Patricia Keiller

I quite enjoyed this film, but for me the ending spoilt the rest of the film. This is essentially the tale of a sexually inexperienced young couple. It’s shown that the young girl had been sexually abused by her bully of a father, and this went some way to explain her fear of intimacy and apparent frigidity. It is implied that perhaps with understanding and patience all of this could have been overcome. However, this doesn’t happen and the couple split up with their marriage remaining unconsummated. This is where I think the story should have ended. Instead the film goes forward in time first to the seventies and then to 2007. In 2007 we see that she has become a successful and apparently happily married musician. She has children and grandchildren. He on the other hand is alone and eating microwave dinners for one, and has clearly never gotten over her. I found this incredibly sad and to be honest left so many questions unanswered.

Although this film was set in the Victorian era it was full of historical inaccuracies. This film joins a multitude of other recent historical dramas which seem to be guilty of giving people who lived in the past very modern outlooks and sensibilities. While it is true that there were many social movements during the late Victorian period which were aimed at improving the lot of women and the working class, the Victorians in general did not think in the same way we do about social and gender equality and in my opinion it is wrong to portray a rose-tinted version of history, people need to have a clear understanding of the past as it really was, and not how we wish it could have been.