This is a subtle and understated film about big subjects: what constitutes betrayal and weakness in the way the living deal with the legacy of the dead. It's also a true story. The noted New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of 33. Just before she died she wrote to her husband, John Middleton-Murray, and named him her literary executor. In the letter she instructed him in no uncertain terms to destroy as many of her papers as possible and to publish as few as possible. He ignored her instructions, destroyed none, and published virtually all. In doing this he secured himself a comfortable living in royalties from Mansfield's estate until his death some thirty five years later. His excuse and justification was that, in acting as he did, he gained posthumous fame and recognition for his dead wife's writings and that this would have satisfied her desire to be considered a great writer. The fact that she was a great writer anyway is undoubtedly clearer now with the benefit of hindsight than it was then, and it's easy to castigate Murray for being greedy and disingenuous. But he does have a point: He did succeed in focusing attention on her work at a time when it might well have otherwise been forgotten or ignored.
But in creating a "cult of Katherine", and portraying her as a needy, sickly, crushed violet of a woman, he did the true Katherine a grave disservice. As this film points out: "she was tough, and funny." The point of this film is to explore these issues and to dramatise them. In this it succeeds admirably. John Gielgud gives a typically marvellous performance as an ageing weakling troubled by a guilty conscience. Jane Birkin is hardly in his league but she holds her own perfectly adequately. The direction is taut and the script is excellent. It all looks so perfectly chocolate box that the image of a vengeful, tubercular ghost bearing down on Murray is all the more shocking when it occurs. Similarly, the scenes of Mansfield alone in a string of cheap hotels coughing up her lungs are delivered without sensationalism or sentimentality - and are all the more effective for this.
For admirers of Katherine Mansfield, this film is an absolute feast but that doesn't mean that it is irrelevant to anyone else. If you admire fine acting, a good script and an original story about a genuine ethical dilemma, then this film will engage you on all those levels. Too bad it's so unavailable. I taped it off the television in the 1980's. I have made a DVD of my tape but it's not very good quality. It's absurd that such a fine Gielgud performance should languish unseen. Track it down if you can.
