Dirk Bogarde's return to the screen after a twelve-year absence -- a happy event in itself, and it injects just that degree of initial interest and lingering excitement lacking in the average Bertrand Tavernier movie. Our first sight of him hardly constitutes a grand re-entrance: flat on his back in a hospital bed, and unconscious, with wires taped to his upper torso. The character, a man of the world originally from England and transplanted to France (not unlike Bogarde himself, whose semi-retirement from acting and resettlement in Midi is the subject of a graceful volume of autobiography, An Orderly Man), has just come out of heart surgery. His devoutly religious and vastly disapproving wife (Odette Laure) nags him about his drinking in particular, and about anything in general. His neglected daughter (Jane Birkin) referees. Father and daughter begin to get to know one another for the first time, and the situation settles into a "relationship" session: one of those intimiste chamber works which the French knock off with such passionless aplomb. Bogarde, with a bald spot opening up on the back of his crown, and gray making heavy advances in what remains, looks a bit -- not a lot -- puffier and saggier than when last seen, but this simply gives him a more poignant lump of clay on which to inscribe those fractional fluctuations of eyebrow, eyelid, crow's-foot, lip. He has not gotten sloppy with age (or inactivity), and the specter of death is not about to frighten him into it. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd