Tess
Roman Polanski (1979)
The mise en scène of Polanski’s adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is accomplished and often imaginative. The light and the colour tones of the Wessex landscape (actually Brittany) are subtly varied; the sounds – of milking and its aftermath, of farm machinery – express the pulse and the relentless routine of agricultural life. There are fine set pieces, like the opening May Dance, where Tess Durbeyfield first meets Angel Clare; and lovely visual details, such as a cow’s tail brushing Tess’s face as she milks it. The sequence in which the four milkmaids’ path to church on a sunny Sunday morning is deep in water, and Angel carries them to dry land one by one, is perfect. (Each of the four girls dreams of being held in his arms, and their dreams momentarily come true: the only one who resists is Tess, at least until Angel explains to her that he carried the other three across only in order to be able to get to her eventually.) The cinematography (by Geoffrey Unsworth and then, after his sudden death, Ghislain Cloquet), the costumes (Anthony Powell) and the art direction (Pierre Guffroy, Jack Stephens) deservedly won Oscars. According to co-producer Timothy Burrill, who was interviewed with Leigh Lawson before the BFI screening, the first cut of the film ran four hours: even with more than an hour trimmed, though, Tess feels excessively long. Polanski dwells not only on his descriptions of rustic ritual and labour, which are worth the attention, but, less justifiably, on the bridges between key parts of the story – especially Angel’s search for Tess after his return to England. The film’s landscape isn’t expressionistic in the way you might expect from reading Hardy – except in darkness and cruel weather, it looks benign. This might be a subtlety rather than a shortcoming if the central drama were dynamic. As it’s not, the predominantly placid appearance of Tess does become a weakness and expressive of a larger one. Philippe Sarde’s skilful score sometimes seems melodramatic because it has greater force than what’s happening on screen.
Tess in Hardy is not only a victim but also, in the novel’s ironic subtitle, ‘a pure woman’. In Tess, she’s a pure victim. (It’s hard to ignore the dedication of the film to Sharon Tate.) On their last night together, at Stonehenge, Angel tells Tess that the place was once the site of pagan sacrifices to the sun. At daybreak, as the police arrive to arrest her for the murder of Alec d’Urberville, Tess is sleeping on one of the great stones – the image, suggesting that she is about to be sacrificed, sums up Polanski’s view of his heroine. As Tess, the seventeen-year-old Nastassja Kinski, who has a look of the young Ingrid Bergman, is a magnetic image and shows a lot of skill but she lacks emotional friction. You watch her suffering and feel for her when the worst things happen – but because those things are awful for anyone to suffer rather than because of anything coming from the actress. Kinski is somewhat remote: perhaps her conscientious attempts at a Dorset accent, which she holds onto except in moments of high emotion, reinforce that effect. She also has a radiant sullenness: when Alec accuses Tess of wearing her ‘ridiculous pride like a hair shirt’ and, in their final moments together, of ‘moping, as usual’, you rather sympathise. In the BBC television adaptation of the novel in 2008, Jodie Whittaker’s Izz was so naturally spirited that I wished that she, rather than Gemma Arterton, had had the lead. Although the role of Izz is smaller here, Suzanna Hamilton has the same effect: there’s more turbulence in Hamilton, in the conversation between Izz and Angel when he asks if she loves him more than Tess did, than in most of the scenes between Tess and Angel put together.
Although Polanski presents Tess as a passive figure, on the receiving end of the cruelty of social and economic structures and of men, neither Alec d’Urberville nor Angel Clare is an out-and-out scoundrel. Leigh Lawson’s line readings are occasionally a bit wooden but his playing of Alec is mostly successful. He’s easily able to incarnate a sneering villain in Victorian melodrama: he and Polanski use this as a counterpoint to the character that Lawson creates – a man who’s thwarted and weak, in spite of the powerful position that he abuses, in what he does Tess. Peter Firth’s Angel is increasingly disappointing. He’s charming in the earlier part of the film, when Angel is viewed admiringly in more ways than one; at this stage, he also suggests a latent priggishness. It’s all the more frustrating, then, that this quality doesn’t connect with Firth’s playing of Angel when Tess reveals to him her past with Alec and as the mother of a short-lived illegitimate child. You don’t get any sense of Angel’s having divided feelings, of being compelled by selfish and socially conscious imperatives which overwhelm his better judgment. (Eddie Redmayne, in the BBC version, did get something of that across.) Firth’s Angel simply turns into a nasty person and back again.
Most of the supporting parts are played by British actors whom I remember from television roles in the seventies and eighties. Some of these characterisations – John Collin as Durbeyfield, Rosemary Martin as Mrs Durbeyfield, Richard Pearson as a shrewd but worldly clergyman, Lesley Dunlop in a brief appearance as a girl who works on the D’Urberville estate – are vivid without being overdone. In cameos where the performances are busier, it may be just a matter of personal taste as to what you think works and doesn’t work: I enjoyed Patsy Smart as the housekeeper at the place where Tess and Angel spend their cut-short honeymoon; I didn’t like Tony Church’s Parson Tringham. The other milkmaids at the dairy farm are all good – as well as Suzanna Hamilton, there’s Carolyn Pickles as Miriam (excellent as she falls asleep talking, and when she has resounding hiccups at the farm workers’ breakfast next morning) and Caroline Embling as Retty. There’s an extraordinary collection of faces and physical types in evidence. As a farm hand, John Barrett is effortlessly eccentric; Fred Bryant as the dairyman has to work much harder to seem so. He has only two lines to speak but Jimmy Gardner creates a powerful image as a dwarfish pedlar. Patsy Rowlands is the landlady of the upmarket boarding house where Tess and Alec live together. Rowlands plays things straight – and the landlady’s transition from nosiness to horror, to great effect.
The scenes in the boarding house are among the film’s best and Polanski’s restraint here is impressive. It’s no surprise how expertly he handles the blood seeping into a corner of the downstairs ceiling but the sequence is remarkable too for perhaps the finest sound effect in Tess: the noise of a hedge being cut in the front garden of the boarding house. The shears are going when Angel Clare arrives asking for Tess; they’re still at work after she has stabbed Alec and as she leaves the place swiftly, in order both to escape and to find Angel again. The sound of those shears suggests a clock ticking and the remorselessness of fate. The film could do with more touches like this – you can’t easily take unfortunate predestination out of Hardy without weakening the story. Although I think of cinema adaptations of his novels as products of the 1960s and later, watching Tess made me wonder if the typical 1940s Hollywood style of literary classic adaptations – more crudely melodramatic in some ways but also often more emotionally direct – might have been better suited to realising Hardy on the big screen.
1 February 2013