Firelight 1997 Full Movie Download
Cherly Fleitas
Firelight is a 1997 period romance film written and directed by William Nicholson and starring Sophie Marceau and Stephen Dillane. The film is about a woman who agrees to bear the child of an anonymous English landowner in return for payment to resolve her father's debts. When the child is born, the woman gives up the child as agreed. Seven years later, the woman is hired as a governess to a girl on a remote Sussex estate. The girl's father is the anonymous landowner. Filmed on location in Firle, England and Calvados, France,[2] the film premiered at the Deauville American Film Festival on 14 September 1997. Firelight was Nicholson's first film as a director.[3]
In 1837, French-speaking Swiss governess Elisabeth Laurier agrees to bear a child for an anonymous English landowner in return for money (500) needed to pay her father's debts. They meet over three nights at a coastal hotel and have sex. Despite their wish for detachment, they develop a deeply passionate connection during their lovemaking by firelight. Their feelings grow after they converse on the beach and at the hotel. Nine months later (10 August 1838), Elisabeth gives birth to a girl, and as agreed, gives up her daughter to the care of the father. Over the coming years, Elisabeth never forgets her child. She begins to keep a journal of watercoloured flowers and plants, adding a page for each of the holidays and her daughter's birthdays which occur while they are apart.
Outside of class, Louisa spends all of her spare time in the lakehouse, a small belvedere on the estate in the middle of a lake, which can only be reached by boat. Here, Louisa pretends she has a mother. At first, Elisabeth watches clandestinely from the jetty while Louisa is in the lakehouse. However, when she finds out that Charles swims naked there in the morning, she begins to go to watch Charles too, leaving before he can see her. In the classroom, Elisabeth paints picture cards to teach the seven-year-old how to read. She also tells Louisa a tale about the firelight:
It's a kind of magic. Firelight makes time stand still. When you put out the lamps and sit in the firelight's glow there aren't any rules any more. You can do what you want, say what you want, be what you want, and when the lamps are lit again, time starts again, and everything you said or did is forgotten. More than forgotten it never happened.
In the 1997 movie Firelight, Elizabeth Laurier (Sophie Marceau) is in a bad way. Her father is heavily in debt and her position as a governess does not allow her the financial ability to assist her father as she would like to.
Firelight (1997) is a little known gem about how women in the early nineteenth century were often not only robbed of their personality, individual desire and ambition, but also the right to raise their own children, because men had complete control over their destinies. The film brings to mind such feminine bildungsroman as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, with its study of a poor, but clever and resilient young woman who is determined to be independent and authentic in a world that wants her to be neither.
One night, after Elisabeth has put Louisa to bed, she finds Charles in the schoolroom. He remarks on the pretend reading methods she uses because Louisa can just look at the picture instead of reading the word, but Elisabeth explains that pretend eventually becomes the reality. Charles then asks her about the firelight story, and she recounts it to him, too. Charles begs her to promise that what came before between them can never happen again, but Elisabeth does not make such a promise, and they give into their feelings for each other and make love.
I happened across this movie one weekend on TV a few years ago and fell in love with it. Made in 1997, it is not a particularly well-known film, but it is one I believe deserves a broader audience. If you love a well-acted period drama that is moving and achingly romantic at times, Firelight just might be the movie for you.
However, things do not go as planned. Elisabeth and the Engishman are surprised to find themselves drawn to one another as they make love by firelight, developing a deep attachment as they converse at the hotel and during walks on the beach. Afterwards, they return to their normal lives.
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