The Go-Between

Joseph Losey in the academic garden. "What kind of flowers truly interest you?" "Poisonous ones, really." Norfolk circa 1900, "a foreign country," the visitor remembers. The lad (Dominic Guard) on a summer holiday, his crush on the school chum's sister (Julie Christie) is a tour of the starched cocoon of English aristocracy. Recruited to take letters back and forth between her and the tenant farmer (Alan Bates), slowly he perceives a clandestine affair. ("The smallest of planets," Mercury, "the messenger of the gods.") The lady of the manor (Margaret Leighton) "has a lot to look after," her daughter's fiancé (Edward Fox) is a disfigured Boer War vet and brother to the masochistic blueblood from The Servant. A dolorous education for the outsider, who dabbles in private mysticism but rattles confusedly in the adult world. "That's enough questions anyway." "But you haven't told me anything." Losey in rivalry with Visconti calls for a proper canvas of genteel hysteria, L.P. Hartley distilled by Harold Pinter fits the bill and then some. The beauty on the hammock has her cruel side, her hirsute lover is a "terribly savage" smacker at cricket, flies buzz around the audience beneath parasols. (A rendition of "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes" unites the couple at the luncheon after the game, the confidante follows with a Handel oratorio.) "I may look hot but I'm really quite cool underneath," or the other way around. The visual plane takes in Peter Lely and John Constable, a painterly technique matched by a rigor of gesture and ruffled by temporal shifts. A crux of cinema, the lost innocence of the carrier of symbols, it goes back to the director's first feature: "Green, you imbecile. Your true color. Green! Green! Green!" It builds to the primal scene interrupted by a soaked Edwardian doyenne, and to Michael Redgrave's stricken stillness as aged Icarus. Bertolucci (Novecento) and Polanski (Tess) offer grand studies. Cinematography by Gerry Fisher. With Michael Gough, Richard Gibson, Simon Hume-Kendall, and Roger Lloyd-Pack.