Repression, as everyone knows, makes for bad
sex. But it does wonders for romance, obliging the yearning heart to
make wondrous imaginative leaps mostly unduplicatable when you're tangled
in the reality of rumpled sheets. It follows, therefore, that Ireland
in the 1950s, a place where condoms were illegal and priests braying
the glories of continence were everywhere, was probably the world capital
of romance.
The confusions it could impose on you if you were young, fresh from
an upcountry village and suddenly exposed to the subversive stimulations
of Trinity College, Dublin, are the subject of the ingratiating, clearheaded,
coming-of-age comedy that director Pat O'Connor and writer Andrew Davies
have fashioned from Maeve Binchy's novel Circle of Friends.
It revolves around three convent-educated girls: Eve (Geraldine O'Rawe),
cautiously quirky; Nan (Saffron Burrows), incautiously ambitious, whose
effort to seduce her way into the Protestant gentry brings her to near
tragedy; and, at the center of the circle, Benny, large, plain, smart
and, in Minnie Driver's performance, utterly luminous.
A shopkeeper's daughter, forced by her parents to return home every
night lest she be lost to the moral ambiguities of college life, she
is lusted after by her father's at first comically creepy, then dangerous
clerk (Alan Cumming) and truly loved by, of all people, the cutest,
nicest guy on campus (Chris O'Donnell). It shouldn't work, this romance
between the ruffled duckling and the swan prince, but it does. Their
sweet, determined, gently understated struggle for fulfillment in a
superstitiously conservative society makes this densely, deftly packed
movie a quiet joy to behold. — Richard Schikel, Time Magazine
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