Review

A narrow-focus dissection of the trials of being English and rich

Andrew Pulver
guardian.co.uk, Saturday May 21 2005 00.36 BST

Chromophobia is the fear of colour; it's also the title of an eye-soothing video/art installation that neurotic art collector and clothes horse Iona Aylesbury (Kristin Scott Thomas) buys for the wall of her spick-and-span, designed-to-the-hilt marital pad. It's the somewhat clunky metaphor for the ailment that writer-director Martha Fiennes has diagnosed among Iona and her ilk: everyone's obsessed with self-help mantras and body image, or they're making too much money to have a proper home life, or (to be blunt) they're a journalist. There's no colour, no passion, in their white-walled homes.

Everyone at Cannes has been hanging on for Fiennes' film, which has been given the prestigious closing slot, though it's in eligible for the Palme d'Or. Was it worth the wait?

Chromophobia purports to be a cross-sectional analysis of contemporary Britain. But in reality, it focuses on a pretty narrow band - the upper classes, and one or two allied tradespeople. Fiennes's story skates between a good number of principal characters: Iona, her lawyer husband Marcus (Damian Lewis), a Spanish streetwalker (Penelope Cruz) and the aforementioned reporter (Ben Chaplin). Most of the cast do pretty sterling work, with Lewis in particular judging his gun-happy working toff to a nicety.

What undermines Chromophobia is its bizarrely myopic social focus. Do we really need, in this day and age, a film so unquestionably adoring of the English landed gentry, attempting to show us that, with all their foibles and tribulations, they are the repository of this country's true heroism and glory?

The narrative web tries to reach out to the streets with Cruz and her social worker (Rhys Ifans), as well as Chaplin as the world's slimiest journalist, but there's little reward for the viewer here: it's all cliche, mawkishness and implausibility.

Fiennes does seem to know her stuff with the upper classes though, and does deserve credit for her cinematic ambition (even if names like Robert Altman and PT Anderson were offered as somewhat ill-advised comparisons in advance of the screening). Chromophobia is not in their league. But as the sole representative of British dramatic film-making in the official Cannes selection, it's far from a disgrace.