An abused child in a broken marriage in present-day Bath (Jane Austen's old stomping ground). The father now lives with his homosexual lover; the abuser is the mother's new live-in boyfriend, a man's-man construction worker. Getting the truth out into the open, getting the right people to believe it, getting them to do the right thing about it -- this forms the arc of the action, a tale of deliverance distortedly mirrored in the child's touching devotion to the escapist mythology of Star Wars. (Memorized audio tapes, plus toy action figures for re-enactment.) And it works up some intense rooting interest, with plenty of groaning disappointments and setbacks along the way. The exasperating but completely understandable reticence of the victim is only one of the complications. The unattractiveness of a homosexual household as a viable alternative in the eyes of the courts is another. And the wild card of the selfish adult sex drive is still another. To the credit of Angela Pope, director, and Paula Milne, writer, neither the child-abuse angle nor the gay-rights angle muscles its way into the main "focus." Neither of these large social issues becomes the, or an, "issue" -- other than in the sense of a personal, a private, an individual one. They are simply the particulars of the case, inextricably interlocked. So much more human that way. The outcome resembles a TV movie-of-the-week transmuted through British understatement. Martin Donovan, Joely Richardson, Ian Hart, Jason Flemyng, Sam Bould. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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