The Queen of Sheba's Pearls

Herald rating: * *

Emily Bradley waves goodbye to her 8-year-old son, Jack, as she boards a train for London in 1944. It will be goodbye, too: a Spitfire is brought down and Emily is killed.

Eight years later Jack (Rollo Weeks) lives in the country with his father, Harold (Lorcan Cranitch), his grandmother, Laura Pretty (Elizabeth Spriggs), assorted aunts and a great-uncle.

On the eve of Jack's 16th birthday a visitor arrives. Nancy Ackerman is Swedish and looks very like his mother.

This may have something to do with the fact that both parts are played by Helena Bergstrom, wife of Colin Nutley, an English film-maker who has worked in Sweden for 20 years.

Jack is besotted. Harold is spooked. Nancy looks too much like his late wife and he is still grieving. He shuns her.

The family - from grumpy undertaker great-uncle Edward (Peter Vaughan) to the oldest Pretty sister, Audrey (Lindsay Duncan) - is suspicious.

We learn that Laura had an affair when she was young, and her lover took one baby to be brought up in Sweden while she raised the other. Darn, you've guessed the answer.

A sweet and gentle film, a collection of vignettes that paint Nutley's picture of a troubled family finding itself again.

* DVD, Video rental today