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Poliakoff's film is better than his last play. Now the gloves are off, so are the hats and knickers. A film about families, plain and simple - and incestuous. The jerky, clumping start does little justice to the later smoothness. Natalie and Richard finally meet and mate when Richard is working in London and Natalie has married a steady cashflow. The affair feels more distracted than dangerous. Thank God for Alan Rickman anyway. The 2 leads are good enough, but he quietly goes about his usual business of filching the film from under their noses. At one moment they rant away while he sits inside eating a cooked breakfast. And what do they gain from it? Not a sausage, you hardly bother to listen to them. Rickman is the first English actor in years to join that select band: James Mason, perhaps Robert Donat, certainly George Sanders; sensual unhurried, turning everyone else into jitterbugs. Their villains are played like lovers and vice versa, you don't trust them for a minute, but they won't give you a minute to look away. "Close My Eyes" is strong and intense and Rickman joins in but at the same time you can feel his frosty spirit mocking the indulgence of these young bloods. He looks so unshocked that he might, you never know, have set the whole thing up for his delectation. Someone please hurry up and cast him as Iago, his character lives in splendour on the Thames holding languid court. Poliakoff's film is too talkative and none too believable, but it has a twisted pastoral weirdness that stays with you, and in the hands of Alan Rickman is conjured into a comedy worthy of Nabakov: wicked ways to keep it in the family.
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