SYNOPSICS
The Heart of Me (2002) is a English movie. Thaddeus O'Sullivan has directed this movie. Helena Bonham Carter,Olivia Williams,Paul Bettany,Eleanor Bron are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2002. The Heart of Me (2002) is considered one of the best Drama,Romance movie in India and around the world.
In the 1930s Ricky Masters, an English businessman, marries Madeleine, a fine match socially, but the cultured aesthete is more and more attracted to her sister Dinah, a 'Bohemian' painter, and as they spend time together their affair becomes physical, even all the way; yet when she gets pregnant they decide to leave his marriage intact. He raises his son with Madeleine, who tells him only in 1946 that she knew after he had a car accident during a 'business trip' to southern France that caused Dinah to loose her unborn daughter; now Ricky wants to leave Madeleine, but she refuses a divorce; after a time in hospital he is told Dinah chose to move back to France without him while she's really living in London, still not the last twist of the drama...
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The Heart of Me (2002) Reviews
A moving and beautifully acted piece of real cinema
This film played to a packed audience at the closing night of the London Film Festival last week. The story of an upper class English man falling passionately in love with his wife's sister was so involving I completely forgot myself for the duration of the film (and from what I could see,so did the rest of the audience). It is a flawless film. Intensely moving. The complex characterisations were handled with immense integrity. One of the wonderful things about it was that during the course of the story I both liked and disliked all the characters. By the end it is impossible to judge them, only appreciate what they had gone through. A most wonderful and uplifting film. Paul Bettany is a discovery. An actor of immense subtlety who is not afraid to play a character who appears simply weak on the surface but is actually very complex. A very detailed and brave performance. Olivia Williams is transformed by the character. She plays Madeline, a woman who lives by the strict rules of her class. No emotion is allowed to get in the way of how this class organises their lives and Madeline respects that. When we see her years later in life, Williams makes us utterly believe the immense changes that she has endured. Madeline must forgive her sister Dinah for her betrayal. This seems impossible given what Madeline has endured at the hands of her sister, yet Williams makes us believe in that forgiveness. This was a great lesson to me. To see how you must move on in your life. Helena Bonham Carter is more vulnerable, sensitive and outrageous than I have ever seen her. Her character is on a knife edge. She falls passionately in love with her brother- in- law and from that moment on the film takes you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that I still can't get out of my mind. The film also has one of the best scores I've heard in ages - romantic and tuneful without being slushy or sentimental. It's also a ravishing looking film (maybe that's why I cant get it out of my mind) and yet the powerful images never interfere with the story but add to it all the time. Real cinema.
A beautiful, heartbreaking film
A movie full of dramatic irony and beauty. I love Helena Bonham Carter and Paul Bettany. On screen, the characters are so believable that I forget that I am watching a movie. I'm transported to this world of war and snobbery, kite flying and poetry. And every twist in the plot basically rips my heart out or sends it soaring. It's so different from any other romance film that I've ever seen. The premise is familiar, but it's beautifully done. Definitely worth seeing. Keep a box of tissues nearby. This movie made me want to read more William Blake. Watch it, and you'll see why. Seriously. It is a film that grips the heart, wraps up the senses, and causes emotions to boil. Despite the poetry in the film, it is mainly a movie of action, of eyes, beautiful, intense eyes. See this movie.
Brilliantly acted drama
`The Heart of Me' is pure, unadulterated soap opera redeemed by the kind of high-toned, stiff-upper-lip seriousness of which the British seem uniquely capable. Set primarily in the 1930's, the film tells the story of two sisters caught in a passionate and quasi-incestuous love triangle. Madeline (Olivia Williams), the older of the two, is an uptight woman whose weak-willed husband, Rickie (Paul Bettany), falls in love with her younger and more free-spirited sibling, Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter). These two in-laws, soul mates for life, carry on a torrid love affair until Madeline discovers the truth and even for a time thereafter. Given the material, `The Heart of Me' could easily have devolved into a cheap, sensationalistic melodrama for the `Masterpiece Theatre' set. Instead, thanks to truly brilliant performances by the three principal actors and an intelligent, thoughtful screenplay, the film becomes a wholly absorbing drama that offers profound insights into the realities of the human heart. The pain each of these people experiences is so palpable in its intensity that it washes away all traces of artificiality and contrivance. The film becomes a fascinating study of what happens when clanging passions are hemmed in by the restrictions and proprieties of a strict, morally repressive upper class society. Rickie and Dinah choose to turn themselves into social pariahs, then must face the consequences of their convention-defying actions. Of most interest is the emotionally complex relationship between the two very different sisters. What makes the film special is the way in which it allows the seemingly cold-hearted Madeline to become as much a sympathetic figure as the two impassioned lovers. Thanks to Williams' impeccable performance (she played Penelope in the TV movie version of `The Odyssey'), Madeline is allowed to live and breathe and have her own say, making her, in many ways, the most intriguing of the three main characters. `The Heart of Me,' which is beautifully detailed in costumes and settings, transcends the limits of its genre to deliver a heartbreaking tale of love, loss, lament - and hope.
As a warning: (Could be considered a spoiler, I suppose)
I thought this movie was exquisite. From the casting to the acting to the settings to the directing and so on and so forth. The plot was beautifully seamless and carried out quite well by all involved in the film. Now that I have stated that, I just wanted to leave a warning that mentioned (at least somewhat) the triggering scene in this movie. It was entirely unexpected that Rickie rapes his wife Madeleine, somewhat close to the end of the story. It's not a very long scene, not even an entirely graphic scene, but some of the elements (it being 'flash-backy' in style, with bleeding over of crying/screaming from both 'time-frames', especially) were quite poignant. Beautiful movie, fair warning.
The BBC Agains Shows Why There'll Always be an England (on celluloid)
I've heard that Western religious dogma eschews the thought never mind the act of a man lusting for his neighbor's wife. What really rocks the boat is a married man sappily and hopelessly enmeshed in the arms of his wife's sister. And that's what we have in this dark hued English drama whose scenes alternate between the pre-war social frivolity of affluent men and women unaware that their time was almost up and postwar scenes tieing the story together. Helena Bonham Carter is Dinah, a free spirit given to studying, and perhaps evangelizing, the gospel of malcontents and revolutionaries in that nonthreatening and oddly endearing manner that insures both bemusement and acceptance by well-to-do English gentlefolk. Olivia Williams is her married sister, Madeleine, a hostess with the mostess, married to businessman Rickie, played by Paul Bettany. The focus of the film is on this trio, not a menage a trois but a coruscating set of characters wracked by love, lust and confusion leavened by sporadic betrayal and reconciliation. It's really simple: Rickie sort of loves or at least very much likes Madeleine but his heart and other body parts desperately seek and need Dinah. Dinah loves her sister and her charming adolescent son but she must have Rickie. Madeleine loves both but is blind to the reality of their relationship until... A story of this genre must have a clear and unambiguous "until." Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, the acting of the three principals is, simply, mesmerizingly superb. Helena Bonham Carter is renowned for her period pieces (she can do much more and she does) and she fits into London's prewar world and its gray aftermath as if she actually experienced those times. Paul Bettany captures the lost male guided by his...ah, lust, with but minimal if any moral insight into his conduct. Special mention must be made of Olivia Williams who captures the pathos, hope and desperation of a decent woman swept up by acts of betrayal she never envisaged as possible. I hope we see much more of this fine actress. The score by Nicholas Hooper is very good but judicious editing was needed to reduce intrusiveness of the music and the sound level ought to have been lowered for a number of scenes. A fine production. 8/10.