Movie Notes: "Ladies in Lavender"

Saw this last night. Beautifully done, in a special sort of little British manner: charming, slight, but made with exquisite taste (itself perhaps a decent self-criticism) and with lovely performances by the two dames, Maggie and Judi. The actor Charles Dance adapted and directed. (It's his debut on both counts.)

As the young Polish virtuoso whose sudden apppearance in a Cornwall village sets up a small (tasteful, British) tempest of jealousy and buried sexual tension Daniel Bruhl is one of the most stunningly beautiful youths I've ever encountered at the movies. I kept looking for a physical flaw in this boy and couldn't locate one for a gander, as they say. With his finely-chiseled cheekbones, thin but sensual lips, thick boyish eyelids, aqualine jaw and slender yet surprisingly muscular frame (which, to our delight, we get to see in both a tailored tweed suit and a deliciously skin-tight period bathing suit) he not only acts a treat but is, as John Gielgud would have said, a dream of beauty. You can easily imagine him shagging other pretty boys in a Bel Ami video. At least, I can.

The only sort of odd note about the movie, or its story, is that—even though Dame Maggie converses with the boy in German, and even after he's learned to speak a bit of English—no one asks him how he got washed up on the shore in Cornwall. No one. Ever. Was he shipwrecked? We don't know. Did he fall off a boat somewhere in the Atlantic? Is he merely a figment of the world's fervid, pre-War imagination? Did fairies leave him on the beach for want of a cabbage-leaf? Pick one solution or any combination—it's all the same to Charles Dance.