ANOTHER COUNTRY

UK, 1984
Director: Marek Kanievska
Stars: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth

Rupert Everett’s big screen persona is virtually indistinguishable from his real one, and both are starting to look a little worn out.  Everett’s a plummy English poof, three words that could also form category titles for his repetitious film roles. Most recently heard as Prince Charming in Shrek 2, and King Charles II in Stage Beauty, his other crown jewel roles include The Prince of Wales (The Madness of King George), and Christopher Marlowe (Shakespeare In Love). In the Masterpiece Theatre department, he starred in An Ideal Husband (as Lord Arthur Goring), The Importance of Being Earnest (Algernon), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oberon). His Hollywood breakthrough came in the late Nineties, where he played the recurring role of ex-pat poofter best friend with a toffy accent in My Best Friend’s Wedding (George Downes), The Next Best Thing (Robert Whittaker) and Unconditional Love (Dirk Simpson).

His role as Guy Bennett in Another Country was one of his first major film roles, and because it synergises the key elements of all his subsequent roles it should be regarded, for better or for worse, as his signature performance, the Rosetta Stone of Rupert.

Another Country starts Amadeus style with an old wheelchair-bound villain being pushed into a room to confess the sins of his sordid past to an earnest young interviewer. Guy is said villain, and we learn that he defected to Russia years ago to spy on his homeland. Why, we wonder? What could have happened? We drool with anticipation over the prospect of a savage expose on British private school life, and the bitter hypocrisies of the aristocracy, but all we really get is a story about a couple of ambitious prats thwarted by their slightly older rulebook peers.

Turns out that the main disaster of Guy’s adolescent life was his quashed ambition to rise to the highest social peak of the ruling student body ("The Gods") and from that, launch into his dream career as a diplomat. But his flagrant sexuality got in the way. Not because being into guys was a foreign and unpardonable sin in the English private school world – are you kidding?? – but because Guy’s brazenness opens up a chasm into which his career and social path tumble. He’s not punished for being gay, he’s excluded from the power circle for having more than one agenda. If Guy had been chasing skirt, the same thing would’ve happened.Guy might be easily able to juggle romance with a serious job, but that’s his business – what’s expected of "The Gods", and what’s demonstrated by those who’ve been accepted to that position, is single-minded devotion and a passion for tradition.

Guy flaunts his disdain for serious traditions during an important military parade inspection, mortally embarrassing all, and potentially bringing the school and its Gods into disrepute. In another immature and apparently unacceptable breach of rules and etiquette, he’s sprung passing a love note across school boundaries to a handsome boy. In other words, Guy throws it all away in the name of self-expression and romance – fantastic, but that doesn’t justify his indignation, defection and bitterness. I can’t see anything here that’s specifically condemnatory – it’s just rigid political and social systems against a bold main character who’s too distinctive and headstrong to play by the rules, a description that could apply to the plotline of any movie from Gandhi to Funny Girl.

As a gay pride battering ram, it doesn’t really work either. No one objects to Guy’s sexuality – at one point it’s acknowledged that he’s slept with virtually everyone in the school, and despite his attempts at obnoxiousness, he’s fairly popular and apparently respected. The only times that he’s reprimanded is after using ribald language in front of pre-pubescents, and for going too far in his flirting, which involves the forbidden activities of leaving the school grounds late at night, and fraternising with a member of another school in public. When he’s squeezed out politically it’s not a direct case of homophobia, but the result of his over the top personality and refusal to play by the rules, which gives his rivals sufficient leverage to plot his "destruction". His eventual defection to Russia seems like the kind of thing up-for-an-adventure Guy would do, not an embittered aberration in response to an unfair system.

It seems that Another Country’s Guy Bennett is the species originator of the horrible line of "woe is me" gays (on screen and off) who started to emerge around the time of this film’s release, and went big time with the AIDS epidemic and the politicised, grungy talk-show nineties that followed it. No wonder Everett enjoyed such stardom around this time.

Colin Firth’s loyal but fair Tommy Judd is the far more interesting, and far less precious, lead character of this film.

Related Reading:
Get Real

Review by Mark Adnum

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A scene from Another Country


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