Emma Thompson in Carrington (1995): Movie Review

The action takes place in the English countryside between WWI and the 1930s. After Dora Carrington falls in love with a gay writer, Lytton Strachey, she leaves her boyfriend, who had been pursuing her sexually (and for marriage) for years, and lives with Lytton Strachey in a humble house in the countryside. Then Lytton becomes a successful writer, and they move to a larger and more welcoming house. Various people are involved in one another's lives, and many of them actually get to call home, at least part-time, the quarters of this improbable couple.

As other people have noted elsewhere, this is a film that asks you to accept what common Hollywood rom-com fare would have you deny, namely that sometimes you desire people sexually while loving other people (one person or more); that sometimes there’s love with sexual desire but the object of your attraction might not be interested in you sexually; and that at other times a purely-sexual relationship may work for you, but not for the other person – and not because he/she is in love and sexually attracted by another person; no, simply because the other person is not sexually attracted to you, after all. To make it short, sometimes you’re simply not meant to have a complete or sexual relationship with one person the way romantic comedies would have us believe.

Christopher Hampton takes all this and makes quite a mess. And a disjointed one at that: bits and blobs of life and partially-fulfilled relationships follow one another in the story of Dora and Lytton, and, with rare exceptions, the people involved are pulled into the tangle of lives around this couple.

The word "mess" sounds bad, and the film may seem that way to some people, but I think it is, on the contrary, quite an accomplishment, for the various reasons I briefly mention in this article. Christopher Hampton's Carrington begs the viewer to think about times when people did live such lives (together, in one house), and, as I already mentioned, about what we are to make of love beyond the standard script of romantic comedies, which are often quite far removed from the realities of life and desire, and which some people really take as guideposts to help them negociate actual relationships.