The Heart of Me

'The Heart of Me', based on Rosamond Lehmann's novel 'The Echoing Grove' (and rather pointlessly retitled), is a tale of two sisters and the two eras which they come to represent. Madeleine (Olivia Williams) is a cold, highly conventional society woman who is determined to keep up an appearance of decorum in her life in the same way that she applies make-up to her face, and who will do anything to preserve her marriage to Rickie (Paul Bettany) even though it is loveless. While Madeleine is a relic of the old world, her sister Dinah (inevitably, for a period film, played by Helena Bonham Carter) embodies a new, revolutionary spirit: unmarried, independent and bohemian, she rejects the suitors thrown at her by her family, works for her own living, and likes to sleep on top. Rickie, who has become the new 'man of the house' now that the sisters' father has died, is trapped between his adulterous love for Dinah, and pressures from family and society to remain with Madeleine. His affair with Dinah begins at a New Year's Eve party, and forms a new kind of menage based on passionate love and mutual happiness, but it is thwarted by Madeleine and her equally old-world mother (Eleanor Bron), who draw him back into his former domestic arrangement with tragic consequences.

While 'The Heart of Me' deals, like most British period films, with the stifling repressiveness of the English class system, it is unusual for being set in the final years of the British Empire, a period when this whole system of values was on the point of collapse. By skipping to and fro from pre-war 1930s to post-war 1946, it offers an elliptical account of a society in transformation, seen through the prism of a single family's fate; and it suggests that the next generation down, provided that it survives the war, can look forward to a different, brighter future.

The repetition in its plot, based around an on-again off-again relationship, does make 'The Heart of Me' seem considerably longer than its 96 minutes, but it never quite becomes boring. All the acting is impeccable, the period detail is impressive, and Dinah and Madeleine really do look ten years older in the 1946 scenes. Oh, and for those interested in such things, Bonham Carter continues her practice, begun in 'Wings of a Dove', of baring all for her craft.

An affecting parable of changing times and mores.

Anton Bitel, 14.05.03