As a narrative, David Hare's Dreams of Leaving … has the confined simplicity and elegance of an Eric Rohmer moral tale….

And yet the film is a disappointment, all the more frustrating for being so tantalizing, for offering elements that are never quite connected. In a Radio Times interview David Hare has said that in Dreams of Leaving he was trying "to push aside the business of being a teacher or a moralist". Perhaps in this remark lies the source of my frustration, for in this film Hare seems to have chosen a means of proceeding, through the use of voice-over, that is essentially moral: a man in early middle age looks back on his youth, and tells the wistful story of a failure of recognition. Conrad would have approved such a structure….

The film proclaims moral intent, moral progress from Innocence at the opening of the play—"I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know if it was breakfast or lunch"—to Wisdom at the end—"If anyone now asks me what I feel about these things …". Consciously or not, Hare has put himself in the business of delivering up meaning, or being a moralist, and I think he has evaded his responsibilities….

[Perhaps] Hare feels that in Dreams of Leaving he was making a clean break with the political and social concerns that have been at the centre of his previous work. And yet what is valuable in that work has been an insistence that private—especially sexual—relationships are not distinct from economic and political relationships. This was especially so in Licking Hitler and Plenty. And while Hare has had his share of flak from feminist critics, it cannot be complained that he has not tried to make sense, in dramatic terms, of that old saw of the Women's Movement, that the personal is political.

And, tantalizingly, in Dreams of Leaving all the material is present for a range of complex connexions to be made. The public world intrudes at every point in this non-love affair—the cynicism of the media, the corrupt art market, the whining narcissism of rock stars—but it remains an unassimilated backdrop. And there are times when William the narrator is suddenly objectified, his need for praise made so identifiably male, and Caroline's rejection of these needs—"be your own man"—so evidently endorsed by the author, that—again enticingly—it begins to seem as though larger meanings are about to impinge. Is William's failure to understand Caroline prompted by his failure to understand all women, by the pervasive scheme that casts Caroline as Madonna and the rest, William's girlfriends ("rather grim girlfriends, some of them well, not particularly nice"), as whores? Is that what Caroline's photographs of prostitutes are meant to suggest? If so, William's belated recognition that Caroline was not waving but drowning is insufficient.

And if Caroline's fasting or anorexia (which inflicts brain damage on her) is a logical extension of her detachment from life, her inability or refusal to take nourishment—at least from William—then the metaphor seems to cry out for development, for explanation. We need to know more about her madness. Is that madness or that isolation the price women must pay for their independence? William's conclusions nine years on ("Our lives dismay us. We know no comfort. PAUSE. We have dreams of leaving. Everyone I know.") are too frail, too precious in the face of such rich possibilities.

One can be too demanding of course. That the film is intriguing and elegant is never in doubt…. But Hare must be judged by the standards he has set himself. He chose a narrator, and ultimately the film has to stand or fall by what William eventually comes to understand of Caroline, of himself and, implicitly, of us all. To accept what the film's author has argued, that it is enough if people say to themselves "It may not say anything, but it's true" is to evade the crucial and dramatically necessary task of moral explication that he set himself here.