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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 71CINEMAA Month in The Country
By RICHARD CORLISS
TITLE: ENCHANTED APRIL
DIRECTOR: Mike Newell
WRITER: Peter Barnes
THE BOTTOM LINE: The fable of four Englishwomen on a
Portofino holiday gives moviegoers a vacation in rapture.
What do women want? To get away from men. To escape into
a community of sisterhood. And then, nourished by that sorority,
to find better men -- even if they are the ones left behind, but
now with hearts refreshed and reformed.
Can dreams of independence and reconciliation both come
true? Such is the seductive, fairy-tale feminism of the novelist
Elizabeth von Arnim. She wrote Enchanted April nearly 70 years
ago, around the time Virginia Woolf was lobbying for a room of
her own. Von Arnim thought bigger: Why not a villa? Bring four
restless Englishwomen to a castle near Portofino to shake off
London's damp climate and dim proprieties.
Mrs. Fisher (Joan Plowright), a crusty matron, was once an
intimate of Ruskin and Rossetti, as she will remind you without
prompting. Lady Caroline (Polly Walker) might be a
pre-Raphaelite princess, but adrift in the jazz age and bored
by the clammy attentions men pay her. The others, Lottie (Josie
Lawrence) and Rose (Miranda Richardson), are trussed in
marriages that seem more like mergers. Lottie's husband, an
attorney, wants her to be a housemaid and party ornament. Rose's
husband, a writer, wants her to stay at home, out of his lightly
lecherous way, and tend the emptiness she feels after a
miscarriage.
All four women, quietly in mourning for the past, are
emblems of a Britain whose imperial grandeur was violated by the
Great War, its ashes sowing their memories. Mrs. Fisher says it,
but they all want it: "to sit in the shade and remember better
times and better men."
Instead they find Paradise.
The four sorceresses are splendid: Plowright in high Lady
Bracknell form, accommodating herself to happiness; Walker,
sensationally poised and pretty, radiating a soigne sexiness;
Richardson (Dance with a Stranger) as a sad Madonna doomed to
fidelity; and Lawrence, a TV comedy star, as a liberated slave
gaily savoring her freedom.
It is a privilege to be in the company of these four
women. Like the actresses in Howards End, the quartet in
Enchanted April summon bygone graces and glamour. In a raucous
movie summer, this is a film for those who appreciate wisteria
and sunshine, and a recollection of a time when women and movies
could be purveyors of enchantment.