Handful Of Dust, A

The setting is Hetton Abbey, ancestral seat of the Last family and in particular, Tony (James Wilby) and Brenda (Kristin Scott Thomas), the current Lasts, who with their young son, John Andrew, live a life of bygone and financially-straitened self-indulgence withdrawn from the realities of the  modern world. Tony is happy with this state of affairs but Brenda longs for some good times and takes an apartment in London and starts an affair with a young man named Thomas Beaver (Rupert Graves). The fling, which is known to everybody but Brenda's doting husband, is apparently perfectly normal for London society. It is only when she attempts to force her husband to sell his ancestral home in order to support her and her feckless lover that she earns any disapproval.

This curious moral (or immoral) universe is something with which we are very familiar from movies about 18^th century French aristocracy (think of Stephen Frear's Dangerous Liaisons that was released the same year) but seems incongruously passionless. Perhaps Waugh whose wife left him, was drawing on and exaggerating his own experiences here. In this respect the performances seem to be almost in a state of suspended animation. This is nowhere more evident than in the scenes dealing with the death of the child, which is summarily dispensed with as little more than a bother. Perhaps this condition of cruel indifference is the point and the latter tonally darker part of the film in which Tony heads into the jungles of  South American jungle only to become the prisoner of an eccentric recluse (Alec Guinness) who likes to have Dickens read aloud to him, suggests exactly this. 

Nevertheless, A Handful Of Dust is a splendid-looking film with carefully detailed production design and a fine if oddly bitter addition to the catalogue of cinematic Edwardiana.

 

Want something different?