Swann in Love

Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff, 1984) Some things are just miracles of happenstance.

 

Director Volker Schlöndorff (The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum, The Tin Drum) was having dinner with his regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and writer-director Peter Brook when Brook casually mentioned that he'd done an adaptation of a section of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (or as it was published in English "A Remembrance of Things Past") and had sufficiently "cracked it" to make a screenplay in the spirit of the novel, but, owing to a busy schedule, couldn't find the time to direct it (as was his intention) and that the producers were looking for a replacement. 

 

"A terrific excitement gripped me..." the director recalled. "'I am available,' I said half-jokingly without thinking it over." Schlöndorff had read the Proust novel when he was seventeen at his boarding school. "Proust revealed three worlds to me: the French language, the corresponding society and the unknown regions of love and jealousy." And the memory of the book was so vivid, he did not go back and re-read it, merely using Brook's script as a template, to recreate the world of La Belle Époque, with a lushness and luxuriousness that recalled the work of Luchino Visconti (who'd tried to make a version of it in 1969) ably helped by the cinematography of Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

Jeremy Irons plays Charles Swann, a well-to-do bon vivant in Paris, accepted in most social circles despite being Jewish. He is a habitue of the most fashionable salons of Paris and, if looked on with suspicion by most of the husbands, is positively cooed over by their wives, particularly the Duchesse de Guermantes (Fanny Ardant) and Madame Verdurin (Marie-Christine Barrault), the latter of whom has suggested that Swann might have an interest in a courtesan, Odette de Cracy (Ornella Muti), to whom he is introduced by his friend, the Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon, in a role that he plays floridly and rather heroically—he's the most fun I've ever seen him).

Their meeting does not initially go well, but over the course of lunch Swann becomes smitten and then obsessed with Odette, his thoughts becoming consumed by her. Especially when she doesn't make herself available to him. His days are spent trying to find out details about her—who her male companions might have been, if she's ever slept with women—personal details the knowledge of which might put him off, but having no desire to not possess her completely. This might cost him—prestige, respect, Odette would never be accepted in the society he enjoys—but, although warned, he loses control of his perceived dignity for this one woman.

"Why do I subject myself to such humiliation?" he muses at one point. "I used to think Odette was ugly! I had to fall in love with her because she reminded me of a Botticelli. Now I've decided to fall out of love with her and I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't! Tonight - tonight, I finally understand that her love for me - which I rejected at first - that the feelings she had for me will never be revived. But without her I will cease to exist. It's an illness that could prove fatal. And yet I'm afraid of being cured." And, later, "My love for Odette goes beyond physical desire. It is so caught up in my actions, my thoughts, my sleep, my life, that without it I'd cease to exist...My love is an illness that has reached the stage where it cannot be removed without destroying me. As surgeons say, it's inoperable."

Wow. Tough words. A brutal self-assessment. And Swann will risk everything—his friends, his status, his dignity—for her. Even when Madame Verdurin attempts to insert a rival between him and Odette, Swann will not be deterred, going so far as to spend the night in Paris trying to find her, trying to find out out anything about the time away from him—actions that even Swann's lowly carriage driver thinks are beneath him—until he can win her over, something that she already desires. "You fear affection? How odd." she says to him at one point. "That's all I look for. I'd give my soul to find it."

And, in a way, she does. There is compromise for comfort, and Swann certainly provides affection, obsessively so, but she loses her own autonomy in that particular bargain (hardly something that is out of the ordinary in any society, much less 19th Century France). Swann, who spends way too much time in his own head, is left, toward the end of his life, to contemplate the mystery of what has become of him, with his usual brutality: "To think that I wasted years of my life - that I wanted to die - that the love of my life - was a woman I didn't like - who wasn't my type."

Well, it's not a mystery to me, as I've nattered on about my thoughts on that subject. But, Proust...and Brook and Schlöndorff, in their time...rather bravely dissect the details and peculiarities and humiliations and self-flagellations that an obsessive love can wreak on a rational mind. It's a lovely film with a particularly wicked sensibility towards a too-common subject. We've had scads of rom-comedies. But, seemingly too few...rom-tragedies?...that still have, outside of the mind, anyway, a conventionally happy ending.

Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade (aka The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade) (Peter Brook, 1967) July 13, 1793 Jean-Paul Marat, revolutionary fire-brand afflicted by a debilitating skin-disease that confined him to a bath was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who had once sided with Marat and now thought his more radical views of the revolution would only bring more disaster and destruction onto France. 

July 13, 1808. It is 15 years later to the day, when Napoleon is Emperor of France and the revolutionary fervor has died down now that France is in the ascendancy as a world-power, even while things are pretty much the same for its citizens that still have their heads attached. In the asylum of Charleton, one of its inmates, the Marquis DeSade takes advantage of some revolutionary therapeutic techniques to stage the murder of Marat with the inmates of the asylum acting out all the parts. An audience of gentry are invited to observe the performance behind bars, while the asylum's director uses the opportunity to curry favor and talk up the sanitarium's accomplishments through its advanced therapies, demonstrating them by holding the performance in the facility's hydrotherapy chamber. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The play goes well after the director's flowery and self-congratulatory introduction, the inmates escorted to the "stage," Marat is played by a paranoiac (Ian Richardson), Corday by a woman (Glenda Jackson) suffering from narcolepsy, the chorus commenting in verse and in song are all done up in clown face, and the Marquis (Patrick Magee) sits sullenly, feigning civility and docility, while putting his invective into the script.

Oh, the layers. It's a film of a play within a play. We are an audience watching (and standing in for) an audience, who could be considered either in front of or behind bars. The play itself is a historical drama with commentary and interjections from the author who inserts himself frequently in the narrative. And the dynamic of jailers overseeing the production of mad-men reflects the government thinking themselves in charge of an unruly mob, a revolution has been mollified, after all, and the right people are in charge in a France that is stronger than ever, led by the proverbial man on a white horse.

Oh, what one could say if one wanted to be pedantically current. But, one could find undercurrents of all sorts of transitions and "revolutions" in the discussions in Marat/Sade—how, for awhile, when things get bad, the public spontaneously combusts, worries the power-brokers about their handle on things, things get better and go back into a torpor as the crowd is satiated with their bread and circuses. Nothing much changes but attitude. And maybe some budgets to be allowed to "trickle-down."

But the play is a microcosm of revolution. De Sade was once a revolutionary, but by the time of play's events, he's found another way. at various times, protests are made of the script and the asylum director steps in to say that things have gone too far, names should not be named to avoid scandal and the Marquis symbolically rips up the script to appear to allow the play to keep going. Because the play is the revolution. To allow it to go on keeps the flame of anarchy alive until such a time as spark can flame and everything descends to chaos.

Because that is the aim. It is one thing to rant and rave and wave one's arms in the air and make a big show. It is quite another to appear docile and allow small victories to keep the show going on. Placate to distract. The end result will still be chaos, because that is the Nature of things, despite our schemes to control them. And when the root is madness...well...

Not even Napoleon could control that.

Olde Review: King Lear (1971)

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Friday's films in 130 Kane are the Northwest Premiere of Peter Brook's King Lear and Roman Polanski's MacBeth, and for those of you who have never had an English course cross your academic path, these are recently filmed interpretations of two of Shakespeare's tragedies.

King Lear (Peter Brook, 1971) Peter Brook is one of those eccentric geniuses in our artistic society of whom it is supposedly required to say that "if he had never been born, we would've had to invent him." That's something of an easy out for critics who don't know enough to know what to praise about the man.

What there is to praise in the film is the play, of course. That's a given. Also a given is the fact that film has abandoned its formerly sterile view of past conditions* to show us the squalor of the times we have left behind us. Brook's interpretation of the squalor of "King Lear's" time is to set it in the dead of winter and the snow mixing with mud and sand sets the dramatic mood and provides a proper backdrop for the icy acting by the principles.

In the initial stages of the film, Brook keeps the direction rigidly under control, leaving little room for the actors to full express their characters, giving the audience a feeling of claustrophobia--such is the confinement of Brook's images. But, as those familiar with "Lear" know, Lear's on-coming madness brings on a steady deterioration of that control; the camera can't contain the performers or the characters, and the onslaught of Lear's insanity is a thorough ripping apart of the control, cataclysmic in intensity, totally destroying what was before. And though it is certainly different from my expectations--my ideas--of how that scene should be handled, my gut reaction to the sequence is that it is right, for we tangibly feel the ripping of Lear's psyche for the film and the film's techniques we have seen before are also ripped apart and we are taken to new territory, just as Lear is.

When studying Shakespeare--when appreciating Shakespeare--I find the best thing I can do is to read it line by line, concentrating on each, finding its independent meaning and then its contextual meaning. Brook does something similar here. In a monologue he will (editorially) isolate phrases, though at times it is distracting, and cuts the flow of the total speech. I am sure it is something of a help to those unfamiliar with "Lear." Overall, it is an eccentric version of (the play), but one, at least, that I can live with.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM November 18th and 19th, 1975

Weird review. It smacks of insecurity being hidden by brio. But I had seen a couple versions of "Lear" and had read it in High School and College, so I was "familiar" with it, probably more so than the other plays, with the exception of "Julius Caesar." Still, it's an odd tone to set for a review--there's too much "me" in it. I was no Shakespeare expert then, nor am I now.

And Brook's technique for Lear was very much in keeping with his stage style. He famously said, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage." Even more so with film. Take any expanse of space and put a frame around it and you have a film, even if it's nothing but a black background with a face in front of it. And the thing about film is, there doesn't have to be a strict adherence to the concept of "stage." Olivier staged his Hamlet in a labyrinth of stages. He started his film of Henry V on a stage and opened it up to the outside world later in the film. Welles ignored any rules: his Othello was filmed in such a catch-as-catch-can manner (finaciers bailing) that he would shoot one side of a conversation in one country and shoot the over-the-shoulder reply in another. "All the world's a stage," indeed.

The other thing about Brook's Lear is the pedigree of the actors. One of those actors I always enjoy watching is Paul Scofield--winner of the Oscar for playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons--he'll show up later this week in another reviewed Shakespeare film. He plays Lear here; first, as a cruel, unfeeling martinet of a King, and lastly, as a pathetic, broken old man--off-putting and sad, but always with great stores of power. Scofield never lets you forget that though Lear is many things, he was always King for a reason. Jack McGowran plays The Fool. Cyral Cusack plays Albany and Patrick Magee plays Cornwall. Great cast. Maybe not stars, but extraordinarily powerful stage actors.

Someone's always staging Lear; it's the K2 of parts for older actors. Next year we're going to be seeing two productions: PBS will (supposedly, at this point) show a video production of Sir Ian McKellan's Lear, and a new filmed version is due in a year, with Sir Anthony Hopkins as Lear...and as his daughters, the triple threat of Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Naomi Watts. I hope they have enough sense to have Paltrow play Cordelia and Knightley one of the cruel sisters. (Update: No, Knightley will play Cordelia, Regan will be played by Paltrow, and Watts will play Goneril--ah, well!).

Update on the update: McKellan's version was made. The Hopkins was not.

* A throw-back to the stage-origins of the plays. Lately, Shakespeare has been getting gritty and grimy.