It is not a sense of duty that makes me go into the plot in such detail, but something more like gourmandise: I could talk about this movie non-stop for weeks on end. The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity. We're always aware that we're watching an ironic comedy about two women who can't control their lust and who bollocks their way into a parody of a relationship. At the same time, this wicked, pungent entertainment is also a work of sensibility, partaking of the still-vibrant tradition of the English novel (as did Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Julian Fellowes's Separate Lies, and the Australian John Hillcoat and Nick Cave's The Proposition [all 2005]).

Barbara's narration is an amazing combination of acute observation of character and class; nastiness and conniving that wouldn't be out of place in an abduction melodrama; and girlishly exalted sexual reveries and bitter resentment when abruptly awakened from them. The narration, which in the novel Barbara writes retrospectively with the goal of "shed[ding] a little light on the true nature of [Sheba's] personality", tells us much more about Barbara herself. Thus, we are privy to the workings of Barbara's strong mind as it is warped by her emotions, at the same time that she pushes the story along, chop chop.

Although Barbara manipulates Sheba in the manner of a villainous seducer, and both women's offenses resemble romances of temptation, their stories have been conceived in terms of novelistic identification rather than allegorical admonition. That is, Barbara is not the personification of Sheba's temptation and its consequences — she's not apparitional (as Glenn Close is in Fatal Attraction [1987] by way of contrast). Thus, the whole raft of allegorical surnames — Covett, Hart, Pabblem, Rumer, Shreve, Bangs, Self — register without making the story symbolic or didactic. Barbara never becomes a "type," not even in the book when she attaches the Pecksniffian euphemism of "Sheba's unofficial guardian" to herself to justify rummaging in the younger woman's handbag. One of the great ironies of this brisk, candid approach to character is that Barbara's self-deception is so exactingly portrayed you wouldn't have a keener sense of what it's like to be Barbara if you were Barbara.

She remarks that she was a quiet girl and dissembles to Sheba by saying that she never had time to have children, but even as a lesbian Barbara has faded and withered without having bloomed. It's apparent she has no memories to carry her into old age, and it's this depth of dustiness that puts people off and makes every new day as bleak as that past. The stern exterior, the commanding air, which present the very image of adult authority, result from sexual repression that has left her chaotically delusional: under the crusty shell of a drab old maid bubble the gooey insides of a lovesick girl who exults about her flaxen-haired "friend" to her diary and plasters the pages with gold stars. But her repression is hers; Marber explicitly refuses to lay it off on the "deferred gratification stock" from which she comes. As we see during a Christmas get-together, Barbara's family attempts to accept her as a lesbian; she coldly says she doesn't know what her sister is talking about.