This very long1980 movie isn't the worst Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala movie (that would be "Jefferson in Paris") but is numbingly dull even to an admirer of many of their movies. I'd assign blame mostly to Jhabvala's screenplay about two radically different troupes vying for the chance to première a (real) recently discovered play written at age twelve by Jane Austen. From what we see of it, Austen wasn't much of a playwright at age 12 (who is?!).
Jhabvala imagines a charismatic experimentalist Svengali (Robert Powell) pitted against a socially well-connected aging actress whom he had used and abandoned earlier (Anne Baxter in her last big-screen role paying off the sins of Eve Harrington?). She wants to stage an operatic version. It defies plausibility that the experimentalist actors have operatic voices, but the audience has to simply accept that, while trying to care about any of the characters struggling to survive whimsical arts patronage. I could muster a bit of sympathy for Baxter, and more for the very handsome spurned husband played by Kurt Johnson, but couldn't care less about the "star" played by Sean Young (in her first screen role) or about which absurd production got supported and mounted off- Broadway.
Jhabvala imagines a charismatic experimentalist Svengali (Robert Powell) pitted against a socially well-connected aging actress whom he had used and abandoned earlier (Anne Baxter in her last big-screen role paying off the sins of Eve Harrington?). She wants to stage an operatic version. It defies plausibility that the experimentalist actors have operatic voices, but the audience has to simply accept that, while trying to care about any of the characters struggling to survive whimsical arts patronage. I could muster a bit of sympathy for Baxter, and more for the very handsome spurned husband played by Kurt Johnson, but couldn't care less about the "star" played by Sean Young (in her first screen role) or about which absurd production got supported and mounted off- Broadway.