I don't mean to belittle the drama or moral concerns of Faulks' novel, just to point out how wrapped up they are in conventions. And there's nothing wrong with conventions when they're executed as entertainingly as Faulks manages. He wrote the sort of "old-fashioned" novel that's concerned with giving the reader pleasure (something you might also say of another literary romance novel that appeared about the same time, Valerie Martin's "Italian Fever") with the virtues of character and plotting and conflict.

Gillian Armstrong and her screenwriter, Jeremy Brock, have made almost exactly the movie I hoped someone would from the novel. We know from the opening, when we see Charlotte (Cate Blanchett) riding in a train through the sunny French countryside after the war, raising an elegantly gloved hand to the window as if she were reaching out to her memories, that we're in for a sumptuous melodrama. And the solid craftsmanship, the way the train glides away from and near the camera as it winds its way through the landscape, tells us we're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

Armstrong and Brock, eager to get to the meat of the story, give the opening sections a graceful concision. We move swiftly from Charlotte's arrival in London, to her romance with RAF flyer Peter Gregory (Rupert Penry-Jones, who brings something warm to a role that could have been just a pip-pip, chin-up chappy), to her receiving the news that Gregory has been shot down, to her training and her landing -- via parachute -- in France.

It's a sleek joke when Charlotte strips off her paratrooper outfit to reveal a sensible, tailored two-piece suit underneath. It reminds you of how people in classic Hollywood movies were always pressed and groomed, no matter what situation they found themselves in. Of course, undercover agents landing in France had to be dressed in civilian clothes, but it's typical of Armstrong's approach that she blends movie conventions with the details of the time.

You see that throughout the section in rural France that's the heart of the movie, with Charlotte working with Julien (Billy Crudup), a member of the French Resistance, while trying to get information on Gregory. And yet Armstrong and Brock never lose the sense that there's something vital at stake.

There's a wonderful detail of Julien saying to Charlotte, "Thank you for coming," almost as an afterthought, after she parachutes in. It tells us how the small niceties of life have become irrelevant. And we're plunged swiftly into life under the Occupation when a contact Charlotte meets in a cafe is picked up, a scene that's a small marvel of sustained tension.

Armstrong doesn't fall for the myth of the glamour of heroics. After the first action Charlotte takes part in, the dynamiting of a train carrying German troops and weapons, she's a mass of nerves, shocked by the fact that she's so easily played a role in killing people. Armstrong gives the scene a fitting coda when a trembling Charlotte returns to the house where she's staying with Julien's father, Levade (Michael Gambon), and he acknowledges her knotted-up mixture of fear and horror and delivers a line, "It's always a shock the first time," that somehow manages to convey the weight of what she's just done.

Gambon, dressed in the torn and dirty corduroys of a country farmer, is superb. With just the right edge of gruffness, he dries out the potential sentiment in the role. His best moment comes when he's confronted by the Occupation police. Asked for his identity papers, he dumps every bit of detritus out of his pockets before locating the tattered card, his eyes radiating a reckless contempt all the while that is the only way he has to hold on to his self-respect.

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