A 29-year-old Jeremy Irons and a 43-year-old Judi Dench star in this 1978 BBC effort, which has finally made its way to the Museum of Fine Arts. Adapted by Harold Pinter from a 1966 novel by Irish writer Aidan Higgins, the somewhat cryptic film is set in the 1930s in the countryside near Dublin. Dench’s Imogen Langrishe, one of three spinster sisters clinging to the fraying string of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, takes up with Irons’s handsome, pretentious Bavarian scholar, who’s renting a cottage on the Langrishe property while working on a perpetual thesis connecting 17th-century Irish culture to the Brothers Grimm and Goethe. Against a backdrop of general lushness and decay, their affair moves from newly unbuttoned sensuality to cruelty and discord while Imogen’s repressed sister (Annette Crosbie) looks tensely, voyeuristically on and the simpler sibling (Susan Williamson) feeds the chickens.
Pinter’s fractured screenplay and David Jones’s enigmatic direction place the romance in a deep bed of elegiac and even political subtext, and Pinter plays a small part. But the delight is in watching the pre–French Lieutenant’s Woman Irons as a callow yet charming user — his moustache weighing awkwardly on a lip spouting intense, intellectual hooey — and especially the younger, kittenish Dench that the movies mostly missed. It’s so hard to think of Judi as a Dame when she’s rubbing whipped cream into her nipples. (105 minutes)