Easy Virtue

Noel Coward is one of the authors and playwrights I most admire. He had great sense of humour, often bordering on sarcasm, contained and usually justified. He showed with great insight of human nature manifested in his creation of colourful characters, and always armed with the wittiest dialogue. Even his tragedies could seem funny, and his comedies were hilariously convincing and simply delightful and delicious.

One of his many legendary work was 'Easy Virtue' which, as early as in 1927, the era of the silent films, was already adapted by Hitchcock, 2 years after the play was premièred. Now once more, It's taken up by the Australian director Stephen Elliott, this time with the title 'A classy family'. A title quit befitting Coward, with his outrageously aristocratic air, mannerism and speech, often laced with wicked humour and double edged observations.

Stephen Elliott changed the chronological order, and starts the film with the arrival at the Victorian family mansion of the young master and heir (Ben Barnes), with his new bride (Jessica Biel), American and divorcee with a questionable past.

The imposing mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), matriarch of the respectable dynasty, possessive and elitist, immediately dedicated herself to make life impossible for the intruder, a foreigner at that, who would add blemishes to the impeccable honour and reputation of the classy family. "Any piece of furniture in this house is older than your country." she would say to her daughter-in-law.

Colin Firth plays the master of the mansion, a position in name only, barely tolerated by his tyrannous wife, and the only one truly welcomes the daughter-in-law, to him like a breath of fresh air into the long been suffocating home.

Coward's vitriolic dissection of the British aristocracy in the Victorian era was vivid and cutting in the book, baring the hypocrisy of a society, decadent and perverse. Another 'must-see' in my already near a mile long film list.

Tags:coward,easyvirtue

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