I’ve just finished watching a made-for-TV film of Anita Brookner’s Hotel de Lac, filmed in 1986 for BBC. Edith Hope (Anna Massey), a romance novelist, has been ‘exiled’ to a Swiss hotel where she lives for a while with the other loners and misfits: an old lady (Irene Handl) placed in the hotel by her son as if it were a care home, shunted out of sight, an aristocratic wife (Patricia Hodge) who needs to produce an heir for her husband or face the divorce courts, and a ghastly mother (Googie Withers) and sexually frustrated daughter (Julia Mackenzie). In flashbacks we learn about her affair with David (Barry Foster), the man to whom she has been writing letters and the disaster of an engagement to a man she jilted at the church. Despite her literary success, she is lonely and unfulfilled (but then, so are all the rich people with whom she associates). She has more fun when she meets an avowedly amoral businessman called Philip Neville (Denholm Elliot) who urges her to be selfish and then asks her to marry him.
There was an awful air of frustration behind a stiff upper lip. The characters spoke with such cut-glass accents and were so polite; it was like watching Jane Austen come to as close as what she might have thought was life. The film had that slightly misty air of 1970s film stock, most recently reproduced in The Holdovers. But the script was by Christopher Hampton and the music was by Carl Davis: in its day it had just about the best people working on it as it possibly could have.
It made me want to re-read the book.
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