[.ca] Love in a Cold Climate

From Amazon.com:
Love in a Cold Climate, Deborah Moggach's efficient 155-minute adaptation of Nancy Mitford's two best-known novels, hits an entirely appropriate balance between the comic and the sentimentally tragic. Viewpoint figure Fanny (Rosamund Pike) observes from her happy marriage the complicatedly messy lives of her two closest friends, Polly (Megan Dodds) and Linda (Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh). Polly escapes from a mother jealous of her beauty into a marriage that gets her disinherited and leaves her ultimately alone when her husband falls for the pretty male cousin who has supplanted her; Linda falls in turn for an Anglo-German banker, a posh young Communist who ships her off to the Spanish Civil War, and a brilliant doomed French aristocrat. Mingled with this sweet-sour material is the memorable comic relief: Linda's monstrous father and world-weary mother, the eccentric and affectionate Lord Merlin (John Wood) and Fanny's long-absent mother, the Bolter (Frances Barber). This has everything we expect from a BBC serial--excellent casting, a strong sense of period, and fast-paced direction. --Roz Kaveney