7 / 10
score

The Lowdown

Lars von Trier regular Jean-Marc Barr puts the good looks that earned him a place in Empire's 100 sexiest movie stars of 1995 to use in this BBC adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 'St. Ives', a novel that was unfinished upon his death and completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Franco-American Barr plays Cpt Jacques de Keroual de Saint-Yves, the smooth Napoleonic Hussar officer who makes the mistake of insulting a ranking Paris Guard, and finds himself drawing pistols at dawn. After putting the poor chap out of his misery, the rest of the Guard hilariously come out of the woodwork, and Jacques finds himself facing several revenge-fuelled duels. He cunningly manages to dodge these by insulting his superior (an interesting use for lobster) and getting demoted, but as an example, he’s pushed down through the ranks to a Private in the infantry. And of course, he then gets captured by the British. It’s here he meets Redcoat Major Farquhar Chevening (Richard E. Grant), an uneasy, stiff-lipped Brit who requests lessons in l’amour from his “Frenchie” friend. In what probably wasn’t a cliché when Stevenson penned it, it turns out wise-cracking Jacques has designs on the same girl, and his situation is made all the more complicated, not to mention watchable, by the arrival of his estranged family, most of whom he thought dead.


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Sum it up, s'il vous plait?

We’ve been presented with a DVD+R, and so the technical specifications will bear little relation to the final retail authoring, and the extras only run to a small text biography on author Robert Louis Stevenson, filmographies for the cast and a picture gallery, but it’s a nice little piece which is thankfully infused with enough comedy to offset the rather laid-back, small-scale approach to period drama. The performances are suitably accomplished from a host of British stars of the big and small screen and the script is surprisingly robust, excelling at both the comedic and dramatic in a film which could easily have failed at both. While the lack of authenticity in the accents may grow to be a bugbear, not least because it makes it difficult at first glance to figure out who’s who and what side they’re on, if you can overlook this, you’ll find a swashbuckling comedy romance that’s short on the actual swashbuckling, but has enough of the latter in fine form. And it features full-frontal male nudity. From the BBC. Whatever next?