By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * *)
No two ways about it: the strikingly handsome Blanchett looks good in a beret and floral frock. No wonder that, as this film's eponymous heroine, she caught the eye of the chaps at the War Office who were excited by her excellent French and parachuted
her into occupied France.
And a strikingly handsome France it is too, set-dressed within an inch of its life and beautifully lensed in period-perfect desaturated colour. She probably would have jumped at the chance to go even if her new love, a dashing airman, wasn't missing in action over there.
As it turns out, she doesn't need that fluent French, since everyone except the surly old farmer (Gambon) with whom she fetches up speaks English with a French accent. Charlotte plays along - spicing her native Highland burr with the odd "Non".
All this while, she (and we) have no idea what she's supposed to be doing, except get in the way of the brave Resistance fighters led by the farmer's son Julien (Crudup) who looks pretty strikingly handsome, too, especially bathed in the light of a burning German transport train.
So she spends much of her time bathing and cooking for a couple of Jewish boys and the rest having existential crises (with tears in her eyes, she says, "I don't know what I'm doing here" and we feel like shaking her and reminding her Jews are being transported) or enunciating banalities like "war makes fools of us all; the rest it kills" which makes neither numerical nor philosophical sense.
The adaptation of the best-selling novel by Sebastian Faulks is the work of Jeremy Brock (who wrote much of television's Casualty) and it opens well in England, morphing from romance to adventure story in concise and polished fashion. But, once in France, it becomes so laden down with implausibilities and tangled with loose ends that you feel like weeping.
Armstrong, one of Australia's most distinguished directors of women's stories, extracts some moments of real conviction from a good cast. But the heroine is so poorly drawn and the romantic drama so bereft of emotional weight that the whole thing dismally fails to convince.
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon
Director: Gillian Armstrong
Running time: 119 mins
Rating: M (contains violence and offensive language)
Screening Village, Rialto, Berkeley cinemas
By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * *)
No two ways about it: the strikingly handsome Blanchett looks good in a beret and floral frock. No wonder that, as this film's eponymous heroine, she caught the eye of the chaps at the War Office who were excited by her excellent French and parachuted
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