MOVIE REVIEW : Opposites Attract in ‘Antonia and Jane’

“Antonia and Jane” (selected theaters) is a pleasingly small-scale movie about two long-term friends, polar opposites, who admire and envy each other’s spirit. Released in Britain as a BBC telefilm, it has the mild, mildewy virtues of domestic British TV drama. At its best, it manages to be both sedate and quirky, and some of the people in it are appealing without setting your teeth on edge. They lay out their foibles before us without apology.

The film, which was directed by Beeban Kidron and scripted by Marcy Kahan, also has the limitations of its own modesty. The characters don’t really develop beyond their quirks, and the dramatic situations don’t really develop either. By the end of the movie (Times-rated Mature for mild nudity), we don’t really know that much more about Antonia and Jane than we did at the beginning. And that seems to be the point: These women keep whirring in the same old ruts.

The joke in the material is that both women, who now meet once a year for lunch, are patients of the same psychiatrist, and so we get to see and hear about their connecting lives from opposing viewpoints. It’s a neat farcical situation, but the film isn’t really peppy enough for farce. The lives of Antonia (Saskia Reeves) and Jane (Imelda Staunton) don’t really complement each other, and since their friendship doesn’t deepen over the years, it’s as if we were watching a series of self-enclosed skits. At 69 minutes, the movie seems a bit overlong.

Of the two friends, Antonia is the more interesting; a star at Oxford, she now works for a hectoring book publisher and endures a bad marriage to a photographer who was once Jane’s true love. (His specialty is taking photos of body parts.) Reeves has a troubling, intelligent presence; she’s able to show the self-doubting discontent of a woman who recognizes her talents are being wasted without quite having the strength to do anything about it. The reason she envies Jane’s life is because, on the surface, Jane seems like such a pagan free spirit; she is everything Antonia fantasizes for herself.

If Antonia emerges as the film’s true heroine, it’s not just because Reeves is such a stand-out actress. It’s also because Jane isn’t nearly as well grounded a character; she’s a dramatic conceit, and her flip-flops through the years, from bohemianism to the musty middle-class, don’t ring true. She gets involved in outlandish situations that are meant to be funnier than they really are. (Exception: One of her boyfriends can only be aroused by having her read from the works of Iris Murdoch.)

Jane’s sequences have an amateur-night clownishness that clash with the more moody and substantial scenes involving Antonia. They might have issued from a middling music-hall revue while Antonia’s seem to come out of the same faintly absurd and melancholic universe as “Truly Madly Deeply.”

Comic relief works best when one actually wants some relief from the seriousness. In “Antonia and Jane,” the time away from Antonia’s story feels like wasted time.

‘Antonia and Jane’

Saskia Reeves: Antonia McGill

Imelda Staunton: Jane Hartman

Bill Nighy: Howard Nash

A Miramax Films release of a Malofilm presentation and a BBC Films production. Director Beeban Kidron. Producer George Faber. Screenplay Marcy Kahan. Cinematographer Rex Maidment. Editor Kate Evans. Costumes Joan Wadge. Music Rachel Portman. Production design John Asbridge. Running time: 1 hour, 9 minutes.

Times rated Mature (mild nudity and sexual situations).