter Biziou.

GORDON GOW