Somewhere inside this baggy, stately, beautifully acted movie there's something smaller and fiercer busting to get out.
Veteran film-maker Fred Schepisi has directed an adaptation of the 1973 novel by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White. Charlotte Rampling cuts a Miss Havisham-type figure as Elizabeth Hunter, a brilliant and demanding woman slowly dying – and succumbing to morphine-fuelled flashbacks – as she summons her grownup children to her elaborately furnished Sydney home to impose her caprices on them one final time, torturing them with suspicions about what they can expect in her will.
Her putative heirs – to her neurotic personality, if not necessarily her cash – are the successful and conceited stage actor Basil, played by Geoffrey Rush, and the unhappy Dorothy (Judy Davis), still addressed as "Princesse" after a failed marriage to some European aristocrat.
Dorothy seems unable to imagine any future other than the desperately needed bequest, but the ageing lothario Basil has his eyes on Elizabeth's sexy nurse, Flora, well played by Alexandra Schepisi, daughter of Fred. The movie proceeds at a measured and reverent pace, a little unfocused, but with intelligent performances from three heavyweight acting talents.
