"You're an almost perfect specimen of the genus 'peach,'" says dashing reprobate Rowley Flint (Sean Penn) to the truly peachy Mary Pantin (Kristin Scott Thomas) in this stilted version of a Somerset Maugham trifle about the moneyed class inconvenienced by lust and Fascism in 1938 Florence. It's the sort of stiff-upper-Brit badinage that one may think one is nostalgic for, until one hears it played straight in a film with no glamour (the cinematography makes everyone look blotchy), urgency or sense. Really, my pet, it's all just too terribly terribly...terrible.
--By Richard Corliss
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