Up At The Villa

Somerset Maugham was a master teller of stories about superficial people who are revealed and drastically changed by circumstance or luck. His novella Up at the Villa is a tale of death, seduction, blackmail and theft among British and Americans in Florence in the turbulent days just before World War II. The film, despite an outstanding cast including Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne Bancroft, Sean Penn and Derek Jacobi, is strangely mannered and rather flat, more like a waltz than the tango Maugham might have had in mind. (imdb)