Miss Bentley (Vanessa Redgrave) has been spending every April at an elegant hillside villa on Lake Como. It's 1937, and her father has recently died. It's supposed to be an uneventful vacation and then Major Wilshaw (Edward Fox) arrives. Next is tall, flirtatious, sassy, young American Miss Beaumont (Uma Thurman). It's all fun and games to her, but her affects are much more powerful than she realizes.

It's a breezy film at first like the countryside setting. It is where the rich set vacation. There's some attempts at slapstick with the tennis game. The Italians are mostly cartoonish. Vanessa is easy going. Uma is flashy. When the specter of jealousy arise, the story finally gets going. Instead of using this emotional drama, the story ends and it's wrapped up with a happy ending. It lacks any tension or power. Vanessa Redgrave makes it watchable. It's just a slow watch.

"A Month by the Lake" is a light comedy and drama about a love late in life for two Brits. It's set in 1937 around beautiful Lake Como, the deep glacial lake in the sub-Alps of Italy and Switzerland. The story is told through the eyes of Miss Bentley who has vacationed at the lake for years since 1913 with her father. He has died recently and this is her first time back at the lake.

Miss Bentley is known by the staff of the villa-hotel where she stays, and she is a student of life. She befriends others who come to stay at the villa. This year, she meets a single Englishman, retired Army Major Wilshaw. Also in the mix this year are an Italian family with an American nanny, Miss Beaumont, some loud Americans, and local young Italian males.

Vanessa Redgrave and Edward Fox are the seniors who meet and eventually come together. Their many years of single life lead to deep love eventually. This happens after the major is brought to life by the teasing of the young Miss Beaumont, played by Uma Thurman. This is a delightful story of life and single people coming together late in life. The two fine British performers shine in this enjoyable light melodrama. Fox plays a somewhat stuffy Brit - no one can do that better than he. Redgrave is a bouncy and perky spinster who's gentle passion is slowly awakened.

The movie is based on a short story of the same title by H.E. (Herbert Ernest) Bates (1905-1975),a prolific English author. Bates wrote more than two dozen novels, several volumes of short stories, numerous collections of essays and non-fiction works, and several children's books. Various of his works have been been made into movies and popular British TV serials. Among these have been "The Purple Plain" of 1947, "Love for Lydia" of 1952, and "The Darling Buds of May" of 1958.

This is a movie that allows viewers to slow down from the usual fast-paced action stuff of today. It gives modern audiences a chance to see quality acting by two great talents of the English stage and cinema.

H.E. Bates has never really been a popular author in the cinema- there have been far more adaptations of his works on television- but in 1995 there appeared both "A Month by the Lake" and "The Feast of July", the first feature films based on his writings since "Dulcima" and "The Triple Echo" in the early seventies. The reason why these two films both came out at that time is doubtless the temporary revival of interest in his works provoked by "The Darling Buds of May", the highly popular television adaptation of his "Larkin Family" series of comic novels.

"A Month by the Lake", based on a story from Bates' collection "The Grapes of Paradise", is set in the Italy of the 1930s; to be precise, by Lake Como in April 1937, the very month in which Edward Fox, one of its stars, was born. Rather unusually in a youth-obsessed cinema, its theme is the growth of love between two middle-aged people, both British guests at an elegant lakeside hotel. Miss Bentley is a spinster who, on the first day of her month's holiday, meets Major Wilshaw, a retired Army officer. This is not, however, a straightforward romance. Even in middle age the path of love does not always run smoothly, and complications arise in the shape of two other characters. Miss Beaumont, an American nanny working for a rich Italian family, flirts shamelessly with the Major. Vittorio, a handsome young Italian, flirts equally shamelessly with both Miss Bentley and Miss Beaumont. (Vittorio, incidentally, is the only major character whose Christian name we discover. The others, in keeping with Anglo-Saxon conventions of this era, address each other by their titles and surnames alone. Perhaps Italians were more relaxed about such matters).

This film is considerably better than the film version of "The Feast of July", which turns a fine novel into a dull piece of rustic gloom and misery, but it does have its faults. The action tends to drag at times, particularly in the first half. The character of the Major changes rather abruptly; at first he seems like a rude, petulant man, especially after Miss Bentley beats him at tennis, and then suddenly becomes charming towards her. It is something of a convention in comedies such as "I Love Trouble" and "You've Got Mail" that all love affairs begin with hatred at first sight, but "A Month by the Lake" is a drama, a genre which has generally demanded a greater degree of psychological realism than has romantic comedy.

Nevertheless, it is also a film which has its virtues. It may fall within the "heritage cinema" category but, despite the beauties of the scenery, it is not as visually lavish as some examples of the genre. It not only visually but also emotionally subtle. This type of cinema often demands a rather different style of acting technique than does contemporary drama for the reason that earlier generations, particularly but not only in Britain, often valued emotional self-control (the so-called "stiff upper lip") as a virtue, far more than most people would today. To display strong emotions, especially in public, was seen as a sign of weakness.

To play "heritage cinema" well, therefore, demands the ability to display emotional states though subtle behavioural or verbal nuances rather than through overt histrionics. Uma Thurman, as Miss Beaumont, seems more at home here than she did in her earlier venture into historical drama, "Dangerous Liaisons". Roger Ebert points out that her character's surname means "beautiful mountain", but unlike Ebert I do not think that this is a reference to Thurman's physical height. Bates, after all, died in 1974, never knowing that his story would be filmed or that such a tall actress would be chosen to play the character. I think that he chose the name to emphasise that Miss Beaumont, beneath a surface playfulness, is inwardly cold and icy, and this is something which Thurman suggests well.

Miss Bentley and Wilshaw, by contrast, hide strong emotions beneath an outward reticence. Like most British film actors of their generation (they were born within a few months of each other in 1937) Edward Fox and Vanessa Redgrave are both practised stars of historical drama- Redgrave, for example, starred in "Agatha" and Fox in "The Shooting Party"- , both possess the gift of being able to express emotion and mood subtly, and both make full use of that gift here. The result is a quiet, understated film, but nevertheless a very good one. 7/10