‘Wetherby’ requires thought

Press, 29 June 1987, Page 6

‘Wetherby’ requires thought

at the

hans petrovic

WETHERBY Written and directed

by David Hare

Be warned, “Wetherby” (Savoy) is an intelligent film which requires the viewer to think.

Ostensibly, it is a mystery, but you never find out the reason why. Instead you are given an

insight into the social workings of a British microcosm, set in the Yorkshire town of Wetherby. This semi-rural setting has a modern school, but also the kind of stone cottages which you would expect to be inhabited by Miss Marple. Possibly, if she had been there, the mystery would have been solved.

It all begins at a cosy dinner at which the local spinster teacher (Vanessa Redgrave) entertains her friends, including Judi Dench and lan Holm. They comfortably enjoy their food and wine with conventional connoisseurship. But, instead of a fly in the soup, there is an uninvited guest (Tim

Mclnnemy), whom nobody knows and everyone assumes was invited by somebody else. v When Redgrave and Mclnnerny go upstairs to repair a leak in the roof, there is a brief but close encounter between the two — or is it all in the spinster’s mind?

Whatever the case may be, it certainly triggers off memories of her first lover, back in the early 50s, an R.A.F. conscript who was killed on a tour of duty in Malaya. Mclnnerny also returns the next day, looking

more sinister in natural light, and his conversation is subtly sinister as he questions Redgrave about her life and values.

When he pulls out a gun, we certainly do not expect him to put it in his mouth and blow his brains out against the kitchen door. This is the film’s first shock, and we suddenly realise that things are not quite as comfortable as they first seem. The writer-director, David Hare, who also wrote last year’s “Plenty," likes to keep his. audience guessing. What we first took as a genteel exercise is quickly turned into a mystery: why did this man shoot himself?

The police are there to ask the questions, and everybody else, including the audience, is doing the same.

This is where Hare is most misleading, for although “Wetherby” takes on all the air of a mys-

tery-thriller, it is anything but. Everything is revealed except the answer to the original question.

This suicide, preceded by a possible romantic interlude, further triggers the spinster’s memory of her love of 30 years earlier, which also ended in violent death. These flashbacks are the film’s most effective device, for to play the part of the younger Redgrave, Hare uses her actual daughter, Joely Richardson. The similarities — and differences — between the mere et fille are uncanny, so that one is continually blinking, trying to rationalise whether we are in the present day or the flashback.

Joely is certainly a totally different person to her mother — but those shy gestures, that nose? “Wetherby” also uses a third time level, often re-

turning to that dinner party of the previous evening, with Mclnnerny still quite alive, which gives the film the uncanny feeling of revisiting, “Last - Year at Marienbad.”

It is when one begins to compare -/’Wetherby” to other films that the fun really starts. That farewell scene between the lovers at the foggy airport could easily have come from “Casablanca”; the look at British life, with the underlying mystery, is reminiscent of Joseph Losey’s “Accident”; the flashbacks were used to equally good effect in last week’s “Cal”; or is this all just an English version of “The Big Chill”? As already said, “Wetherby” answers no questions. I cannot help feeling that David Hare must have been a cryptic crosswordsmith before becoming a playwright.