Summary
Said devotees'jaws will start dropping relatively early on, namely with the first sufficient viewing of teddy bear-wielding aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (Perfume's alien weirdo Ben Whishaw). In the novel and the miniseries, he's young, dandyish upper-class privilege personified, and his relationship with our protagonist-upper-middle-class loner and fellow Oxfordite Charles Ryder (future Watchmen star Matthew Goode)-has been picked over and cherished for its wild-but-never-consummated homoeroticism.
Alas, anyone peeved that the film's complexity has been reduced for our times can relax-at least on this issue. Charles is still destined not for Sebastian but Sebastian's fetching sister Julie (Hayley Atwell of Cassandra's Dream), whom he meets when Sebastian drags him to his family's stunning estate.As for making the gay subtext a more prominent theme, it's a coy move, akin to trying to "fix" the novel but instead creating a whole other nest of problems. A movie extolling the virtues of unwavering faith might have been a bit creepy, but it would've been preferable to a movie that doesn't know what it wants to say.See the full content of this document
Extract
Lit Service
Lit Service
This adaptation of a classic novel will confuse even the most well-read fans.Fans of Brideshead Revisited, both Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel and the seminal 11-hour BBC miniseries adaptation starring a young J...See the full content of this document
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