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Product Description ------------------- A romance, THE GOVERNESS stars Minnie Driver as Rosina Da Silva, a high-spirited young woman forced to forsake her heritage after her her's murder. Tom Wilkinson (The Full Monty) co-stars as Driver's employer Cavendish, an isolated gentleman whose only passion is for his work. But as Cavendish begins to teach Rosina the pioneering art of photography, she teaches him the outermost limits of passion. .com ---- Minnie Driver stars as an impoverished Jewish woman, Mary, living in an emphatically anti-Semitic England in the mid-19th century. Following the murder of her beloved her--who leaves his survivors strapped with his debts--she camoues her identity as a Protestant of Italian descent and takes a job as governess to an unorthodox Scottish family. In this film by Sandra Goldbacher, sundry conventions from Victorian novels mix with a contemporary, feminist take on Mary's subsequent adventures. Mary asserts, with some effort, her authority over her willful charge (Florence Hoath); she dodges the insults of a vaguely ghoulish matriarch (Harriet Walter); and she becomes an aide, confidante, and lover to the man of the house (Tom Wilkinson), a naturalist dabbling with early experiments in photography. Goldbacher fails to make it all feel as fully realized as it could be (much of the detail and soul of Mary's life in London is too teled and impressionistic to sink in). But the film's middle section, in which the heroine's complicity with Wilkinson's married character engages her keen intelligence as well as her untapped ity, is deeply felt. It's nice to see Driver prove she can carry a film, though the dreamy, exotic photography by Ashley Rowe certainly pulls a viewer along as well. --Tom Keogh