Daily Archives: Wednesday, July 13, 2016

  • Victor Victoria

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Blake Edwards (1982)

    A British soprano called Victoria Grant, out of work and on her uppers in 1930s Paris, becomes the talk of the town when she pretends to be a drag act.  Julie Andrews had a big success with Victor Victoria – bigger than anything else she did after the career-defining hits of the mid-1960s – and casting her as ‘a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman’ is potentially interesting: the wholesomeness of her screen presence, like Doris Day’s, commingles with a tomboy vigour.  But Andrews, although she can be awkwardly unfeminine, is sexless rather than androgynous.  The English rose beauty of her face and complexion makes it impossible to accept her here as a man offstage (Victoria pretends to be a Polish count, Victor Grazinski).  Her lack of panache as a performer makes her no more convincing as a female impersonator on it.  Her sexually remote quality, combined with the almost unreal accomplishment of her singing and line readings, gives Victor Victoria an artificial quality very different from, and pretty well in conflict with, the pretending-to-be-someone-else themes at the heart of the story.  Julie Andrews is pretending all right but surely not in the way her husband Blake Edwards intended.  Her usual elocuted delivery is almost completely intact except that she says ‘wanna’ and ‘gonna’ etc in an unsuccessful attempt to come over casual and bohemian.  The film as a whole appears to profess liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and feminism but its progressive outlook doesn’t go any deeper than the heroine using the word ’emancipated’ (or, as Andrews delivers it, ‘emencipaded’).

    Julie Andrews’ comic timing is a remarkable thing:  you can hear how spot-on it is but there’s never the slightest possibility of its raising a laugh.   It’s much more sophisticated, however, than the rest of the comedy in Victor Victoria, which is broad, to put it mildly.  There are repeated brawls with people and cabaret tables going flying but Blake Edwards’ direction of these sequences lacks any sense of farcical abandon (or precision).   Edwards, working with Hans Hoemberg, based his screenplay on the one Reinhold Schuenzel wrote for his 1933 film Viktor und Viktoria, set in Berlin.   The original was, in other words, contemporary with the story that it told but Victor Victoria, made a decade after Bob Fosse’s brilliant realisation of 1930s Berlin in Cabaret, places 1930s Paris in the timeless zone of Hollywood comedy-musical.  In spite of its supposedly daring themes of transvestism and sexual nonconformism, Edwards’ version of the material feels tame and square.  Victoria’s life gets complicated when a Chicago club owner called King Marchand, on a visit to Paris and in the audience for Victor’s show, enters the picture.  It’s hard to think of many actors more straightforwardly masculine than James Garner, who plays King; and, since King is convinced from the word go that Victor must be a woman and Victoria immediately likes the look of King, the audience can rest assured that Julie Andrews and James Garner will end up a happy couple.  This makes the revelation two thirds of the way through that King’s minder Bernstein is a repressed gay a condescending turn of events:  after all, he’s only a minor character.   (It doesn’t have much impact either because Alex Karras, who plays Bernstein, has never made him very macho anyway.)

    The tension in the romance between Victoria and King is sustained entirely through King being shown as anxious to protect his masculinity.  Victoria’s frustration that her professionally successful new identity prevents her from appearing in public as a woman, and as King’s woman, is artificially delayed until it can trigger the denouement.  In the meantime, Victoria tells King that she likes being a man because she enjoys freedoms she never had as a woman, although these are scarcely in evidence.  (Victor Victoria is especially tedious when the sexual liberation themes are in the foreground of the dialogue.)   For the most part, Blake Edwards recycles ancient gender stereotypes.   When Victoria lands a left hook in the face of a young gay hustler (Malcolm Jamieson), it may be the only moment in the film that exploits the tomboy in Julie Andrews but it’s still offensive:  the hustler, who thinks he’s been punched by a man, doesn’t retaliate because he’s homosexual ie crap at fighting.  When Victoria accompanies King to a boxing match, however, she flinches from the bloody violence; when she tries one of King’s cigars, she coughs helplessly, etc etc.   One of the cabaret routines is striking:  four dancers appear with Janus masks – male one side, female the other – and costumes with an evening suit front and an evening gown back.  Their routine is choreographed so that you can be watching four men or four women or two men and two women.   What’s odd about Victor Victoria, however, is that its most perverted moment appears to be unintentional.  In order to check that he’s right to think Victor is a woman, King hides in a bathroom cupboard to watch her undress.  This peeping tom routine is played for laughs:  only James Garner’s almost invincible likeability prevents it from being very creepy.

    Garner’s easy naturalness as an actor is a considerable relief amid the strenuous theatrics.  As King Marchand’s girlfriend/moll Norma, Lesley Ann Warren is amusing in her first scene.  She and King watch Victor’s act:  Norma’s delight that here’s a beautiful woman who’s really a man and who’s therefore no threat to her turns to horror when King tells her he thinks the creature on stage really is a woman.  From this point onwards, Blake Edwards encourages Warren to be so coarse and shrill that a little of her goes a very long way.  As Toddy, the gay cabaret performer who has the idea of Victoria doing a drag act (and proves to be a loyal friend – because, of course, gay men are always loyal friends to straight women), Robert Preston is likeable and assured.  His closing drag routine has a verve and wit missing from what Julie Andrews does on stage but Edwards’ decision to end the film here – Andrews, as a woman, and Garner are together in the audience – makes the routine anti-climactic.  The cast also includes a motley collection of British character actors, including John Rhys-Davies, Graham Stark, Peter Arne and Michael Robbins.   The unremarkable (Oscar-winning) songs are by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse.

    24 March 2013

  • Venus in Fur

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La Vénus à la fourrure

    Roman Polanski (2013)

    I was sorry that the screen adaptation of David Ives’s play Venus in Fur didn’t give Nina Arianda the chance to put her famous Off Broadway then Broadway performance on lasting record.  Instead, the role of Vanda is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, the wife of Roman Polanski, who worked with Ives on the screenplay.  The other character in Ives’s two-hander is Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), who has adapted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella Venus in Furs (sic) for the stage, intends to direct it and, at the start of the film, is reaching the end of an exasperating day of auditions for the part of Vanda.  Thomas is on the phone to his girlfriend, lamenting the cluelessness of all the actresses he’s seen and saying he’ll be home soon.  Then Vanda’s real-life namesake arrives in the theatre and begs Thomas to let her read for the role.   He eventually agrees:  Thomas reads the part of Severin, the rich idler who, in Sacher-Masoch’s story, becomes so obsessed with Vanda that he asks to be her slave and for increasingly degrading treatment at the hands of this ‘Venus in furs’.  Thomas and Vanda act out various roles and antagonisms:  the two characters in his play; writer and critic (or other audience member); director and actor; the individuals that Thomas and Vanda are; male vs female.  None of this is surprising, even if (like me) you know nothing about the novella.   Thomas, very early on, volunteers the information that his adaptation has a lot of himself in it; Vanda is soon complaining that the material is sexist S&M porn.   Thomas never does get home.  Venus in Fur ends with him tied up on the stage against a huge phallic cactus – a leftover from the set of the theatre’s previous production, some kind of spoof Western.

    Polanski has made few films adapted from stage plays:  Macbeth, Death and the Maiden, not much else until recently, but now two in a row – with Venus in Fur following Carnage.  The latter was hamstrung on screen by the implausibility of the two couples staying together for the duration.  That’s not a significant problem here.  Once Polanski’s camera moves, as it almost immediately does, from a Paris street in a thunderstorm to inside the theatre, it stays there until moving out again, revealing a succession of exteriors in a kind of reverse Russian doll effect, in the closing shots.  The fact that the physical setting for the story is a stage has the effect of validating the action rather in the way that an actual stage does in the theatre.  You don’t wonder why Thomas doesn’t throw Vanda out.  When, after one of their arguments, she threatens to leave, it’s clear that she won’t:  the film will end if she does and there’s plenty of running time to go.  But Venus in Fur isn’t a full-grown film.  The structure of the piece is such that it doesn’t allow Polanski to do very much except direct the two actors.  I was surprised the power struggle between Thomas and Vanda, as they inhabit their different roles, wasn’t more of a competition.  Vanda nearly always has the upper hand:  it’s one-way traffic as she reveals that she’s not the dumb actress she initially appears to be, that she knows the Sacher-Masoch original.  She’s able to invent new scenes for Thomas’s adaptation, and new business, which usually discomforts him.  (The only sense in which it might be said that a woman is being used by a man in this film is that Emmanuelle Seigner is required by her husband to expose a fair amount of bare flesh.)  The games that Vanda and Thomas play are theatrical games designed by David Ives and Polanski.  These games have no real weight and Alexandre Desplat’s meticulously roguish score reinforces this effect.  The success of the film depends on the actors’ ability, and particularly the lead actress’s ability, to hypnotise.

    The actors are considerably older than those who took the roles on the New York stage.  Nina Arianda was twenty-five when she played Vanda in the Off Broadway production of 2010, opposite Wes Bentley, who was then thirty-one.   Hugh Dancy, thirty-six at the time, replaced Bentley as Thomas when the play opened on Broadway in 2011.   Mathieu Amalric will be fifty later this year, Emmanuelle Seigner forty-eight later this month.  Seigner looks great but she doesn’t look young – in fact, she looks older than Amalric, who appears small and slight and has a boyish innocuousness about him.  From the start, he somewhat resembles Polanski.  I don’t want to make too much of the age difference between Arianda and Seigner but, since Vanda is meant to be a struggling actress desperate for a part, it has to be significant if she’s in her late forties rather than her mid-twenties.  A bigger issue, though, is that Emmanuelle Seigner always looks utterly in charge.  You don’t feel sorry for Vanda as she arrives, flustered and late, perhaps too late, for the audition:  when she cries and wipes her nose with a tissue, Seigner is a strong, confident actress doing a bit of pretend snivelling – she doesn’t need to travel far at all to become the dominatrix to Thomas’s underling.  Her playing of the role is powerful but monotonous.  Mathieu Amalric, in the opening scene, acts the way actors often do at the start of a stage play – he’s too busy and emphatic, as if he has to establish himself with a live audience.  Once he settles down, Amalric shifts more subtly than Seigner between Thomas’s different personae.  In the closing stages, as the pair switch roles in the reading, he’s compelling.  When Vanda applies lipstick to his mouth and puts the ‘fur’, a large shawl, round Thomas’s small form, Amalric looks to be turning into the cross-dressed Polanski in the climax to The Tenant.

    6 June 2014

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