It's 1920, four years since the Irish freedom fighters took up arms against the British Army, and for the idle Anglo-Irish in County Cork, life is a matter of cutting the roses and waiting for the van to come. Indeed, one can almost hear the echo of Eliot in this film: "Hurry up, please, it's time." Very country, oh so English, the dirty secret among the likes of Sir Richard (Michael Gambon) and Lady Myra (Maggie Smith), the fact that so complicates life, is that this "tribe" consider themselves Irish. A young British soldier, any soldier, who crosses their wooded path will pay the price for this duplicitous identity. Like any self-respecting country estate this one attracts myriad guests and hangers on, among them, sophisticated Marda (Fiona Shaw). "Am I a vamp?" she vamps. But Shaw's Marda is a vamp of wit and innuendo, of openness and bite. It's a marvelous performance, on which the whole shaggy tale, from Elizabeth Bowen's novel, hangs.