1978 Directed by David Hugh Jones
In the late 1930s, three reclusive middle-aged spinster sisters live on their run down family estate in Ireland. Otto Beck, a perpetual graduate student from Bavaria with a habit of making pompous declamations, rents the back lodge to work on his esoteric thesis. Imogen Langrishe, the least repressed of the sisters, begins an affair with Otto. Imogen takes the love affair seriously, but Otto just enjoys the cheap lodging and the comfort of Imogen.
An erotic and claustrophobic drama set in Ireland which contains one of Judi Dench's most sensual and powerful performances. Lost in a place of a lack of confidence, drab, and curious, her Imogen is drawn to the young German, Beck, who is played by Jeremy Irons, who talks of the purity of the Irish and awakens a dormant longing in the quiet and mousy woman.
Annette Crosbie is also marvellous as Imogen's sad and strict sister, a tight bundle of repressed energy. The piece is focused on the body, the baseless of desire, the breaking out from everyday norms. And being a Pinter play - in which the author himself appears - every word is given depth and meaning far beyond usual conversation. It is a stilted style many dislike, but it works well here, alongside themes of sex and emotional violence.
Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons playing a couple in a play for television by BBC. He has an affected German accent that fools nobody and is later on even dropped. He is pompous and quite predatory in the beginning. The seduction scene in the house in town was infuriating, and Shannon and his "trollop" even more so. He becomes distant and even cruel when the passion wears off. She is more of a mystery, but essentially a woman in need of adoration and security, which he cannot and will not provide. She keeps testing his love and he hardly even cares to simulate it. The relationship deteriorates quickly.
It's odd to see Dame Judi so young. She also does some…
Birth Year Challenge: Part 1 (Progress: 36/43)
#24
Top-notch performances in an otherwise unremarkable film.
Jeremy why do you have to be an asshole but so breath-taking at the same time? 😭😭😭😭
A BBC movie about a romance between Jeremy Irons' poor German scholar and Judi Dench, an Irish woman who lives with her two sisters in an estate of quickly diminishing wealth right before World War II. Most of the story is a flashback, and the timeline is fractured and unclear, offering a narrative complexity to unravel if you feel so moved, but the central relationship which balances class respectability with base eroticism is solid enough to carry the film despite its mysteries. Pinter's French Lieutenant's Woman deals with similar ideas.
According to Michel Ciment's indispensable book of interviews, the great Joseph Losey originally had eyes on an adaptation of Aidan Higgins's novel LANGRISHE GO DOWN, so the fact that none other than Harold Pinter provided his services for this 1978 adaptation is ever so apropos. Shot on 16mm and directed by David Hugh Jones, who would later helm Pinter's Betrayal (1983), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), and Jacknife (1989), this independent picture was shot in Ireland and picked up by the BBC for their 90-minute Play of the Week series, only to see a 2002 U.S. theatrical release in a new 112-minute version, to a fair amount of critical acclaim. Allegedly, it had been discovered after having played well as…
The story telling takes its time which is not out of place with the time and setting.Some peaceful Irish scenery helps and the interior sets are spot on. The acting by Judi Dench and Annette Crosby (I counted two half smiles including one on her birthday) is terrific.
Dench's fallen aristocrat Imogen Langrish and Irons' emigrant student Otto Beck fetishize each other to near-death in Pinter's ghostly look at the collapsed grandeur of Anglo-Irish luxury in 1937. Imogen is one of three sisters living together in their family's grand estate, years after their fortune has run out following the death of their businessman father. Their days are depressive, repressed gasps at a lost life, spent wandering aimlessly through the house performing mundane tasks or, in Imogen's case, dreamily re-reading old letters and pulling out stacks of family volumes which are then left half-perused. Imogen is unwilling to meet Beck unless it is under the guise of an innocuous encounter between strangers, so accustomed is she to the old,…
