Oscar and Lucinda

Director: Gillian Armstrong
Cast:
Ralph Fiennes
Cate Blanchett
Tom Wilkinson
Clive Russell
Ciaran Hinds

Oscar is a boy addled by the religious ferocity of his father; Lucinda is a girl trained to be a socialite. Instead—or perhaps, because of their upbringings—Oscar and Lucinda find themselves inexplicably drawn toward the forbidden. He can't stop playing cards and gambling; she invests in a glass factory and becomes an independent businesswoman.

When they finally discover each other as adults on a sea voyage to Australia, their attraction is as infinite as it is unspoken. Ralph Fiennes stars as the almost autistically shy Oscar, a man so pockmarked by guilt that he must find ways of expressing his love for Lucinda in the most far-fetched of fashions. Cate Blanchett, her luminescent face and bright eyes lighting up the face of Lucinda, has a steely determination and soft heart that brings them together. In movies, we always want people to fall in love; in this one, we desperately want them to fall in love.

Oscar must drag a glass church across Australia to pastor in a far-off river village—well, he doesn't have to, but in his mind, it's the only way he can garner Lucinda's trust. "You had my trust already," she cries when she reads his letter, but like all epic love affairs, this one must be proven by triumph and tragedy. Metaphors abound; the steel structure of the church is Lucinda—the fragile glass is Oscar. When the glass church is floated down the hostile river, surrounded by aborigines, we see the most breakable of men, the most perilous of faiths, braving the cruelty of the world in an effort to find love. Sound hokey? Maybe in the cold language of analysis, but "Oscar and Lucinda" is a passionate victory in the theater.

With Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, Ciaran Hinds, Josephine Byrnes. Screenplay by Laura Jones.

—Ian Williams

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