CENTURY (Directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Starring Miranda Richardson, Charles Dance, Clive Owen)

AS OUR century draws to a close, Poliakoff’s movie looks at life at the century’s beginning. Framed between two New Year’s parties, 1900 and 1901, it is a peculiarly modern costume drama, fascinated not with the trappings of the era so much as its ideas. This is the costume drama as a kind of Wellsian science fiction.

Clive Owen plays Paul Reisner, a young Jewish doctor joining a scientific think tank in London. Here, under the tutelage of Professor Mandry (Charles Dance) and in the arms of a liberated woman (Miranda Richardson) he encounters the birth of two of our century’s most influential concepts: eugenics and feminism. The former provides the film with its source of conflict and most fascinating undercurrent, as Reisner contemplates the potential effects of well-meaning social engineering (that, we know with hindsight, will ultimately lead to the holocaust against his own people). The latter is less convincing, a rushed romance with a woman who seems grafted on to the era to fit modern dramatic requirements.

Like Poliakoff’s earlier films, Century is weighed down by its own sense of significance, setting up constant echoes and parallels with our own times but failing to weld them into a coherent drama. Dry and distant, and lacking narrative thrust, it nonetheless exploits a fine cast to explore ideas not often touched by cinema, least of all by British costume drama. No sign of Emma Thompson, who I was beginning to think was a fixture of the era (every period house should have one) and for that small mercy we must be grateful.