Joseph Losey  (1973)

To say that Ibsen’s play makes a virtue of a single set is putting it mildly.  It illustrates and intensifies the predicament of Nora Helmer, who can’t extricate herself from the consequences of past actions which have come back to haunt her.  It’s integral to the theme of the claustrophobic marriage, which emerges as her underlying captivity.  David Mercer’s opening out of the story in this adaptation is counterproductive and sometimes ridiculous.  He tacks on to the Christmas Eve starting point of the play a good fifteen minutes of backstory.  We see Nora and Kristine Linde together, in the days before Nora married Torvald Helmer;  Nils Krogstad is glimpsed, an ominously looming figure, on a hillside above the frozen lake where the two women have been skating.  We get the bedroom of Nora’s dying father, with Dr Rank in attendance – then preparation for the Helmers’ trip to Italy.  A short scene shows Kristine giving Krogstad the brush-off, another Krogstad throwing his splenetic weight around at the bank where Torvald is about to take over as manager.  It all serves no purpose except to reduce the impact of the characters – especially Krogstad – when they re-enter the action.  Once the Ibsen part of the picture gets going, Mercer’s screenplay (based on Michael Meyer’s translation for the stage) is pretty faithful in terms of dialogue – but it’s broken up into scenes, much shorter than the play’s, located in various places around the town where the piece is set.  (The film was shot in provincial Norway.)   Mercer didn’t rewrite the material enough to provide a rationale for why the characters keep zipping around – at several points there’s no good reason for their being where they are, except that it’s not where we last saw them.

Joseph Losey and Mercer appear to think that, because A Doll’s House was pioneering naturalistic theatre in 1879, it’s made for adaptation into naturalistic cinema a century later (as if there were just one kind and level of dramatic naturalism) – and that regular changes of location are enough to make a piece more ‘cinematic’.   It’s a crazy miscalculation.  Most of the relocated scenes remain essentially static conversation pieces – the same goes for the apocryphal additions.  (Once they’ve taken their skates off, Nora and Kristine just sit and talk in a café.)  Occasionally Losey’s appetite for melodramatic colour produces an unintended laugh, as when Krogstad bellows threats to Nora on a snowy hilltop.  (This bit gives a new meaning to the earlier line in the script that this is a small town where news gets around fast:  it’s a wonder that Krogstad’s imprecations don’t echo down the hill so that the whole community can hear.)    Losey’s use of exteriors also draws attention to the fact that there’s a lot more daylight than you’d expect in Norway in midwinter.  (The film hasn’t aged well visually in even the most basic sense:  the BFI apologised for the quality of the print – one of those fade-to-pink jobs.)    In the early stages Michel Legrand’s meaningless score is on the soundtrack almost continuously and the film’s lack of impetus means that, in spite of the changes of scenery, the tempo is pedestrian (it feels a good deal longer than its 106 minutes).  The pointlessness of the Losey-Mercer approach comes across most clearly in the climactic exchange between Nora and Torvald, which takes place, as it should, in one room:  it’s the only sequence in the picture with any momentum.

All five of the main performances are thoughtful but I found myself watching the actors at a remove – getting an idea of how effective they might have been if the mise en scène hadn’t been so misconceived.  And they’re performing in different styles:  Losey isn’t able to orchestrate the playing – so that you never believe this collection of individuals belong to the same time and place.   Edward Fox snarls plenty but he has no real inner force as Krogstad:  you don’t get a sense of how this man’s self-loathing and vengefulness feed off each other.   (Fox is surprisingly more effective when things start looking up for Krogstad.)   As Kristine, Delphine Seyrig is markedly less theatrical than the others:  her hesitancy speaking English means that some of the stresses are wrong and – a bigger problem – she throws away too much.  Even so, she’s a lovely, rather mysterious presence:  Seyrig, an intuitive screen actress, makes you want to know more about Kristine than she tells you.  Trevor Howard is good at suggesting Dr Rank’s suave misery, particularly his fear of death, although some of his effects are relatively stagy.   David Warner’s is probably the best performance:   he’s absorbed Torvald’s boringness and bullying condescension and created a convincing portrait of a quiet tyrant, imperviously self-centred.  He also shows Torvald as strongly physically attracted to his wife – an aspect of the relationship I’ve not seen before.  Although she’s resourceful and often vivid, Jane Fonda is probably miscast as Nora – frivolity, even willed frivolity, doesn’t come easily to her.  The distance between the naturalism of A Doll’s House and that of 1970s American cinema, which Fonda epitomises, is jarringly evident in a scene like the one when Kristine reappears in Nora’s life:  you can sense Fonda’s incredulity that, in a matter of seconds, Nora would get beyond her surprise at seeing Kristine again and they would be straight into intensely personal conversation.   Fonda is powerful in the final showdown with Torvald but I felt that she came out of character here to an extent that went beyond Nora’s transformation.  It’s as if Jane Fonda has been marking time until this point – doing the supposed scatterbrain on sufferance, impatient to get to the feminist meat of the piece.

16 July 2009