 • About the ratings • Write your own review • Back to main page By Moira Macdonald Seattle Times Posted: July 23, 2003 There are days, I must confess, when absolutely nothing will do but a period drama from the BBC, full of perfect frocks and sconces and people giving each other lingering, wordless looks across an artfully lit drawing room. If you're nodding in recognition (and if you're not, off you go -- this one isn't for you), "The Heart of Me" will fit the bill nicely. Featuring Helena Bonham Carter doing a 1930s variant on her bohemian sister in "Howards End," it's a melancholy love triangle that may suffer from being released out of season -- this film cries out to be watched on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea. Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams ("The Sixth Sense") play a pair of well-off London sisters in the years before World War II. Madeleine (Williams) lives a decorous life with her handsome husband, Rickie (Paul Bettany). Dinah (Bonham Carter), still single, sashays about looking like an art-deco poster girl, blowing smoke rings at potential suitors. When Dinah's kohl-rimmed eyes meet Rickie's ... well, you can write the rest of this story, can't you? Based on a 1953 novel (now out of print) by British writer Rosamond Lehmann, "The Heart of Me" is a remarkably even-handed look at infidelity -- everybody behaves badly, everybody gets his or her heart broken, everybody gets to weep a few very restrained but nonetheless devastating tears. It's the sort of movie in which you can tell when a character is about to have a crisis because she dons a less-flattering outfit -- when Madeleine suddenly appears in a dumpy, lumpish gray sweater, you ache for her already. Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan has chosen his cast well; Williams' dainty, cut-glass features are perfectly suited to the precise Madeleine, and Bonham Carter's heavy-lidded eyes and purry voice make for a textbook Jazz Age femme fatale. As for Bettany's unfortunate Rickie -- well, as the gentleman watching with me remarked (see, this movie can make a person start talking like a British novel), these are the hazards of life when you look like an Arrow Collar ad. "The Heart of Me" is far from a perfect movie. It's almost too pretty for its own good, with its carefully chosen hues of mauve and aquamarine and its exquisite period settings. In one bedroom scene, Williams is nearly upstaged by a stunning art-deco dressing table -- something, alas, she probably wasn't warned about in drama school. But there's a crispness to the performances, and a real sisterly bond between Williams and Bonham Carter, that makes the movie quite affecting -- and at times very funny, in a stiff-upper-lip sort of way. "Can't you push that up?" asks Dinah, referring to a veil worn by the visiting Madeleine. "I feel at a disadvantage." Only in BBC movies do people talk like this, and it's delicious. | |||||||
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