During the first three decades of the 20th century, England's literary and artistic life was heavily influenced by the so-called Bloomsbury Group, an influential ad-hoc collection of Camridge-educated writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals who met regularly at Virginia Woolf's house in Bloomsbury, London to share ideas and support each other's artistic activities. An eminent member of this celebrated Bohemian coterie, which included, apart from the aforementioned Woolf, E.M.Foster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes and Clive Bell, was the writer Lytton Strachey. In the summer of 1916, whilst staying at his cottage in Berkshire, the physically frail Strachey, whose homosexuality was an open secret among his tight-knit group, formed an unusually close friendship with an impulsive, restless young painter named Dora Carrington. Coming off a failed marriage to Ralph Partridge, another Bloomsbury member and a former lover of Strachey's, Carrington found uncommon comfort and calm in Strachey's non-judgemental aloofness and soft-spoken, intellectual embrace. Despite a brief affair with a friend of her ex-husbands (and a subsequent terminated pregnancy) her undying love for Strachey became the one constant in her life, and the deep, platonic relationship the pair shared (until his natural and her tragic death) has the makings of one of the most poignant, heart-breaking love stories of the 20th century. Borrowing heavily from Michael Holroyd's Strachey biography, director Christopher Hampton's film paints an intimate period-perfect portrait of a compelling, deeply moving and unconventional romance distilled from the wildly diverse personalities of two extraordinary but now largely forgotton people. With her distictive pageboy haircut and tomboyish attire, Emma Thompson is superb in the title role, but it's the remarkable Jonathan Pryce as the emaciated Strachey who walks away with the film. His performance deservedly won him the best actor award at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
