The Age of Innocence

A man meets a woman who seems confident in her own desire, even if it has caused her to become trapped for a time in a prison with a man whose own desire is overly violent (which does not exactly mean that she regrets having entered that prison of marriage). As a consequence of meeting her, the man begins to yearn for the freedom of his own desire, recognising that he is trapped in a stuffy and repressive aristocratic society. Yet even though that social universe organises itself to prohibit the fulfilment of his wishes, it turns out that he himself is only play-acting, and that the greatest obstacle to the actualisation of his desire is the fact that, of all the members of that society, he is perhaps its most repressed and most conformist member.

This great movie can be described as, in a way, the anti-ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985), in the same way as GOODFELLAS (1990) is the anti-GODFATHER (1972). Where ROOM WITH A VIEW was in a sense a dramatic film, even an action film, this is a film in which nothing happens. It is a great shame that I only realised in May 2022 that the Duke is played by Kevin Sanders, who a couple of decades earlier had been a TV news personality in Australia and a great friend of my father (who I’m sure saw this film without noticing him). But I was very fortunate to have been able to correspond with Mr. Sanders’s wife, June Atkin, who told me that her husband was moved to hear that my father had spoken so fondly of their friendship.