High Season

Hemdale. Dir Clare Peploe; Producer Clare Downs; Screenplay Mark Peploe, Clare Peploe; Camera Chris Menges; Editor Gabriella Cristianti; Music Jason Osborn Art Dir Andrew McAlpine

Jacqueline Bisset
James Fox
Irene Papas
Sebastian Shaw
Kenneth Branagh
Robert Stephens

Someone should have told helmer Clare Peploe that shots of beautiful scenery do not a boffo film make, and since she co-wrote the screenplay (with Mark Peploe), she has to shoulder some of the blame for a weak and generally unfunny script.

High Season has a weaving plot with lead characters meandering in and out, but it pivots around Jacqueline Bisset as a photographer and the folk she meets up with in a tiny village in Rhodes. As well as poking fun at the tourists, also thrown in are subplots about a valuable Grecian urn, an elderly Russian spy - an art-historian friend of Bisset, with overtones of Anthony Blunt - and a rebellious Greek national.

Best of the cast are Kenneth Branagh and Lesley Manville as a seemingly archetypal English tourist couple. Irene Papas seems to enjoy herself overacting madly, while James Fox, as Bisset's estranged hubby, looks unsure about what sort of film he is appearing in.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1987. Running time: 92 MIN.

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