Film ‘Leave All Fair’ attracts attention

Press, 5 December 1985, Page 26

Film ‘Leave All Fair’ attracts attention

NZPA staff correspondent London

The New Zealand film, “Leave All Fair,” has been labelled "sensitive and pretty on the surface” by the British press, since it screened at the London Film Festival. “But the film is one of outrage and protest against the manipulation of a woman’s image by a man, once the woman is no longer alive to disprove it,” the “Guardian” said.

John Reid’S film, which has won a special prize at the Orleans film festival in France and earned the best actress award for Jane Bitkin, focuses on the relationship between the writer, Katherine Mansfield, and her husband, John Middleton Murry. It stars Birkin as both Mansfield in flashback and the companion of her husband’s publisher. John Gielgud plays the elderly Murry. Set in the last years of Murry’s life, it follows his visit to his French publisher

to approve a new edition of Mansfield’s works.

The publisher’s companion reminds him of his former wife and disturbs him with her accusation that he has published the “scraps” which the dying Mansfield had asked him to destroy (Leave all fair, she had written). Murry calls New Zealand “a little land with no history” and says that if Mansfield had taken it seriously she would have told him more about it.

“Of course she used the place for copy,” he says. But Mansfield, “with a pefect passion for the island in which she was born,” says she wants to write

about her country until she i has exhausted her store.

The film is the only New Zealand entry to have been reviewed by the British i Sress. “Shaker Run," “The feglected Miracle," “Kingpin," and“ The Quiet Earth” have also been shown. J Filmgoers have been S luring into the West End r London’s biggest festival, which? features 160 films. '

A big British section, to coincide with British Film Year, and several American films including the Steven Spielberg-produced “Back to the Future,” and “Plenty,” starring Meryl Streep, Sting, and Sam Neill, are among the highlights.