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 In cinemas Thursday[G]
Director: Toa Fraser
Runtime: 100 mins
In 1936, Edward Plunkett, also known as the 18th Baron of Dunsany – or Lord Dunsany – wrote a fantasy novel called My Talks With Dean Spanley. This filmic adaptation, based on Plunkett’s text and written by Alan Sharp, brings Plunkett’s fairly obscure tale of the supernatural to twenty-first century audiences. This isn’t a ghost story, or a CGI-fuelled fantasy epic. It is instead a wonderfully restrained narrative of mysticism and the supernatural permeating the stiff upper crust of English society in the early decades of the last century.
Jeremy Northam plays Young Fisk (the narrator), a somewhat jaded English gent who lost his younger brother in the recent Boer War. Every Thursday, he visits his profoundly bitter, arrogant and unfeeling father, Fisk Senior (Peter O’Toole, in predictably fine form). The visits are occasions of ritual only and Young Fisk loathes them. Reading the paper one Thursday, Young Fisk persuades his father to get out of the house to attend an oration by an Indian Swami on “the transmigration of the soul,” which his father has already dismissed as “poppycock.”
The oration is absolutely snooze-worthy but it’s here that the two first encounter the quirky and reclusive Dean Spanley (Sam Neill). Two more coincidental encounters with the Dean that same day convince Young Fisk – somewhat desperate to introduce spiritual meaning to his life – that he must pursue a relationship with Spanley and learn of his thoughts on reincarnation. In order to do this, he must bribe the Dean with his favourite drink, a special aromatic liqueur usually reserved for Hungarian royalty. This rare elixir is provided by the rather dodgy but immensely affable Wrather (Bryan Brown).
And so the meetings begin – the Dean sipping on the wine late into the night at Young Fisk’s house and deepening his recollections of his own past life. Despite the irrationality of it, Young Fisk finds himself enamoured by Spanley’s powerfully vivid recollections. Could these ‘memories’ be actual traces of a previous life? Young Fisk, along with the audience, is left wondering with escalating enthusiasm for most of the film.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie, engagingly directed by New Zealander Toa Fraser, that deserves much more praise than it is likely to receive. Its unique plot with its various twists and turns makes it difficult to thoroughly summarise, but let it be said that you’re unlikely to find a more pleasingly magical film this year – especially if you’re prone to the thought that dogs are something more than simply ‘man’s best friend.’
****
ADAM DODD
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