Rent Another Country (1984)

All Blazer, No Bloodstream - Another Country review by griggs

This one's got the confidence of a great tragedy and the plot logic of a school prospectus.

Guy Bennett is queer at a vicious boys' school, which explains plenty of the rage he's carrying and the walls he's built around it. Communism is a much bigger leap, and the film never quite shows its workings. It wants desire, class resentment and ideology to fuse into a single motive, and mostly it just insists they have.

Rupert Everett is the reason to stick with it — he gives Bennett a brittle, wounded vanity that hints at a sharper film underneath. Colin Firth is solid too, though Judd mostly comes across as a manifesto with a side parting.

The corridors are gorgeous, the cruelty comes wrapped in Latin and tradition, and the institution leans on everyone exactly as intended. I never bought the pivot — the moment Bennett tips into the man who'll eventually defect slips past unexplained. Somewhere along the way, the emotional logic seems to have defected too.

Handsome, chilly, oddly weightless. Good cheekbones, thin causality.

Engaging piece of '80s Queer Cinema - Another Country review by AER

Another Country is a classic British movie made in the 80s about the oppression of homosexuality in public schools and hypocrisy and order of life therein. Rupert Everett (THE HAPPY PRINCE) plays Guy Burnett perfectly as the lovelorn teen whose success on graduation is guaranteed. However, his need to express his sexuality isn' t the 'done thing' and it ruffles a lot of feathers which lead to some decisions that will echo throughout his life profoundly. Also starring Colin Firth (THE ENGLISH PATIENT), Cary Elwes (SAW), and a few familiar faces from 80s TV, this would have benefitted from sharing a bit more detail about how Guy Burnett went onto defect to the Soviet Union and why he was being interviewed by a young woman for his story. He explains early on that he cannot 'name names' and that all he can offer is background. Sadly, this renders the bookending story void as the whole film is told in linear flashback making it hard to relate the 80s to the 30s. More spy stuff would have enhanced this otherwise engaging, important movie.

Recommended.

A Brilliant, Classic British Film Based on a Play about Schooldays of Guy Burgess, Cambridge Spy - Another Country review by PV

This is such a great film. Launched the careers of Rupert Everett and Oscar-winner (the King's Speech) Colin Firth playing an interesting posho leftie schoolboy character.

All very ETON and 'If', so in a schooldays genre of cinema really, more than a spy genre or queer cinema.

Yes, it's romanticised, and influences the Style Council's LONG HOT SUMMER song/video for sure.

Watch with 1983's An Englishman Abroad to get a less romantic more drunken waster portrait of Guy Burgess after the spy ran away to the USSR.

The quality of the writing by Julian Mitchell and his stage play shines through here - Everett played the lead on stage too in the West End. His big break.

4.5 stars rounded up.