Sawtell First Avenue Cinema

Now Showing at Sawtell Cinema

Edge of Love
Rating: M      Running Time: 1 hrs 46 mins

Session Times: Fri 21-Nov 6:00 pm, Sun 23-Nov 10:30 am, Tue 25-Nov 12:30 pm

Synopsis:

Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley) and Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) were teenage loves; ten years later the two reconnect in London during the war. She's working as a singer whilst he's churning out scripts for government propaganda films, and living off the last in a long line of infatuated women. The two former lovers still feel the emotional pull for each other, but Thomas is now married to the adventurous Caitlin (Sienna Miller). Despite their love-rival status, the women form a surprising friendship. When William Killick (Cillian Murphy) meets Vera, he's smitten and woos her until she agrees to marry him. But he is off to the war and Vera is left in Dylan's orbit.

Review by Louise Keller:
Love, war and poetry swirl together to form this cocktail of a film, in which fantasy and reality are the main, but conflicting ingredients. Sharman Macdonald (who also happens to be Keira Knightley's mother) has written a dense screenplay about a high-pitched emotional story involving Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (played by Matthew Rhys), his first love Vera (Knightley) and wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller). Infatuation, infidelity, friendship, jealousy and betrayal are not comfortable partners, as Vera and Caitlin discover with the help of Cillian Murphy's catalyst soldier hero William Killick. In keeping with Dylan's ethereal poetry, director John Maybury injects an artistic flourish to this involving drama, allowing us to understand the intricate complexities of the spiral of love and friendship in which the characters find themselves engrossed.

To Dylan, Vera lives in his sky, while Caitlin remains in his earth. In an unexpected twist, the two women in Thomas' life become best friends. 'I might like you; then again, I might not,' Miller's Caitlin tells Knightley's Vera on first meeting. It is clear from the start that Vera still holds a large crush on Thomas, her first love, but lets the persistence of Murphy's devoted and loyal William to penetrate her reserve. He falls for her beauty and aloofness as she sings torch songs in the underground shelters of the 1940 blitz. But when William heads to the isolated Wales coast during the war, and finds the threesome comfortably settled in a controversial relationship, a war of a different kind erupts. To William, life is simple when it comes to the woman he loves, but to the parasitic Dylan who feeds off life in order to create his thoughts and words, people and emotions are nothing but commodities used for pleasure.

Knightley and Miller deliver splendid performances, the former showing she has a pretty, tuneful voice. Murphy is enigmatic as the strong-willed soldier, while Rhys is suitably soppy as the weak and often detestable Dylan. The story drags at times but there are rewards as the relationships each find their footholds, and Vera is taken right to the precarious edge of love as she finally realises what is most important.