Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script. I shall attempt to list these message here. a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew! Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline. The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.

This will be more of interest to British history majors, particularly those interested in the Margaret Thatcher days is prime minister, this surrounding the Falklands War and how the press dealt with it. It's a very gentle story, even considering the subject matter, and with a cast of actors such as Jonathan Pryce, Tim Curry and Rosemary Harris (all actors I have seen on stage), and as political as it is, it focuses so much on character development and the recital of data that it tends to slow down to a halt at times. Yet it is beautifully filmed, and all three give sensational performances. But I'll never forget the site of a little boy reciting all the names of the Kings of England over the years, and corrected that he left out the Cromwells, commenting, they don't count.

I have to give Harris the nod for being the most memorable of the three actors, because she can just give a look and say so much more without speaking a word. But the script itself really doesn't take the film anywhere into the important places it should have gone, and the movie is completely void of any type of action outside a few incidents where Pryce finds his toes being stepped on, keeping him destracted rather than in order to do his job. Surprisingly, what starts off as a dull recitation of facts begins to pick up as I'm tempted to pull away from it, and it makes me wonder if this would have been better as a TV movie rather than going on to the big screen where it was surely not to get much attention. It's obvious that the agenda was very anti-Thatcher (as it seems that the British film industry was), but it certainly could have presented its facts and thoughts in a more entertaining way rather than the dry structure much in need of life giving moisture.

Spectacular balancing act between fact and fiction, public and private, greedy, ambitious Thatcherites and vacuous upper class specimen of the gauche caviar. The "Ploughman's lunch" is extremely tightly narrated and manages to make the spectator interested in the sorts of a bunch of not really likeable characters and their struggles for love, sex and power. This is "Wall Street" in European and ultra-minor key version and a formidable depiction of the Eighties and their political and social contradictions.

Hope I haven't made it sound boring, because it isn't -- it's wryly, dryly funny, without even so much of a wink to the spectator, and dissects his protagonists with surgical precision.