My Life So Far

A large estate in Scotland after the First World War. A stern grandmother heads the house; her daughter, the daughter's inventor husband and two grandchildren live there too. The father is forever chasing a new invention and none of them works. Ten-year-old Fraser watches everything. One day the grandmother's son arrives with his French fiancée and the balance of the house comes apart. The source is Denis Forman's memories of his childhood. Hugh Hudson's film tells it through the boy's eyes, and its real subject is the father coming undone: the man cannot hide what he feels for the woman who has arrived, and the whole order of the house cannot bear it. Colin Firth plays the father and Rosemary Harris the grandmother; Irène Jacob and Malcolm McDowell are also in the cast. The telling stands between nostalgia and unease; the Scottish landscape is beautifully shot but the film is not comforting at all.