The Heart of Me

Old-fashioned moviemaking at its best.

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

A handsome but lightweight period piece about passions indulged and repressed, and the calamitous outcomes that result from both courses.

Their dilemmas are the stuff of dozens of Masterpiece Theater productions, but they're brought to life with a vividness that defies changing mores and cuts to the heart of the ways people justify hurting each other in the name of love.

Madeleine's such a cold bitch that the adulterous lovers' anguished scruples scan like inert masochism.

The end product suggests tepid, bottom-drawer Merchant-Ivory in which the emotions rarely catch fire.

Terribly tragic, terribly romantic and, ultimately, terribly, terribly dull.