The Laureate review – writers throuple up in sinisterly erotic literary thriller – The Guardian
Britain’s premier literary throuple is the topic of this gamey, borderline-silly however watchably acted film, which could have sat extra comfortably as a three-part Sunday evening TV drama. Robert Graves (Tom Hughes) is the poet traumatised and creatively blocked by his experiences within the nice struggle, Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) is his forward-thinking feminist spouse, and Laura Using (Dianna Agron) is the charismatic American author who involves dwell with them in a scandalous menage.
Laura entrances them each sexually and stirs Robert’s stagnant juices in each sense, main him to invent a whole pagan aesthetic round his adoration for her because the “goddess” on the centre of his poetic being – with Nancy’s barely wan permission. However Using’s irreverent lustiness is to infuriate the fusty male circles of literary London, significantly TS Eliot (Christien Anholt) who’s portrayed, maybe justly, as an obnoxious hypocrite and bore.
Motion pictures about poets are at all times at risk of being treasured, however right here the preciousness is offset by a sure mixture of eroticism and creepiness, significantly in regard to Using herself who is not only the disrupter and life-force inspiration that everybody wanted, however can be a predator and parasite; she has an unexpectedly disquieting scene with Robert and Nancy’s daughter. There are some cliches right here; this movie, for instance, conforms to the time-honoured custom {that a} man and a lady portray a room should at all times wind up impishly sploshing paint throughout one another.
Then then there may be the issue of the important thing scene by which Laura falls quasi-suicidally from a excessive window on the climax of a bunch argument and Robert moderately absurdly finally ends up following swimsuit, throwing himself from one other window in some weird gesture of solidarity along with her – and even from a muddled want to finish all of it and keep away from the results. The film fudges the doubtless ridiculous second by which Graves does his personal swan-dive; it’s non-fatal, like Laura’s. An entertaining melodrama with in all probability extra jazz age decadence than Graves would have recognised.
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