A rueful, romantic tale of the awfulness of life in an ancient English public school in the 1930's. At its center is the friendship of Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett), a dark, Byronically handsome young man, who accepts the horrors of the school system in return for its rewards, and Tommy Judd (Colin Firth), who attends the school against his will, refuses to play the gentleman's game, and is already a Marxist. Guy falls in love with a handsome fellow student named Harcourt (Cary Elwes), and the student prefects use the evidence to blackball Bennett from becoming one of the school leaders in his senior year.