Charlotte Gray

22 February 2002

So much promise orbits the romantic drama  Charlotte  Gray,  it's  hard  to see how it can fail. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Sebastian  Faulks, its story of love and  betrayal  in  Vichy  France  has  the  classic  throwback appeal of rousing wartime  dramas  such  as  Casablanca  and  Passage  to Marseilles. It has a director, Gillian Armstrong, whose shrewd  and  graceful handling of literary material  goes  as  far  back  as  My  Brilliant  Career  in 1979. To clinch it all, it stars Cate Blanchett, possibly the most accomplished and certainly the most fashionable actress of the moment. 

The result? Well, not an outright failure, but  far  from  a  triumph.  Something has gone amiss, because the qualities  that  seduced  readers  of  the  book – passion,  subtlety,  a  sense  of  danger  –  are  nowhere   discoverable  here.

Blanchett has said in a television interview that she'd never encountered  such a persuasive psychological portrait  of  a  woman  as  in  Faulks's  Charlotte Gray. Very little of Jeremy Brock's screenplay conveys any sort of character at all. Blanchett's chameleon versatility allows her to slip into the period  look (1943-44), though once she's  recruited  by  the  SOE  and  parachuted  into enemy France the film's claims on plausibility  gradually  evaporate.  For  one thing, everybody is required  to  speak  an  'Allo 'Allo  French-fried  English, making a nonsense of Charlotte's supposed fluency in the  language:  couldn't the film-makers have shown some nerve and used subtitles? For another, it is not made sufficiently clear what Charlotte is meant to  be  doing  in  the  drab provincial town where she hides in plain sight. Her private agenda –  to  seek news of her RAF pilot lover, missing in action somewhere  over  France –  is overtaken by her  duties  as  an  auxiliary  to  the  Resistance:  one  night  she accompanies a unit as they sabotage a munitions train, but takes no part. The next morning the unit leader Julien  (Billy  Crudup,  a  handsome  blank)  tells her, "You did a good job last night." Er, how's that?

There are signs of life in the margins, where Ron Cook as her  morose  SOE contact and Michael Gambon as Julien's  laconic  father  do  good,  unshowy work  in  smaller  roles.  Yet  the  film  never  manages  to  shake  a  sluggish atmosphere  of  inconsequence.  Charlotte  pedals  furiously  on  her  bicycle down country lanes, yet always seems to  miss  the  vital  moment.  Even  the subplot, in which she becomes entangled with the fate of two Jewish boys, is a pale reproduction of the novel's high drama; we ought to be excited by  her last-gasp mission of mercy, yet Gillian Armstrong's grasp of pace and tension feels uncertain, and the sequence curiously inert.   However  much  Blanchett connected with the novel's Charlotte, she never really achieves the necessary passion and authority here, and one can feel the movie slumping  around  her. It must have seemed a fine idea at   the  time;  sadly,  it  looks  like  a  missed opportunity now.