The Governess

The real wonder becomes how British filmmaker Sandra Goldbacher was able to write and direct such an accomplished, touching and original movie her first time out.

Goldbacher's film is lovely to look at, but the blurry heart of the film only suffers by the comparison.

The claustrophobic, isolated Victorian household is a stage on which every nuance, however small, is noticed.

Minnie Driver gets a showy workout in The Governess, a beautifully crafted, if ultimately opaque, study of art, sensuality and outsider status in early Victorian England.

Though Driver's offbeat beauty and Wilkinson's weathered visage make for an unlikely pairing, it works because their passion wells from something deeper than physical apperance. [31 Jul 1998]

Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]