One gripe about Jackie & Hilary is that from now on Jacqueline du Pre's recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto will be inseparable from the sexual predator version of her life. But it's an argument that holds no water. Think of Amadeus.
It was Ken Russell who discovered, with a series of television films in the 1960s, that the way to portray the emotional intensity of classical music on film was not by focusing on the fingers but upping the ante on the subject's sex life. Although his approach irritated the few, it pulled in the many: Debussy, Elgar, Delius and, finally Tchaikovsky with The Music Lovers became household names by being given the unconventional-sex spin.
As Hilary & Jackie garners laurels both sides of the Atlantic, the storm over its veracity continues. For the defence, director Anant Tucker has said "There's no such thing as the truth. It doesn't exist. What there is this side of the story and that side, and probably 20 more sides".
The film is based on the memoir of their sister by Hilary and Piers du Pre. Its detractors, led by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, say that the pair wrote the book because they were eaten up with jealousy. The film version, they suggest, presents their "generous, golden-haired angel" as less du Pre than depraved.
Jacqueline du Pre's recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto, made when she was just 20, transformed her from a talented child prodigy into a genius. This is the one point on which both sides agree; the title of the book, A Genius in the Family, carries no sense of ambiguity. When I interviewed brother and sister shortly after the book was published, what was so striking was their near-Messianic belief in Jackie's musical genius.
If anything, the film shows a watered-down version of the Jackie they described. Given all the du Pre children's hot-house existence (no school for example after the age of 10, thus no friends except each other) it's hardly surprising that they all turned out so strangely. Because the paradoxes in Jackie's personality that her musical peers find so unpalatable are all mirrored in her sister. In the film Hilary is portrayed as an ordinary woman whose patience and loyalty are stretched to unbelievable limits. The Hilary I interviewed, however, was far from normal.
She sounded and looked like an anachronistic 1950s throwback - a caricature of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (Jackie was "Jeckie") - yet both her and her husband's sexual etiquette is bizarre even by 1990s standards. The very fact that they wholly misjudged the reaction to their revelations (Daniel Barenboim is suing) demonstrates their other-worldliness. The 16-month affair with "Kiffer", Hilary's husband, came to an end when a friend suggested that what Jackie needed was psychoanalysis. They claim not to have known such a thing existed. Nor, presumably, sibling rivalry.
Jackie's musical peers, they said, were attacking them because they blamed the family for the onset of MS. (And indeed after her death the family were shunned.) It was to prevent her near sanctification that the du Pres were determined that the world should know "the whole Jackie", the one they loved.
"After all, we're her family and we should know. What were we to do? Burn every single thing we had and never ever open our mouths? Or put down what we knew. It was very simple."