Young Fraser Pettigrew has always been an adventurous child. But with the arrival of his sexy French aunt Heloise, Fraser enters a truly eye-opening summer of discovery.
Colin Firth, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Malcolm McDowell star in this delightfully charming comedy about the fun and awkwardness of growing up! Young Fraser Pettigrew has always been an adventurous child. But with the arrival of his sexy French aunt Heloise, Fraser enters a truly eye-opening summer of discovery as he learns some delicious truths about adulthood and the comic eccentricities of his loving family! Also featuring Rosemary Harris, the great ensemble cast lights up the screen. Come join the Pettigrews as their lives are forever changed in one unforgettable season!
First-person narrator Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) is age 10 in 1920, a moment when it seems that the charmed life of Kiloran, the rambling Scottish estate he shares with several generations of his relentlessly quaint family, will go on forever. Even a stray shellshock casualty from the Great War–a sub-Dickensian bogeyman who haunts the grounds–is treated as a picturesque bit of local color. The family is what counts: would-be inventor Colin Firth, eccentric paterfamilias and sphagnum moss farmer; his wife Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who traded an opera career for multiple maternity; crusty uncle Malcolm McDowell, who hopes to inherit Kiloran from matriarch Rosemary Harris and evict everybody; and Irène Jacob, the beauteous young Frenchwoman to whom the uncle is engaged and over whom everyone else goes gaga. Not to mention a gaggle of precocious siblings, colorful servants, and oddball interlopers. –Richard T. Jameson
It’s been said that the most pleasant of all lives were lived in the great British country houses, in the years between the wars–for those who lived there, of course. The rest of us can only enviously imagine those days as idealized in the works of P.G. Wodehouse, whose characters occupy an endless summer of dotty earls, alcoholic younger brothers, eccentric inventors, ferocious aunts, hopeful suitors and prize-winning pigs. Their household staff functions not as servants but as keepers. – Roger Ebert
Starring Colin Firth, Rosemary Harris, Irène Jacob, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Malcolm McDowell.
Note: “My Life So Far,” set in the late 1920s on an estate near Argyle, Scotland, is based on the memoirs of a real person–Denis Forman, former director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.