Angels and Insects
Tags: romantic

Plot synopsis:
William Adamson (Mark Rylance), a brilliant naturalist, has recently returned to Victorian England, staying with the family of his wealthy benefactor, Sir Harold Alabaster (Jeremy Kemp). He is penniless after losing all of his possessions in a shipwreck returning from a years-long expedition to the Amazon. Now dependent upon the hospitality of his patron, William is employed to catalog Sir Harold's specimen collection and teach his younger children the natural sciences, assisting their governess, the unassuming Matty Crompton (Kristin Scott Thomas).
William quickly becomes enamored with Sir Harold's eldest daughter, Eugenia (Patsy Kensit), who is still mourning the recent death of her fiancé. Despite his impoverished circumstances, Eugenia proves receptive to his advances and accepts his proposal of marriage. Although Sir Harold grants his approval, Eugenia's snobbish brother Edgar (Douglas Henshall) takes an intense dislike to William because of his humble origins.
Soon after the marriage, Eugenia informs William that she is pregnant. She insists on naming the boy 'Edgar' after her brother, frustrating William. Eugenia's behaviour alternates between coldness towards William, locking him out of her room at night, and moments of intense sexual passion. Over time the couple has four more children, although William never warms to them. He instead spends much of his time with the Alabaster children and Matty, observing the activity of an ant colony in the forest. He forms a strong bond with Matty Crompton, who encourages his scientific activities and displays a strong intelligence of her own. They collaborate on a book about the colony, which is successfully published in London.
One day, during a hunting excursion, William is summoned back to the house by a servant boy who claims that Eugenia wishes to speak to him. He walks into the bedroom, surprising Eugenia and Edgar while they are engaging in incestuous sex. Eugenia then confesses that she and Edgar had been having sex with each other for years and that her fiancé committed suicide after discovering this. Eugenia also tells William that even though she knew it was wrong for her to have sex with her brother, it did not quench her desire to do it. William realises that he has been used by Eugenia and that all of the children (who bear no resemblance to him) are Edgar's.
Matty reveals her knowledge of the affair to William during a Scrabble-like game by discreetly moving around letter tiles that spell INSECT to INCEST. Meeting in her attic room, she explains that the servants were also aware and it was through their instigation that the secret was exposed to William. Expressing frustration at her life and her dependency on the Alabasters, Matty reveals that she has published her own book on the insects and has bought two tickets for passage aboard a ship bound for the Amazon. William is initially reluctant for them both to go; despite his attraction to Matty, he does not feel that the rain forest is a suitable place for a woman. After she assures him of her strength, and reveals that she loves him, William acquiesces to her plan.
Before leaving, William meets with Eugenia one last time and tells her he intends never to return. He also promises to keep her secret, for fear of injuring her ailing father with the news, and hopes she may find a way to live with herself. The movie ends with William and Matty departing in a coach for Liverpool, eager to begin their new adventure and leave the past behind.

Review: Strong performances highlight this film, set in Victorian England during a time when science and society overlap to reveal secrets of nature, as well as some of the deeper secrets born of the human condition, which, as in the case of those depicted in `Angels and Insects,' directed by Philip Haas, were never intended for public disclosure, encompassing as they do, love, shame, ignorance and desperation, and all on a highly personal level.
And, that being the fact of the matter, in the end, all that separates us from the insects or the animals are the aspirations of those individuals who are determined to take us all to that higher level, no matter what the cost in terms of personal sacrifice, and in the final analysis, we are-- for better or worse-- only what we make of ourselves.After ten years on the Amazon and surviving a shipwreck in which most of his work is lost, naturalist William Adamson (Mark Rylance), now lacking a home and means of his own, is taken in by his benefactor, Sir Harald Alabaster (Jeremy Kemp), who hires William to assist him with the writing of a book, as well as to tutor the younger of the children in residence on his estate.
It's good fortune for William, who finds satisfaction in his work, as well as in making the acquaintance of one of Sir Harald's daughters, Eugenia (Patsy Kensit), with whom he quickly becomes enamored.
But some secrets are better left buried, and before it's over, William may discover more than he bargained for.Beautifully filmed and acted, working from a screenplay co-written by Philip Haas and Belinda Haas (adapted from the novel, `Morpho Eugenia,' by A.S. Byatt), director Haas sets a deliberate pace, which along with the stunning cinematography of Bernard Zitzermann, gives the film a riveting, hypnotic effect.
Haas understands the emotional terrain with which he is dealing, and it shows-- both in the innate perspectives of human nature which he so readily conveys, as well as in the performances he obtains from his actors.As Adamson, Mark Rylance lends a quiet, personable charm that works perfectly for his portrayal of this man who has seen, perhaps, too much of the world, and as a result, by choice takes that which is pleasing to him at face value.
It is the quiet strength of Rylance's performance, however, that makes it so effective and emotionally involving.Patsy Kensit does an admirable job of capturing the angst of Eugenia, this young woman who lives in a seemingly perpetual state of inner-turmoil.
And it's effective work, too, inasmuch as she presents Eugenia as fragile, but not too vulnerable, which goes far in establishing the true nature of her character.It is Kristen Scott Thomas, however, who gives the most memorable performance of all, as Matty Crompton, a member of Sir Harald's extended family.
This is, without question, an Oscar-worthy performance, coincidentally coming in the same year that Scott Thomas was nominated for Best Actress for her work in `The English Patient.'  It goes without saying that it was an incredible, memorable year for this incredible actor.The supporting cast includes Douglas Henshall (in an extremely noteworthy performance as Eugenia's brother, Edgar), Annette Badland (Lady Alabaster), Chris Larkin (Robin), Anna Massey (Mrs. Mead), Saskia Wickham (Rowena), Clare Redman (Amy) and Paul Ready (Tom).
From a very young age I have been interested in period films and thought provoking themes, however, upon first viewing I was incredibly bored by the whole project.
He realizes that like his insects (ants in particular), the Alabaster family has a unique and questionable structure/nature.
William Adamson (Mark Rylance), a biologist who collects rare insects (especially the butterfly), survives a shipwreck and comes under the protection of an upper class English family.
now i admire antonia susan's writing, but trying to slog through morpho eugenia (book from which this movie was made) was like a peculiar form of torture-- insect description til i thought i would vomit.
Angels and Insects is one of the most visually stunning movies I have ever seen but every bit of the immense beauty & luxury that is on the screen contributes to the sense & definition of exquisite excess that is so ingrained in the Alabasters' way of life.
Angels and Insects has some of the most beautiful costumes I've ever seen, but one of the most shocking stories.
Will Adamson as Mark is very subdued,as Kristin Scott Thomas remarkable as Matty- who proves to be the real beauty.I like how the director kept giving us subtle hints and then was not afraid to throw the truth in our faces- like being hit by the bucket of ice water.
A U.S.-British co-production for PBS, from A.S. Byatt's story "Morpho Eugenia" (a better title!), this head-scratcher of a human drama involves a Victorian England bug-specialist who comes to stay with a wealthy family and falls in love with his benefactor's lovely but unstable daughter.
Great acting and directing plus an ingenious plot line make "Angels and Insects" a movie worth watching.
He thinks she is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.What he discovers about the Alabaster family is a dark secret which shatters his world.The movie is beautiful to watch and a real thought provoker.
I find this movie absolutely fascinating on all levels: basic idea, story, acting, imagery, set design, colors, music.
It all fits together so well and tells a fascinating, rather sad story of beings, their limits and the way they deal with it in a time period of great changes and discoveries.
Kristin Scott Thomas gives an Oscar worthy performance full of nuances and subtleness in tune with a by gone Victorian era when nothing is outrightly spoken but always hinted at so unlike our lurid confessional age.
Angels and Insects is a thoughtful adult tale predicated on an anagram of the word "Insect." It benefits from a provocative story, interesting collection of characters, the charm of a period setting, and several philosophical and social musings, all worthy of consideration.
For example, in an early scene when Adamson returns to Britain and is feted at a private ball, instead of using authentic music to nail the period effect and introduce all the elegant and subtle feelings that run beneath the Victorian surface, Balanescu concocts a drone that is an explicit imitation of locusts.
A fascinating film about people acting like insects.
The costuming is beyond brilliant, but it is the actions of the people that really are striking in this film.The matriarch of the family is definitely a Queen ant or bee.
Sometimes, it is a plain little ant like Matty Crompton (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is busily working on her own plans for William.This all takes place shortly after Darwin's Origin of the Species was published, and during the Civil War in America.
At the same time, a collaboration of William and Matty results in a book being published.Then the shocking secret comes forth.Mark Rylance, Patsy Kensit, and Kristin Scott Thomas were all fantastic in this shocking tale..
There are few movies better than the novel that spawned them, and 'Angels & Insects' [from A.S. Byatt's 'Morpho Eugenia'] is one.Mark Rylance, better known for his Globe Theatre Shakespearean productions, is excellent as a poor-but-honest Victorian naturalist who has lost everything except a few prized specimens in a shipwreck while heading home to England after years in the Amazon jungles.Patsy Kensit, the melancholy beautiful daughter of his patron Sir Harald Alabaster, enchants him and accepts his proposal.
Kristin Scott Thomas of 'The English Patient' is the drably dressed worker-ant of a governess to the Alabaster children, Rylance's intellectual equal who shows him the rot behind their privileged but stagnant lives and catalyzes him into action.I found the extremely vivid costumes of the upper-class women distracting, and mentioned this to a friend who works in the textiles department of a museum who said it was actually authentic:  Victorian Europe was in love with the newly invented analine dyes, and both sexes in all classes revelled in garish colour combinations such as bottle-green and violet [insect colours ;-) ].Back to the movie:  there are adult themes, graphic soft-focus sex and frontal female AND male nudity for a change, but one of the most erotic moments is the married Rylance day-dreaming about Scott Thomas's naked wrist.What makes 'Angels & Insects' worth watching and re-watching?
The performances, of course, especially of Rylance as the quiet hero with 21st century sensibilities [watch the scene of him with his brother-in-law and their different definitions of courage], the theme of the Alabaster home as hive, the showy, needy, damaged butterfly wife versus the drab, resourceful, repressed but passionate governess, but even the opening credits are wonderful.
As someone who usually keeps abreast of Antonia Byatt's work, this novel somehow escaped me and I saw the film first instead of the other way around this time.
In the case of this film, Kristin Scott Thomas (a brilliant actress) was the draw.
Particularly visually amusing are the often-matching outfits of William's students.The acting is brilliant, as one would expect from a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Mark Rylance and Oscar/SAG Award Nominee, Kristen Scott Thomas.
Very impressive for a movie.In all, Angels and Insects' is a rich romantic drama whose dialog buoys the plot through the treacherous Victorian Age.
One thing that often irritates me about costume dramas, or period pieces, is they fall in love with the scenery or the clothes and they forget about the story and the characters (the only reason, I'm convinced, Oscar categories like Best Costume Design exist is to award those who can show off the best).
Things may seem a little slow at first, but it turns out director and co-writer(with wife Belinda) Philip Haas is setting us up, and the pay-off was astonishing, at least to me.Besides the way the tale is told, the best reason to see this is to see another great performance by Kristin Scott Thomas.
Like the movie, Thomas'character, Matty, doesn't seem much at first, but gradually you realize there's a lot going on that she's not revealing, and you always sense something going on behind those eyes.
What made the movie interesting was it's very accurate setting in the mid-19th century when Victorianism was at its height and what went on in the story was scandalous during that time.
When William Adamson an entomologist (Mark Rylance) marries Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit) the daughter of an aristocratic family, he realises that he will always be considered an outsider.
I love the 19th century English period films and was captivated by the costumes, homes and gardens in this movie.
I had to watch this film for a class about Mid-Victorian Britain...with my professors and my class...and I was shocked at the story; Not just how awful the acting was, but that the script was actually bought and given a green light for production.
Mark Rylance and Patsy Kensit give two of the worst performances I have ever seen in my entire life.
The main characters are pretty lame and are acted much the same.Mark Rylance, as William Adamson, seems to have perfected an expression of blank emotion (or maybe it's just boredom).Patsy Kensit's character exists to simply have a different frock on in EVERY scene she's in or get her kit off.Douglas Henshall provides the 'evil' character & is actually quite good, he doesn't overdo it so it never reaches the pantomime stage, however Annette Badland has no trouble in reaching these dizzy heights as Lady Alabaster (PK's characters mother).Kristin Scott Thomas plays a subdued second female lead and, like Henshall, comes away with some credit One has to assume it's not the actors fault as the director, Philip Haas, surely got what he asked for.How on earth this got the Evening Standard award for Best British film in 1995 beggars belief (it MUST have been a BAD year)..
A waste of beautiful but pretentious costuming and fine settings well filmed ruined by a contrived and unsatisfactory story line.
This is one of the most visually repulsive movies I have ever watched.I enjoyed reading the other reviews for this film.I got a good laugh from the person who described the women's dresses as being like a visual jackhammer.
The actors, particularly Patsy Kensit, were so wooden and unbelievable that I thought of turning this film off a few times.
A fascinating and psychologically suffocating film based on a novella by A.S. Byatt.A doomed love affair and some serious family dysfunction provide the content for the story, and director Philip Haas ratchets up the sense of something rotting at the film's center to a high degree.Though all of the acting is fine, what I remember most about this film are the costumes, all designed to evoke insect imagery.
Does anyone actually speak like the Adamson character in this film?
At first you think its going to be one of those stupid English drawing-room pieces where the characters just exist to show off fancy clothes and move in gorgeous scenery; then the story takes an unusual turn (hence the comparison to Henry James)The unhappy situation of the young wife could have been dealt with in a more sympathetic and emotional manner - as it is, she's a bit too distant at the end.
Mark Rylance's dour and soft-spoken scientist is blindly taken by the beauty of Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit), the daughter of his new benefactor, and he does not apply his meticulous observation of insects to the family that employs him.
The interesting interweaving of insects as part of the plot and as metaphor to the characters' lives adds another layer to this quiet and mysterious film, which at first glance may seem tidy enough, but soon gives way to the turbulent waters that are barely hidden beneath the surface..
A beautiful movie, but an utterly predictable story..
What a weird yet perfectly plausible character for the time period!) The strange, brilliantly colored costumes are imaginative and sumptuously designed, with a psychology all their own.What's really interesting about the film is its subtle, controlled sense of menace.
At times the movie looks like a strange cross between a film by James Ivory and a film by Peter Greenaway, with the Alabaster women carrying bright colored clothes that suggests different sort of insects.
One realizes that this is way we spoke in America before our English got so sloppy that now we sit in a movie and miss dozens of lines because nobody has taken the care to pronounce their lines clearly.Angels and Insects takes us into the snobbish atmosphere of a Victorian home.
The English "class system" is beautifully illustrated and the characters in the movie are so well delineated that it is as if we had been personally introduced.The movie has some gorgeously costumed scenes, so unlike the films we see nowadays when the make actors seldom wear a decent suit and tie.The subject of incest is dealt with in a breathtakingly plausible way and, despite your disgust for such behaviour Patsy Kensit skillfully explains her vile obsession for it.Mark Rylance as James is absolutely perfect as an actor and Kristin Scott Thomas is mouthwaterling good.
'Angels and Insects' is certainly better than the usual Hollywood garbage, but it is certainly not of the caliber of the best British period films.
There is a scene near the end of the film where the main character shuffles a hand of cards and in so doing rearranges the word 'INCEST' to spell 'INSECT.' Maybe this anagram was the inspiration for this entire story!William Adamson, a Victorian naturalist/entomologist of modest means, suffers a devastating career setback in the course of returning from a Brazilian expedition.
And the great secret of the film, i.e., the incest, actually fails to make much of an impact, and Patsy Kensit is spectacularly unconvincing as the mortified, disgraced Aurelia after William discovers her..
Although the film and story is wonderful I felt the ending lacked more than most should.
The brilliant young actor Mark Rylance (he's also the Artistic Director of the restored Globe Theatre in London) stars as a mid-19th century naturalist who is forced into a lowly teaching position on a estate, when a tragic turn of events destroys his life's work of insect studies in South America.
At the house, is a plain but brilliant young governess (Kristen Scott Thomas) but he overlooks her for the aristocratic daughter of the family (Patsy Kensit), who is traditionally blond and gorgeous.
(I studied fashion history in design school, and I can vouch for this!) It IS startling, because we have been largely misled by "tasteful" costume dramas, but I found the picture of the 19th century represented here to be fresh and authentic.Since many contemporary domestic films and TV movies have dealt with the theme of incest, it may not strike some viewers as all that shocking or extraordinary, but in the tightly repressed Victorian era, such things would be deeply hidden and repressed, and even more so -- never spoken of, which would guarantee that such things would continue to go on, only in secret.I think whether or not this film (or the novella for that matter) touches you, depends on whether you identify with the idea of the "plain jane" who has to inevitably watch the man she desires reject her and choose the prettiest girl.
(What a pity Kristin Scott Thomas is in there, too.) One atrocious dress after another, all scenes doing the nudge-nudge routine, then we get the incest and we are (supposed to be) overwhelmed by the realization: "yes, these two screw like two insects".
I felt like the director did this for no other reasoning than just to shock the viewers at the end of a dull film.
I would recommend this film for anyone that has a passion for insects as well as for people in their own families.