Tara Chirpy / 26 May 2025 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

The Heart Of Me is a long drawn out exhausting watch

A BBC period drama with good reviews 2002

“passionate and carnal” “ravishing” I don’t think so.

This film seemed to go on and on for hours and left me feeling exhausted and thinking about what another reviewer had said about a completely different film, makes you think about your life and why you just spent two and a bit hours investing in this movie” I am the type of person who always believe it will get better, somethings about the happen, and then it’s over and it didn’t.

The Heart of Me premiered at Sundance Film Festival in Park City in Utah, 2002 a British period drama directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan starring ironically three of my favourite actors Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Bettany and Olivia Williams.

It’s essentially a love triangle between two sisters, Madeleine, Williams and Dinah Bonham Carter sharing Madeline’s husband Ricky played by Paul Bethany with the girls mother, Mrs Burkett played by Eleanor Bron.

It’s stoic and so sad actually, maybe that’s why I found it so draining as it clearly depicts wasted lives and loves for everyone trying to keep up appearances when really they all just needed to tell each other the truth.

But it just wasn’t done, isn’t done.

The sets were dark and a bit dreary, deco style and period and even the champagne guzzling and glamourous costumes of affluent middle class society failed the create some light on what was too much shade for me throughout the movie.

The best and most memorable scene for me was when Ricky encounters Dinah his lover by chance after a time apart and she invites herself to a very embarrassing lunch with Jack a suitor of hers from the past and the elephant in the room is not addressed until a hideous scene ensues in the restaurant and a drunken Dinah has to be dragged out of the restaurant kicking and screaming and thrown in a taxi distraught whilst her lover Ricky denies the love affair with sister in law.

The make up and costume definitely confirm Dinah as the Scarlett women she would has been at the time and I wondered how much things have actually changed in almost 100 years for women.

An interesting plot of two sisters navigating their relationship and pretty much passively aggressively getting along throughout which to be honest I just couldn’t see happening even in the 1930’s and a weak man in the middle who did both woman a grave disservice and died a hero in the end.

Yep not much has changed for women when it comes to love.