Here is an excruciating period drama of forbidden love from Patrice Leconte, starring Alan Rickman and Rebecca Hall. After a while, I didn't know where to look. Anywhere but at the screen. The dialogue and direction are agonising, like some Franco-German television production translated into English – or indeed like a play by none other than Mr Ernie Wise. When Rickman is in extremis, his noble features a virtual death's head, I expected a certain bespectacled figure to pop up behind him and ask what he thinks of it so far.
It is based on a novella by Stefan Zweig (who inspired Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel) the bestselling Austrian author of the inter-war years, whose Judaism forced him into exile after the Anschluss and who finally committed suicide in Brazilian exile, deeply depressed by Nazism. I count myself a fan, but this is an awful moment for Zweig lovers: a clunkingly laborious movie, without any of the style of Max Ophüls's famous Zweig adaptation Letter From an Unknown Woman.
Rickman is Hoffmeister, the ailing owner of a steel mill in 1912, married to a beautiful younger woman, Lotte, played by Hall. She falls in love with her husband's handsome private secretary, played by Richard Madden – just at the moment that he is packed off to manage the firm's new plant in Mexico, vowing to keep the flame of their love burning. The film slips into a tasteful coma of its own making.
