Brideshead Revisited

A preview of the new version shown at the GFT.

I absolutely LOVE the book, and so this was rather a disappointment. It seemed too convoluted, insofar as it jammed the story into too short a timespan. This book can't be done justice in 2 hours. Whilst the casting was OK (Matthew Goode was good, Emma Thompson not so - in fact in the post-screening Q&A the film's producer Douglas Rae let slip that he had much preferred Kristin Scott-Thomas to play the part, and I have to agree it would've been much better with her), it appeared a compromised film. It wasn't truly cinematic, and seemed stuck between cinema's more grandiose visuals and those solid, stately mises-en-scene you find in 'good, quality' BBC costume adaptations. It was no surprise to see BBC Films in the credits.

If possible, the film was far less subtle than the book but came across as far more vague and unsure of itself. The film-makers had made some strange choices too. Gone was the book's wonderful ambiguous relationship between the Charles and Sebastian, replaced with a fairly obvious unrequited love angle. Douglas Rae said afterwards that they had made the decision very early on to really go with the Sebastian Is Gay idea. I remember the book as having this wonderful vagueness, so wonderfully captured by Evelyn Waugh's perfect prose. He is so economical with his language that he gives you room to breathe, to take in the story almost by osmosis, to really understand it. This film trundled you on from "event" to "event" without pausing for reflection.

By wonderful coincidence, I switched on the telly today and on ITV3 was the original TV series, which I'd never seen before. One hour of it was enough to know - like everyone else - that this is the superior adaptation.