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The Laureate

William Nunez | 2021 | 104 MINS
UK
A married couple on the brink of disillusion allows a stranger to live with them in their idyllic cottage. Will this stranger push their fragile state over the edge?

In Detail

Robert Graves is the poet traumatised and creatively blocked by his experiences in the great war, Nancy Nicholson is his forward-thinking feminist wife, and Laura Riding is the charismatic American writer who comes to live with them in a scandalous menage.

Movies about poets are always in danger of being precious, but here the preciousness is offset by a certain combination of eroticism and eeriness, particularly in regard to Riding herself who is not just the disrupter and life-force inspiration that everyone needed, but is also a predator and parasite. Brilliantly entertaining melodrama with bags of jazz age decadence and erotic undertones.

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