The Last September

Deborah Warner

 

Even in the ultra-competitive world of festivals, first-time director Deborah Warner is already well ahead of her more prolific peers. Awarded the prestigious Chevalier De L'Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres in 1992 for her distinguished career in theatre and opera, Warner chose to make her feature debut with an adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Bowen. Under the aegis of veteran producers Nik Powell and Steve Woolley - no longer quite the oiky Croisette bohos of the early 1980s - Warner's film is a quiet meditation on the fate of the Anglo-Irish 'aristocracy', who were violently displaced in the wake of the Republican uprising of 1916.

Boasting an estimable cast of British talent, the film takes place four years later at the country home of Sir Richard Naylor (Michael Gambon) and his wife, Lady Myra (Maggie Smith). The Naylors live a life of privileged complacency, refusing to accept the rift in Ireland's political structure and seeing it simply as proof of the great unwashed's semi-civilised status.

But while the upper-crust elite entertain their friends at tennis clubs and military functions, the IRA's underestimated Black And Tan force is at large, waging a crude but deadly war on the enemy within.

Staying close to Bowen's original text, Warner's film explores the cracks between the old and the new, and the rights and wrongs in the battle for political independence. At its heart, though, The Last September is about humanity's hopes and failings. "Elizabeth Bowen explores the tightrope between the surface of how people present themselves and their seething, boiling emotional worlds beneath," says Warner. "With seeming effortlessness, she combines this intensity with a meticulous observation of social comedy." Steve Grayson