Scheming Under the Spires

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PRIVILEGED Directed by Michael Hoffman

Screenplay by Michael Hoffman, David Woollcombe and Rupert Walters

Intellectual intensity, social arrogance, psychological self-absorption, sexual confusion and, above all, a ferocious literacy: if Privileged is to be believed, student life at Oxford appears to be as immutable in its ways as the university's famously dreaming spires are in theirs. It would seem from this movie that Evelyn Waugh and all the other novelists who made the world aware of what it was like to be young, gifted and absolutely tops in an elitist society could safely drop in for tea at Oriel or Balliol or any of their formative haunts and feel utterly at home. And this despite the decades of welfarism and general leveling that have wrought so many changes in the rest of British life.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the manner of the movie's making says more about the quality of undergraduate ambitions these days than the film's rather conventional view of its subject admits. For Privileged, written with assurance, acted with panache and technically quite smooth and knowing (despite a murky blowup from 16 mm to 35 mm), is, of all things, a student film. It was conceived, created and hustled into the world's film markets by a cooperative of Oxonians in the same age bracket, 20 to 27, as the students they have conspired to place on the screen. The chief difference between creators and creations is that the former apparently have a more vaulting sense of what young people can accomplish if they devote their nerve, energy and talents to doing something of more general interest than merely finding themselves or turning up someone suitable to sleep with.

This does not mean the group, which raised much of the picture's minuscule $60,000 budget from family and friends (with the aid of an Oxford alumnus. Director John Schlesinger, who helped get production equipment at a discount), has achieved a perfectly glittering surprise on its first try. Indeed the film is flawed at its center by an unattractive protagonist named Edward, an oversmart, oversmug womanizer and all-around user of people, who is supposed to summarize all that is wrong with traditional Oxford attitudes. In this role Robert Woolley does the nasty bits well, but mostly leaves out those moments of charm and vulnerability that might have evoked real sympathy.

Even so, Privileged offers many pleasures. As Anne, the young woman who does not know quite what to do about Edward, Diana Katis, the cast's one professional, is very fine. There is a sweet reserve to her playing, and a sense that despite her temporary befuddlements, her Anne is on the way to becoming a woman of genuine, and entrancing, character. Having her conduct her relationship with Edward while they are involved in a drama club production of The Duchess of Malfi puts them in logical touch with a group of eccentrically orbiting minor characters and imparts a resonance, narrative richness and a range of human interest extraordinary to find in a film by young people.

Privileged's profits will go to the Oxford Film Foundation, which the movie's producer, Richard Stevenson, a 27-year-old American, helped establish. It will provide professional movie training, which has never existed at Oxford. This might be a mistake. The film, whatever its miscues, already has what no trade school can teach: a sense of how intelligent people think, talk and act within a cultivated society. It is hard to find that in any movie today, rare indeed to find it in the typical academic product.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.