Irony is what the characters breathe in the second Bennett-Schlesinger BBC collaboration, A Question of Attribution, a 70-minute film about Burgess' partner in espionage, Sir Anthony Blunt -- the English art expert and Soviet double agent who became the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Fitting over the previous masterwork like a tailored waistcoat, this movie gets at the split consciousness required for spies to be spies. In so doing, it sensitizes viewers to the mental agility that goes into any self-aware person's everyday presentation.
The principal characters are that urbane snob Blunt (James Fox); an M15 investigator named Chubb (David Calder), the smart suburbanite who interrogates and antagonizes him; and the formidable monarch herself (Prunella Scales). At the movie's peak, Blunt bumps into Her Majesty in a Buckingham Palace corridor. The scene produces a continuous comic startlement that comes partly from the absolute confidence with which Bennett writes and Scales plays "HMQ." They see her as a woman who blends the maximum self-consciousness with the utmost practicality: the perfect person to jolt Blunt. While winning laughs with her massive yet vigorous air, Scales throws Fox's own deceptive greatness into comic relief. With his impressive height and carriage, he doesn't just externalize Blunt's attitudes: He italicizes them. His mask is delightfully impervious; a moment's insecurity registers like clangor.
These actors help Schlesinger turn Bennett's script into an exhilaratingly deft and imaginative comedy of doublespeak and second sight, of public faces and private lives. Like the rest of Bennett's oeuvre, it's for those who like their wit tart and their catharses compact and bittersweet.
-- Michael Sragow
A Question of Attribution screens at 5:30 p.m., and An Englishman Abroad screens at 7 p.m., on Sunday, June 1, at the Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant (at College) in Berkeley. Tickets are $5.50, $1.50 more for the second film. Call (510) 642-1124. The two films will reprise on the evening of Tuesday, June 10, at the Kabuki.
