Brideshead Redecorated Pt. 2

One exciting thing to note about Brideshead is that it is much sexier. The book is muted, but you pretty much get the idea, and the tv-series ran screaming from the whole issue. So in theory it was a canny way to make the film seem more authentic than its superlative predecessors. In theory. But the film is hamstrung by having to continually appeal to an american audience, and fails to capitalise on it. (Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things could not be named after the novel Vile Bodies, it was rumoured, because american audiences would think it was a horror.) This is even more surpising, since the script was written by adaptor of the wonderful Line of Beauty and period drama veteran Andrew Davies (Pride & Prejudice). The gay element just doesn't fit anywhere, but I can't help but love it all the same. Ecoutez.

One of the more famous scenes from the original is the lunch party at which Charles meets Sebastian and Anthony Blanche, the exotic, stuttering queeny foil designed purely to make Sebastian look even vaguely hetero. On entering the room, Antoine kisses Sebastian on the lips, which is perhaps not as anachronistic as reviewers have suggested. As Eve Sedgwick points out in Between Men, it was common for men to be much more affectionate with each other than even now, often walking arm in arm and holding hands. In any case prudery was much more vulgar than sodomy.

This scene economically implies a back-story between the two, although Sebastian is already smitten with Charles, and gives Antoine a hilarious little brush-off.

Sebastian falls for Charles, and takes him to Brideshead to visit Nanny, and says "I'm your family now." Revolting and cloying, but, again, I am helpless.

Hayley Atwell plays the cuckoo in the nest as the irritating cock-block sister, as she does in The Line of Beauty. Which is a very strange way to be type-cast.

They're making an actual triangle with their bodies! Fucking triangulation. Story of my bleeding life. Despite there being a sex scene between Julian and Charles, there is only one kiss between Charles and Sebastian, which helps to strengthen the heteronormativity of the book. Thanks a bunch, Andy Davies!

Bloody good kiss though. Ryder is completely passive (as he is throughout the film) and Sebastian is surprisingly wilful. And I LOVE the little blushing smirks in the awkward silence afterwards. (Click for greater detail).After "snogging", there is a lovely bathing scene (cf. Little Ashes, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Room With a View and My Summer of Love. Those gays sure love to swim.)

And then they towel off, before Julia comes to ruin everything AS FRICKING USUAL. The third wheel gets the grease. And by grease, I mean Matthew Goode's cock.
The film takes so many liberties, I don't know why they didn't just put a sex scene in between Charles and Sebastian. Instead of having Whishaw try to kiss Goode in the middle of a ballroom, they could have just had them kissing each other's ballrooms. I would have enjoyed it so.much. more.