7 hours ago
5
Waris Hussein’s earnest 1969 movie, adapted by Margaret Drabble from her own novel The Millstone, is a London-set drama about a young woman who has difficulties with men while researching a PhD in English literature – and as a result we get some tremendously nostalgic shots of the British Museum round reading room, when it was still a working library. American star Sandy Dennis puts on a stage-school English accent to play Rosamund, the graduate student who has well-to-do but insufferable bien pensant liberal parents, the kind of people who, as she explains to someone, “let the charlady sit down to dine with us, that kind of nonsense”.
Rosamund finds herself alone in her parents’ London flat while they are away doing good works in Africa and she exchanges brittle, knowing dialogue with chaps who take her out on dates: Joe (Michael Coles) and Roger (John Standing). However, she is only attracted to an oddly camp television newsreader called George, played with bizarre twinkly eyed condescension by Ian McKellen. (The 60s setting and the air of sexual loucheness put me in mind of McKellen’s performance as John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal.) Rosamond loses her virginity in a single, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with George; she gets pregnant and resolves to keep the baby despite objections from family, friends and nurses.
This is a strange film in many ways. It’s a solemnly paced kitchen-sinker but without the grim, retributive ending on which a more sternly socialist-minded director might have insisted. It’s also a sex-and-the-single-girl issue film featuring a rather daring spoof black-and-white erotic French film called L’Etranger Perdu that is seen on television, and yet without the satire and humour that might have gone with that. Eleanor Bron has a supporting role as her knowing friend and confidante, a comedy star required to play it absolutely straight.
The film is dramatic and eventful on paper, and yet you could spend the entire time wondering when it is going to start. Rosamund endures agonies of waiting in grim GP surgeries and hospitals (these scenes are overpoweringly real) and yet it is her (unexamined) wealth that shields her from the actual problems of single mothers, and when her baby gets terribly ill it is really her parents’ acquaintance with the consultant that helps. Drabble appears to have based the novel and film on her own experiences, though transferring them to a fictional person whom she perhaps unconsciously imagines to have the resources that she had as a married woman.
The dialogue is all of the knowing, tartly droll sort that is difficult to listen to after a while, and Rosamund herself is a curious character: she always seems pale, strained, depressed, mumblingly on the verge of tears, yet it’s difficult to tell if this is simply a result of Dennis’s attempt at Englishness. At all events, it’s a vivid time capsule of a London that isn’t really swinging.
