This doesn't seem to be getting a very wide release in the UK though it is a fine little film, fairly faithful to the W. Somerset Maugham novella from which it is taken.
Kristin Scott Thomas was exactly my idea of the heroine Mary Panton, a British widow in late 1938 Florence, who in short order has a marriage proposal, falls in love and has a one night stand and then gets mixed up in a sub-Hitchcockian plot with Sean Penn.
There's a great cameo from Anne Bancroft as an ex-pat American (with a cruel streak towards the end).
Not outstanding, but it hangs together and you feel you've had a bit of high and low culture by the end. Derek Jacobi seems wasted though and the underlying theme of the rise and corruption of fascism is absent from the book, but I think helps here.
Kristin Scott Thomas was exactly my idea of the heroine Mary Panton, a British widow in late 1938 Florence, who in short order has a marriage proposal, falls in love and has a one night stand and then gets mixed up in a sub-Hitchcockian plot with Sean Penn.
There's a great cameo from Anne Bancroft as an ex-pat American (with a cruel streak towards the end).
Not outstanding, but it hangs together and you feel you've had a bit of high and low culture by the end. Derek Jacobi seems wasted though and the underlying theme of the rise and corruption of fascism is absent from the book, but I think helps here.