Up At The Villa. - Review - movie review

Interview, May, 2000 by Graham Fuller

Directed by Philip Haas

Christopher Isherwood gave up on an earlier adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's sexy novella, from which Haas and his wife, Belinda, the film's screenwriter and editor, have fashioned an enticing but ultimately unsatisfying snapshot of upper-class Anglo mischief in fascist Florence in 1938. By the time Kristin Scott Thomas's fortune-seeking English widow has wound up with a dead Austrian refugee (Jeremy Davies) on her bedroom floor, Up at the Villa has lurched from acerbic moral fable into shrill melodrama, and neither Sean Penn's louche American playboy, coming to the rescue like the cavalry, nor the relishable turns by Anne Bancroft, Derek Jacobi, and James Fox can save the day.