Alan Rickman breezily narrates his lunch date in London Soho with former lover Emma Thompson in Sunday’s PBS Masterpiece Contemporary feature, The Song of Lunch. Fifteen years removed from their last night together, Rickman’s now the vinegar to Thompson's fine wine, a libation that figures prominently.
In the adaptation of a narrative poem, a copy editor finds pleasure in his words and the sensual world. He’s also insulated, childish, bitter, resentful and not nearly as insightful as he imagines himself. The lunch proceeds, he tipples into inebriation, his observations ever more tart. Thompson counters with pity, sorrow and frustration with little more than the arch of her brow. This song is one of pain, pathos and humor — of the allure of women and wine. Unable to “nuzzle her jawbone,” he indulges in the other.
Rickman, with his distinctive intonation, essays a melodious “sweetly swung ax,” “fine, fiery, feisty candle flame,” and assails hackneyed writing as a “dog’s dinner of sex, teenage philosophy and writing course prose.”
He’s florid, prone to alliteration, banal, clever to a fault, and that’s the point.
Thompson doesn’t get the last word, just the ones that cut: “It’s not just that you’re stuck in the past; you’re stuck in your poems.”
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2011.