Love letters and libido

Possession

I'm so grateful for a civilised film at last: it hardly matters to me what Literary Correct folk think of writer-director Neil LaBute's adaptation of AS Byatt's 1990 Booker Prizewinning novel. Not a lot, I imagine. Fancy replacing the earnest English scholar of the novel with an unkempt American, they'll say. Why, the chap doesn't shave. He wears big T-shirts outside his trousers, totes his research papers in a shoulder bag, describes his morning ablutions as "brush and flush", and is likely to bring the British Museum, where he works as a research assistant, into disrepute by discovering and impulsively purloining a hitherto unknown love letter. It's from Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), a Victorian poet laureate, to Christobel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known literary lioness whom Ash makes his mistress.

I think it's years since an American character showed up on screen - Hannibal Lecter excepted - who took the slightest interest in literary works. LaBute will predictably be damned for his chauvinist presumptuousness in casting a hunky Yank go-getter instead of a picky British gent as the exponent of grey matter.

Aaron Eckhart - a LaBute regular ever since his debut film In the Company of Men - maybe doesn't do a better job than svelte Jeremy Irons might have. But his brashness is a blessed relief in a story where one more custom-tailored English accent would have left me gasping for air in a too rarefied atmosphere. He helps to popularise the novel without vulgarising it.

Roland Michell (Eckhart) has a scholar's cupidity: he's greedy for "possession" of his unique find, but soon realises he needs the help of Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a gender studies academic at Lincoln University, to decode the stolen letter and lay bare the secret ties between Ash, LaMotte and her lesbian companion Blanche (Lena Headey).

Maud herself is a relative of LaMotte by some vague lateral branch of the family.

With her crisp but colourless tailoring, hair scraped slightly too tightly into a Victorian bun and a voice that can put a guy like Roland in the freezing tray ("Did you not do any reading before you came?"), Paltrow is what you could call a fishnet bluestocking: seductively donnish. She satirises, so delicately you could miss it, the feminist itch to validate the credentials of women who love women more than they need men.

But, as she and Eckhart tease new clues out of old documents - including a hoard of love letters found in one of those venerable English piles inhabited by a dotty titled relation (pop-eyed Graham Crowden) - she has to submit her Victorian heroine to a revisionist "re-reading" and admit that LaMotte had the hots for Ash, jilted her lesbian lover and consummated her passion in the very bedstead where eventually the two contemporary detectives bring their own research to climax.

LaBute cuts back and forth, with intriguing finesse, between this couple of academic opportunists tumbling on the truth and the pair of eminent Victorians tumbling in the bedsheets. In the aftermath of passion, guilt hangs like a pall over all the parties. Victorian values and a tragic suicide stain the 19th century affair of the heart, while the 20th century affair of the mind reveals more to Paltrow about her own sexual identity than she was prepared for.

The film challenges comparison with the Karel Reisz/Harold Pinter version of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which also ran its 19th and 20th century romances in tandem to a tragic-ironic conclusion. LaBute's movie has the stylistic edge. As the emotional connection is made between ancient and modern, its time-tripping technique becomes less timorous, bolder and more allusive.

Jean-Yves Escoffier's camera merely needs to turn its head, from Roger and Maud driving along Whitby Bay to Ash and LaMotte's steam-train puffing towards the same assignation, and one period falls imaginatively and beautifully into step with the other.

Luciana Arrighi's production design shows the two Englands - and one brief cross-Channel hop to Brittany - as much the products of their changing times as the two sets of lovers are - one burdened by the constraints of Victorian society and the other by the confusion of contemporary freedoms.