Buccaneer Films
Julia (Juliet Stevenson) at a Malta café in "A Previous Engagement."
"A Previous Engagement" begins with such an aggressive onslaught of madcap farce, painful '60s singer-songwriter pop and picturesque Maltese scenery that I nearly bailed out after six or seven minutes. The only reason I didn't turned out to be an awfully good one: horsey, gawky English character actress Juliet Stevenson as a vacationing married woman who scrutinizes herself in the mirror and utters the film's first word of dialogue: "Fuck!"
I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy -- in her role here as Julia Reynolds, a married woman from Seattle who's returned to Malta to fulfill a 25-year-old promise to meet her former lover, that she lifts writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin's ordinary middle-aged rom-com above all its abundant clichés. (Stevenson's long and varied career goes back to playing Antigone for British TV in the early '80s; more recently, she's appeared in "Bend It Like Beckham," "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Being Julia.") Every scene Stevenson is in she commands, even more so because she plays Julia as a woman adrift in a sea of yearning and uncertainty, a bottomless fount of stammered double-takes, deer-in-headlights epiphanies and enraged zingers. Every time she says "fuck" -- and she says it a lot -- it's really funny. I have no idea why.