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USA/UK 1998
Reviewed by Edward Lawrenson
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Argyll, Scotland, 1920. Twelve-year-old Fraser Pettigrew lives with his parents (Moira and Edward) and two siblings on Kiloran estate, owned by Moira's mother Gamma Macintosh. Moira's brother Morris - who disapproves of Edward - introduces the family to his 24-year-old French bride Heloise. Edward is attracted to Heloise and forces himself on her in one of the estate's outhouses.
Fraser devours Gamma's dead husband's library of sexually explicit literature, stored in the attic. Morris and Heloise return from their travels. At a curling contest on a frozen lake, the ice under Gamma's feet gives way; she dies from pneumonia weeks later. Edward inherits the estate and boasts to Morris that he slept with Heloise. They fight, confirming Moira's suspicion that Edward has been unfaithful. Morris and Heloise leave. Moira reluctantly forgives Edward. With the family reconciled, Fraser is sent away to boarding school.
It's not long into My Life So Far that alarm bells will start sounding for anyone even vaguely familiar with the sad old bag of clichés film-makers have tended to delve into when making movies about Scotland. The moment comes when dashing French pilot Gabriel lands his aeroplane in the grounds of Kiloran estate, takes in the gorgeous Argyll landscape and comments, "I seem to have landed in Shangri La." Portraying Kiloran very much as a timeless idyll, My Life So Far proves the ghost of Brigadoon just won't go to rest, no matter how hard cultural theorists might try to exorcise it.
Apart from airing a pretty dusty line in comedy Scots (the drunken minister; the abstemious housekeeper who keeps the cooking sherry under lock and key), director Hugh Hudson ends up with a film embarrassingly patrician in outlook by falling back on this cheerily bucolic vision of Scotland. The servants (played by such fine Scots actors as Jimmy Logan) are gossipy, good-hearted folk, earthy types (Andrew knows a lot about geology) if not vaguely pantheistic (the old servant Tom namechecks Greek mythology in a pep talk with Fraser). It's clear the Macintosh family have the best interests of these people at heart: raising money for unemployed miners, treating the downstairs staff with friendly respect, setting great store in their stewardship of the land, Gamma the Macintosh matriarch and her extended family exude benevolent authority and kindly concern. Like BBC1's unspeakably naff series The Monarch of the Glen, My Life So Far plays like a subtle endorsement of the (largely inept) private ownership of vast tracts of rural land in Scotland. When Gamma orders Edward to stop using explosives for one of his harebrained land-development schemes, she explains that the noise bothers the sheep. This might cause a rather wry reflection on the role her ancestors had in the Highland clearances (where tenant farmers were turfed off their land to make way for woolly livestock), but any irony here is surely unintended.
Not that My Life So Far is visually unimpressive (French cinematographer Bernard Lutic's camerawork is outstanding), but the picture-postcard aesthetics gloss over a darker, more interesting film. Fraser's father Edward - childish, jealous, dogmatic - is clearly a flawed, if not unsuitable parent. But as portrayed by Colin Firth, he's no more than a loveable eccentric, the kind of playful patriarch who used to turn up in those cute and cloying movies produced by the Children's Film Foundation. In a film devoid of dramatic incident, his unwelcome advances towards his sister-in-law Heloise spark off a major crisis, but the question of whether he raped or not is skirted over, cited obliquely in terms of a family disgrace, much as it would be in a Victorian family melodrama. There are some delicate and lively touches - Fraser's unknowingly crude language during the hushed civility of a dinner party; Malcolm McDowell's caddish portrayal of Morris - but for the most part My Life So Far is a hard slog, like trudging shin-deep through heather on a pointless albeit very pretty Highland excursion.