Just watching the trailer for the 1981 adaption of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is a real trip down memory lane. Watching the rerun on TV some fifteen years or so later, my late teenage self waited in great anticipation for each episode. Adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, it has been remade many times but never bettered.
We follow Charles’s romantic attachment to the Flytes, a wealthy English Catholic family. First his love affair with Sebastian and then with Sebastian’s sister Julia. (The first implicit and the second explicit, due to the time the book was written.)
The casting, the music, the sense of place, the dialogue (largely faithful to Waugh’s book) is so beautifully rendered. Set in England, prior to the Second World War, it is so nostalgic of place; so evocative of a lost time.
Watching again, I feel as Charles does when, after long years, he hears the word ‘Brideshead’ again: it is “a conjuror’s name of such magic power.”
