Monthly Archives: July 2022

  • Hedda

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Trevor Nunn (1975)

    Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler isn’t a barrel of laughs but the BFI build-up to this screening of  Trevor Nunn’s film of the play was a comedy of errors.

    ‘The rare 35mm print we are presenting is courtesy of the National Library of Norway and therefore has Norwegian subtitles.  We hope audience members will not find these too distracting.’

    That was the advance warning email to those who’d booked for Hedda in this month’s Glenda Jackson retrospective.  In fact, it was the third such email because the first two got the show times wrong.  On the day, a BFI person took to the stage to reiterate the above and apologise for the visual quality of the print – one of those fade-to-pink specials from the 1970s.  He went on to explain that the outstanding lead performance meant it was still worth showing the film, as part of the Janet [sic] Jackson season.

    I didn’t expect to see Hedda just a day after Dangerous Liaisons (1988) but Stephen Frears’ film had turned up on BBC4 the night before.  As a result, I sat down to watch Nunn’s version of Ibsen with Frears’ translation of stage material to the screen, and what I felt was wrong with it, fresh in my mind.  Even without this coincidence, though, Hedda would have come over as an egregious example of ‘filmed theatre’.  (Important to make clear that it’s hardly fair to mention these two films – as films – in the same breath:  returning to Dangerous Liaisons after thirty plus years, I found it dissatisfying but it’s streets ahead of Hedda.)  Nunn’s picture was an adaptation of his stage production for the RSC.  The argument for filming a play in this way is that the screen version supplies a valuable record that wouldn’t otherwise exist.  The argument is valid only up to a point.  If the adapter turns the stage production into faux cinema, as Nunn does with Hedda, it’s not only inadequate as a film but tends to rob the piece of what may have been important assets in the theatre.

    In this case, there were additional grounds for making the film:  there hadn’t been a previous English-language version of Hedda Gabler in the cinema, as opposed to on television (nor has there been another since).  Hedda – so called because American distributors hoped audiences might think they were buying tickets for a biopic of the quite recently deceased Hedda Hopper? – starts on board the steamer on which the title character is returning from honeymoon with her husband, George Tesman (Peter Eyre).  There are shots of mountains and fjords.  There’s a crowd scene of sorts, as the newlyweds disembark and are greeted, before a carriage drive back to the marital home.  This scene-setting opening up of the play, which accounts for only a couple of screen minutes, isn’t an issue.  Once the camera enters the couple’s house, it stays there, except for a brief interlude, about halfway through, when the Tesmans’ maid, Bertha (Pam St Clement in an unexpected pre-EastEnders role), goes outside to collect the day’s delivery of milk.  So Nunn doesn’t dilute the drama.  The problem is, rather, with how he films the action indoors.

    As a sequence of events, Ibsen’s plot may read like melodrama but a suitably rhythmical production needn’t be experienced as such, even on screen.  I don’t remember finding melodramatic the first Hedda Gabler that I ever saw, a BBC Play of the Month in 1972, directed by Waris Hussein, with Janet Suzman (then married to Trevor Nunn) in the lead.  In Hedda, any sort of rhythm is lost thanks to clumsy and unimaginative attempts to be ‘filmic’ – close-ups of character as they deliver lines, reaction shots, a score by Laurie Johnson better suited to Hollywood romantic tragedy.  Nearly all the performances seem overemphatic.  Perhaps they were in the theatre, too, but, even if they were, Nunn’s technique, such as it is, magnifies their flaws.  It probably didn’t help Patrick Stewart, who plays Ejlert Løvborg, that he hadn’t made a film before this one.  Peter Eyre’s Tesman is such a foolish wimp (crudely so, unlike Ian McKellen’s Tesman in that Play of the Month) that his marriage to Hedda isn’t just bound to fail but is utterly incredible.  Jennie Linden (Thea Elvsted), Constance Chapman (Aunt Julie) and, especially, Timothy West (a jocular but sinister Judge Brack) are better but all are hamstrung by Nunn’s direction.

    So is the leading lady, though you can’t help wondering if Janet is really cut out anyway to play Hedda Gabler.  She has wit, authority and intelligent vocal variety in the role, wearing her close-fitting gown like a straitjacket.  But she registers Hedda’s furious claustrophobia instantly and unequivocally, leaving little scope for developing the character.  You not only can’t imagine that this Hedda would ever have given weedy, pedantic George Tesman the time of day.  You can’t see either why Judge Brack is drawn to a woman so full of aggression, so lacking in sensuality and surface charm.  All you really believe of Glenda Jackson’s portrait is that this is a woman angrily desperate enough to shoot herself dead.

    8 July 2022

     

     

     

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  • Dangerous Liaisons

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Frears (1988)

    The film version of Christopher Hampton’s play is an accomplished tautology.  I saw and enjoyed Les liaisons dangereuses on the West End stage in 1986.  Although I don’t remember it as physically static, the words were the star of the show:  the expert delivery of Hampton’s dialogue, by a cast headed by Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, itself imparted a strong sense of movement.  Stephen Frears’ players – Glenn Close (the Marquise de Mertueil), John Malkovich (the Vicomte de Valmont), Michelle Pfeiffer (Madame de Tourvel), Uma Thurman (Cécile de Volanges) et al – are no slouches in this department either:  their line readings often tell us all we need to know.  On screen, of course, it’s not all that we get.  There are close-ups on the actors’ faces to underline what their voices are conveying.   As well as the score that George Fenton composed for the film, there’s music by Gluck, Handel and Bach.  Frears doesn’t lay this on thick and Philippe Rousselot’s lighting delivers some beautifully striking mug shots.  Both still feel surplus to requirements.

    In eighteenth-century Paris, with the 1789 Revolution just a few years away, Merteuil and Valmont, former lovers, are now rivals-cum-partners in an enterprise that tests their ingenuity and gives them pleasure at the expense of others.  Seduction is the main weapon used in their cruelly manipulative games.  Merteuil, smarting from wounded pride after the (unseen) Comte de Bastide has ended their affair, plots revenge by arranging the bedding and public disgrace of Cécile, Bastide’s virginal fiancée.  This young girl, fresh from the convent, is under the watchful eye of her mother (Swoosie Kurtz), who is also Merteuil’s cousin.  The Marquise seeks to enlist Valmont’s help but he’s already engaged in a project of his own – to bed and bring low the genuinely pious Madame de Tourvel who, with her politician husband away on business, is currently a guest in the home of Valmont’s aunt, Madame de Rosemonde (Mildred Natwick).  Impressed by the breathtaking nerve of his undertaking, Merteuil offers to sleep with Valmont again if he succeeds in seducing Madame de Tourvel and supplies written proof of the conquest.  Valmont takes up the challenge.  Viewers of the film, even if they don’t know Hampton’s play or Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel of 1782 on which it’s based, can probably guess that the two nasty protagonists will eventually get their comeuppance.  The success of Dangerous Liaisons therefore depends on the convoluted journey to its destination being a chilling and beguiling one.  It rarely is because nearly every stylishly spoken line from Merteuil and Valmont is accompanied by a confirmatory, often arch facial expression.  In terms of impact, the two things somehow cancel each other out.

    Glenn Close reads her many lines with pinpoint accuracy but without much surprise.  This is physically one of her best performances, though.  The film’s prologue and epilogue, both at the Marquise’s dressing table and wordless, are two of its highlights.  In the former, attended by her maids, she puts on her face and costume.  In the latter, after Valmont’s death and her public humiliation at the Paris Opera, Merteuil sits alone, removing her make-up.  In between, Close always carries herself with formidable technical control (her portrayal gives new meaning to ‘war paint’ and ‘dressed to kill’).  John Malkovich is less successful and, I think, miscast as Valmont.  His readings are adroit but his snaky look is too much a giveaway – this Valmont has charm but it’s hardly a deceptive charm.  Malkovich is best in occasional, unexpected bursts of physical expression.  The only performance that really yields emotionally is Michelle Pfeiffer’s:  she makes Madame de Tourvel’s undeserved fate tragic.  As the Chevalier Danceny, Cécile’s suitor, Keanu Reeves is as handsomely pointless as his character is perhaps meant to be.  The liveliest contributions in smaller roles come from Mildred Natwick and Peter Capaldi as Valmont’s valet.  The film won three Academy Awards – for Hampton’s adapted screenplay, Stuart Craig and Gérard James’ art direction, and James Acheson’s costume design.  Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer wear their splendid outfits superbly although Dangerous Liaisons also features a deal of what now seems like male gazing at unclothed female bodies.

    7 July 2022

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