Todd Haynes | Far From Heaven / 2002

nostalgia for an imagined world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Far From Heaven / 2002

 

     Haynes' suburban 1950s couple, Cathy and Frank Whitaker, with a son and a daughter, a beautiful home, lovely friends, and a bank account that might easily see them through retirement, seem absolutely blessed; "You're the luckiest guy in town!" insists Frank's friend, Stan Fine. But anyone who has seen a Douglas Sirk movie or any other soap opera about that period, knows even before the movie has begun that, as Frank says to Stan: "It's all smoke and mirrors, fellas." Like numerous films of that period such as Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, (clearly a model for Haynes' film), Peyton Place, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Imitation of Life, we quickly perceive that something else is going on beneath the placid surface of cocktail parties and pleasant shows of art.

     Before we can even say "I've Got a Secret" (the name of the popular weekly '50s panel show), Cathy witnesses her husband in the midst of a passionate kiss with another man. He admits his problem, of course, and is determined through the help of a psychiatrist to overcome his homosexual "predilections." But only a few scenes later, after continuing to work late most nights and consuming enormous amounts of alcohol, Frank, we perceive, isn't succeeding in his "transformation."

     A vacation imposed upon him by his employers sends the lucky/unhappy family to Miami, where he meets up with another man, this time falling in love. A divorce is the "reward" for his painful admission of his new love to his wife.

     Meanwhile, Cathy has befriended her black gardener, Raymond Deagan, who not only creates beautiful flower arrangements, but is able to intelligently comment on Joan Miró and other painters in a local art show. He is also a gentle listener, particularly for a woman who has no others with whom she can communicate her marital problems. But Hartford, like any good 1950s city, is abuzz with gossip of their interracial friendship, and the women of her set have telephoned one another with the shocking news almost before she has returned home. 

     Their condemnation only further assures her isolation as she is forced to fire the man upon whom she increasingly has come to depend.

     Soon after Raymond's daughter is hit with a rock thrown by malicious boys, punishing the child for the father's apparent infraction of the rules. When Cathy hears of the news, she runs to his side, but he, too, now foresees no future in their love. He is leaving for Baltimore, and suggests to Cathy that life would be no better for them there than in Hartford: "I've learned my lesson about mixing in other worlds. I've seen the sparks fly. All kinds."

     Despite such heavy-laden dialogue, Haynes' bland restatement of 1950s stereotypes, like Sirk's films, is beautifully filmed with the warmest reds, brightest oranges, lyrical lime-greens, and brooding browns of wide-screen cinema's palette. The acting is resplendent, with Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore, and Patricia Clarkson all receiving numerous award nominations.

     I wonder, however, how anyone could describe this picture, as many critics did, as representing a "cruel honesty" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) about "the repressive taboos of a past decade" (Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal). For, while we all know that, for many, such taboos did and do still exist (we need only remind ourselves of the recent outing of evangelist Ted Haggard, who also, incidentally, is attempting to change his sexuality through psychiatry) that such things have happened, it almost appears as if, in his homage to this period, Haynes is not simply reiterating those facts, but reviewing them through a lens of nostalgia. Any truths this film reveals are "cruel" only because the writer and director make no attempt to comment on them.

 

    I think I have made it clear by this time in my several volumes of My Year, moreover, that I do not see the 1950s as the void of hypocrisy that Hollywood has long portrayed it as being. While there was—just as today—open racial bigotry, homophobia, and sexual role playing and stereotyping, there was much else going on. Indeed, throughout the decade there was a growing repeal in state after state of anti-miscegenation laws; and in 1958, only one year after the events supposedly portrayed in Far From Heaven, Hannah Arendt passionately wrote that the right to choose a mate is "an elementary human right": "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs." By 1967 the Supreme Court, in the case of "Loving v. Virginia," struck down anti-miscegenation law in Virginia, responding in language very similar to Arendt's; and most Southern states—the last bastion of such laws—quickly followed.

     If Haynes was truly interested in these issues, one wonders why he didn't more thoroughly explore them. Perhaps by following Frank Whitaker's relationship with his male lover, we might discover how his life was changed for better or worse. If Cathy had been allowed to make the decision to join Raymond Deagon in Baltimore, we might discover more about the dangers or possible joys of an interracial marriage. As presented in this film, there is no future for either Cathy or her totally ignored children (throughout the film they are repeatedly told to go upstairs and be quiet, both Cathy and her husband abusing them through silence). Her final train station wave to Raymond is a goodbye to any possibilities of love, leaving its audience with nothing to say or do but wipe away a tear or two and "tsk" the situation away.

     One has to ask, why in 2002 is a film director interested in merely representing a past that primarily existed only in Sirk's and other such directors' imaginations. At least we can understand why filmmakers such as Sirk carefully tiptoed around these explosive issues of the day. Haynes' refusal to speak out now seems, at best, a coy retreat into those beautifully colored fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2009).

F. W. Murnau | Faust / 1926

faust’s library

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gerhart Hauptmann and Hans Kyser (screenplay), F. W. Murnau (director) Faust / 1926

 

Employing numerous versions of the Faust legend—perhaps least of which was Goethe’s stark depiction of good and evil—director F. W. Murnau takes his Faust from the works of Christopher Marlowe, the French composer, Charles Gounod, and others, including the original Faust legend. Accordingly, while good and evil are still very much at the center of his work, the lines between the two are fuzzier, Mephisto both grander than in the Goethe work and more comic, which, in some respects, makes the Devil a more human figure, and the all-too-human Faust a more pitiable one who, at work’s end, not only can the archangel forgive, but the audience as well.

       As most critics have pointed out, it is the beginning and ending of Murnau’s film that most stand out. What is particularly interesting to me is that, just as in the massive movement of crowds in Fritz Lang’s great Metropolis of the following year, how much of the forthcoming Nazi philosophy is hinted at in Murnau’s work. Faust (Gösta Ekman) begins as a wise old man, determined to help his fellow beings who, through the contagion-filled cloak of the terrifying and horrific Mephisto (Emil Jannings)—played out on the screen, in almost Kabuki-style, in a series of dark shadows and endlessly smoke-filled models of small villages—who infects Faust’s small, beloved community with the plague. In reality, these smoky mists were created by the burning of unwanted nitrate film, an ironic occurrence given the fact that so many of the films of this period would be destroyed or partially eaten away by the decaying of that very substance or, in many cases, the actual burning of the films. In some instances, the fumes sickened members of Murnau’s cast.

    Despite Faust’s healing powers, his deep knowledge of alchemy, and even his prayers, the dead continue to be delivered up to his door. Suddenly doubting his own ability and, more importantly, dismissing all the knowledge he has received from his books, Faust determines to burn his library, first the books on alchemy and ultimately the Bible itself—an act so appalling that it alone seems almost to call up the Devil, as the fire flips the page to reveal the method to conjure him up, a frightful prophesy of the Nazi book burnings to come.

 

     More like the Devil’s deal with Joe Boyd in the American musical Damn Yankees than Faust’s pact with Mephisto in Goethe, Murnau’s Mephisto first offers Faust a 24-hour bargain, in which time Faust uses his power for the betterment of his people. But when they discover that he cannot face a cross, they attempt to stone him, and Faust has, one might suggest, little choice but to continue his pact, demanding a younger self.

      First seducing the Italian Duchess of Parma, which results in the death of her groom on the wedding day, Faust goes on to a series of sexual encounters and orgies, until, growing tired, he yearns—like so many figures of German literature—for die Heimat, where he immediately encounters the simple, but beautiful, peasant girl, Gretchen. 

      Most discussants agree that this part of the film is the weakest, due, in part, to the bland acting talents of the neophyte actor Camilla Horn. If she is not stellar, however, she certainly suffices to represent the kind of simplicity after which Faust now lusts. And the wonderful scenes with her bawdy, rum-toting aunt, Marthe Schwerdtlein (played by the veteran actress, Yvette Guilbert), later to be seduced by Mephisto himself, are worth our attention.

 

     When Faust leaves Gretchen with a child and no source of survival, moreover, Horn’s surreal-like attempts to protect her baby in a snow-storm by buying it, if overacted, are sufficiently moving. It is the child’s death which leads to the community’s demand that she be burned at the stake, Faust returning to her, again as an old man whom she miraculously recognizes and demonstrates her continued love, saving her—and Faust’s souls.

      It may represent little consolation, as Roger Ebert argues, that as both burn upon the pyre the archangel proclaims this couple is saved, but this is, after all, not so much a real presentation of a human Faust and Gretchen as of doll-like figures representing them. As Ebert himself suggests, it is the very melodramatic and over-staged elements of Murnau’s work which make it so visually powerful. This is myth at its most elemental presentation, a legend in which we viscerally comprehend that the abandonment of reason and knowledge can only end in sacrificing life itself.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2012).

 

 

 

Chris Derek Van | Trois Jours (Three Days) / 2024

the abstraction of ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Trois Jours (Three Days) / 2024 [15.30 minutes]

 

Ghosts again seem to be at the center of Van’s French titled effort of 2024. The three days of the title are segmented with the subtitles of “Silence,” “Action,” and “Vie” (“Life”), yet all three seem to recall some horrifying past which left behind the ghost-like figures who haunt all these scenes.

     On the first day we see a boy, evidently named Dave, eating breakfast. Soon after he gets in a car and drives apparently to work. The rooms we see are all shot from within, looking out on the street, and it appears as if Dave’s “office” is merely the lobby of a high-rise Chicago office building where he takes the call of his spectral partner, obviously arising after Dave has left for “work.”

      Their conversation, the only verbal lines of the work, regard the “ghost’” questioning when Dave will be returning home. Dave attempts to explain he’s at work, but we will be back soon. The ghost reports, most disturbingly, that there are other people who live there now, hinting obviously that the apartment where we have witnessed Dave breakfast is now rented or owned by others, Dave having gone off and perhaps never being able to return, leaving his ghost of a lover behind. As the unnamed ghost declares: “I miss you every day.”

   The ghost attempts to watch television, but in the next day is replaced by another man lying in the couch. Day two begins with a view of the office building lobby chairs now empty. Dave, evidently, dead or alive, having moved on. So too is the apartment breakfast table empty—that is until the ghost-like figure again appears, hovering in the background of both the apartment breakfast table and the office lobby. He particularly haunts the apartment where, as I said, another person now is laid out on the couch.

       But here for the first time, we also escape the rooms that so dominated the first day, as we see the lake, a parade of ducks, an observatory, and a large ship anchored near a Ferris Wheel. A couple of boys hover near the water’s edge. Obviously, we can only wonder are these our central figures in another time, a time before their current hauntings of rooms and spaces.

     Van immediately returns us to the heart of downtown Chicago, its busy interchanges and its friendly people which might be said to be the locus of this film. The action, in fact, has nothing apparently to do with our spectral boys.

       At first the apartment seems to be totally abandoned on the third day when we are to discover “life.” But then Dave reappears, this time also as a ghost, with the ghost of his friend wandering the room as well. But after full fields of France’s tricolour, blue, red, and white, we are taken to what might be seen as the opposite of life, a cemetery, where Van’s camera wanders the various grave markings for about 45 seconds before returning to the omnipresent Lake Michigan beside whose waters the second largest US city sits. Of course, as anyone who comprehends time, only death can define a life, just as the great lake helps to define the Chicago city landscape.

      We return to the empty high-rise lobby, again looking from within to the outside and to the empty apartment, with no ghosts this time, but simply the screaming sirens we have heard throughout this short film. A bouquet of flowers on which the camera focuses, the kind sent to commemorate a death, are placed nearby. And again the camera roams the downtown center city streets before seeming to move off toward the rest of the city and its suburbs. Van ends his film in a flurry of abstract circles, obviously based on the large streetlight bulbs strung about the city, symbolizing presumably the circle of life.

       Try as we might to create a narrative, to imagine what happened between these two lovers, we can only fail. Did they break up, with Dave leaving his now ghost-like lover? Did Dave die, leaving his lover alone? Did they both die is some traumatic event, now haunting the places where they once lived full and rich lives? Or is Van simply presenting with the images of the past which haunt every house and street that hasn’t just been newly constructed? There are no answers to be found.

 

     The hauntings of this film, as are its last few imagines, entirely abstract—but no less meaningful for that fact.

 

Los Angeles, August 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (May-August 2024).

 

Hiroshi Teshigahara | Rikyū / 1989

 living in vain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Genpei Akasegawa and Hiroshi Teshigahara (screenplay, based on a fiction by Yaeko Nogami), Hiroshi Teshigahara (director) Rikyū / 1989

 

The great sixteenth century master of the tea ceremony and aesthetician Sen no Rikyū carefully fills the pot with water in preparation for the highly ritualized tea ceremony. Upon choosing a single flower from a bush for a floral arrangement, he commands that all the flowers in bloom be

cut away. The ceremony itself, the tea prepared as part of Rikyū's lessons for his master, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, is a slow one, filmed by Teshigahara in dark tones, with only the red bowl (Hideyoshi will not permit black bowls, although they too are described as "venerable") that will eventually contain the tea glowing against the rest of the screen.

 

   In a sense, this one scene is the essence of Teshigahara's 1989 film: the pace of this scene, the quietness of tone, and the fraught relationship of master teacher to his master warrior alters little throughout the rest of the movie. Like the ceremony itself, everything in Rikyū lies in the subtle details of movement and verbal expression.

     Hideyoshi is most appreciative of Rikyū's (the great Japanese actor Rentaro Mikuni) lessons, and it is clear that the master would like to become as cultured a man of aesthetics as is his teacher, and he seeks the graciousness and ceremony of the traditions. Yet he is a crude version of his own desires, at heart a brutal warrior, who, as the movie proceeds, grows into an increasingly blundering ox. It is clear from the beginning that ultimately, the two men, Rikyū and Hideyoshi, cannot coexist.

     One of his first great joys is Hideyoshi's invitation to serve tea to the emperor himself, an honor that might overwhelm anyone. Teshigahara's subtle direction shows us an unsure server who begins with shaking hands; yet he does succeed, and this, in turn, leads him to award his tea room with a surface of gold. A new pot, cast especially for him, is rejected since it has turned black.

    In the hands of a broader director, we would immediately perceive Rikyū's displeasure in the changes taking place in his master's house. Indeed, some of Rikyū's friends, Soji in particular, are surprised by the teacher's placid acceptance of these changes. Although remaining true to himself, Rikyū admits, however, his own love of the gold-covered walls which make the room seem almost "infinite."

    Like numerous artists before him, Rikyū clearly attempts to remain apart from the political world stirring around him. But when Hideyoshi declares his decision to go to war against both China and Korea, Rikyū recognizes the folly of the acts. Hideyoshi has already demanded the death of his own brother for daring to doubt his intentions, and commands Rikyū to poison him in the tea ceremony.

     As the two men, Rikyū and Lord Hidenaga, dine together we are still uncertain of the outcome. But when Rikyū joins him in the drink, we realize that he will disobey his orders and that he can no longer remain neutral in the inevitable war between the moral values of the past and the expedient demands of the present. But Teshigahara also suggests, through Rikyū's passivity, that there may, in fact, be no gap between the two. As we all know, the worship of past values and the aggressive brutality of the present may actually represent different aspects of the same thing. One need only remember Hitler's adoration of Wagner to comprehend this fact. The gift of a globe to Hideyoshi might be read almost as a reference to Chaplin's comic portrayal of Hitler in The Great Dictator, particularly in the context of Chaplin's own neutrality in World War II.

     Even though he has disobeyed his master, Rikyū still refuses, despite Soji's and his brother-in-law's pleas, to save himself and his family. Yet the showdown between the two is inevitable, as Hideyoshi's visits Rikyū, presumably seeking advice. Rikyū advises against his master's attacks on China, which results in the removal of all statues of Rikyū and his being banished to Kyoto. For his insolence he is later ordered to kill himself.

     Finally, it seems, Rikyū has realized that art cannot substitute for a life nor protect one from it. As he leaves, he discusses his actions: "I do not want to die, but I do not want to have lived in vain." The film ends with the terrifying vision of a father and daughter playing with the globe, followed by the facts that help us to realize, in the context of this dark and brooding dialogue between action and aesthetics, that all life is fleeting: Rikyū died in 1591. The shogun died six years later in Korea.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2009

Both pieces reprinted from Nth Position [England] (June 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

 

 

 

King Vidor | Show People / 1928

a very serious actress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agnes Christine Johnston and Laurence Stallings (screenplay), Ralph Spence (titles), King Vidor (director) Show People / 1928

 

In the very year when American silent films had their last gasp, King Vidor and Marian Davies produced one of the best send-ups of the movie industry, almost cataloging the various silent screen stars—from Charles Chaplin, William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Norma Talmadge, and John Gilbert, to Mae Murray, Renee Adoree, Rod LaRoque and Karl Dane, Leatrice Joy, Claire Windsor, Aileen Pringle, Dorothy Sebastian, and Polly Moran, all in cameo roles—in the process of spoofing Gloria Swanson’s career. The two stars of the film, Marion Davies (as Peggy Pepper) and William Haines (Billy Boone), were themselves Hollywood royalty, and lesser figures such as Dell Henderson (as Colonel Pepper), Paul Ralli (as Andre), and King Vidor, playing himself, contributed to the sense that this film was, unknowingly, a kind “morgue” group photo of the numerous talents whose lives in just a few years would be ravaged by alcoholism, sexual scandals, suicide, and just plain forgetfulness of the American audience.

 

     Davies’ forced smile, as she reminds herself of her serious role as an actress, may have been based on that of Mae Murray, but her toothy performance of the plot of this slight yet enjoyable comedy is based on Swanson’s life, who like Peggy began working as a comedic actress before becoming a “true” star, whose every gesture was calculated to demonstrate the seriousness of her art, and who would marry into royalty (in Polly’s case, it was to have a phony French nobleman, Andre, whereas Swanson married Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, herself becoming, accordingly, a marquise).

     Swanson arose to fame through the Mack Sennett slapstick comedies, while Peggy Pepper (changed to Peggy Pepoire) in Show People finds fame, with Billy Boone, in the Comet Comedy company—which Vidor actually filmed on the old Sennett studios with some of the original Sennett company. As in most Sennett comedies, Peggy was posed by Vidor to get a pie in the face, but the protests of Davies’ lover, William Randolph Hearst, left her only with a wet nose of seltzer.

     Kevin Browlow, involved with the restoration of this film (as well as Abel Gance’s Napolean) reassured the audience that Swanson never saw this film, but surely she knew about it; Billy Wilder later invited Haines to play a crony of Nora Desmond in another, much darker, Hollywood satire, Sunset Boulevard; noted, by that time, for his interior decoration, Haines turned the role down. Brownlow noted that of all the people he interviewed, Haines was the only one who refused to talk about Show People and other movies of the day.

     While there were several successful Davies works before this, including Vidor’s The Patsy, Davies’ career playing in costume epics such as When Knighthood Was in Flower had tarnished her screen image, and, just as Peggy is no longer a screen favorite once she becomes a “serious actress” in the film, Davies was no longer at her peak—probably the source of the myth, played out in Citizen Kane, that Hearst’s mistress was untalented. Anyone seeing Show People, however, will realize how mistaken that notion is, for Davies as the naïve Georgia belle is a natural comic, wonderful in her abilities to imitate the pretentions of Hollywood movie stars. That toothy smile and fluttering eyes are enough to send a large audience (in attendance at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Thursday night) into laughter (see the picture of Mae Murray, whom Davies’ imitates, above).

     William Haines, playing, as usual, a likeable, attractive, and masculine lead, stands his ground, reminding Peggy ultimately, of her roots, and, thus, saving her from the mistake of marriage to Andre. The fact that Haines was a relatively open homosexual was unthinkable, surely, to his legions of his women fans. But only five years later, when Haines arrested for having sex with a sailor at the Pershing Square YMCA, Louis Mayer gave the actor an ultimatum to enter into a “lavender” marriage (a fake relationship which helped to hide the individual’s sexuality from the public) and give up his relationship with his companion, Jimmie Shields. Haines refused, retiring from the screen despite his continued popularity. Haines remained with Shields until his death in 1973.

      Vidor’s comedy is no masterpiece, but it does amiably take its audience along for one last slightly hysterical, silent ride through early images of light and darkness.

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (November 2012).

David Lean | Brief Encounter / 1945, USA 1946

an overwhelming desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noël Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, and Ronald Neame (uncredited, based on a play by Noël Coward), David Lean (director) Brief Encounter / 1945, USA 1946

 

Flip through almost any standard video guide and you will read of the high praises for David Lean's romantic melodrama, Brief Encounter—so much so that, at times, one might almost think of the film as a British classic. Halliwell's Film Guide (a volume intolerant to most movies) declares of the film, for example, "An outstanding example of good middle-class cinema turned by sheer professional craft into a masterpiece." On the other hand, as my favorite quick guide, Time Out, argues: "Much beloved, but still exemplary in demonstrating what is wrong with so much of British cinema,"

 

    The work has a story, even though it is hard to say the film has real "events." A suburban woman of Milford, England, Laura (Celia Johnson) once a week travels to the city where, after shopping, she takes in a movie theater, returning by the evening train to her conventional marriage and two children. Much of the story centers around the small tearoom, and it's mostly comical residents, near the train's waiting platform, wherein travelers sip tea and munch on pastries.

     On one such visit, Laura stands on the platform when another train, not stopping there, passes, throwing a small cinder into her eye. Inside the tearoom she asks for a glass a water to wash her eye free of the painful bit of grit, whereupon a man, Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), stands up to help, noting that he is a doctor.

     This simple event is almost forgotten until the following week the two run into each other again, this time at a busy restaurant where almost every table is taken. Accordingly, the two share a table and, later, an afternoon at the movie house. Charmed by the idealistic doctor, Laura intrigues the married Alec with her strong sense of self and her easy laugh (as he later puts it: "I love you. I love your wide eyes, the way you smile, your shyness, and the way you laugh at my jokes"). Feeling a bit guilty, the couple furtively make plans to repeat their outing the next week, but this time the doctor, who fills in once a week at the local hospital for a friend, does not show up until Laura is at the tearoom at the train station, where he hurriedly explains his absence as his train, traveling in the opposite direction as hers, arrives. The two again plan an outing the next week.

    Their next venture together, a comical boating trip downstream, quickly develops into a furtive relationship, in which they both admit their love for one another. When they take a drive into the country on this penultimate meeting, however, he purposely misses his train, intending to stay at his doctor-friend's flat, into which he invites her. She refuses, returning to the station and her voyage back to Milford, but at the very last moment, rushes from her train, running through the rain to the flat in which she has left Alec. At almost the same instant she arrives, however, the friend returns early, so that she is forced to rush out the back entrance, ashamed for what has almost occurred.

     Realizing the impossibility of their relationship, and the dark consequences arising in both their relationships with their spouses, he announces upon their final meeting that he will be traveling with his family to Africa, and will never see her again. Painfully, they sit together in the tearoom—which, in fact, has been the very first scene of the film—awaiting perhaps a tender goodbye, until one of Laura's chattering, suburban friends enters, and the two are unable to say anything. When Alec's train arrives he has no option but to tenderly squeeze her shoulder before disappearing forever, Laura rushing out of the tearoom as another train passes, possibly intending suicide to squelch what she describes:

 

                 I had no thoughts at all, only an overwhelming desire not to

                 feel anything ever again.

 

     She returns, however, to the tearoom, riding home with her incessantly chatting friend to suffer out the night, as she mentally repeats the events to her seemingly unaware husband, as he studies a crossword puzzle. As they are about to go up to bed, he approaches her:

 

              Fred Jesson: You've been a long way away.

              Laura Jesson. Yes.

              Fred Jesson: Thank you for coming back to me.

 

So this tale of guilt for an imaginative, if not actual, sexual digression ends.

     Perhaps in the immediate postwar context of English and American life, wherein returning soldiers might have at least wondered about the faithfulness of their wives during their absence, this all meant something. Lean seems to focus on the chastity of Laura despite her duplicity and her would-be faithlessness. The lure of illicit sex seems perfectly balanced with the draws of home and hearth.

      Yet the dramatization of these events, accompanied by the lush romanticism of Sergei Rachmanioff's Paino Concerto No. 2, seems almost goofy, as if some high drama where being played out through perfectly ordinary events. As Laura herself describes her condition, she is almost hysterical about feelings that "can't last."

 

               This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself.

               Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts

               very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about

               this anymore, when I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheer-

               fully how sill I was.

 

   Yet she does not want to forget, but to remember, for Alec is clearly the superior of the two men in her life, just as we suspect (without ever being allowed to see her) that Laura is a better choice for his love than Alec's wife. At least, Alec is allowed to have an adventure; he is on his way, after all, to Africa, while Laura must remain in the little community of Milford with no real actions behind the passion she has inwardly felt. One almost feels she has been a bit betrayed by her creators, having asked her to express such intense emotions for no sensual rewards. What is there even that she might be allowed to remember?

     The film, accordingly, has riled up for both its central character and its audience feelings that are never fulfilled, transforming the cinema from being a true romance or even melodrama into merely a symbol of one. It's so hard to get excited, I am afraid, over a symbol. One has to ask, what is all the fuss about? Although Laura may have temporarily been caught up in an "overwhelming desire," this viewer, at least, is thoroughly underwhelmed.  

 

Los Angeles, March 23, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2012).