Wetherby

The town of Wetherby, in Yorkshire. Jean Travers, a schoolteacher, gives a dinner at her house. A young man she does not know is sitting at the table, invited by nobody, each guest assuming he came with someone else. The next day he comes back to the house and kills himself in front of her. The town goes looking for a reason. The police ask, the neighbours talk, Jean says nothing. From there the film goes back to her youth, to a soldier who shipped out to Malaya forty years earlier and to a door that has been shut ever since. David Hare's first film as director; a hundred and two minutes. Vanessa Redgrave plays Jean and her daughter Joely Richardson plays her as a young woman, with Ian Holm and Judi Dench in the cast. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1985.