musings

Right from the opening credits – with a throbbing Led Zeppelin (cover) soundtrack – you know you are watching a well-crafted film. Such a good start meant that I was able to relax, settle into my seat and prepare to immerse myself in the cinematic experience. I admit that this trance was briefly disturbed early on when Daniel Craig asks for a specific brand of cigarettes. I hoped that such product placement wouldn’t be peppered intrusively throughout. Thankfully it wasn’t – apart from

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I hugely enjoyed Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City but his latest nostalgia-fest is a curate’s egg.

Davies creates rich, sepia scenes of ’50′s Britain at least as evocative and depressing as those in 10 Rillington Place. Rachel Weisz does an outstanding job – in more than one sense. For whilst her performance is convincing as the camera lingers on her beautiful tortured expression, the film’s backdrop is an array of caricatures sprinkled with scenes of ludicrous sentimentality with an often intrusive soundtrack. I’m thinking of the sing-song in the boozer, and the London underground during the Blitz both of which are almost pastiche.

Weisz’s lover is supposed to be a self-centred cad, but is too one-dimensional to be either a convincing villain or the object of her lust. Simon Russell Beale has a better time of it as the pained and repressed cuckold.