Word: aristocratic
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Grant, who can soon be seen in Sirens and Bitter Moon, is every inch the blithe aristocrat. MacDowell imports her Groundhog Day sweetness to a role that is more a fantasy than a character. And Rowan Atkinson has a cute turn as a tongue-tied cleric. Richard Curtis (The Tall Guy, Blackadder) has stocked his script with transatlantic gags (How many times has Carrie had sex? "Less than Madonna, more than Lady Di"). The movie strains a bit to prove it's all a lark, but because the mood is cunningly sunny, and the cast is so relaxed...
...years pass. Mui (now played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe), a beautiful young woman, is sold to a handsome pianist (Vuong Hoa Hoi). Cinderella finds her Prince Charming, and an aristocrat is ennobled when he falls in love with a pretty peasant. Every fable deserves a happy ending...
...narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel, The Remains of the Day, a drama so delicate that it touches the reader deeply without applying the pressure of sentiment. The story runs on parallel tracks: the years before World War II, when Stevens worked for his beloved Lord Darlington, an aristocrat who falls into an alliance with the Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German": a man who disappointed...
...emptier. "I took that," Hopkins says, "and kept it in my head for the entire film. It was simple: just stand still." So much of the comedy in his role, and the sadness, arise from this stillness. Before a hunt, Stevens holds a drinking cup for a horseman; the aristocrat takes no notice of his offer, and the butler takes no notice of the slight. His stillness may mask sexual fear: when Miss Kenton amiably approaches him, he freezes like a bruised virgin. The rest of the film Hopkins carries with a small gnomic smile that means a dozen things...
...heroine is Ellen Olenska, May's cousin, now separated from her European aristocrat husband and thus the subject of purring rumor from the town's smooth hypocrites. As the radiantly giddy May seems a child to Newland, so he feels like a boy in Ellen's presence. The two fall in furtive love. But it is not falling so much as tiptoeing in the dark. Once he kisses her slipper; later he unbuttons her glove and kisses her wrist, then her mouth, which opens more in anguish than in lust. Guilt is the barrier between their lips. And both could...