Director James Kent has a sensitive touch that deserves recognition and praise in this age of formulaic CGI films where character is more often than not ignored, or simply mass-produced to wooden specifications.
The film's curious title, THE THIRTEEN TALE, refers to a book of just 12 tales. The 13th tale amounts to the narrative that its dying author - superbly portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave - is conveying to a contracted biographer, intelligently played by Janet Amsden. The author's name I could not narrow down to Adeline or Emmeline because of the strange, almost transmutable relation between the twin sisters. However, one can reasonably assume that the 13th and final is the tale written by Amsden, who reveals that she too had a twin sister who died knocked down by a car, a death for which she blames herself. Thus, Redgrave and Amsden in a sense become spiritual twins, too, and that final tale is the result of their collaboration which starts edgily but ends on a tender, friendly note.
This TV film largely shot in a decaying manor house that still reflects past grandeur has the quality of Gothic vision and contained horror interlaced with credible, if deliberately evasive, characterization. Bedridden Redgrave, taking liquid morphine to relieve constant physical pain - to add to the pain of losing her sister(s) - narrates in a rather dettached manner, admitting that she physically beat up her sister but could not tell why.
Thus, she leaves her biographer with some interpretative loose ends that the latter supposedly weaves together into THE THIRTEENTH TALE.
Exquisite cinematography by Jean-Philippe Gossart, fittingly restrained musical score, sharp yet touching screenplay by Diane Setterfield off the novel by Christopher Hampton.
Definite must-see. 8/10.
