Film 1
Jacqueline du Pre was a brilliant cellist who contracted multiple sclerosis and died young. This you know already. Did you also know she had sweaty armpits? That she slept with her sister's husband and crouched by the side of rivers muttering, "All I want is a fucking fuck, for fuck's sake"? No? Then you haven't seen the film.
Du Pre is our modern Chatterton: she has become a myth - a Channel Island genius, an English rose, cut down in full bloom. She was also - crucially for present purposes - famous, more famous than her sister or her brother. Indeed, neither Hilary nor Piers du Pre were famous at all, until last year when they published a book about their sister. Jackie wrote letters home on lavatory paper signed "PS Unused!", they revealed. She was selfish. The only way to make her happy had been "to give her what she wanted". Hilary gave, or lent, Jackie her husband.
The film of the book has now been made, and brother and sister have a petit succes, at last, to match their sister's big one. The film is enraging Jacqueline du Pre's musical friends and colleagues; her former husband, Daniel Barenboim, has been threatening. But of course. It is not a film for them. It is a film for those whose deserts have not, or so they feel, been just.
The film offers little Jackie and Hilary in its opening scene. Trim, prim girls in fair isle knits and woolly hats, they dance on a beach, embarking on life's adventure with joint abandon. They are both musicians. But the story sours. At the Coulsdon and Purley annual competition they both win prizes, not just clever Hilary; soon Jackie starts winning them all. Metal cups with bug-eared handles will encumber their emotional lives for ever.
Hilary and Jackie - note that Jackie's name is not first - is Anand Tucker's motion picture debut. The camera twirls round the cellist as she plays ever dizzier cellistic feats, and we feel a little sick; Jackie leaves her cello - the priceless Davidov Strad! - in the sun and the snow; the early zoom on Jackie's ear - an organ of superfine musical sensitivity, you understand - leaves one hoping that Desmond Morris or Jonathan Miller will pop up and take us on an internal guided tour. But they are minor disappointments in a pleasingly constructed period drama.
Is it, musical types may ask, authentic? The exaggerated swing and swagger of Emily Watson's playing seems true to the du Pre we know from film. But is her Jackie meant to be mentally unstable, or just eccentric? Rachel Griffiths' Hilary is an acute study in embittered love. And in the small authenticities Hilary and Jackie is a joy: Jones the Milk delivering pints on sturdy London doorsteps; Mummy offering tea from tartan flasks (the action predating the time when thermoses got cold); a Morris Traveller proving just the size for some yeomanly rumpy-pumpy. And the scene in which Daniel Barenboim (James Frain) breaks into jazz during a recording of Beethoven Trios is memorably, convincingly deflating.
Is it truthful? That is a harder question. The closing credits provide a mundane answer: "composite characters, adjusted chronology . . . constructed dialogue and other fictionalised elements" have been used for dramatic purposes, they explain. But the more important question is left hanging in the air. By telling its story twice - from Hilary's point of view, then from Jackie's - the film feigns fairness. Given this modern recognition of truth's relativity, one wonders, why stop there? What about the milkman? What was his take on events? And what, say, of Daniel Barenboim's mum?
It is too late for fairness when the film's premise - the sister's book - is partisan already. "You should meet Hilary's husband," says Jackie to Dame Margot Fonteyn (who else?) in one scene. "He was the best fuck I ever had." We leave the cinema with a queasy feeling that this - recrimination, separation - is what the film is about. Jackie does it with sister's husband; sister does it with husband to patch things up. A Bactrian camel of a film, the story of two humps.
"Hilary and Jackie" (15) opens on 22 January
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