BRIDESHEAD REVISITED/A MINEFIELD

The battle is well and truly joined. Directors know that they take on a classic TV series at their peril. It is possible to do a delicate multi-episode drama based on a novel in just two hours?

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You know the answer: Yes and no.

Obviously something is lost. Just as the TV series can never be the same as the novel.

On the other hand, moving to a different format does bring rewards, and there is no doubt that this new cinematic version of the 80s TV hit is better in many respects.

For one thing, it is sumptuous in a way that the 80s could never even imagine, as is obvious in the trailer below.

And in case your memory is a bit fuzzy, here is the girt of the tale, described as "an evocative story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence, set in pre-war England when privileged aristocracy fell into decline".

It begins in Oxford in1925 at Oxford, when Charles Ryder, played by handsome Matthew Goode is befriended by the louche and flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, brought to saucy life by Ben Whishaw), son of Lord Marchmain, and is quickly seduced by an exciting new world of money, glamour and outrageous behaviour.

Worse follows when he is invited to Brideshead, the Flyte family’s magnificent ancestral home (played here again by Yorkshire's elegant Castle Howard).

Besotted by this stately pile, Charles becomes dangerously infatuated with Julia, Sebastian’s beautiful sister, in the form of Hayley Atwell (pictured).

the whole story will be in cinemas in October.

For further details now, try the trailer in Real Player.

Posted July 30, 2008.