The critics can be pushed only so far. Having fallen over themselves to praise John Bayley for Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, they were kind, rather, about Iris and The Friends. But now - and this even after Bayley's appearance with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench on his arm at the première of Iris: The Movie - the cracks have begun to appear.

Writers have often been priggish about the cinema. 'A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness,' Virginia Woolf complained in 1926, and the feeling persists. Even the best images won't do. The scene in Iris that everyone seems to like most has her in the late stages of Alzheimer's, tearing blank pages from her notebook and pinning them to the beach with pebbles. It's offered, and has duly been read, as a visual metaphor for an unspeakable loss - one of those moments when cinema aspires to the poetic. The film is full of such images: the blast of a Tube train and the mêlée of the platform stand in for Iris's linguistic disorientation, her face refracted in a window-pane for her fragmented self. But the effect of such scenes, in the end, is to point up film's difficulty in rendering a life 'lived in the mind'.

LRB 7 February 2002 | PDF Download