User reviews

It's a while since I saw it, but this fine film demands someone's comment. Edith Hope (Massey) attempts exile from a failing affair, and from her loneliness, in that quintessential place of exile, a Swiss lakeside hotel. But the other residents, ridiculous and sad, only compound her isolation, revealing the emptiness of disengagement. Flashbacks to her affair in London have a colour and vibrancy that startle in their contrast with Hope's melancholy quiet in Switzerland. Hope must return, without hope, and face the reality of her life in England, no matter how painful. The acting is immaculate: Massey plain and still, passion hidden deep within her; Elliott in a typical role of wise counsel; Julia McKenzie as the absurd lubricious vulgarian, they and the rest of the cast all deliver perfectly pitched performances. Quiet and introverted, accurately reflecting Anita Brookner's novel, this is a very English film and about as good as an English film gets.

Edith (Anna Massey) is a crime writer who lives alone, several years into an affair with married man David (Barry Foster). Seeking to escape her loneliness and a failed attempt to marry someone else, she goes to the Hotel du Lac, only to find everyone else is as lonely as she is, whatever appears to be the case on the surface.

Some beautifully understated acting from Patricia Hodge, Denholm Elliott, Irene Handl, and others helps this Anita Brooker adaptation to shine; while Googie Withers and Julia MacKenzie make a frightful mother and daughter combination, dreadful snobs both, pushy, irritating, and quite sad.

'Hotel du Lac' is bittersweet but quite involving and extremely tightly written and performed. Anna Massey is perfect as the mousy writer in a cardigan with hidden depths and passions she can't quite understand.

The bittersweet award winning Hotel du Lac was one of Screen Two's most repeated film. The BBC seemed to put it on each time there was a strike on or they needed to put something on at short notice.

Screenwriter Christopher Hampton who has gone on to win two Oscars as a writer. Has distilled the essence of Anita Brookner's Booker prize winning novel.

Edith Hope (Anna Massey) is a middle aged, romance writer who is single. She is rather plain looking and her friends think that she will soon be confined to be left on the shelf.

However she has been having an affair with a married man David (Barry Foster) who comes to Edith, when he needs her. Edith rapidly did get engaged to marry another man but she jilted him at the altar. A move that upset her friends.

Now she has gone to a hotel on a lakeside in Switzerland to find herself. It is out of season as she observes and interacts with the other guests of the hotel. All female until the charming Mr Neville (Denholm Elliott) arrives.

He proposes marriage to Edith, not out of love but companionship. Edith can even have other lovers discreetly, but she finds Mr Neville is just another womaniser.

The film is touching, wistful, sorrowful and slightly humorous. Especially as Edith first believes that guest Jennifer Pusey (Julia McKenzie) is in her 20s when she is much older and a maneater. Much to the disgust of her mother who seems to want to keep her daughter infantilized.

Edith Hope, a middle-aged romantic novelist, goes to stay in a lakeside hotel in Switzerland. We are given to understand that she has been "banished" from England by her friends after some social indiscretion, and later learn that this indiscretion was an abortive wedding in which she jilted her fiancé, Geoffrey, at the last minute. Edith's private life is clearly a complex one, because while engaged to Geoffrey she was also carrying on a secret affair with a married man, David, an affair which is still continuing. (While staying at the hotel, Edith writes long letters to David, but never posts them).

White staying at the Hotel du Lac, Edith does not do very much apart from going for occasional walks or trips on the lake, which gives her time to observe the other guests, including Mrs Pusey, a wealthy English widow and her daughter Jennifer, Mme de Bonneuil, in exile from her chateau, now occupied by her son and daughter-in-law, and Monica, the wife of a diplomat attached to the EEC, who is on some sort of health cure. Eventually, Edith meets Mr Neville, a divorcee and successful businessman who proposes marriage to her, although this would be an "open" marriage which would allow both parties to take lovers.

"Hotel du Lac" formed part of the BBC's "Screen Two" series of television films. It was based upon a novel by Anita Brookner which had won the Booker Prize two years earlier. I read the novel after it achieved that success, but did not enjoy it. (Those were my salad days when I was green enough in judgement to assume that literary prizes were some sort of guarantee of good writing). The Edith of the book came across as a dull and prosaic individual, and not only did Brookner try to create a whole novel around so uninteresting a character, she also concentrated upon the least interesting part of Edith's story. The history of Edith's tangled relationships with David and Geoffrey could have supported a novel; the history of her stay at the hotel would have been dealt with better in a short story, and trying to stretch it out to novel length merely resulted in something bland and bloodless.

I did not, therefore, have any very high expectations of this film, but it turned out to be better than I had expected. I think that the reason was the Brookner's characters, often lifeless on the printed page, come to life in the hands of a gifted cast. This is particularly true of Anna Massey as Edith and Denholm Elliott as Neville, but there are also good contributions from Barry Foster as David (seen in a series of flashbacks) and Julia Mackenzie as Jennifer, who initially seems very much under the thumb of her domineering mother, but who later reveals a rebellious side to her character. The film was also mercifully free of some of the eccentricities of Brookner's prose style, such as when she describes Edith's hotel room as being "the colour of overcooked veal" or Monica as having "a face like a grebe? (I cannot imagine what a human with a face like a grebe would look like. Certainly not like the charming Patricia Hodge).

The film still suffers from some of the weaknesses of the book; we never, for example, learn why Edith decided at the last minute not to marry Geoffrey (or, for that matter, why she agreed to marry him in the first place). Overall, however, it is a well-made, understated TV movie. It reminded me of another film about the British abroad in a lakeside hotel, the 1995 adaptation of H. E. Bates's "A Month by the Lake". 7/10.

Successful author Edith Hope arrives at The lavish Hotel du Lac in Switzerland, for a term if recuperation after a love affair ends, there she encounters several people, all of whom are haunted by loneliness.

The first thing that struck me about this when I first saw it, is just how lavish it is, four decades on, and it is still a sumptuous and decadent production, perfectly shot, incredible location work, and that unmistakable elegance.

It is a decadent character study, every single player has a massive part to play, there isn't a wasted line or action.

The acting is spellbinding, a captivating performance from Anna Massey, one of her first ever performances, Gooogie Withers, Julia McKenzie and Denholm Elliott all perfect.

Patricia Hodge dazzles as the cake eating chain smoker Monica, she's captivating and so elegantly beautiful, I am such a fan.

Lovely to see Irene Handl in a serious role, that moment where she leaves her son, perfection.

Another BBC Screen Two masterpiece.

10/10.

This is a very interesting film about relationships with Anna Massey and Denholm Elliott in the leading parts. None of them is very attractive, they are both anti-romantic and on the verge of the critical upper middle age, and still this is an extremely romantic film, even though there is hardly any romance in it. On the contrary. But the film is made in Switzerland in a fairy tale luxury hotel by a lake with overwhelmingly romantic surroundings with possibilities of lake tours in rowing boats and a ropeway up into the mountains, and like in all such hotels there are a number of bizarre guests, who all have a say in the plots going on and affecting them, especially an old lady with a daughter (Julia MacKenzie long before she turned into Miss Marple) who theatrically dominate the circus of intrigues. Denholm Elliott is an aging lonesome man whose wife left him three years ago, why he desperately is looking for company and finds Anna Massey, a successful author from London who has taken time out from circumstances there,. which we learn about eventually. The film is a polyphonic but almost documentary prying into the nature of relationships, almost dissecting them, none of the characters is very sympathetic, they all have their aching and disturbing spots, they all have their disillusions, which is what makes it interesting. Two people with a load of experience find each other completely void of illusions and therefore accept each other in spite of all personal shipwrecks and failures, leading to an interesting experiment, which turns a most unexpected way.

Everything about this production is simply perfection. The casting of the actors is superb, the location filming at the Parc Hotel in Vitnau, Switzerland is just beautiful, the music score completely appropriate - evocing the end of summer/early autumn atmosphere perfectly. The adaptation of the original novel is exceptional and actually improves it. There are memorable scenes throughout with narratives you will memorize and repeat word for word, especially between the wonderful mother/daughter characters played by Googie Withers and Julia MacKenzie. Take time out and watch and enjoy this masterpiece.