A seemingly flawless aristocratic family spirals into emotional chaos after a weekend guest upends their lives, exposing the fragility beneath 1930s London's glittering, decadent façade.
This page opens with the synopsis supplied by the programme’s makers. Everything after it is our own.
Tony and Brenda appear to be the perfect married couple - with money, position, a great house and an adored son, John Andrew.
When Tony invites John Beaver to stay for the weekend, he sets in motion a series of events which drastically disrupts the course of all their lives.
A stunning, Oscar-nominated adaptation of one of Evelyn Waugh's sharpest books. A family is torn apart by the corruption, cruelty and decadence so rife in the 1930s London aristocracy.
The film opens in the English countryside, with birdsong and a toy motor somewhere off to one side, and a conversation so light it barely registers. Did you have breakfast? Twice — two breakfasts, but I couldn't eat them. Why are you dressed like that? I was cold. Are you in love? Yes, I think so.
Nothing in that exchange sounds like the beginning of a catastrophe. Waugh worked that way throughout the novel, and Sturridge keeps to it: the family is destroyed without anybody raising their voice.
Tony Last has a wife he loves and a son he adores. He also has a vast Gothic house, which he adores rather more. Brenda is bored. The boredom is not dramatic and is not presented as a failing. She is a clever woman in a large cold building in 1930s Hertfordshire, and the most interesting thing in her week is a letter about knitting measurements and whether they must stay with Angela for the new year.
Into this comes John Beaver, who is charmless and penniless and entirely available. The affair that follows involves remarkably little passion for a piece of English fiction. Brenda takes a flat in London, the arrangement becomes known, and everyone adjusts to it. Tony adjusts for far too long.
Waugh wrote the novel just after his own wife left him. The London set in it are thoughtless rather than wicked. A marriage ends because ending it is slightly more convenient than not, and the social machinery closes over the gap without a sound.
Then the novel does the thing that made it famous, and Sturridge follows it without flinching. The story leaves England altogether and ends somewhere nobody watching a comedy of adultery would expect, in territory much closer to nightmare. It lands the way it does because everything before it has been so carefully ordinary.
The film depends on James Wilby's Tony, a decent and unimaginative man whose worst quality is that he cannot believe anyone would actually do this to him. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Brenda without asking for sympathy or refusing it. Alec Guinness turns up late and quietly walks off with the picture.
Directed by Charles Sturridge, from Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel. One hour fifty-eight minutes. Set in 1930, among people who would be appalled to be told they were cruel.