from Miramax
Directed by
Nick Hamm
Starring
Polly Walker
Vincent Perez
Frances McDormand
Franco Nero
Written by
Ann Guedes
Frank McGuinness
based on Kate O'Brien's novel
Rated: 
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Romance // It's 1922, and Mary Lavelle (Polly Walker),
the 22-year-old daughter of a widowed doctor in Ireland, is quiet
and seemingly conventional, yet she has two qualities that are
bound to attract notice: her startling beauty and her yearning
to become an independent wanderer. Mary is engaged to nice-but-dull
John MacCurtain, a demobilized soldier now working as shipping
clerk. John cautiously insists on waiting for marriage until
he has a good income, and so Mary, feeling fondness but no great
ardor for her fiance, decides to make use of the time to become
a governess in Spain--a then traditional occupation for rootless
Irish women. She finds work tutoring the daughters of a family
headed by the aristocratic Don Pablo Areavaga, whose marriage--complicated,
sexless, but not unloving--is explored in depth. Despite initial
homesickness, Mary soon takes to her charges, who include the
vain, gregarious Pilar and the spirited, amusingly precocious
Milagros.
With her youth and looks, their new governess provokes comment
in the spinsterish community of Irish "misses", but
she nevertheless finds friends in Rosie O'Toole, a spunky eccentric,
and Agatha Conlon, an austere, mysterious semi-recluse. As Mary
develops a taste for bullfights and an infatuation with Spain
in general, she comes to find answering John's daily letters
a chore. Events reach a crisis when she meets Don Pablo's married
son, Juanito--while, at the same time, Agatha is developing her
own illicit passion for Mary. Passive and impressionable Mary
is sometimes a frustrating heroine, but O'Brien writes with a
striking grace and acuity that illuminate not only the landscape
of but the complexity of the people living in it.
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