Privileged

The story of the making of Privileged would make a good film: a group of Oxford students under the avuncular eye of John Schlesinger make a film. Instead, the students have opted for undergraduate melodrama, which rather tiresomely echoes Schlesinger's '60s-style narcissism. Edward (Woolley), who's generously endowed with arrogance, leads an attractive quartet of fellow-students through the travails of love, during rehearsals for a production of The Duchess of Malfi which acts as an arena and a mirror for their emotional ups and downs. Curiously, for a first film, this is well acted, well paced, and made with considerable style (perhaps too much, as punts float by lazily and all too familiarly), but the content is so light that it has all but blown away before the credits roll.