Carrington

This is possibly the best character study made in their last ten years. Taken from a biography of Lytton. This tells an emotionally complete tale of Dora Carrington and her love for Lytton. There is great drama here right from the start. Lytton is a homosexual writer who fancys young men. Dora is a painter who does not want to sleep with her "friend", because she believes its just for the physical (Which the film later shows to be true). Initially Dora is put off by Lytton (as is the viewer) but later as she says to him, She is burdened by one of the most self abasing loves for him. He also in turn loves her. But as he states they can do nothing about sleeping together. This is the contrast which is kept up throughout the whole film. All of Carringtons lovers physically love her body, and one of them even loves her (in a selfish way). But Lytton and Carrington love each other without sex, and their love is the strongest. As with the best Drama's, the character development never stops the whole way through. Each character is so well drawn and acted (Special credit must go to Emma Thompson and Jonathon Pryce, although the rest of the cast is also good) that you know how they are feeling even when it is not directly said or implemented. there is spoken and unspoken conflict in every scene. The two main characters are already in conflict while being in love. She loves him and he loves her but he is only attracted by men. Great drama manages to have conflict in every scene, and this one does. Great music from Micheal Nyman manages to capture the sentiments of this film especially well. So many more things could be said about the excellent narrative structure and lovely cinematography. But to be safe I will simply keep with my opening line. See Carrington. It does not pander to the audiences or ever become exploitational. It is a rare movie where the climax to the film is so fitting that you really can feel the emotion involved in these final frames. This is a film not to be missed.

Emma Thompson in a period piece--I would bet that's a pretty good movie, and 'Carrington' did not disappoint me. It concerns the unusual relationship of writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce) and painter Dora Carrington (Thompson) in their insular world of upper-class friends and other artists in England between the Great Wars. When we first meet Strachey he's a fastidious homosexual of thirty-six going on seventy-six. He mistakes Carrington, with her bobbed hair and masculine clothes, for a boy. Despite this inauspicious beginning, they soon find themselves fascinated with each other, then the fascination turns to love. Their non-sexual relationship endures in spite of her marriage, their other lovers and their lover's lovers. As the years go by, a flow chart might help out the viewer trying to remember who's who.

As you might surmise, this film is not for everyone. There are some who will dismiss the whole group as "immoral" or as an effete corps of impudent snobs, but we won't be that narrow- minded and judgemental, will we? If you allow yourself into 'Carrington's' world I think you'll find it rewarding. It's full of good actors but I believe its success is largely due to director Christopher Hampton's screenplay. It's a full two hour movie without the benefit of car chases, explosions or kickboxing matches, so it's a big plus to have something nice to look at for all that time. We can thank cinematographer Denis Lenoir and production designer Caroline Ames for that.

If you require the overdone loudness, violence and aggressivity of an American film (Training Day comes to mind), you'll need to take an extra dose of Ritalin to get through this film. (That advice could have been useful to a few of the previous reviewers, in fact.)

For those who don't have to be hit over the head, though, this film is a riveting masterpiece about the varied forms human love can assume--and a reminder that subcultures, like the Bloomsbury Group, have always given social norms a wide berth. British society has long tolerated eccentricity, especially when discreetly indulged, of which the nuanced contours of relationships among the literate in early-20th-century Britain provide an excellent illustration. Combine this refreshing glimpse of consensual mores with outstanding interpretations by Thompson and Pryce, and with fidelity to historical fact, and you've got two delightful hours of first-rate cinema on your hands.

And not an exploding car or a vengeance-driven, gadget-laden military operation against a demonized third-world country anywhere to be found. Amazing. And bravo. 9 out of 10.

"How do you spell ‘intangible'?" Dora Carrington asks of Lytton Strachey midway through this film as she sits writing at her desk. How do you spell intangible, indeed. Carrington tells the story of people who tried, in their own way, and at a time when society did not encourage such experiments, to acknowledge openly what most of us are aware of but still reluctant to discuss: that a great many differences exist between love and desire.

Carrington is one of the great epic romances, but a romance where sexual congress between the two who are passionately in love with each other has nothing whatever to do with the deep wells of feeling they share with each ther. Like The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and Out of Africa, Carrington is a film that dares to examine the difference between desire and love, and looks at an adult subject in an adult way. As opposed to Hollywood's usual matter-of-fact insistence that love is a game with a win/lose dialectic simplistically painted in broad stokes, Carrington traces, rather, the fact that love is indeed a mystery which must be acknowledged and honored for the way that it can bring out the best in both people rather than a way of keeping emotional score.

Emma Thompson is able to bring out the awkward, self-effacing aspects of Dora Carrington all the way down to the pigeon-toed stance the way the real life Carrington apparently stood. With all the impatience of a little girl who wishes that one day she'll wake up and finally find herself to be a sophisticated woman, she worships Lytton for his "cold and wise" attitude, his ability to see straight through the conventions of the time, and adopts him as her emotional mentor.

She's an artist whom everyone in the Bloomsbury set knew, even though she never really considered herself a part of the circle, unlike Lytton, whom everyone swarmed around for his scorched earth policy of anti-Victorian insights and rapier wit. Carrington, it would appear, spent her whole life trying to figure herself out, like any true artist, and Thompson very ably transmits that lost quality throughout the film: even as she gains her confidence socially, sexually and artistically, the motivations of her heart she would never let be pressured, no matter how much physical affection and attention she needed. Which I think is an important distinction to make.

A virgin many years past the point of reason, it is as if Carrington bought in to the sexual revolution of the flapper era between the world wars and the way it tried to repeal the oppressiveness of Victorian morals, learning how to cultivate and appreciate the sensual needs of the body, but deep down realized that a healthy, vigorous sex life with a plethora of partners does not necessarily mean more love, but simply more sex. As Carrington points out in the film, with Lytton she was able to be herself in all her confusion and joy, and without the obligatory pressures of regular sexual performance was able to find in Lytton the only person she ever really felt emotionally comfortable with. Echoing that great line of TS Eliot's in Four Quartets, of a "love beyond desire."

Jonathan Pryce, as Lytton Strachey, has the honor of portraying one of the best screen roles of all-time. Like Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins, or Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles, his performance as Lytton is so fully realized that his character becomes unprecedented. Incorporating the attitude of, say, a bearded Oscar Wilde, Pryce's Lytton takes no prisoners and is disgusted by what he sees around him: the behaviour of the upper classes he finds himself eventually skirting is embarrassingly inexcusable to his ethically conscientious grounding. English boys are dying, he scowls, for their right to shamelessly frolic on the lawns of garden parties.

When Lytton moves in with Carrington they both want commitment (with a small c), but also personal freedom. This ambiguity toward each other is parallel to their ambiguity toward the concept of fame, which they both courted in a very teasing way, but soon grew to realize that there is a lot more to be said for secure domesticity (no matter how loosely defined) than their behaviorally adventurous artistic peers. Because Carrington is intelligently written, directed, and acted, however, we do not see the behavior of each of them as simply willful and spoiled, but as part of the contradictions they need to stay individuals in a culture, and at a time, where the conventional notions of love and sex were strictly regimented.

Jonathan Pryce plays Lytton with a sort of detachment that is supposed to come from the character's distaste for commitment.

What's most surprising about this epic romance is that given the amount of territory it traverses (seventeen years) at an almost leisurely pace, it clocks in at only a hair over two hours, but when those two hours are over, you certainly feel as if you've been somewhere, seen something, been privy to so many more truths and realizations than you'll see in any other standard film about a romance. What we have here is a paradox: an old-fashioned story about an avant-garde arrangement. An intelligent, thoughtful love story, told with enough care and attention that we really get involved in the passions between the characters, not the algebra surrounding them.

A movie that asks the question, how did it ever get made? Absolutely not a chance that it was made for profit. Once I stopped asking the question, I could enjoy the superior cinematic quality of all the elements that elevate a film to a work of art. I suppose it must have been exhibited in a theater, somewhere, though getting it booked must have been quite an accomplishment for its backers. I caught it on cable which allowed me to sip on a brandy while the film took its time unfolding in a style that I would describe as a splendidly animated coffee table book.

I am moved to comment on Carrington to express my gratitude to its makers.