My mother had actually met him once, wearing his smoking jacket. I was so jealous of her.
Anyway, so as jeremy irons was party of my everyday existence so too was brideshead revisited. It was shown on the ABC in the 80s, and tuesday nights the city of melbourne shut down. You couldn't get a decent meal for 3 months as people were too busy watching the show to actually work their day (or indeed, night) jobs.
I thought this BBC version completley, amazingly, truely wonderful. It was perfect in every way. As Time said of it, 'it took a book and turned it into poetry'. It completely captured the essence of the book (which is to this day one of my favourites) and also the representation of the charles ryder/sebastian flyte and charles ryder/julia flyte relationship. People always wonder, were charles and sebastian gay?
I don't think they were. I think they were best friends, and they loved each other in the all consuming way that best friends do. women are always presented as loving in their friendships, why cannot men be portrayed this way too? I think it is inspiring for this kind of portrayal to exist so strongly in book and film. Sebastian and Charles are best friends who love and care for each other, driven apart because of Sebastian's growing alcoholism and self-destructive behaviour.
The new movie to be released later this year seems to have thrown all this on its head, focussing instead on the relationship between charles and julia, a tortuous, tumultuous relationship with the unamiguously gay Charles (in the novel and film it is much more ambiguous and never really acknowledged) on the outer, vying for the attention of the man he loves and his sister...
AAAH! What has Andrew Davies done! Why must he make every single classic book into a soap opera? Who could forget the infamous sex scene in Austen's sense and sensibility, or the controversy at the beginning of filming for Brideshead where it was revealed that Aloysius the bear would not be in this filmn version? (Thankfully he was reinstated following gross fan backlash)
I love this book, i LOVE ben whishaw, i love emma thompson... this movie seems to unite in itself all things good and great about the world, but i cant help watch the trailer and be alarmed that it has been turned into something a great deal less than what Waugh's eccentric, flowery, beautiful novel about england and times gone and catholicism...
Despite all this however, the clothes look fabulous. Perhaps i'll see it for them (i usually do).
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