ANTONIA AND JANE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
ANTONIA AND JANE is a film directed by Beeban Kidron, produced by George Faber, and written by Marcy Kahan. The cast includes Imelda Staunton and Saskia Reeves. It is unrated, but includes some profanity and nudity.
ANTONIA AND JANE is probably more like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE than just about any other film I've ever seen, yet even that comparison would have to be qualified at length. Critics have suggested some kinship with THELMA & LOUISE, but that also conceals as much as it reveals about the excellences of this fine film, which was originally shown on the BBC in 1990 and is currently enjoying its U.S. premiere in Seattle at the Metro Cinemas. Seattle first discovered this film at the International Festival of Films by Women Directors in 1990. It is a funny, meaningful film about women's friendships.
The two women are a pair 30-year-old Britishers, one, Antonia (Saskia Reeves), upper-crusty and beautiful, the other, Jane (Imelda Staunton), frumpish, bookish, Jewish, and no clothes sense whatsoever. She's also given to attracting some very odd boyfriends. Antonia and Jane go back a long way, share some interesting details, and make each other very insecure. They meet once a year for dinner, apparently to torture themselves.
The movie's positive qualities include a tart and sardonic sense of humor, a gift for slight exaggerations that strain but never quite rupture our credulity. The men in the two women's lives are pretty pathetic creatures--I mean I don't mind a movie that says men are dickheads, but these turkeys are bare human. Perhaps this is merely a facet of the film's very British sense of the absurd. Certainly, something is bound to be lost on purely American audiences--the class undertones, for example.
I have to say that I don't take ANTONIA AND JANE as seriously as I took ANDRE, which seemed to be real people talking about real, if fantastic and wonderful, things and ideas, or THELMA AND LOUISE, which was ultimately more challenging and upsetting in what it concludes about the choices facing women in our society. By contrast ANTONIA AND JANE appears to a bit on the fluffy side, rather like Henry Jaglom's essays on women. (I know, I praised EATING in this forum a few months and I still stand by that praise, but that film is flawed by its own class prejudices, too.)
The main fault of the movie is its brief 75-minute running time. It was made to fit into a TV schedule. Pity there wasn't some additional shot for the theatrical version to flesh out some of the transitions and changes. Or to extend the story.
We do learn to care for these people, who at first seem somewhat off-putting. Just as they become real people, not merely unexplored neuroses on the hoof, poof! the film's over. We'd like to see more of them, basically. What we do is a successful, but modest, relationship, coming-of-postponed-age comedy, a witty film that says interesting about friendship, things that can apply to any friendships regardless of gender. Certainly, my first thought on leaving the theater was a desire to call an old friend from whom I have been estranged for the last twelvemonth.
I am delighted to recommend ANTONIA AND JANE, but matinee prices will probably suffice.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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