John Sharpe drives repeatedly round a ring road all day musing on his wife, his baby son, his business, his upbringing, his family, and the GM trials that his company are undertaking. There is close detail about potatoes, childbirth and sex. Sharpe thinks about various characters which tells us something about them but, unlike the characterizations and minute observation evident throughout In The Place of Fallen Leaves, I am left feeling I do not know these people, nor does Sharpe, and nor does he know himself. I warm to none of them. There are three occasions when he plainly contradicts himself; he says he went to a therapist, then says he made it up; he says he met his wife hitchhiking, then says he met her playing football; says she fell head over heels for him, then that she settled for him after loving someone else more deeply. These deliberate contradictions are strangely psychotic and disturbing. Sharpe is left to continue on his way.
Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...
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