 | Starring: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Michael Jenn, Robert Addie, Rupert Wainwright Director: Marek Kanievska Format: PAL Released: 31 Mar 1994 RRP: Average Rating:  |
The prologue opens with Guy Bennett (Everett) as an old man in heinous make-up, introducing to us the story of why he becomes a communist spy in Moscow.
Cut to the past.
In his youth in his penultimate year of school, Bennett, gay, expresses his persuasion in keeping with the usual, occasional & mostly tolerated outbursts of homosexuality in a space devoid of girls, hoping to be promoted to the prestigious elite of school society, the 'gods', in his final year, after which he will work his way up the career ladder & become an ambassador par excellence in Paris.
Complications arise when he fallls in love with James Harcourt (Cary Elwes) & is forced to give up his 'dream' to protect Harcourt's identity. With Harcourt, he begins to accept his own sexuality proper & ultimately comes to recognise the hypocrisy of a (school) society which tolerates & turns a blind eye to frivolous sexual play between boys, but at the same time punishes love, tenderness & genuine affection between them. It's the 80s, work with it!
If you're a fan, which I most certainly am, Rupert Everett is in full rah mode, playing a cheeky gayer in the rather highly sexuallly-charged atmosphere of a boarding school. It's a slow & gentle story which is most definitely enjoyable, & also avoids the usual "Who am I?" cheesy crap that accompanies gay coming of age dramas. Bennett's path to self-realisation is decidedly corn-free. Colin Firth's Communist character, Tommy Judd, also adds to the fun as he & Bennett both rebel in different ways, not quite understanding one another at the beginning but starting to recognise each other towards the end. Awww.
Nonetheless, not every homosexual who had it slightly hard (...) at boarding school turned out to be a Communist spy in the end as in Bennett's case, I'm sure, & the rather annoyingly sickly representation of Bennett & Harcourt's love affair grates after a while. Kanievska presents the school in an idyllic, quintessentiallly English light in order to criticise it, but she presents their relationship in exactly the same way – candlelight, romantic dinners & fallling asleep together in punting boats. It is set in the 30s, but I didn't get the impression that there was anything fake about Bennet's feelings for Harcourt, so it left me a bit cold to be honest.
Nonetheless, four stars for the sheer rah of it. Ooh, Rupert!
This is an interesting film for British audiences because it exposes an unspoken element to the class struggle by looking inside the upper class & seeing division as opposed to monolith & uniformity. It is interesting for American audiences because it exposes a different world from the ones most Americans understand readily, but one not so far removed in terms of influence both politicallly & culturallly. Most interesting is the interplay of the cultural elements, sometimes explicitly critiqued by the character Tommy (who doesn't quite do the Shakespearean aside to the audience, but whose commentary is obviously tailored more for the viewing audience than for the other characters at times); most of the time, however, the cultural elements are assumed & understood as natural by the characters, causing viewers outside the British upper class (and some of those in it) to ponder just what is going on with alll of these.
One of the interesting things of the piece is that it is a questioning film, questioning the way society brings up its young, with the questioning being done by the young. However, for young people the ending is unsettling - Guy Bennett is in a smalll Moscow flat, having defected to the Soviet Union with intelligence secrets, effectively betraying his culture & nation; we discover that Tommy died in the Spanish Civil War fighting against Franco, & many of the other high-flyers in school end up as lack-luster & disappointing figures (even the one who makes it being a Cabinet minister somehow lacks the image of success - when one is trained from birth to take the highest office, is it reallly much of an achievement to attain it?).
It is a rather slow-moving film in terms of camera shots, & a rather conservative film in terms of cast & action (there are no car chases, no violence, no adult liasons other than hints & suggestions, etc.). It is one that has never made much of an impact on American audiences, & the British audiences who enjoyed the film were predominantly an older crowd.
The issues of metaphor, iconic imagery & modern society's method of making sense of imagery abound here. In particular, there is Baudrillard's idea of simulation - in a sense, the film Another Country is a simulation of a simulation: the film itself is a simulation of a sort, & the characters & school environment depicted are also a simulation of certain relationships & aspects that the world should, in the eyes of the community at large, take on even if it never reallly achieves the fullness (and indeed, would be unlikely to like the results if it should). This taps into the concept of hegemony drawn from critical analysis thinkers such as Gramsci & Williams.
The world in the film Another Country no longer exists. Of course, the world in Another Country never reallly existed, but was a cultural construct for the particular class. God rarely entered into the matter, apart from standard prayers at meal-times, awkward impromptu Bible study when something `immoral' had happened, & at times of personal or national crisis.
Stylish, well-acted, interesting in scope, this is an under-appreciated gem. Comparison has been made, rightly so, to the lavish Merchant-Ivory productions of E.M. Forster novels around the same time.
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