A tang of Merchant-Ivory but with a distinct taste all its own,  Thaddeus O'Sullivan's elegant The Heart of Me rises above cliché to enclose its characters on a pain-filled journey from burial to forgiveness "throughout" -- as their favorite poet wrote -- "all eternity. . . .  Love Mercy Pity Peace."

Free and bohemian, heart-on-her-sleeve Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter) cares not a fig for what "People" think, but in the interwar world of British business and wealth, appearance is paramount and emotions carefully reined.  Following Father's funeral, this unmarried younger sister is invited to stay indefinitely at the stylish though rather soulless Mayfair Square home of proper Madeleine (Olivia Williams) and husband Rickie (Paul Bettany).  With the dark reddish hair that often accompanies black eyebrows, colorful Dinah is off kilter in this formal, black-attired society.  Even if a bit misdirected and snobbishly selfish, with good intentions the elder sister and their smooth mother (Eleanor Bron) are hopeful of marketing her into a loveless respectable marriage.

The younger woman's vivacity and quality of being different arouse the up-to-now deferential, obedient, vaguely unsatisfied Rickie, as brother- and sister-in-law literally fall together and embark on a path of love and passionate release shrouded with lies and deception.

Introduced by subtitles, London a dozen years later, after the War, is a different, sepia-tinted planet, and the nation's suffering and ache are also individual, as, contrite, wiser and stoically guarding her own secret, Dinah visits the bitter, barely controlled Madeleine.  In contrast to the '30s, furniture is still sheeted, affluence unimportant or gone, the house ghostly as the two snip at each other over a spare meal of garden vegetables.

Sudden subtitles once more, which announce a scene shift again, to 1937. One at first reacts negatively to such written stage directions, facile and non-cinematic though increasingly favored by unresourceful filmmakers. Soon, however, O'Sullivan works magic, drops the announcements and gracefully shifts from one place and time to another.  An office phone rings in 1939 and is picked up at home in '37, or a door is ajar after World War II, pushed open and another era awaits, so effortlessly as to seem the way it should be.  Proust-like, an unredeemed jeweler's receipt, a kite or book of verse slides into a memory that is real because it exists.

Milieu attached to milieu, excepting a coincidence or so and one excruciating Lawrencian lapse into fireworks as fornication, the film is tastefully restrained, well served by an impeccable cast and meticulous but unobtrusive settings.  Characters' errors of judgment, for whatever reason, call forth sympathy, not condemnation, for their mistakes are human and not uncommon. Grief comes from saying the right word but saying it too late, or saying the wrong one, from thinking that one knows best for others, acting out of passing anger, drawing the hasty conclusion, just missing a connection, as in life.

Thus, "forgiveness" becomes the keyword, repeated any number of times, in varying contexts.  That, and acceptance of man's limited condition, is what this movie so well figures.
The Lucinda Coxon script derives from Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove; the novelist later denied that the 1953 book reflected her long affair with poet Cecil Day-Lewis, but cinema à clef consideration is irrelevant, anyway.  Pleased with themselves, films deriving from literature and aiming at blockbuster-dom have a habit of betraying their sources.  But in this case, remarked a Film Guild member afterwards, life is so well rendered on the screen that she  would not care to risk ruining the pleasure by attempting the novel. 

(Released by ThinkFilm Inc. and rated "R" for some sexuality.)