The Queen Of Sheba's Pearls

(Herald rating: * * * *)

British-born director Nutley, who has lived and worked for most of his professional life in Sweden, turns an expatriate's knowing eye on the emotional oddities of his homeland in this handsomely burnished family drama.

As if attempting to a bridge a gap in his own life, he tells a story with roots in both countries: in a Devon country house on the February day in 1952 that the king dies, Jack Bradley (Weeks) is sitting down to a lunch to celebrate his 16th birthday. He is surrounded by the cheerfully oddball extended family - his grandmother (Spriggs), her grown daughters, and her undertaker brother-in-law (the wonderful Vaughan) who employs Jack's dad (Cranitch). The party is disrupted by the arrival of an attractive Swedish blonde (Bergstrom), who - to everyone's alarm - is the very image of Jack's mother, killed in a freak accident exactly eight years before.

The newcomer's identity is soon explained, but if anything it deepens her mystery. Before long, skeletons are clattering out of closets both upstairs and downstairs, and Nutley is embarked on a pointed but tender examination of the persistence of love and the endless complexity of family dynamics.

There's nothing much new in the substance of the film but, in his English-language feature debut, Nutley shows his enormous maturity and assurance both as scriptwriter and visual composer. His keen ear for dialogue evokes the finest distinctions in the different layers of the world he is excavating - between Swede and Englishman; boy and girl; spinster and siren; father and son - and the pitch-perfect performances capture the rage and pain that seethe beneath the very proper English exteriors.

He also has a good feel for the absurd - the one-person funeral in which the only mourner is the bereaved is the best of several - although a couple of jarring moments verge on slapstick.

And the scenes set in Jack's boarding school nail that surreal and very English institution perfectly.

Bergstrom (Nutley's long-time leading lady and real-life wife) plays a character who is part of a long cinematic tradition - the handsome stranger who up-ends an ordered world and, in particular, brings a zinger sensuality into arid lives. Her reliance on her statuesque beauty robs the part of any great depth - though it boosts her power as the catalyst - and the other performances are masterly.

The film is also, not incidentally, among the most visually ravishing of the year. Director of photography Jens Fisher, whose father shot Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal for Ingmar Bergman almost 50 years ago, lends a autumnal glow to one painterly composition after another and makes the most of a meticulous but understated production design that includes some fab 50s outfits.

This is, in the end, one that will appeal to fans of quality British drama, but it's informed by a fancifulness and an emotional intelligence that make it stand out from even that distinguished crowd. Recommended.

CAST: Helena Bergstrom, Lorcan Cranitch, Lindsay Duncan, Tim Dutton, Rollo Weeks, Elizabeth Spriggs, Peter Vaughan DIRECTOR: Colin Nutley
RUNNING TIME: 122 mins
RATING: M (offensive language and sexual references)
SCREENING: Bridgeway, Lido