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Separate Lies (2005)

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From Time Out London

The opening scene of ‘Separate Lies’ seems calculated to foster and quickly undermine conventional notions of English gentility: a flute floats over a bucolic village scene, all green trees and winding lanes; you’re just trying to work out if that figure on a bicycle is actually a vicar when he’s clobbered by a Range Rover. Aptly, the story of deceit and resignation that follows is an exercise in upsetting the complacently fixed notions of its characters, even if that self-conscious Englishness is never far away.

Tom Wilkinson is typically robust yet vulnerable as James, a master-of-the-universe city solicitor with an office in the Gherkin, a gorgeous Bucks home and a biddable wifey in the shape of Anne (Emily Watson, cutting flaky timidity with growing self-determination). The hit-and-run death of their cleaner’s husband (not a vicar after all) is unsettling enough, but when James begins to suspect local bit of posh Bill (Rupert Everett, gloriously louche even for him), his probing threatens to unravel his own marriage and life.

Seamlessly updated from Nigel Balchin’s 1951 novel, this is also the directorial debut of ‘Gosford Park’ writer Julian Fellowes; like Robert Altman’s film, it offers neither goodies nor baddies but a study of the personal gripes and ethical dilemmas simmering behind an awfully English veneer (cricket is played on the village green, a pass made through the breathy offer of ‘a huge bowl of sauce’). Beneath its quaintness, however, and a smattering of cliché and contrivance, this is a complex, mature investigation in which righteous self-assurance gives way to compromise and humility. Ben Walters

Author: BW

Time Out London Issue 1839: November 16-23 2005

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