Where Dragons Live review – reflections on family life in an extraordinary setting
This warm, gentle documentary from Suzanne Raes is about a family – and a family home – that might have interested Nancy Mitford or Wes Anderson. Maybe it takes a non-British film-maker to appreciate such intense and unfashionable Englishness; not eccentric exactly, but wayward and romantic. It is about a trio of middle-aged siblings' from the Impey family who take on the overpoweringly sad duty of clearing out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire. The huge medieval manor house Cumnor Place, with its dozens of chimneys, mysterious rooms and staircases was bought by their late mother, the neuroscientist Jane Impey (née Mellanby), with the proceeds of the sale in 1966 of a postcard-sized but hugely valuable painting, Rogier van der Weyden's Saint George and the Dragon.
Impey died in 2021 and her husband, author and antiquarian Oliver Impey, died in 2005; this left their grownup children with the task of coming to terms with the memory of growing up in what is clearly an extraordinary place. It is magical and chaotic, haunted by these two dominating personalities, full of books, papers, paintings (who knows if there is another one that might be as valuable as the one Mrs Impey sold to buy the place?), huge grounds with a swimming pool, bizarre objects and items everywhere which speak of Oliver Impey's preoccupation with the image of the dragon.
The three children refer to their parents unselfconsciously as 'mama' and 'papa' (oddly and atypically with the accent on the first syllable in each case) and their feelings are mixed. They are in awe of how demanding and also how emotionally cold their parents were, and among the happy memories are those of cruelty and distance. The family itself could be seen as charming or twee and insufferable. This film-maker persuades you that it's the former.
Where Dragons Live is in UK cinemas from 2 May.
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