09 August 2008

Contra mundo

Brideshead Revisited

Crit

The very Catholic are very different from you and me. OK, me maybe not so much.

Never read the book, never saw the BBC miniseries, read a couple of reviews, but was somehow unprepared for the sheer . . . Catholicity of it. Unprepared in particular to be struck so close to home by Emma Thompson's portrayal of Lady Marchmain as a woman who wants only to protect her children from the world's wickedness, and so of course alienates the ones with brains, if not quite permanently enough.

Trailer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does that mean you'd recommend it, or not? I've also neither read nor viewed, but my aversion for Jeremy Irons probably takes care of the possibility of my viewing the much-loved miniseries.

cheeseblab said...

I think someone who has never done the Catholic thing would find much of it implausible, but for Catholics it plays like a sort of real-life horror film. Certainly wouldn't classify it as a "must," though it may get some Oscar noms in the aesthetics categories.

Oh, but thanks for giving me an excuse to mention something that irked me but that I forgot about when posting: they go to Venice in the summer . . . and are there for Carnevale?