Fresh and Exciting

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Biopic of Edwardian painter Carrington and her platonic relationship with author Lytton Strachey. Set mostly in pastoral England, during the Great War and afterward. Strachey and Carrington entice and embrace various male companions, seemingly to vent their own frustrated passions. Unlike almost every "creative artist" film I have ever watched, the angst and toil not shown at all. Emma Thompson, as Dora Carrington, is quite good in this. Also, during the first half of the film, she manages the trick of resembling a twenty year old. Sense And Sensibility was released the same year; while she portrayed another twenty year old, there she looked like a matronly forty year old. Jonathan Pryce as Strachey is brilliant.

This one needed tightening and focus. It drifts aimlessly in imitation of the non-sexual affair between Carrington and Strachey, but the art form is an imitation of an action, not a replication of mere aimlessness. That the characters are inherited from history and from a book about the Bloomsbury circle does not absolve the film, a separate work, from establishing the characters and their motives. Yet here we have the Rufus Sewell character charging around madly for no established reason, other than that he can't get into Dora's knickers. And his brief reappearance almost at the end is inexplicable. Carrington's lovers come and go -- obviously surrogates for her inability to consummate anything with Strachey. But those lovers have no frame or context or reason for being taken on by Carrington other than that old ennui. Her own character, then -- in spite of wonderful Emma -- gets lost in the slow motion meaninglessness of her life. She does depict the layering of the Bohemian that took the place of the stiff corseting of the rest of the ladies of the time. The beautiful moorlands of Yorkshire are just that -- a travelogue. They are not integral as, say, the world of Tess or Eustacia in Hardy. In spite of what other posters say, direction here is a major flaw.

The true story (it says here) of painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey (portrayed by Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce). They fall in love, but Mr. Strachey is a homosexual. Then, the originally frigid, tomboyish Ms. Carrington is bedded by a series of amorous hunks; but, she really loves Strachey. Christopher Hampton's "Carrington" is slow-moving, posed, and one-sided. The latter description refers specifically, to a discriminating focus on the distaff side of the sexuality; it's painfully obvious that the explicitness is gender-biased. The film's subject matter is welcome; it's execution is less so.Ms. Thompson is good, albeit unusually cast; distractingly, her appearance changes little during the story's decades. Thompson is voluptuous in her nude scenes. Perpetually bearded Mr. Pryce is more (intellectually) interesting, as her platonic co-habitué. Pryce matter-of-factly offers the better characterization. Of the strong supporting performers, Samuel West (as Gerald Brenan) is exemplary. Much of the film is visually beautiful; perhaps, its greatest strength is Denis Lenoir's photography.***** Carrington (1995) Christopher Hampton ~ Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce, Samuel West

A muted, rather depressing British-French co-production regarding the unconsummated love affair between painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce) in the early 1900's. Carrington's long-held virginity and Strachey's homosexuality kept the two from becoming physically intimate, but their friendship was so great they found it difficult to be apart. Slow-moving film looks nice but never comes to life, despite the perfectly-cast Thompson and Pryce. It tip-toes around its subject matter with an uneasiness that makes the set-up for the story an automatic downer. Adapted from Michael Holroyd's book by Christopher Hampton, who also directed, this might have been a moving, tragic document, but it proves too tricky a dance for Hampton, who compounds a blandly-rendered narrative with no directorial flourish. ** from ****