Jude

Tackling Thomas Hardy's bleakest novel is not perhaps the most obvious choice of second feature for the man who gave us the serial-killing, lesbian road movie, Butterfly Kiss, but Michael Winterbottom's free adaptation of Jude the Obscure is inspired.

This success is fundamentally due to a generous screenplay by Hossein Amini which retains the essence of Hardy's dour novel while paring down and contemporising the language. This in turn fuels the performances of Christopher Ecclestone (Jude Fawley) and Kate Winslet (Sue Bridehead) who burn with a symbiotic passion and integrity in the stony-hearted England at the end of the industrial revolution.

Ecclestone (last seen on the box in Our Friends in the North) stars as the aspiring intellectual who, after a failed marriage, falls in love with his unconventional cousin Sue. While Sue is strong enough to flout convention - Jude falls in love with her over an irreverant cigarette and a pint in a pub before they finally move in together - her mercurial nature cannot comprehend or cope with the gut-wrenching tragedy which they eventually suffer.

While the tragedy is one very much of its era, there is a certain timeless quality captured by Winterbottom in Jude. Winslet in particular breathes such feisty life into her part that she transcends the normal limitations of period drama. This is about people, not costumes.

While the intelligent Ecclestone whose noble, hard gaze perfectly encapsulates Hardy's deep-thinking dreamer, he is not quite the Jude who ends up alcholic and dead before he's thirty. However, there's no emotional payoff here - Winterbottom's Jude is full-blown tragedy at its best. It takes your breath away.

Reviewed by Monika Maurer