Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Hilary & Jackie (1998)


It is the late 1960s. Hilary and Kiffer live happily with their children in a great stone house in the Hampshire countryside. One day Hilary's sister Jackie shows up and, though the two are close and happy to see each other, tensions arise after Jackie asks Hilary if she can sleep with Kiffer, and Hilary says no. 

The scene above comes the following day, after Kiffer emerges from the house to say he is going to town to pick up something and asks Hilary if she wants to join him. Hilary says no, and Jackie, who's been sulking after Hilary refused her request, brightens; says she'll come. Hilary then suggests that she and Jackie will go, and Jackie changes her mind. Kiffer, who is oblivious to Jackie's desires, is perplexed and ends up going into town alone.

The scene is from the film Hilary & Jackie, which is based on Hilary and brother Piers's biography of their sister, who is best known as the cellist Jacqueline du Pres and whose recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, under the musical supervision of John Barbirolli, is a thing of beauty (here is a version recorded with Jackie's husband, Daniel Barenboim, conducting).

Where was I? Ah, it's a very good film! It begins with the two sisters as children playing on a lonely stretch of beach, and from there we get a taste of their prodigious lives together, until their later teens, when suddenly a card comes on screen that reads "Hilary", and we see their lives from Hilary's eyes, and then later"Jackie", which overturns whatever negative impressions we have of Jackie as a self-centred brat who is not so much competing with her sister Hilary, but in desperate need of her approval.

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