Ever since playing the title role of Albert Nobbs in an off-Broadway adaptation of George Moore's novella back in 1982, Glenn Close has wanted to bring this tale of a cross-dresser in late 19th-century Dublin to the screen. Her labour of love is an affecting, handsomely mounted affair set in the world of Joyce's Dubliners, and its subjects are sexual oppression, the exploitation of women in patriarchal society, gender identity and the shaping and misshaping of character. Most of the action occurs in and around a small hotel where Nobbs has long worked as a waiter, living in a top-floor room alongside the other servants. But the best, most involving scenes centre on her relationship with another cross-dresser, the painter and decorator "Mr Page" (Janet McTeer).

Nobbs, a Londoner, adopted male disguise as a teenage orphan to escape from male abuse and find independent work; Page fled from a violent husband, taking his tools with her, and contracted a marriage to the loving Cathleen (the excellent Bronagh Gallagher). Particularly moving are the scenes involving the two women, especially a visit Nobbs makes to the Pages in their warm, welcoming home and a sequence where she and McTeer dress as women and walk on the beach. McTeer's performance is one of the most convincing of its kind I've ever seen. Close, looking rather like a pickled version of Gabriel Byrne and sporting a sub-cockney accent disturbingly reminiscent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, is both the film's generous begetter and also its central problem.