Rescued by Rover (1905)
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[Production Company: Allarts Cook. Director and screenwriter: Peter Greenaway. Cinematographer: Sacha Vierny. Music: Michael Nyman. Editor: John Wilson. Cast: Michael Gambon (Albert Spica), Helen Mirren (Georgina Spica), Richard Bohringer (Richard Borst), Alan Howard (Michael), Tim Roth (Mitchel), Ciaran Hands (Cory), Gary Olsen (Spangler).] Peter Greenaway’s films have always divided their audiences and critical response. But The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover deserves ‘classic British’ status because, of all his films, it did capture something of its time, and even entered the broader culture, thanks to some courageous performances, Michael Nyman’s timely ‘minimalist baroque’ score, and a very strange title. Greenaway intended The Cook as a savage satire, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, ‘on the current British political situation. Since this is a movie about consumer society, it’s about greed – a society’s, a man’s’. (Smith, 1990: 55) But as with all Greenaway films, The Cook is at the same time a rejection of the conventions of mass popular, feature-film cinema-‘Hollywood’ – and is concocted according to its director’s own distinctive recipe. This is therefore a very ambitious project: can Greenaway’s highly individual aesthetic simultaneously deliver a savage social critique? By the end of 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen, apartheid was rapidly crumbling in South Africa, and Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The world we currently know was taking shape. Within this longer perspective, The Cook now seems a retrospective, even claustrophobic film, addressing a domestic agenda in peculiarly British terms, in spite of its director’s declared preference for European film style. The object of Greenaway’s satirical attack was ‘Thatcherism’, or more precisely, the perceived consequences for British society of Margaret Thatcher’s three Conservative administrations, first elected a decade earlier in 1979. Thatcherism, partnered more grandly on the world-stage by ‘Reaganomics’, broke with the post-Second World War consensus on the economic regulation of the state. The brisk new agenda demanded: privatization of formerly state-owned industries, utilities and assets to enforce competitive efficiency; reshaping of labour markets and trade-union law, again in the interests of a freer market; promotion of the entrepreneur economy in order to break the supposed ‘dependency culture’, and finally, an assault on the privileges and protective practices of the established, professional classes and their institutions – legal, medical and scholastic. These radical interventions delivered greater prosperity to more than half the population, producing what the American economist, J. K. Galbraith, termed ‘the culture of contentment’: that is, unparalleled affluence for a significant proportion of the electorate, who therefore became politically quiescent. However, on some calculations, at least one third of the UK population became, in real terms, poorer than they had been in the late 1970s. The abandonment of the one-nation consensus of the post-war period therefore produced a significantly divided society, with increasing social ‘exclusion’ and levels of disorder and crime that seemed inexorably to rise. The impact of globalization in the 1990s internationalized and intensified all of these trends and their consequent tensions.
Greenaway is a great explainer of his own work; so good, in fact, that you might wonder whether his very helpful commentaries actually betray an unspoken lack of confidence in the power of his films to speak for themselves. He is, for example, very clear about his formalist, anti-realist position as a filmmaker: Every time you watch a Greenaway movie, you know you are definitely and absolutely only watching a movie. It’s not a slice of life, and not a window on the world. It’s by no means an exemplum of anything “natural” or “real”. (Smith 1990: 59) Statements such as these come straight out of high Modernist, early twentieth-century aesthetics, and to that extent are perfectly traditional, in their own way. Even the title can be read as a critical perspective on cinema: just three names would read better in terms of conventional expectations: The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. As an audience, we would know what to expect as we settled in our seats. But then there is also The Cook, a contriver of menus, surely a figure for the Director himself, yet someone hailing from Provence, France, rather than Newport, Wales. The disconcerting title is an example of Greenaway working against classical film narrative expectations, and just as A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Drowning By Numbers (1988) were structured by the alphabet and number counts, The Cook is zoned by colour: blue for exterior reality, green for the creative kitchen, red for the excessive eating floor, white for the rest rooms. Peter Greenaway’s alienating, formalist practice is evident right from the opening credits sequence. A steadily rising crane shot of scaffolding beneath the floor of the sound stage on which the action is being filmed demonstrates a purely Brechtian manner by ‘baring the device’, that is, by foregrounding the artifice of film in general, and this film in particular. Scarlet-clad flunkies pull back curtains to reveal the theatrical mise-en-scène, where two delivery vans, one for meat, one for sea food, symmetrically frame the action. The opulent restaurant itself is redolent of consumer excesses of the late ‘80s. Two of the decade’s style gurus were on hand to advise: Jean Paul Gaultier designed costumes for the waiters and waitresses, and Giorgio Locatelli of the Savoy Hotel, London, created fantasy-food for display. Albert Spica’s table is itself a vulgarian spectacle, dominated by a massive reproduction of Dutchman Frans Hals’ 1614 painting, ‘The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard Company’. Spica and his retinue are dressed in the same costumes as Hals’ officers, who were, Greenaway explains, ‘a gang of people all dressed up with nowhere to go’. (Denham, 1993: 26) The film begins with a steadily rising crane shot, and some of its most beautiful and startling moments derive from horizontal tracking shots that run parallel to the action, or ‘picture plane’ of the film. For example, the camera takes in the pre-modern, artisan bustle of the kitchen then ghosts through a wall to reveal the contemporary spectacle of the restaurant itself. Most disconcerting of all, we – courtesy of the lens – follow Georgina via a service corridor into the ladies’ toilet, at which point her dress miraculously changes from scarlet to white. Is this a clinical purity that vainly hopes to disguise the messy ‘end-process’ of all eating and drinking? The film is as much about appetite as greed, and the vulnerability of the body in desire, an ancient agenda that may finally upstage the transient politics of the 1980s. Greenaway defends his strict camera regime:
(Smith, 1990: 59-60) An obvious objection here would be to argue that Albert Spica is by any standards a pretty ‘psychodramatic’ creation, the figure in whom Greenaway wanted
(Smith, 1990: 58) But the great paradox of Brechtian estrangement theory, in film as in theatre, is that we must be interested in the characters at some level, however banal, ‘modest’ or monstrous they are. Brecht’s intention with his ‘alienation-effects’ was to make us interested in his characters in a different, more critical and reflective way. Like Brecht, Greenaway hopes to encourage his audience to maintain a questioning distance on the spectacle they are watching, rather than simply falling in love with the star, and being swept up in the seductive manner of Hollywood classical narrative film. Yet there are a number of undeniably powerful, humanly engaging performances in The Cook, given by actors who courageously committed themselves to Greenaway’s unsettling vision: Michael Gambon’s Spica, Helen Mirren’s Georgina, and Tim Roth’s Mitchell, as well as many by the supporting cast. Greenaway has said that he would rather spend time working with his cinematographer – the late, prodigiously gifted Sacha Vierny – than with his actors, and the actors may therefore take a kind of revenge, by delivering truly vivid performances which work against the coldness of their director’s declared intentions for his vision of cinema. (Directors are a shamelessly calculating breed, so this might also be a part of Greenaway’s grand strategy.) For example: is Gambon’s Spica a completely repulsive creation? Is there not a kind of monstrous pathos about this thief, as when he breaks down, shouting, ‘Kids, who needs kids?’ His horrifying assault shortly after on young Pup is perhaps partly an attack on what he wants so badly, but cannot have. Again, his dependence on Georgina is total, as we see in the final scene when he begs her to come back to him: ‘I’ve – to tell the truth – been miserable’. (Greenaway, 1989: 90) Spica is a sociopath because, in Freudian terms, his unconscious drives dominate his behaviour. He is the unsocialized baby that remains within all of us. His simultaneous dependence on, and violence towards Georgina is a perfect example of the paradoxical emotions of the unconscious. There is no greater ‘psychodrama’ than this, one which is even more disturbingly shown by David Lynch, one of the few American directors whom Greenaway can admire, in Blue Velvet, made just three years earlier, where Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth makes an atrociously ambivalent assault – if there can be such a thing – on Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens. If Greenaway’s attempt to make his audience attend to films more thoughtfully is flawed by the unfortunate presence of compelling actors, there are also questions about the nature of his critique of Reagano-Thatcherite politics. If The Cook is a metaphorical film, as the director claims, what exactly could the figure of Spica stand for, in terms of an attack on the consequences of Thatcherism? Spica as a graceless monster, ‘unleashed’ from the working class by the new economic regime, is as much a victim of the new values as anyone else. Alan Howard’s antiquarian book-dealer may be read as a member of the professional middle class that felt itself to be increasingly marginalized in the ‘new times’. The true villains of the piece are surely somewhere else, forever off-screen. Helen Mirren’s splendid Georgina surely escapes from the framework of social critique altogether and, predictably, signifies the consequences of sexuality and desire on the ageing, vulnerable body. For Georgina’s magnificent revenge the film gleefully takes on the conventions of renaissance tragedy and bears comparison with the grotesque finale of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s most ‘transgressive’ play, for which see Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999). Further Reading Laura Denham, The Films of Peter Greenaway, London, Minerva Press, 1993. Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Paris, Dis Voir, 1989. petergreenaway.co.uk Gavin Smith, ‘Food for Thought’, interview with Peter Greenaway, Film Comment 26/3: 54-61, 1990. Michael Walsh, ‘Allegories of Thatcherism: the films of Peter Greenaway’ in Lester Freidman (ed) British Cinema and Thatcherism, London, UCL Press, 1990. Nigel Wheale, ‘Televising Hell: Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway’s TV Dante’ in Wheale, The Postmodern Arts, London, Routledge, 1995. Nigel Wheale The Crying Game (1992) [Production Company: Palace Pictures. Director and screenwriter: Neil Jordan. Cinematographer: Ian Wilson. Editor: Kant Pan. Music: Anne Dudley. Cast: Forest Whitaker (Jody), Miranda Richardson (Jude), Stephen Rea (Fergus), Jaye Davidson (Dil).] ‘In Neil Jordan’s new thriller, nothing is what it seems to be.’ So ran the tagline for Miramax’s US marketing campaign for The Crying Game. It is an appropriate hook for a film best known for its plot twist, a revelation of the kind guaranteed to generate frenzied debate in online forums. The film is indeed keenly concerned with the relations between appearance and reality. Genre, narrative, characters: each element contains unexpected trajectories and outright surprises. What makes The Crying Game so fascinating however is that the relationship between seeming and being is not a straightforward one. Appearance is not simply a façade or mask which falls way to reveal a ‘real’ essence. Instead the film offers the audience a tantalising mesh of unresolved ambiguities, suggesting a more complex configuration of manifest and hidden, secrets and disguise. From its earliest scenes the film places an emphasis on role-playing and dressing up, demonstrating at the outset the power of costume and performance. The fairground seduction scene shows Jude playing the role of a sexually available woman in order to ensnare Jody. She looks the part, dressed in figure-hugging pale denim, gold hoop earrings and bright pink lipstick, making it easy for the spectator, like Jody, to believe in her as a sexy young blonde simply enjoying some male company at the fair. Only the mysterious shot-reverse shot revealing a sombre exchange of glances between Jude and Fergus suggests that the situation might not be what it seems. Jude’s masquerade in this scene is highlighted by the contrast in the sequences following Jody’s capture, where she is dressed in a strikingly different style. Her hair loose, her frame engulfed by a big, baggy jumper and no make-up: this, we are given to believe, is the ‘real’ Jude, a serious, single-minded member of the Irish Republican Army, concerned only with her cause. Taken on their own, these early scenes seem to suggest a relatively straightforward process of disguise, deception and revelation, aimed both at the unsuspecting Jody and the equally unaware spectator – a process that will be mirrored later by Dil’s seduction of Fergus. Jude dresses up in order to catch a British soldier and then, her mission accomplished, removes her costume to show us who she really is. As the film progresses however, and on subsequent viewings, the opening scenes come to seem more ambiguous. For one thing, as we become aware of Jody’s homosexuality, we realise that he too is ‘dressing-up’ as a straight man, trying out being with a girl as though trying on an alternative costume. This is emphasised when he says, ‘never pissed holding a girl’s hand, Jude […] and you know what? It’s nice’. This dressing-up game is complicated further still by Dil’s cross-dressing, so that Jody is able to ‘pass’ as heterosexual when showing her photo to Fergus. In both instances then, Jody is also in a sense dressing up in the clothing worn by Jude and Dil. In other words it is not only our own clothes that we use to construct an identity, relationships are also a form of drag. The second event which renders Jude’s dressing-up in the opening scenes more complicated and interesting is her subsequent transformation in the second part of the film, where she reappears in a completely different version of femininity. With a slick dark brown bob, black leather gloves and 1940s-style suit straight out of film noir, this stylised, almost campily cinematic image leads us to question the existence of one ‘real’ Jude behind her various masks. The scene where her new look is revealed foregrounds the constructed nature of her image, whilst at the same time playfully blurring the gender lines along which that construction is supposed to lie. She emerges from a dark corner in Fergus’s room, emphasising both her transformation and its sinister implications for the narrative: Fergus’s shady past has caught up with him. A sequence of shots allows us to absorb fully the new sharp contours of her hair and clothes from Fergus’s point of view, half-concealed at first by the shadows, then moving forward to let us take in her whole figure. ‘What do you think of the hair?’ she asks him, her hand gesture and head movements drawing attention to its new style. ‘I was sick of being a blond’, she continues, ‘needed a tougher look if you know what I mean.’ Her words emphasise the performative quality of her image. It is not just that a new role requires new attire but that the clothing creates the role: she becomes a ‘tougher’ version of Jude by dressing up as a femme fatale. The choice of word is significant, because in her version of drag, Jude is ‘toughening up’, rather than seeking the softer feminine role that Dil performs, the damsel in distress who needs Fergus’s protection. The contrast is underscored by Jude’s reference to Dil as the ‘wee black chick’. Between Jude’s and Dil’s different, yet equally constructed, versions of female glamour, the performance of femininity in the film troubles the connections between sex and gender, revealing all femininity to be a form of masquerade. (1) Not only this but ‘femininity’ is itself shown to be fluid and unstable, not easily distinguishable from its ‘masculine’ opposite through the usual binary divisions of active/passive, strong/weak, hard/soft and so forth, since Jude and Dil shore up these qualities in such different ways. The sense of gender ambiguity is reinforced by the later scenes in the film, where Fergus attempts to undo Dil’s drag and turn her back into a boy, cutting her hair short and dressing her up in Jody’s cricket whites. Swamped by Jody’s ample clothes and with a fragility of demeanour brought about by the distressing confusion of the situation, it is arguably in these scenes that she looks most conventionally girlish, and it is impossible to escape the impression that she is dressing up as a boy, rather than returning to her ‘proper’ gender role. ‘You want to make me like him’, Dil says as Fergus cuts her hair. Even drag is not what it seems in The Crying Game. The film’s proliferation of transformative dressing up combines with the ambiguous relationships elaborated in the narrative to undermine the idea of identity as something fixed and determinate. This fits with Judith Butler’s argument that drag exposes the mimetic performativity of all gender identity. Since the very concept of an ‘original’ depends upon the possibility of imitation, the idea of its precedence over the copy is flawed. ‘There is no originary or primary gender that drag imitates’, she suggests, ‘but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original’ (1991: 21). If ever a film illuminated Butler’s subtle philosophical deconstruction of identity politics it is surely this one. However, the characters’ discussions of ‘nature’ appear to undercut Butler’s idea of ‘the real as nothing other than the effects of drag’ (1991: 29). Jody’s assertion that, ‘there are two kinds of people: those who give and those who take’, illustrated with the fable of the scorpion and the frog, sets up a theme that runs throughout the film. Actions are explained in terms of a natural essence or destiny, ‘because it’s in my nature’ as Mr Scorpion says. Recurrent references to ‘natural’ roles are sprinkled across the dialogue. ‘You were made for this’, Jude tells Fergus after the rehearsal assassination, while Dil says wistfully, ‘Can’t help what I am.’ In fact this acts as a red herring that only serves to reinforce the fluid conception of identity in the film, for the opposition between ‘givers’ and ‘takers’ asserted by Jody is far from clear. Fergus is the most striking example of the way even this binary collapses in the film: does he seek out Dil purely out of kindness and empathy, ‘giving’ Jody his dying wish, or is it partly to prove that he can ‘take’ what Jody had, getting one over the man who gave him the slip, teased and outsmarted him? Or, even more confusingly, is he not also ‘taking’ Jody by means of the feminine figure of Dil, since his potential homosexual attraction to Jody is repeatedly hinted at, though overtly denied in what he says? The interplay of compassion, aggression and desire is a highly complex one, the only certainty being that they are thoroughly intertwined. The Crying Game cleverly undoes our assumptions about outsides and insides and how they relate. The ‘twist’, although offering us a moment of revelation, cannot, as we have seen, be read as a straightforward exposure of Dil’s ‘real’ sex. This is not to say that she is in fact biologically female but rather, like all identities, hers is neither definitively one thing nor the other but depends on what she’s wearing, who she’s with. ‘She’s not a girl, Col’, says Fergus to the bartender. ‘Whatever you say’, he replies. Interior and exterior are constituted through a permeable membrane rather than a rigid divide. This is explored visually in the film through the motifs of masks, veils and shadows, each of which both obscures and reveals. The first of these is the black hostage hood forced upon Jody to keep him from seeing the IRA volunteers’ faces. It is not a mask for Jody to hide behind, but rather a disguise for his captors; in this it already inverts the usual structure of the mask. What is more, despite its opacity the hood becomes the locus for the developing bond between Fergus and his prisoner as it is variously lifted, removed and replaced. Instead of separating the two men, it draws them close, allowing Jody to get under Fergus’s skin. This function is taken up by the veiling effects created by the swathes of fabric that adorn Dil’s apartment, which play with the distance and closeness between her and Fergus. In the scene where Fergus discovers Dil’s male anatomy their passionate embrace is shot through the haze of the semi-transparent curtains around the bed. As Dil moves off to the bathroom, the camera tracks along the bed, finally moving up to peer at Fergus through the parting in the curtains, and rests on him lying on the bed in anticipation. The unveiling, it is suggested, is as much of Fergus’s identity as Dil’s. The veil plays with the spectator’s desire to look and know, always hinting at the possibility of a final revelation that is undermined in subsequent scenes and in the film’s ambiguous ending. Shadows, a significant element in the film’s visual repertoire, also evoke the viewer’s desire to see by both showing and hiding the human form. In the scene where Fergus watches Dil take Dave home, a low-angle shot of her window displays her and Dave’s silhouettes like shadow puppets, while Fergus watches from the lower left-hand corner of the frame, mirroring the spectator’s gaze. As we watch The Crying Game, the layers of drag and dressing up, masks, veils and shadows create an endless strip-tease. While moments of narrative climax, such as the ‘discovery’ of Dil’s sex, offer us the satisfaction of knowledge this is only fleeting, for another layer of possibility is always waiting for us underneath. While the focus in this discussion has been on the ambiguities of gender and sexuality, part of the film’s fascination is that political and racial identities are equally interrogated and shown to be caught up in the same system of performance. A compelling and tantalising game of hide and seek, The Crying Game plays with our desire to know ‘the secrets of the human heart’ while cleverly suggesting they were there on our sleeves all along. Notes
Further Reading Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed.) Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, New York and London, Routledge, 1991, pp.13-31. Jane Giles, The Crying Game, BFI, London, BFI, 1997. Neil Jordan, The Crying Game, London, Vintage, 1993. Isabelle McNeill Gadael Lenin/Leaving Lenin (1992) [Production Company: Gaucho and S4C. Director and screenwriter: Endaf Emlyn. Cinematographer: Ray Orton. Editor: Chris Lawrence. Music: John ER Hardy. Cast: Sharon Morgan (Eileen), Wyn Bowen Harries [Mostyn], Ifan Huw Dafydd (Mervyn), Steffan Trevor (Spike), Shelley Rees (Sharon).] Gadael Lenin/Leaving Lenin is a Welsh language film which successfully retains its national specificity, traverses geographical boundaries and achieves international appeal. It won the audience award for the most popular British feature at the 1993 London Film Festival and established Endaf Emlyn as one of the most important Welsh directors to work in his indigenous language. Set in post-communist Russia, Emlyn’s plot, co-scripted by Sion Eirian, involves a group of teachers and their sixth-form students on an Art trip to Russia. The teachers become separated from the students when their train divides and, facing dilemmas of marital breakdown, artistic ambitions and political disillusionment, they journey towards the students who are meanwhile exploring Russian art and their own sexual identities in St Petersburg. Produced in 1992, it was a time of expansion for Welsh cinema through S4C’s (Welsh Channel 4) support for film production in the 1980s and the development of Sgrin, the Media Agency for Wales, in 1997 increasing English-medium film productions to extend audiences for Welsh cinema. (Woodward 2006: 2) Emlyn’s earlier films reflect this shift with Stormydd Awst/Storms of August (1987) the first Welsh language feature to be distributed on 35mm in cinemas, and Un Nos Ola Leaud/One Full Moon (1991) which ‘trancended national boundaries – and demonstrated how a Welsh screen identity and culture might be forged through the 1990s.’ (Berry 1996: 412) The Welsh language is important in defining national identity on screen but English subtitles aurally inscribe Anglo/Welsh tensions into an imperialist dichotomy. While noting this duality, Woodward extends it to a trinity of Welsh, English and British identities, evident in Welsh films of the 1980s and 90s such as Hedd Wynn (Paul Turner 1992) in which a Welsh poet from North Wales is killed in the First World War and posthumously awarded the bardic prize for poetry; Milwr Bychan/Welsh Soldier (Karl Francis 1986), exploring the dilemma of a Welsh soldier fighting a British war in Northern Ireland who uses Welsh to defy his superiors, and Gadael Lenin which adds an international dimension to linguistic tensions with its Russian setting. If Welsh and English languages are a site for struggle in these films, the tension between Welsh, English and Russian in Gadael Lenin extends linguistic borders by asserting Welsh alongside two major imperialist languages thus strengthening Welsh identity further. (Woodward 2006: 3-5) The thematic concerns of the breakdown of communism in1990s Russia in Gadael Lenin can also be read in terms of the 1980-90s British experience of Margaret Thatcher’s policies of privatisation, dismantling of large-scale manufacturing industries and her stand against the unions in the 1984/5 Miners strike. The direct experiences of the miners’ dispute were addressed in Karl Francis’ Ms Rhymny Valley (1985), and in the independent co-operative Chapter’s documentary on the pit closures The Case for Coal (1984). (1) Thatcher’s victory in 1985 and her political legacy had devastating social effects in the 1990s as mass unemployment, casualisation of labour and a rise in drug culture shattered traditional communities across the UK. Welsh films such as Twin Town (Kevin Allen 1997) and House of America (Marc Evans 1997) explored the social and cultural legacy of unemployment in a post-industrial Wales within a disenfranchised youth culture and are posited against satirical stereotypes of rugby players and Welsh male voice choirs. The Thatcher years also created a breakdown in traditional family relations as the position of men as breadwinners shifted through mass unemployment, and women’s traditional place at home was challenged. During the Miners’ strike, Welsh, Scottish and English miners’ wives travelled across the UK to picket working miners and experienced collective politicisation and empowerment by speaking in public. This change found its cultural and gender repercussions explored in 1980-90s British films such as Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard 1985) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Alan Clarke 1986), in which women move into the street and the clubs while unemployment relegates men to the home space. (Hill in Ashby and Higson 2001: 252) Cook sees such work as ‘transgressing boundaries- between national and international, home and abroad …All of them are about travelling – through time, to new shores – in a restless search for fulfilment which can only be imagined never realised.’ (Cook & Dodd 2000: xiv) Justine King, who explores films of the 1980s which focus on female subjectivity and offer charismatic or transgressive representations of women who challenge boundaries of conventional femininity, identifies a common motif of escape - such as travel abroad or education out of the class structure - not to be read as escapism but rather in terms of ‘movement through a liminal space, a realm of possibility.’ (1996: 220) This enables women to remove themselves from their cultural positioning in the narrative and to ‘undergo a redefining and re-empowering transformation of identity or rite of passage.’ (1996: 220) Once this threshold has been crossed the male protagonists have to redefine themselves through her space rather than punish the woman for her pleasurable transgression as was conventionally the case in cinema. Gadael Lenin can be read as symptomatic of these cultural and cinematic shifts with its narrative journey, away from South Wales to St Petersburg, offering a space within which to re-define gender boundaries, and providing rites of passage for those trapped within the restrictive cinematic stereotypes of the Welsh homeland. For example, Art teacher Eileen’s (Morgan) journey leads her back to St. Petersburg to reassess herself as an artist and teacher in relation to her husband Mostyn (Harries) and her colleague/past lover Mervyn (Daffyd). While Mostyn has both inspired and dominated her intellectually with his Marxist idealism, Mervyn represents the typical Welsh macho ideal of a rugby-playing, heavy drinker, competing against her husband for sexual favour. Both patronise her in different ways and Eileen is overshadowed by their competitiveness. Woodward sees this as confirming a tradition of cinematic representations of Welsh men and women, from John Ford’s How Green was my Valley (1941) onwards, showing that Welsh women have been portrayed as overshadowed by rugby-playing, beer-drinking male voice choirs. (Beddoes cited in Woodward 2006: 10). Gadael Lenin, however, critically re-frames these gender stereotypes through travel away from home to new shores. The shift occurs for Eileen when the train splits, metaphorically releasing her from her quasi parental role over the students. She gradually rejects both her husband Mostyn’s carping over the changes in Russian culture and her old flame. ‘Things are different now,’ she tells Mervyn, rejecting his advances. In the morning, she hitches a lift on her own with a Russian photographer travelling to St Petersburg who shares her experiences of marriage breakdown and the need to make a living selling posies to fund her artistic life. This inspires Eileen to reassess her own position as wife, teacher, artist. ‘I feel like a young girl running away,’ she confesses. Once in St Petersburg, Eileen confidently leads her students around the Russian art galleries, challenged by her gifted art student Spike (Trevor). He questions Eileen’s charade of playing at ‘being artists for a week every year’ on the school trip. It’s not enough for him to go back to Maes Ifor School and live a lie. His courage is a painful reminder of her position, reiterated by Petr Vodkin’s painting Fantasy, which Eileen interprets as, ‘The dream we gave our life to was a lie.’ This suggests an awakening to new possibilities, reinforced as she takes the lead over Mervyn and Mostyn in the final scene at the railway station, leaving Lenin to redefine her identity. Nevertheless, this shift is contextualised by changes in both Mervyn and Mostyn, indicative of a crisis of masculinity. They both lose the signs of their male authority. Mervyn’s demise is articulated through costume, as he becomes more dishevelled, losing his chic jacket and sunglasses, and finally dons a dingy black overcoat to keep warm. Mostyn’s crisis is represented as youth against the rise of capitalism in a post-communist Russia and the breakdown of his Marxist ideology which had impressed Eileen in his youth. In the opening shot, he admires Lenin’s statue and delights that his hero is in his rightful place; the almost identical closing shot is offered in silence, indicating Mostyn’s political disillusionment and the loss of his influence over Eileen –also echoed in the invidious privatisation of 1990s’ post-Thatcher Britain. But Mostyn and Mervyn’s shift is also a positive one, redirecting them from conventional masculine competitiveness, towards more feminised mutual support. In a rare moment of emotional intimacy Mostyn shares his fears over Eileen with Mervyn: ‘What do I have to offer her? Nothing: old dreams gone sour.’ The students follow a different trajectory in their rites of passage when the train splits. Spike is forced to confront his homosexuality without guilt by Sacha (Ivan Shvedoff), a Russian artist who challenges authoritarian approaches to art and sexuality. In a carnivalesque and anarchic moment in the film, Sacha invites Spike to party on the bridge. Drawing on his new-found courage to challenge conventional constructions of male sexuality, Spike crosses the bridge both literally and symbolically. His gay identity is publicly asserted the next morning when he and Sacha embrace at the station. For student, Sharon (Rees), meanwhile this new space enables her, like Eileen, to challenge male constructions of femininity. When her boyfriend Charlie (Richard Harrington) attempts to seduce her in the hotel, he alludes to her reputation as a girl who sleeps around, drawing on hackneyed patriarchal values of the madonna/whore. She finally refuses him, and his conventional notions of female sexuality, and claims her right to say no on her own terms. Later, she defiantly states ‘Cupid won’t catch me. I’m going to do as I please from now on.’ One of the strengths of Gadael Lenin is its approach to the theme of border crossing across the generational divide using the device of the school trip with its community demands and quasi familial relationships to authenticate the plot. Emlyn’s previous experience of directing S4C youth programmes excels here in the refreshingly plausible representation of young people’s experiences, cross-cut with the adults’ separate journey. The film doesn’t offer radical social change or a post-modernist stylistic aesthetic; rather it explores more cautiously manageable signs of new direction for individual characters within the larger changes of the social framework. Eileen doesn’t find a new life in St Petersburg; Spike does. For him the decision is easy, full of youthful integrity. In a powerfully moving closure, a lingering shot on Eileen intensifies her inner regrets, the façade she has maintained and the courage needed to change things. All her fears, contradictions, questions and anxieties are exceptionally captured beyond the dialogue in Sharon Morgan’s eloquent facial gestures in this closing frame, leaving us to ponder on Eileen’s future and how decisions become more difficult, more contradictory, with time. The result is an engaging journey for the characters, a story of warmth, youthful idealism, adult regrets, transformation, individual and artistic aspirations and Welsh and Russian community spirit, set against a 1990s’ landscape of cultural and political breakdown, disillusionment and alienation both in Britain and abroad. Notes
Further Reading David Berry, Wales and Cinema: The First Hundred Years London, University of Wales Press, 1996. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (eds) Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, London, Scarlet Press, 2000. Tony Curtiss, Wales the Imagined Nation, Bridgend, Poetry Wales, 1986. John Hill, ‘From New Wave to ‘Brit-Grit’: Continuity and Difference in Working Class Realism’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds) British Cinema, Past and Present, London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 249-260. Justine King, ‘Crossing Thresholds: The Contemporary British Woman’s Film’ in Andrew Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London, Cassell, 1996, pp.216-231. Kate Woodward, ‘Traditions and Transformations: Film in Wales during the 1990’s’, in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol.6.1 (Winter 2006), Aberystwyth University of Wales, pp.216-231. Trish Sheil Orlando (1992) [Production Company: Adventure Pictures. Director and screenwriter: Sally Potter. Cinematographer: Aleksei Rodionov. Editor: Hervé Schneid. Music: David Motion and Sally Potter. Cast: Tilda Swinton (Orlando), Quentin Crisp (Queen Elizabeth I), Jimmy Somerville (Falsetto/Angel).] Whenever one is tempted to bemoan a certain tendency in British cinema to create lavish, well-crafted but ultimately rather futile period drama, one should remember the eccentric and clever counter-example of Orlando. From a distance it could almost be mistaken for something less interesting than it really is. Like many films in the ‘heritage’ genre flourishing across Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, Orlando is based on a canonical literary text, a contrivance often used in cinema as a convenient, exportable emblem of artistic merit. What is more, like a typical literary heritage film, much of Orlando is set in a grand English stately home, where a sumptuous array of props and costumes allow the audience’s gaze to revel in a recreated historical scene, nostalgically transporting us to lost, aristocratic worlds of leisure and luxury. As Orlando shows us, however, appearances can be deceptive. In fact Potter’s film subverts both genre and gender in an unusual and complex narrative journey. The visual splendour of the mise-en-scène is no mere eye candy, rather it is integral to a cinematic exploration of the interweaving threads of social identity, sexuality and time. All literary adaptations into film pose certain challenges. Moving from words to an audiovisual medium entails a shift to a very different kind of sign, a transposition from description to showing. However Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography (1928) has a further layer of difficulty, for it is a written text itself obsessively concerned with questions of writing. Potter’s film responds to this in a variety of ways, not least by making radical changes to the plot, but the central underpinning of the approach is a delicate sense of the relations between words and images. In her introduction to the published screenplay of the film, Potter describes how, despite the book’s fascination with literature she felt instinctively that the image was a vital part of its textual fabric. This instinct, Potter found, ‘was affirmed in Virginia Woolf’s diaries where she writes of her attempt with Orlando to “exteriorise consciousness” [...] she set out to find images rather than abstract literary monologues to describe the secret machinery of the mind.’ (1994: ix) This suggests that the move from description to showing in the transition from writing to film is already at issue within Woolf’s literary aims, and Potter harnesses this by using cinematic technique to explore precisely what is at stake in our exterior images. Like Woolf’s protagonist, the filmic Orlando is a writer and a lover of literature, but Orlando’s role as an obsessive reader is mostly stripped away in the film, creating space for an emphasis on theatricality and performance. This offers a more directly visual way of exploring the complex relations between inside and outside evoked in Woolf’s diary. The external world as Orlando experiences it is conjured for the viewer through a series of highly controlled colour palettes in the mise-en-scène and lighting: rich gold, orange and crimson for the Elizabethan banquet, chalky white with smudges of brown-black for the frozen winter under King James, or lush green and velvety blue clouded with mist for the romance of the Victorian era. In each setting Orlando both fits in and sticks out; despite his elaborate costumes he – and then she – fails to produce the complete and acceptable performance demanded by the surrounding social environment. Youth, nobleman, ambassador, soldier, lady, woman: each is revealed as a role shaped from the outside, always at odds with the fluid and mysterious interiority of the individual. Tilda Swinton’s remarkable presence as Orlando is crucial here, capturing as she does a gauche innocence that jars slightly with the visual harmony of the scene. While her androgynous look doubtless makes it easier for the viewer to accept her as both male and female, more significant is a certain blankness in her gaze, both expressive and unreadable, that enables her to convey a character at once uniquely individual and yet subject to continual inscription by the discourses of each age. This is reinforced by her third-person voiceover at the opening and close of the film, which draws attention to the way words combine with the visual symbolism of fashion and environment to situate the individual. ‘There can be no doubt about his sex – despite the feminine appearance that every young man of the time aspires to’, pronounces the voiceover, picking up the ironic ‘no doubt’ from Woolf’s text in order to emphasise the way sex and identity are generated through expectation and description. This understanding of identity resonates with the theories of Judith Butler, who has argued that sex is constituted through socially regulated performance. For Butler, sexual difference ‘is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way marked and formed by discursive practices.’ (1990: 1) Performance is at issue in the film not only in the ways described above, where within the diegesis we are shown the imposing exteriors of class, fashion and milieu all demanding a certain enactment of identity, but also in the performance of the actors of the film themselves. The casting, in particular, of Swinton, Quentin Crisp and Jimmy Somerville creates, as casting often does, an extra layer of signification, as recognisable figures from a cultural context outside the film evoke a host of potential associations in the viewer’s mind. Swinton is often described as Derek Jarman’s muse, and was very much associated in the 1980s and early 90s with his avant-garde, painterly and queer aesthetic in films such as Caravaggio (1986) and The Garden (1990). (1) Her screen persona is therefore well suited to the portrayal of a character possessed of what the Archduke Harry calls ‘ambiguous sexuality’. The sense of Swinton as an edgy actress herself present in the film, highlighted by recurrent moments where she looks at or addresses the camera directly, contributes to a more blurred and complex evocation of gender performance. For rather than presenting us with a character who simply changes sex during the course of a 400-year lifetime, Orlando’s sex oscillates before our eyes as we see both actress and youth. Orlando’s desire for the boyishly exotic Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey) contains within it a lesbian relationship. Similarly, when Orlando, now become a woman, discovers sex with Shelmerdine (played by Billy Zane who bears a hint of resemblance to Valandrey), her history as a man resurfaces in gestures and glances. More explicitly queer casting gives us Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I and pop star Jimmy Somerville as an Elizabethan falsetto as well as the singing angel caught on video camera by Orlando’s daughter. An ageing virgin queen who desires Orlando for his youth and a singer/angel: both roles are sexually indeterminate, neither gay nor straight, nor even straightforwardly male or female. So while both Crisp and Somerville are gay icons whose sexuality forms part of their public personae, their performances here suggest a fluidity of identity and sexuality at work in between the inner and outer worlds of the film. In this way the film can be seen as a site of contestation of the performative naturalisation of sex and sexuality described by Butler. Despite the sexual oscillations suggested by Swinton’s performance, the journey from Elizabethan youth to modern woman remains a vital progression in the film. Orlando has a classical narrative structure in which the protagonist encounters obstacles, learns lessons and becomes wiser (thought not, in this case, older). Orlando’s experiences of love and sex, her travels to Constantinople and her encounters in English society are portrayed cumulatively rather than as detached episodes. The vision of the angel shared with her daughter at the end of the film suggests a culminating moment of redemption, understanding and freedom. Orlando’s voiceover tells us, ‘she’s no longer trapped by destiny [...] since she let go of the past, she found her life was beginning’, and this suggestion of a reconciliation of temporality and sex is reinforced in the lyrics of the angel’s song: ‘Neither a woman nor a man / we are joined, we are one / with a human face [...] I’m being born and I am dying’. This ending also provides a moment of reflection on the question of adaptation, evoking a journey in women’s artistic production as well as the more central journey of identity. Orlando having handed in the final draft of her novel, her daughter’s playful experimentation with a video camera gestures towards future forms of representation. The chaotic, light-infused images of grass, treetops and sky – not to mention the ability to make angels visible – suggest new artistic possibilities. In changing Orlando’s child’s sex to a girl, Potter forces her to let go of her grand house and class-burdened past; she also hints at a genealogy of women’s art, in which the filmmaker picks up where the writer left off. Adaptation itself becomes a theme, as women are seen adapt to different historical constraints and the different forms of artistic expression available to them. The trajectory of the narrative suggests a linear, progressive vision of history, in which individuals of the present moment – women or men – really do have greater freedom of movement, identity and expression than the stiff, power-laden structures of past epochs allowed. However parallel to the historical succession is an equally striking thematic structure, in which the historical sequences embody ideas: death, love, poetry, politics, society and birth. This suggests an alternative mapping of Orlando’s life, through concepts and experiences that are timeless as well as historically contingent. There is a non-linear temporality in the film that provides a playful counterpart to the classical progression of the narrative. Potter explains that she never thought of Orlando as a ‘historical film’: ‘I always thought of it as a film about now that happened to go through 400 years.’ (2) The film’s music, composed by Potter herself with David Motion, reflects this in its fusion of contemporary pop sounds, such as electric guitar, with motifs that gesture to the music of each period. A strong visual alternation between movement and stasis mirrors the way Orlando both moves through time and stays still, her features and gaze remaining the same. In a particularly memorable scene Orlando runs through a topiary maze in eighteenth-century costume, the image cross-cutting between mobile point of view shots and shots from just behind as though we were chasing her. The editing accelerates and by interspersing shots that give the impression she is just out of our sight, Orlando can then emerge in a Victorian crinoline; a time span of a hundred years is crossed. Creative use of fades to black and white contribute to the feeling of time as fluid and erratic. The fade to black (or white) is a filmic convention often used to indicate the passing of time but in Orlando its use is subtly subverted. For example, after Shelmerdine rides off romantically into the mist, we see a medium close-up of Orlando in heavy rain. After the fade to black we expect a lapse of time to have moved us into a new scene, but instead there is a close-up of Orlando in the same Victorian costume, though the rain has now stopped. The roar of an aeroplane passing over head therefore acts as a dramatic intrusion of the twentieth-century into the nineteenth; for a brief moment the two eras co-exist. This wry toying with the conventions of the medium allows the overt reconciliation of past and future at the end of the film to arise of out subtle discontinuities throughout, disrupting the overall linearity of the narrative. As with sex and sexuality in the film, time’s flow is imagined somewhere in between the poles of sameness and difference, stasis and mutability. But the fluidities of sex, time and identity are evoked within a recognisable story, and lightened by quirky humour. Orlando may be far removed from a typical period drama or literary adaptation but it was nonetheless a global commercial success, a striking example of conventional cinema undone from within. Notes
Further reading Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, London and New York, Routledge, 1990. Sally Potter, Orlando: Sally Potter, London, Faber & Faber, 1994. Isabelle McNeill Bhaji on the Beach (1993) [Production Company: UMBI Productions. Director: Gurinder Chadha. Screenwriters: Gurinder Chadha and Meera Syal. Cinematographer: John Kenway. Editor: Oral Norrie Ottey. Music: John Altman. Cast: Kim Vithana (Jinder), Jimmi Harkishin (Ranjit), Sarita Khajuria (Hashida), Lalita Ahmed (Asha), Mo Sesay (Oliver), Shaheen Khan (Simi).] In an interview for a report commissioned by the BFI on British films with black themes, Gurinder Chadha revealed that: ‘It was after I saw My Beautiful Laundrette that I decided that I wanted to direct. I thought wow! This is something I could do […] it is a great way of telling our stories.’ (in Arnold and Wambu1999: 38) Indeed, she drew on many of the issues and themes explored in Frears’ work, and was influenced by some of its stylistic innovations, and created a film that marked another new turning point for British cinema. Chadha was one of only two black women to make and release a film in Britain the 1990s. Concerning the surprise commercial success of Bhaji on the Beach, Karen Alexander has suggested that ‘[w]hat engaged critics and audiences alike was the opportunity of seeing and hearing from a section of the community so often constructed as silent.’ (2000: 112) To do this, Chadha drew not only on the specific strategies of My Beautiful Laundrette (realism, surrealism and rich symbolism), but also on the models of narrative structure, characterisation and humour of classical melodrama, as well as on the theatricality of the traditions of popular Indian cinema. Chadha’s debut feature followed Laundrette in exploring what it means to be Asian and British, but from a more overtly comic perspective and from a female point of view. (Street 1997: 107) It follows a group of British Asian women from Birmingham on a day trip to Blackpool to see the lights and enjoy a break from routine. It is soon made clear that despite the cultural unity of the group, each character is dealing with a different personal dilemma that is in some way connected to the tensions of living in Britain. Whether discussing the clash between Indian traditions and modern values, or the racial prejudice that exists within Britain, the insights offered are often provocative. Older characters are shown trying to preserve their traditional cultural identity, while the younger ones appear anxious to be accepted by and become a genuine part of British life. The narrative relies upon the successful interweaving of these individual tales, developing a multiple-diegesis model that allows for a fuller understanding of the network of social relations and diverse cultural identities. The multiplicity of British Asian female identities is revealed via three generations of Asian women in Britain, and the film deals with ‘questions of feminine destiny and identity … lived out in the complex post-colonial hybridity of contemporary Britain.’ (Arnold and Wamb 1999: 36) The opening title sequence reveals a row of small shops that provide goods mainly for the local Asian community, interspersed with visual signs of hostility towards that community in the form of abusive graffiti on the shutters of some of the shops. Cultural identity is embedded into the soundtrack as music and Punjabi voices are heard from the radios blaring in each shop. The tone of the film then switches to fantasy, at the end of which reality is returned by the accidental smashing of a tray as the character suffering the nightmarish vision stumbles and falls. Thus, the film’s preoccupations with tension and conflict suffered on a private and personal level, interlocking with a specific cultural and social context, are neatly and powerfully introduced. Chadha set out to make an entertaining film that dealt with the two most taboo topics for the Asian community in Britain: African Caribbean and Asian relationships, and domestic violence. Debates about these issues are developed via focus on a differentiated group of culturally connected people, who share a journey away from the primary site of conflict for a single day during which the various dramas are played out under the microscopic gaze of the rest of the group. During their day-trip to Blackpool, the various women each come to slightly new understandings of their situation and those of the other characters. Jinder, for example, has already left her violent husband and taken their five year old son to a refuge for Asian women, but is unsure what to do next. She is shown struggling to cope with the stigma of separation and potential divorce (labelled ‘the English curse’ by the older generation), struggling to decide whether to put family duty above personal safety and happiness, and whether to return to her husband. Meanwhile he is shown battling to cope with the emasculated position of having been deserted by his wife, in a society that he feels has already marked him out as ethnically and racially inferior. Sensitive character development is helped by careful framing; close-ups of Jinder, Ranjit and their boy aid our grasp of their dilemma, while distancing of the camera from the final physical struggle encourages the viewer to consider both sides, empathise more greatly with Jinder, but ultimately to remain as outside observers of their plight. The approach to characterisation and engagement of audience sympathies in general is complex: heterogeneity within cultures is acknowledged and shown as complicated to deal with, especially for those who regard the values of unity and family loyalty as superior to all others. The film thus denies that identity can be reduced to straightforward polarities of good/bad, and refuses an essentialist position of victim/oppressor. The general themes of destiny and choice for (British) Asian women, and the specific issues of inter-racial relationships, intergenerational struggle, are all embodied by the dilemma faced by student Hashida who discovers that she is pregnant by Oliver, who is black. Stuck in an unthinkable position for a young Asian woman, she is treated with disgust by the older members of the group who are concerned with holding onto a distinctive sense of their own cultural and racial identity. They will not accept the ‘mixed’ nature of the relationship and the inevitable hybrid that will be produced by such a union, a child that will have difficulty fitting into British, Asian or Caribbean culture. Sexuality is used as a metaphor for cultural relations, and the film thus suggests that ‘the most intimate acts are […] implicated in a complex set of social determinations.’ (Brunsdon in Murphy 2000: 166) Hashida is under enormous parental pressure to go to medical school although her natural yearning is to be an artist, and scenes early on in the family home emhasise the generation clash that has emerged. Her parents are desperate to climb the social ladder, and need their daughter to follow the route of education and career as proof to their white neighbours that they are worthy of their respect. Again, this situation arouses sympathy since they genuinely appear to want what is best for their daughter, and is more complex in that it relates the difficulties to issues of class as well as race. Meanwhile, Oliver faces pressure from a black college friend who would rather he stuck to his own culture, arguing that: ‘Black don't mean not white any more. Forget the melting pot and respect the differences. You try fusion and you get confusion!’ The friend recognises ethnic difference as being far broader and more complex than a simple black/white dichotomy and forces Oliver to think hard about the future of his relationship with Hashida. Although white characters are kept on the periphery of the narrative, at several moments during the film the Asian women become the erotic subjects of the white male gaze. Teenage sisters Madhu (Renu Kochar) and Ladhu (Nisha Nayar), relishing a day of liberation from parental constraint, are only really interested in checking out the local talent, and find themselves attracting the attention of two white boys, one of whom comments on the exotic nature of their looks: ‘You're all golden, like the top of a sesame seed bap.’ More uncomfortably, Simi, the leader of the group and the most vociferous in terms of her feminist beliefs, and Jinder are the subject of verbal and physical abuse at the service station when they react negatively to the sexualised taunts of the same men who had earlier displayed their backsides to them from their van. Later on, timid and traumatised Asha finds herself being shown the sights of Blackpool by a charming pantomime performer, Ambrose Waddington (Peter Cellier) who admires her ‘exquisite’ beauty, and is fascinated by what he perceives as her culture's strong and pure sense of tradition. He instantly idealises and stereotypes her, and situates her romantically in a nostalgic past that shows no understanding of her contemporary predicament. Indeed, the scenes focusing on Asha are perhaps the most disturbing and most representative of the general dilemma experienced by the women in the film. Chadha inserts extra-diegetic hallucinatory sequences in the theatrical style of Indian popular cinema (Bollywood) to dramatise the anxiety Asha feels about her position in society. Her low self-esteem appears to stem from a loss of individual and cultural identity. She no longer knows who she is or where she belongs, having spent all her life being told how to behave according to a set of cultural rules which are now being questioned and challenged by the younger generations, as well as by Rekha (Souad Faress) a visitor from Bombay who wears western style dress and declares that they are all living in the past. The location of Blackpool is used as a complex site where personal desires and social tensions are worked out away from the domestic spaces where those conflicts have been allowed to develop. The reality of the seaside town is less important than its value as an imaginary space with ambivalent symbolic value. It is presented as a place for tacky consumer culture, even compared by Rekha to modern day Bombay. Moreover, the diversity offered by the people, colours, surreal performances and even snake charmers are highlighted to show Blackpool as a potential site of cultural merging. It is thus transformed, on the one hand, into a post-modern space where new forms of social connection become possible. On the other hand, any veneer of social change is easily disrupted by incidents such as the racist sneers and abuse directed at the older women as they try to enjoy a cup of tea in a local café. With its charming blend of the melodramatic with the political, this film highlights the notion of diversity within an ethnic group that tends to be stereotyped and homogenised by the dominant white British culture, and which is rarely given a voice with which to explore such differences. Unusually, the Asian women are placed at the core of the action while the white characters remain largely one-dimensional and on the margin, in a reversal of the conventional core versus periphery opposition of (post)-colonial relations. It shows the frustrated attempts by the younger women to become accepted by, and integrated into, white British society, and emphasises the distance that remains between white, Asian and African Caribbean communities. The film thus reflects a British society of the early 1990s in which issues of cultural diversity and hybridity were still wrapped up in hostility and racist discourse. In this context, Chadha’s film joins the diverse cinematic representations of Britishness. As she declared at the time: ‘What I’m trying to say is that Britain isn’t one thing or another. It isn’t just Howard’s End or My Beautiful Laundrette. There are endless possibilities about what it can be – and is - already.’ (in Street 1997: 107) Further Reading Kevin Arnold and Onyekachi Wambu, A Fuller Picture: The Commercial Impact of Six British films with Black Themes in the 1990s, London, BFI, 1999. Karen Alexander, ‘Black British Cinema in the ‘90s: Going, Going, Gone’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the ‘90s, London, BFI, 2000, pp.109-114. Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Not Having it all: Women and Film in the 1990s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.) British Film of the 90s, London, BFI, 2000, pp.167-177. Sarah Street, British National Cinema, London, BFI, 1997. Sarah Barrow Remains of the Day (1993) [Production Company: Merchant Ivory Productions and Columbia Pictures. Director: James Ivory. Producer: Ismael Merchant. Screenwriter: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (from novel by Kazuo Ishigaro). Cinematographer: Tony Pierce-Roberts. Music: Richard Robbins. Editor: Andrew Marcus. Cast: Anthony Hopkins (James Stevens), Emma Thompson (Mary Kenton), James Fox (Lord Darington), Peter Vaughan (William Stevens).] The films of Ismael Merchant and James Ivory tend to provoke strong reactions. Their work provides some of the most iconic moments of ‘British’ cinema - the couple sitting at the window in Florence, Stevens physically recoiling from the (actually desired) advances of Miss Kenton - as well as some of the most popular films. However, some audiences and critics find Merchant Ivory films all but unwatchable; the period style and themes of restraint provoke frustration rather than admiration. Remains of the Day seems to be a quintessentially English – rather than British – film, but there is very little which is English in terms of funding, creative production or distribution of the film. It was produced and distributed by a Hollywood studio (Columbia), directed by James Ivory (an American) from a novel by the Japanese - British author Kazuo Ishigaro. In one way this is just another move in a game called ‘What is a British film?’ and therefore not particularly illuminating. It is also problematic to suggest that only people with British passports can make British films. It does, though, emphasise one of the main criticisms made about Merchant Ivory films, that they are a Hollywood simulacra of British cinema, a fake vision of an England based on a false memory. For those who are critical of these films this representation of a lost England operates ideologically, placing the values and structures of England’s colonial past, over those of the present. This criticism of Merchant Ivory films is particularly based on the visual style – the civilised beauty of the costume drama – where the look of the film is deemed to obscure any social or political analysis of the period. This criticism has also gained credence due to the reported comments of Ismael Merchant which seemed to confirm an attitude of snobbery about contemporary British society detected in the films; What made a person civilised in the past was reading, writing and the art of conversation…Who is England being inherited by? The lower class, not by the upper class. The ruling class is the lower classes - who talk about making money in the City and football. (1)
With the success of Room With a View (Ivory, 1985), followed by Maurice (Ivory, 1987), Howard’s End (Ivory, 1992) and Remains of the Day the term Merchant Ivory (often assumed to be one person - Ivory directs, Merchant produces) gained a meaning beyond the literal identification of the producer and the director of the film. This isn’t simply the result of an adherence to auteur theory as there are Merchant Ivory films which aren’t ‘Merchant Ivory’ films, e.g. Slaves of New York (1989), Le Divorce (2003). Rather, Merchant Ivory became a brand, selling a particular type of film style – and Englishness - to a mass audience. The components of the Merchant Ivory brand, which had been apparent since the late 1970s (Heat and Dust, The Bostonians and The Europeans) but which only became successfully marketed in the mid-1980s, can be identified fairly clearly. A Merchant Ivory film will be a literary adaptation (E.M. Forster and Henry James are particularly popular), set in the past with great attention to period detail in setting, architecture and costume. The settings also tend to be signifiers of upper class life (great country houses, landscaped acres) as well as high culture (Oxford, Cambridge, Rome, Florence, literary salons, classical concerts). The films are made with great technical skill in a visual style which emphasises the classical and harmonious - smooth camerawork, a predominance of mid-shots, an emphasis on meaning created by the mise en scene rather than by the juxtaposition of shots. British actors (rather than film stars) dominate, often appearing in more than one film, creating the feel of a repertory company (Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Greta Sacchi, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith). While the description of the films as beautifully shot costume dramas may suggest that the brand is a conservative one appealing to middle England, it is also true that the films deal with themes of repression, whether due to class, nationality, gender or sexuality. The Merchant Ivory film aesthetic has the backing of Hollywood money (as producer and/or distributor) but signifies something different from, and better than, mere commercial films. This awareness of cultural status is apparent in the differing responses of audiences and critics. These are characterised by the interplay of elitist views, all of which rely upon signifying the superiority of their own tastes. Hipsky (1994) explains the appeal of the films to American audiences as based on this aspect of the brand. To Anglophile Americans, he argues, Merchant Ivory is a signifier of serious, artistic filmmaking and the term operates as a shibboleth – a password – connoting membership of an elite club. Several critics have made explicit reference to the filmmakers as a brand. Sheldon Hall (2006) summarises the dominant critical view: Merchant Ivory now tends to be regarded as the cinematic equivalent of Crabtree and Evelyn or Fortnum and Mason: a provider of tasteful, exquisitely crafted, up market fare, but slightly dull and very definitely bourgeois. (2)
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the criticisms of Remains of the Day aren’t valid. Does the appeal to the vanity of the audience (through their recognition of high culture references) engender the same false feeling of superiority over others found in the hierarchical structures – apparently criticised – in the film? Is the Merchant Ivory brand based on a deception? While seeming to criticise the hierarchy of class it congratulates the audience on their similarity to the upper classes – belonging above rather than below stairs. Remains of the Day opens with a neo – classical (an artistic movement defined by a yearning for an earlier period) drawing of Darlington Hall. This establishes the weight of the past on the present – further emphasised by the use of flashback - as well as the dominant role the house plays in the film. The setting of the Hall becomes a microcosm of England, creating a symbolic world in which the characters become representations of particular groups and ideas (the different classes, English and US national identity, appeasement, Nazism) rather than individuals. As the camera pulls back to reveal the green of the English countryside, it also emphasises the isolation of the house and, we soon realise, that of Lord Darlington and Stevens. The film opens in the late 1950s and it is clear that the England represented by the image of the stately home is now gone; the remaining treasures from the house are being auctioned off and an American is now the owner of the Hall. Whether this is a cause for sadness or celebration is not apparent. This ambivalence is at the centre of the film and is personified by Stevens who sometimes seems to understand the danger of his Master’s views but who ultimately states his own position, ‘I am his butler’, as reason not to question them. Such conflicting viewpoints are evident in the film’s investigation of the redundancy and loss of a particular way of life. The contrasting representation of the US – in the guise of the US ambassador, Jack Lewis - as modern, democratic and professional (Lewis tells Darlington’s gathering that the era of the ‘well meaning amateur’ is over) is in direct contrast to that of Lord Darlington and his allies from Old Europe. Their attitude to Lewis is to underestimate him and his country by sneering at what they understand professionalism to mean - greed, power and ungentlemanly behaviour. (4) American culture disrupts the hierarchy of the English class system, but in the character of Lewis it also seeks to emulate it, Lewis becomes Darlington’s replacement. (This ambivalence could also explain the appeal of the film to an Anglophile American audience.) The visual style of the film is undoubtedly linked to one of the main themes – the effect of the hierarchical society on the working class. Stevens is not merely repressed in his inability to express his desires. His position means he must be invisible; his aim is to efface himself, to become, as far as possible a part of Darlington (the Hall and the man being indivisible). The dominant style of the film is a visual representation of this idea. The precise composition repeatedly emphasises the position of the servants at Darlington Hall as they are closely framed by doors and narrow, endless passageways. The emphasis is always on the need for invisibility; servants seem to appear and disappear through the elaborately decorated walls of the house, the doors camouflaged to aid the pretence that the aristocracy is served by invisible forces. That these images of restraint and denial are also visually pleasing highlights the problem of reading Remains of the Day as an attack on English society. Any attempt in the film at a political analysis is undermined by the beautiful, harmonious style. (5) Notes
Further Reading Martin A. Hipsky Yüklə 1,18 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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