England to-day is maybe a small influence in the thinking and emotion of America. This film merits great consideration. It reflects the English cultural way of life of the 1800's, a way of living, albeit in the upper middle classes and aristocracy that provided a fundament to the American society and that still survives in thin layers of Englnad. This English personality is united with a cool realistic and monetary Swiss attitude to life. An English heir (Stephen Dillane, played with great sensitivity) to a lord (Jon Ackland, epitomizing the spendthrift lords seeking only pleasure) resides in a lovely house and park with pond and bathing hut in glass. But he needs himself an heir. He pays the debt of a Swiss women owed for her father. She agrees as her part of the agreement to give birth to his child. The women is portrayed superbly by Sophie Marceau with the Swiss minimum of facial expression and restraint. A Swiss behaviour that is still noticed to-day. She arrives seven years after the birth of their child to reply to his need for a gouvernant for the child. Thus one learns a lot about some very impotent facets of the future make up of America: moral rectitude, the work ethic, how to bring up children, the appreciation of natural beauty, the restarting of ones life. Most important is the sensitivity to sensual forces repressed but released when needed: conception of a child despite being contracted for money, love eternal for a wife that is paralyzed, love of a mother for the best development of her child, the demand that love will be the force that unites the parents of the child and in the end the future for all three. Even euthanasia. Ironically, but so often the case, the heir has to sell his lovely house and grounds to pay off the debt of his father. Thus he and the mother of his child find themselves in the same quandary. The photography of the English countryside in autumn and winter is for dreams. A film to be seen and savoured several times.
Review of Firelight
