costume drama

Under Capricorn (1949)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

In Douglas Brode’s book Edge of Your Seat, he writes of Under Capricorn: “Tepid, uninvolving mishmash set down under, with stars utterly unbelievable as Aussie husband and wife […] in a creaky, soap-operish plot that goes absolutely nowhere and, worse still, takes forever getting there.” Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers listed forty thrillers in the book, this is one of only two single-star reviews (the other is Topaz). In Truffaut/Hitchcock, the master of suspense recalled a contemporary NYT review that stated the first suspenseful moment comes at 100 minutes into the run time. In his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, leading man Joseph Cotten called the movie “Under Corny Crap,” and the film’s box office likely suffered due to the scandal surrounding Ingrid Bergman that same year, when she became pregnant with the child of Roberto Rossellini (they were both married at the time). To circle back to Mr. Brode’s notation above, he makes two major errors: first, both Sam (Cotten) and Hattie Flusky (Bergman) are Irish expats living in Australia (though they remain “utterly unbelievable” as Irish folks as well), and secondly, this is not a thriller, but a melodrama that cribs from Gaslight in its final moments. Audiences at the time had come to expect something different from the filmmaker; in the preceding decade alone, he had made Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt (also starring Cotten), and Notorious, just to name a few. Under Capricorn, I would imagine, shares more in common with his earlier British non-thriller dramas like The Skin Game or Rich and Strange, and I would also go so far as to posit that it’s filed with his suspense films less because of the content of the feature itself and more because forty makes for a nicer, rounder number for a list of “Hitchcock Thrillers” than thirty-nine does. 

Not only is this a melodrama, it’s also a period piece, which meant it was already starting on the back foot for me. Taking place in the 1830s in New South Wales, then still a penal colony under British rule, the film finds Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arriving in Sydney with his second cousin, Sir Richard, whom the crown has appointed as the region’s new governor. Charles is the youngest son of his family, and the practice of primogeniture means that he is set to inherit nothing, so he has come to the colony to seek his fortune. Although he’s a man of good humor, he’s fairly disinterested in honest work. After meeting with a local bank manager to discuss his prospects, he meets Sam Flusky, seeming to recognize the name; the manager tells him that Flusky is a successful landowner but also an emancipist (someone sent to Australia for penal reasons who has since served their time but remained on the continent). Despite being warned against becoming socially linked to Flusky, whose newfound wealth has not resulted in his acceptance in high society (such as it is) in Sydney, and being directly forbidden from associating with him by his cousin, Charles accepts an invitation to a dinner party at Sam’s. The dinner is attended solely by several local gentlemen, all of whom deliver poor excuses for the absence of their respective wives. The reason becomes clear when Sam’s wife, Hattie, descends the stairs in a drunken stupor. Surprised, Charles recognizes her as a childhood friend of his older sister’s, and suddenly recollects that she left Ireland suddenly when she eloped with a man below her station. Said man was her stable boy, Sam, who was sentenced to seven years on the chain gang for the slaying of Hattie’s brother Dermot. 

Sam, recognizing Charles’s immediate rehabilitative effect on Hattie, asks him to stay with them in his manor house; this raises the ire of Flusky’s housekeeper Milly (Margaret Leighton), who has become accustomed to running the household in Hattie’s stead, all while enabling and facilitating Mrs. Flusky’s all-hours stupefaction. What follows is a series of vignettes, as Charles manages, over time, to wean Hattie off the bottle and encourage her to reassert herself as mistress of the house. When Milly purposefully embarrasses her in front of the other servants, Hattie retreats back to her room and locks herself in; Charles climbs up to the balcony and lets himself in, setting her right again. Sam is not entirely unaware of the love that Charles begins to have for Hattie, but he also adores his wife and believes that she deserves to re-enter the society that shunned her while she waited seven years for her husband to be freed from imprisonment. When Charles’s various subterfuges pay off and Hattie attends a ball at the governor’s mansion, Milly poisons Sam’s mind with thoughts of their potential infidelities, resulting in Sam arriving and embarrassing Hattie so thoroughly that her rejection from high society is confirmed. Poor horseman Charles departs the Flusky home on the back of Sam’s wild mare, and the animal breaks its leg, forcing Sam to shoot the old girl and put her out of her misery. A confrontation with Charles follows, and Charles is shot, albeit nonfatally, leaving him delirious and intermittently unconscious; since Sam is a previously convicted felon, he is likely to be hanged for the crime. 

This prompts Hattie to admit that it was actually she who shot her brother, and that Sam took the fall for her. When she confesses to the governor, he tells her that she will have to return to Ireland to stand trial, but Sam refuses to corroborate her version of events. Reluctantly, Sam decides he will return with her and leave his life as a nouveau riche gentleman behind, much to Milly’s chagrin. To keep him in Australia, she tries to poison Hattie, but is exposed, as is her scheme of making Hattie believe she’s losing her mind by leaving shrunken human heads in the lady’s suite. Charles recovers enough to claim that his shooting was an accident, and we all end happily ever after, with Sam and Hattie’s love having conquered all, and Charles returning to Ireland in disgrace, but cheerful. 

Under Capricorn is notable in that, like its immediate predecessor in Hitch’s C.V., Rope, the film is shot almost entirely in long, unedited shots, although the breaks here are a little more obvious than in his previous film. Unfortunately, they don’t end up amounting to much. There’s a credit for the use of Technicolor here, but it feels like a waste of that technology, as this a mostly beige and brown movie; Charles wears a couple of blue and green waistcoats, but the color of them is so muted that it hardly seems like costuming should have gone through the effort at all. That’s not to say that the film looks bad, but it certainly doesn’t leap off of the screen. Since this was a melodrama and not a suspense thriller, I couldn’t help but think about Douglas Sirk’s films in the genre. The snow in All That Heaven Allows is so pure and white that it almost looks blue, and the absurdly pink bedroom of Lana Turner’s daughter at the end of Imitation of Life is doing some excellent environmental storytelling; there’s not a single image in this film that’s as visually arresting as the scenery that Sirk worked with. The extended shots display a mastery of the craft, but it’s no surprise that Hitchcock made precisely two movies composed entirely of “oners” and then went back to using the technique only when it matters. In Rope, the film’s real-time nature makes that work for the entire thing, whereas its use in Under Capricorn feels like a failed experiment. It’s an interesting technical exercise, but nothing more. 

I viewed this as a Kino Lorber release, and while their print looks quite good, the quality control on the subtitles is, frankly, unacceptable. Flusky’s Roger Corman-quality matte painting house is named “Minyago Yugilla,” which supposedly means “Why weepest thou?”, and every time someone translates this for another character, the captions substitute “though” for “thou,” and that’s only one of the many errors that makes one wonder who’s minding the store over there. (I’m personally willing to accept, at a very reasonable rate, any proofreading jobs that any boutique physical media retailer has to offer, if there are any companies that are still offering this kind of work instead of outsourcing it to AI to be botched.) It’s not even as if the dialogue is all that difficult for a captioner to understand; to say that anyone in the film is failing at an Irish (or Australian) accent would be a lie, because it would imply that there is a single person in the cast who’s making the effort to even try one. There’s not much to speak of when it comes to extras on the disc, either, if that’s of interest to you. 

All of that being said, I went into this expecting a much worse film, and perhaps because my expectations were so low, I didn’t despise it the way that Brode, Cotten, Hitchcock, and the film-going public did. It held my interest well enough, even if it wasn’t terribly exciting, and I don’t think that I’ll ever revisit it or recommend it to others. This may be the worst performance of Bergman’s storied career; it is, at least, the worst one I’ve witnessed. Not helping matters is the hideous period dress that she’s forced to don on several occasions. Every bonnet they put on Bergman is more ostentatiously ugly than the last, and there’s a set of nightclothes that she wears that are meticulously decorated with lace that seems strategically placed to make one ask “Why?” There is already a nineteenth century period piece in which Bergman plays a wife driven to madness, featuring the presence of a sullen housemaid and Cotten in a lead role, and in which Bergman is publicly embarrassed at a societal function when she dares to leave the house for the first time in years. It’s Gaslight, obviously, and it’s a much, much better picture than this one. Under Capricorn is for completists only, and only the kind of completist who needs to either (a) see every Hitchcock ever made, or (b) who needs to watch all of the master of suspense’s thrillers while also needing the number of the said films to be an even forty.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812 (1967)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

War and Peace: Part III: The Year 1812 opens with the same shot which ended Part II: Natasha Rostova, as Napoleon’s army of thousands enters the Russian theater of war. We then return to Russian high society, where the final lines of the previous film, regarding war as an event “beyond human nature, and human reason” are repeated over the image of another gala, but this one is quickly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers onto the ballroom floor, disrupting everything and turning the perfectly formed lines of group dances into chaos. The image contrasts Napoleon’s incoming army, so regimented and moving in perfect union, to the disruption of that same uniformity on the home front. There’s a strange air of casual indifference to the war among those far from the front lines, until it’s nearly knocking down their doors. The incompetence of Field Marshal Kutuzov, who eventually oversees (and utterly botches) the Battle of Bordino, is a matter of aristocratic gossip, to be pulled out, picked over, and joked about at fancy parties. 

Part III, thus, ends up being a story about the ignorance of an older generation. I’ve puzzled over what I perceive to be an ideological disconnection between the Soviet philosophy and these films’ romanticized depiction of the aristocracy of the era. Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk) and Andre Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov)’s world is one of ornamented decadence; Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), who is once again reduced to little more than a background character for this outing, is both a product of that lifestyle and an object of desire within it. The Year 1812 is the shortest of the four films, at only eighty minutes, and it’s divided neatly in half at the midpoint by the beginning of the Bordino conflict, with that battle playing out over the last half of the runtime. The first half is itself divided in two, with the first quarter of the film focusing on what’s going on back in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the second quarter depicting the preparations for the war that will take up the back half. In the beginning, we meet a boy who can’t be more than ten years old, begging his family to allow him to join the army, despite, as his guardian says, his lips still being wet with his mother’s milk. We move from here to the Bolkonsky home, where the elder Prince Andrei is being tended to in his dying days by Princess Maria, the younger Prince Andrei’s sister, who is also overseeing the raising of Andrei’s son. 

Despite increasingly bad news about the Russian Army’s performance on the borders, including a letter from Andrei the younger saying that he fears the very camp he’s writing from will be taken by the French by the time it finds its way home, Andrei the elder doesn’t absorb any of this. It would appear at first to be dementia, but when he finally understands the peril in which Russia finds itself on his death bed, it’s an equally valid interpretation that he had simply rejected reality with a clear mind all along. This is mirrored in the more war-oriented parts of the film, where we see that the jokes that the upper class have been making about Field Marshal Kutuzov are apt; he’s unable to mount his horse, is winded at the slightest exercise, and, in a piece of on-the-nose characterization, blind in one eye. There is a boy in his camp that’s barely any older than the child we saw at the very beginning, and may even be the boy to whom that first child was referring when he said “Obolensky’s younger than I and he’s going.” There are other parallels, but the reading I take from the film is that this is a story that is made to address the inadequacies of the generation that preceded Pierre and Andre’s, one that is full of fools, truth-deniers, and incompetents who rose to power through nothing but birthright alone. The nineteenth century has come, and although the new generation sees things as they are, the trappings of the old ways and their attendant wealth are still with our characters (and still empower them). I must admit, however, that I haven’t quite parsed out what value the Soviets perceived in all the gilded filigree of the monied nobility, and how they were able to square what appears to be a celebration thereof with the anti-aristocratic political ideation of the government that funded and empowered the creation of this unbelievably massive undertaking.

In truth, I’m beginning to feel that I may not understand the actual overall thesis at all. Shortly before the Battle of Borodino, latrines are being dug and maimed soldiers are borne away from the lines of engagement in carts when Pierre, resplendent in expensive, clean white clothing (and a top hat to boot), appears to meet his friend Andrei and offer his services. Following the dual narratives in Part I, which saw Pierre and Andrei separately coming to the realization of just how precious and fragile life is, it feels redundant to have them seem to learn this lesson again. Maybe there’s something deeply Russian about revisiting this again, that the cyclic and reiterative structure is a literary device to which I’m unaccustomed or that it’s aiming for something that I’m failing to perceive. It’s also possible that it’s simply becoming more difficult to keep track of the intricacies of the narrative, or perhaps this is merely a reminder of their values when faced with another miserable war. Andrei’s only real notable moment of agency in this is that he rejects a staff position under Kutuzov and instead remains in a command position in actual combat, which underlines a soliloquy he has about how war is not a game and that the men above him in the chain of command are too far removed from the horror of it all. And it is grisly, and nightmarish, and through all of it, Kutuzov sits in a state of relaxation, enjoying tea and canapes while filtering out the reports of death and destruction that surround him. Like the elder Prince Andrei, he only hears what he wants to hear and turns his literal blind eye to the reality of the rapidly deteriorating battle around him. As a result of his ineptitude, Pierre even ends up getting splattered in the blood of the young attendant who might be Obolensky. 

It feels redundant, at this point, to go on praising the masterful filmmaking here, but it really is spectacular. War is once again hell, the screen filled with images from nightmares, smoke and blood and gunpowder and fear. Anatole, who almost eloped with Natasha last time, has his leg amputated, which is witnessed by Andrei (and the audience), and it’s nauseating. We go from a scene in which a grateful army descends on a small lake in the nude and en masse to bathe themselves, and they seem jovial, and it undercuts it even further when we see these same men gutted and killed in the fog of war. I’m still trying to fully grasp at every different thesis that War and Peace is laying before the audience; I can only hope that Part IV is capable of wrapping up all of those threads and braiding them into a tapestry that fills in the gaps in my interpretation. We’ll find out soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Queen Margot (1994)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Do Americans care about the César Awards? The annual film awards ceremony is colloquially known as “The French Oscars,” but it doesn’t get nearly as much Oscars-precursor press coverage as, say, “The British Oscars” (The BAFTAs), which Americans already only barely pretend to care about. I presume a large part of that cross-cultural indifference has to do with the fact that France already has a super prestigious awards ceremony at Cannes, which tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen in that industry. Last year, for instance, Jafar Panahi’s political revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to earn great international acclaim, while The Ties that Bind Us won Best Film at The César Awards and has been heard of by no one outside the borders of France. The year before, Emilia Pérez swept the César Awards before becoming an openly mocked punchline at The Oscars, and no one knew to make fun of their French colleagues for it because no one pays attention to the Césars. I say all this to note that I have no idea how big of a deal it is that the 1994 historical drama Queen Margot won five César Awards in its qualifying year (for cinematography, costume design, and nearly every acting category), since its single, subsequent nomination for Best Costume Design at the Oscars has at best left it as a pop culture footnote. No American is picking up a used DVD copy of Queen Margot at the thrift store because it was a major player at The French Oscars; we’re picking it up because it advertises a blood-soaked Isabelle Adjani on the cover, and she has an impeccable track record of being great in movies where her character is having a bad day.

If I closed my eyes and imagined what a stereotypical film that cleans up at an event called “The French Oscars” would look like, I would picture something a lot like Queen Margot. The lavish historical drama details the big-picture atrocities and petty personal betrayals of the French royal court during the 16th Century crusades, in which the Catholics in control of the nation were eager to “convert” (i.e, kill) all Protestants by sword or die trying. It’s a staggeringly extravagant production in its scale, its costuming and, because it’s French, its sex & violence. Star Isabelle Adjani’s glamour-shot lighting is extravagant as well, with more attention paid to her stoic beauty than to her trademark talent for simulating a total mental breakdown, as featured in earlier titles like Possession, The Story of Adele H, and Camile Claudel. Of course, Adjani continues to suffer here—as that is her specialty—but she does so quietly instead of thrashing her body against the proverbial tunnel wall. She starts the movie being forced into a sham royal wedding that is either meant to end the Catholic-Protestant conflict through cross-faith marriage or meant to bait her scheming family’s enemies to a single location for convenient slaughter, depending on who you ask. Regardless, the opening wedding celebrations quickly devolve into a Paris-wide bloodbath and Adjani’s queen-to-be has to spend the rest of the movie negotiating the continued survival of both her brothers and her lovers as the conflict plays out. She has very little success in that regard and often finds herself mourning one loved one after another, but she looks great doing so, never missing the spotlight for her closeups.

By American & British costume drama standards, Queen Margot is shocking in its scale and its extremity. Whether it’s staging a celebratory post-wedding orgy or a horrific battlefield massacre, there are bodies everywhere. Every wide shot is packed with extras in exquisitely detailed costumes, often for them to be removed or destroyed depending on the mood of the moment. Every candlelit interior is warmly intimate and carefully arranged – every frame a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the sex & bloodshed are deliberately ugly & messy. Slit throats spew geysers of blood, like a visual gag from Kill Bill Vol. 1. Whenever sexually frustrated, the titular royal LARPs as a streetwalker, enjoying anonymous alley sex with peasants as if a simple half-mask could obscure a face as striking as Adjani’s. People fuck; they kill; they hunt wild boars for sport and then fuck & kill during the excitement. It’s like an overlong, over-serious episode of The Great in that way, to the point where I’d be shocked to learn that this wasn’t a formative work for screenwriter Tony MacNamara. The very best sequences find a way to combine the sex & violence into a single lethal concoction, created in a mad-scientist lab by Margot’s mother’s perfumer, who also dabbles in poisons. He creates a poisoned glove, a poisoned book, and a poisoned batch of makeup that offer a much softer, more sensual murder method than the sword-wielding brutes outside the Louvre. Of course, those poisons can be gnarly too, causing their victims to bleed to death out of every pore in prolonged agony. The movie never misses its chance to show the audience some more blood.

Queen Margot opens with a long scroll of expository text that orients the audience in its historical setting, followed by forty or so minutes of character introductions before its melodrama starts in earnest. That relatively dry intro and the film’s lingering reputation as an awards-season period piece will lead you to expect something much statelier & more subdued than what’s ultimately delivered. Once the stage is set, though, it wastes no time indulging in the grotesque sex & violence of its 16th Century royal court, where it’s totally natural to hear lovers plead, “I want to see the image of my death in my pleasure” while fucking and combatants declare, “For each one you kill a sin will be forgiven!” while fighting. It’s a real actor’s showcase in that way, with plenty space in its near-three-hour runtime for every performer in the main cast to get in their own awards show clips. Notably, Adjani did win Best Actress at the 20th César Awards for her performance as the titular lead, but at Cannes that honor went to her co-star Virna Lisi, who plays her scheming mother (Catherine, the court’s #1 poison enthusiast). Adjani already had earned two Best Actress wins at past Cannes for Possession & Quartet, but it’s still a surprising footnote among the film’s official accolades, continuing the two women’s mutually destructive onscreen power struggle to the press circuit. They did both go on to win separate acting awards at The French Oscars, but I’m still not totally sure of those statues’ worth. Hell, the American Oscars awarded two statues to the aforementioned Emilia Pérez a couple years ago, so even the ceremonies we do pay attention to are effectively a joke.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #246: Howards End (1992) & Merchant Ivory

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Welcome to Episode #246 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Merchant Ivory costume dramas, starting with the company’s 1992 hit Howards End.

00:00 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
08:17 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
10:52 Salt of the Earth (1954)
16:18 Weapons (2025)

27:09 Howards End (1992)
56:10 Savages (1972)
1:11:26 Quartet (1981)
1:23:04 The Remains of the Day (1993)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

The Age of Innocence (1993)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (1996)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The 1996 BBC Films production of Twelfth Night: Or What You Will is a mostly faithful staging of the classic Shakespeare comedy, directed by The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn. It’s not the kind of MTV-era update to Shakespeare’s text that you’ll find in fellow 90s titles like 10 Things I Hate About You or My Own Private Idaho, which tried to Make the Bard Cool Again for a generation who mostly knew him through frustrating homework assignments.  You wouldn’t know that from Twelfth Night‘s poster, though, which sold it as exactly that.  Attempting to cash in on a recent string of mainstream gay comedies with themes of crossdressing & drag, 1996’s Twelfth Night was marketed with the tagline, “Before Priscilla crossed the desert, Wong Foo met Julie Newmar, and the Birdcage was unlocked, there was … Twelfth Night.”  I assume most adults expecting a boundary-pushing gay farce based on that marketing would’ve found this film tame by comparison, as the queer sexual tension of the text isn’t updated or sensationalized for the 90s in any flashy, daring way.  If nothing else, it’s somewhat surprising that Tromeo & Juliet is the 1996 Shakespeare update that includes a lesbian makeout session, given which one would’ve been supported by its source text.

I have to imagine, then, that this version of Twelfth Night was a little more subtle & subversive in its queer appeal.  If the adult audience marketed to in that tagline were already well fed by the mainstream echoes of New Queer Cinema and the bratty teens of the time were looking for Shakespeare plays set in the halls of their high school (preferably starring Julia Styles), it’s the younger, more sheltered crowd who would’ve benefited most from the queer themes of Shakespeare’s play.  It’s not hard to imagine a heavily policed gay preteen who wasn’t allowed to rent a copy of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sneaking Twelfth Night past their parents as a cultured, educational video store selection.  1996’s Twelfth Night seems ideally suited as a queer-awakening VHS rental for younger audiences who grew up watching titles like Ever After, The Secret Garden, and The Secret of Roan Inish in regular slumber party rotation or on solo lazy afternoons.  Romeo+Juliet was the Shakespeare update with true Gay 90s™ flair; this one lets the confused-lust genderfuckery of the original play stand on its own without any post-MTV stylistic embellishments.  It’s very warmly pleasant & endearing for that, and maybe even quietly transgressive depending on the parental censorship of your childhood household.

I won’t dare recount the plot of such a faithful adaptation of the original play here, at least not until this blog starts generating income as a SparkNotes subsidiary.  All you need to know is that twins who make do as traveling entertainers are separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead.  Putting their twin-magic cabaret act to good use, the sister goes into hiding in male drag and quickly gets entangled in a queer love triangle with a man & woman who use her as a romantic surrogate, to the sexual confusion of everyone involved.  Then, her near-identical twin brother shows up wearing the same dumb little wispy mustache, leading to a chaotic reset to normalcy at a heterosexual wedding, in classic farcical tradition.  Before order is restored, though, there’s plenty of intense dwelling on the same-gender attraction stoked by the hiding-in-drag sitcom premise.  Characters often breathe heavy as they lean in for a near-kiss – an exchange that reads gay whether it’s Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her male employer or Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her employer’s female crush.  Other highlights include tender bathtub flirtation between bros and an opening-credits montage where Viola first gets into Cesario drag, with major emphasis put on her stuffing the crotch of her pants for accuracy.  It’s not hard to imagine a young audience discovering things about themselves watching all of this gender play & queer desire onscreen, and it’s all presented under the guise of traditional, sophisticated theatre.

Presuming that you are no longer a sheltered 90s child depending on Blockbuster Video rentals to smuggle Gay Content into your family home, the best reason to watch the 1996 Twelfth Night at this point is the cast.  Imogen Stubbs does a decent enough job in the central Cesario drag king role, in which (through Viola) she mostly equates being a man to being a Bugs Bunny level smartass.  Ben Kingsley, Richard E. Grant, and Nigel Hawthorne are all formidable fools in the goofball periphery of the central conflict as well, along with what I can only presume are veterans of The Royal Shakespeare Company and of multi-episode arcs of Downton Abbey.  The real draw in the cast, though, is a young Helena Bonham Carter, especially if you have any nostalgia for the era when her time machine got stuck in centuries past and she made a name for herself playing love interests in costume dramas (including an early starring role in director Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane).  While the film’s younger video store audiences experienced a queer awakening at home, HBC was experiencing a kind of goth awakening onscreen as Olivia, who’s introduced in mourning for her own deceased brother, which is what attracts Viola to her.  She takes to black lace like no one before or since; it’s a marriage built to last longer than any among the story’s main players, so it’s romantic to think that it all started here.

-Brandon Ledet

Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of journalistic handwringing over the Twitter bots behind the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut “movement”, following reports that at least 13% of the accounts behind that online uproar were 100% fake.  I’m not sure what part of that revelation was supposed to be a shock, except that maybe 13% feels like a low-end estimate.  Anyone who’s ever been tortured by a Twitter-feed algorithm should be well used to seeing a nonstop flood of automated, incoherent “opinions” posted by fake accounts.  That’s especially true when it comes to superhero movie discourse, which I’m convinced alone accounts for at least 13% of all non-pornographic internet traffic.  It’s much more shocking when that kind of organized bot-posting swells up around something that doesn’t involve superheroes, like the out-of-nowhere outrage over 2020’s Cuties or the more recent, even more preposterous outrage over the Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion.  When the trailer for Netflix’s cheeky, modernized version of Persuasion was released, there were plenty of sincere (even if hyperbolic) complaints about how it bungled the tone of the source material, marketing one of Austen’s most heartbreaking dramas as a Clueless-style comedy for Zoomers.  That Austen Fan Club outrage must’ve “done some numbers,” because every third post on my Twitter feed for weeks was labeled “Trending: Dakota Johnson”, with hundreds of accounts named “AustenFreak347492947” complaining that Austen didn’t know what a playlist was, so she would not have written that screenplay.  I’m not going to weigh in on whether Johnson’s flippant zingers about playlists & exes are appropriately respectful to the source material, since I have neither seen the film nor read the novel.  I just think it’s bizarre that any Austen adaptation could generate the same kind of widespread, automated online outrage as a $300mil superhero epic, much less something as insubstantial as a Netflix Original.

If there’s anything to be learned from the Austen & Snyder debacles—both real & fake—it’s that creators do not need to listen to The Fans.  Maybe the hardcore Persuasionheads out there had a genuine point about how that specific work was inappropriate for a playfully modern, Fleabag-style update.  That sentiment quickly backslid into inane, astroturfed discourse about how any straying from the tone & text of any movie’s source material is somehow shameful.  It’s the same pedantic, close-minded thinking that sends comic book nerds into belligerent rages about “faithfulness”, except this time it’s dressed up in lacy bodices instead of spandex & capes.  Worse, it leads to boring, unimaginative movies.  I happened to watch the 2015 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel Far from the Madding Crowd around the time of the Austen Bot invasion, and it was heavily weighed down by faithfulness.  Determined to hit every plot point of the novel, Thomas Vinterberg plows through the events of the text like a video game speed run, cramming decades of love & loss into what appears to be two page turns of a calendar.  It’s a prolonged, episodic storytelling style that feels more at home in a BBC miniseries than a mid-budget Oscar contender. Bot outrage over movie adaptations taking creative liberties with their source texts feels just as juvenile as complaints about sex scenes that don’t “advance the plot”.  If that kind of indulgence bothers you, I promise you’d be much happier just watching TV instead of movies.  At its best, cinema is streamlined & poetically expressive; it also says just as much about the time when it’s made as it does about the time when it’s set.  Maybe the new Persuasion movie didn’t update & reinterpret Austen’s novel especially well, but the attempt to do so shouldn’t be an offense in itself.  At least, I found myself wishing Vinterberg had shaken up Hardy’s novel a little himself, instead of carefully coloring within the lines drawn out a century earlier.

All that said, the central conflict of Far from the Madding Crowd is compelling even without embellishment, and it’s obvious enough why it’s been adapted several times over the decades.  Usually, in these literary costume dramas our heroine has to choose between two potential beaus: one that looks good on paper and one that feels right in her heart.  Hardy explodes that template by throwing in a third wild card option that fucks everything up for everyone involved.  Carey Mulligan stars as an independently wealthy landowner who’s reluctant to become “some man’s property” through marriage.  Michael Sheen plays her potential mate who looks best on paper, proposing to merge their two adjacent estates into one enormous, profitable empire.  Matthias Schoenaerts is the beau who feels right in her heart – a once-independent farmer who falls on hard times and dedicates the rest of his life in service of her success instead of his own, patiently waiting for her to admit to herself that she loves him.  And then there’s Tom Sturridge as the toxic fuckboy military man who breaks up that classic love triangle with a sudden rush of sex & chaos, challenging Mulligan’s self-image as a strong, independent thinker by directly appealing to her libido.  It’s all very well performed and narratively engaging (especially if you aren’t already familiar with where it’s going), but it doesn’t offer much in the way of interpretation or personalization.  If anything, Vinterberg is outright stubborn in his refusal to modernize, shooting this traditionally lit & costumed drama through a modern digital grain that feels like a tug of war between form & content.  The 2015 version of Far from the Madding Crowd is perfectly serviceable if you’re looking for any old costume drama to fill up your Sunday afternoon, but there’s nothing especially urgent or unique about what it has to offer within that genre outside illustrating the scene-to-scene events of its source text.

Of course, the two most exciting elements of Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd are the ones where he does modernize the novel.  There’s something thrilling about Mulligan’s wardrobe in particular, which conveys her badass girlboss independence by toughening up her 19th Century fashions with leather, denim, and pants.  The hypegirl sidekick she adopts when she first starts running her own farm is also a distinctly modern thrill, played with flippant Gen-Z sass by The End of the Fucking World‘s Jessica Barden.  Hardy’s novel is already packed with enough sex, death, and cruelty to feel freshly modern in comparison to buttoned-up costume dramas of the past, but Mulligan’s heavy denim dress and Barden’s aggressive brattiness are really what brings the film up to date.  Personally, I’m a sucker for that kind of modern intrusion into historical settings.  When Sofia Coppola snuck some Chucks into Marie Antoinette’s shoe closet, I was cheering while the most boring nerds in the room were rolling their eyes.  The very best Austen adaptations of my lifetime have all been cheekily modern, like Autumn De Wild’s Emma., Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and, of course, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.  I’m sure there are plenty of very real people who had very legitimate reasons for balking at that Persuasion trailer, but I would also like to think, for my own sanity, that most of the ones complaining that Jane Austen didn’t know about playlists were the softer side of Snyder bots.  There has to be more to movies than just faithfully illustrating the literal events of their source texts as they were written.  Otherwise, we’ve completely lost the dividing line between art & content, a thought too grim to bear.

-Brandon Ledet

Mothering Sunday (2022)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

If there’s anything especially noteworthy about the post-WWI romance Mothering Sunday, it’s the sex.  By most metrics, the film is exactly what you’d expect from a BFI-funded costume drama in which a deflated Colin Firth & Olivia Colman mope around a cold, tidy estate in mourning of their young sons, lost to the horrors of war.  At the same time, it’s unusually fixated on the sexual awakening of that grieving couple’s young maid, often in raunchy detail.  Mothering Sunday features way more onscreen semen & peen than you’ll see in other stately costume dramas of its ilk (provided by The Crown‘s Josh O’Connor, in case that matters), to the point where there are multiple(!!) scenes depicting cum stains on bedsheets.  It’s not overflowing with fun, adventurous sex scenes or anything; it’s not Season 1 Bridgerton.  Instead, it lingers on one unrushed, afternoon-lit sexual encounter that reverberates loudly through the rest of the maid’s life, as told in a loose, disorienting mix of flashbacks, flashforwards, and looping images.

Shirley’s Odessa Young stars as the maid in question, a sheltered service worker who’s given a full sex-ed crash course by a family friend (O’Connor) of her employers (Firth & Colman).  In the lull between World Wars, the English village where she works is suffering one of the rare scenarios in history where dick is in short supply, which is why it’s especially risky that she crosses class lines to steal the heart of the only eligible bachelor around.  The story is mostly anchored to their final tryst, an especially sweaty, intimate afternoon avoiding the usual village conversation about how many young men are dead & missing from their lives.  Before that afternoon, the maid is a naive child who knows little of the world inside her body or out.  Long after, she’s a self-assured literary genius who’s destined to suffer way more heartache than losing her first love.  It’s during that final afternoon together when she finds a way to truly be herself for the first time, especially in moments when she’s left alone without her wealthier, more experienced lover looming over her.

The loopy, dreamy editing style is a double-edged sword.  It’s disorienting to the point where I couldn’t get a handle on the whos, whats, and whens of a very simple story for way too long, but the film would be a forgettable, standard-issue post-WWI romance without it.  As is, it gives the story a languid kind of sensuality that I appreciated, and frees it up from having to adapt every moment of the source material novel.  This is more a film of sensory details than one of linear storytelling.  It lingers & distracts, intercutting memories and losing time as if it were reminiscing through post-sex pillow talk instead of dictating a memoir.  Its attention to prurient, raunchy detail fits snugly in that editorial headspace, so much so that it’s easy to forget it’s a tragedy – several times over.  I’m honestly not sure it all comes together as anything solid or commendable, but it pairs its climax with a true stunner of a musical piece that almost convinced me it was nearing genius (or, at least something more substantial than most period romances in the same vein):

-Brandon Ledet

Cast List Power Rankings: A Room with a View (1985)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

It’s not something you’ll detect as quickly as my love for horror or sci-fi, but I’m an easy sucker for costume dramas.  Other genre fans are organized & mobilized enough to throw their own conventions where oceans of nerds line up to have Elvira sign their bald spots, but there isn’t really an equivalent for the costume drama (unless there are Ren Faire booths I don’t know about; please report back, if so).  And yet, if you’ve ever found yourself sipping Pinot Grigio at an opening-weekend screening of a Downton Abbey movie, you know the fandom for costume dramas can be just as electric. One buffoonish misstep from Mr. Molelsey at a stuffy dinner party and the crowd goes wild.  In that insular, quietly fired-up subculture, the names Merchant Ivory invoke rock star adulation the same way names like Romero, Carpenter, and Cronenberg get horror nerds’ brains whirring.  Somehow, I had never seen an Merchant-produed, Ivory-directed movie myself, though, despite the phrase “Merchant Ivory” being a recognizable adjective for a type of buttoned-up, award winning costume drama that I very much enjoy.  I recently filled in that knowledge gap with the producer-director duo’s breakout hit A Room with a View, which earned them three Oscars, four BAFTAs, and decades’ worth of household name recognition. 

Predictably, I had a wonderful time with it.  For all its Awards Circuit prestige, A Room with a View is a small, sweet romcom of manners that recalls the heightened social-maneuvers humor I love in Jane Austen comedies (please do not lecture me about the century’s difference between the Regency & Edwardian eras; I assure you I do not care).  What really floored me is how stacked the cast is with genre giants of the costume drama, all working in delicious harmony like spoonfuls of honey stirred into afternoon tea.  And since there would be no practical use for fully reviewing this genre-standard award magnet that hit American shores the year I was born, I’d mostly just like to discuss each member of the main cast individually.  Here’s a quick listing of the central players in A Room with a View, ranked from most to least essential.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse – DDL plays the ultimate dipshit fop, an uptight misogynist dandy whose wealth & status make him look like great marriage material on paper . . . until you spend ten seconds in his slimy presence.  It’s incredible how easily he steals the show, considering that he doesn’t appear on-screen for at least the first third of the runtime.  Once he crashes the party, though, he delivers a sublimely hateworthy comedic performance that the movie would be hollow without.

2. Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch – HBC is even more of a costume drama heavy-hitter than DDL, and I have to assume this early role was what landed her all that steady work in the unsteady past (unless there’s a huge Lady Jane fan club out there that I’m unaware of).  She’s a perfectly furious, frustrated teen as the film’s lead, stuck between the rich idiot she should want (DDL) and the hot idiot she does want (TBA).  Her furrowed brow while concentrating on complex piano pieces conveys a rich inner life in contrast to the sheltered social one she’s allowed to live outside her head, which makes her a great audience surrogate for young costume drama nerds who can’t wait to move out of their parents’ house.  She’s also got gloriously thick, extravagant curls of hair that are enviable at any age.

3. Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett – Speaking of Downton, Dame Margaret Natalie Smith brings long-established stage & screen prestige to the proceedings, even if she’s not allowed to cut as loose as she does with her withering quips as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.  She’s in the same uptight chaperone role here as she plays in The Secret Garden, except her stiffness makes her the butt of her sister’s jokes instead of inspiring fear & good behavior in the teen she’s supposed to be keeping in check (HBC).  I’m sure it’s just a stock character Smith plucked out of her 60+ years & 80+ IMDb credits worth of experience acting on camera, but she does it well, and the punchlines at her expense are always solid (often to the refrain of “Poor, poor Charlotte”).

4. Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson – More of a That Guy character actor than the legendary Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott is nonetheless equally matched as her doddering comic foil.  He’s cast as a sweetheart eccentric, one whose “tactless”, “indelicate” boisterousness constantly pulls the rug out from under the rules-obsessed chaperone.  He also gets to ramble at length about the inane gender politics of who should get to have “a room with a view” at the opening hotel setting, a scene that feels like a contemporary SNL sketch written by a comedian who’s only seen the trailer, not the movie proper.

5. Fabia Drake & Joan Henley as the Misses Alan – The perpetually traveling spinster “sisters” are the closest thing the movie offers as aspirational objects of envy, especially if you read them as covert lesbians in a Boston marriage that everyone else just has to tolerate.

6. Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish – You’d think Dame Judith Olivia Dench would rank as worthier competition to Dame Maggie Smith here, but her trash-novelist side character isn’t afforded much momentum to make a dent on-screen.  She does push Smith’s uptight nerd into her biggest fuck-ups, though (including spilling the beans on her young cousin/ward’s scandalous, unchaperoned kiss, published for all to read under a half-hearted pseudonym), which makes for some great comedy at her expense.  Poor, poor Charlotte.

7. Simon Callow as The Reverend Mr. Beebe – There are plenty of misbehaving vicars out there in cinemaland, but not many get to hang dong while roughhousing with their flock in the local swimming pond.  You’d expect it to be the bigger shock that HBC runs into her naked crush or her naked brother when she stumbles across said roughhousing on an afternoon stroll, but the naked vicar earns the biggest laugh.

8. Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch – HBC’s younger, rowdier brother is exactly who you’d expect to stumble across in the throes of flagrant public nudity.  He doesn’t have much effect on the film’s tone or plot, but he is a playful, delightful source of chaos that makes HBC reluctant to graduate from childish japes to sincere adult emotions & romance.

9. Rosemary Leach as Mrs. Honeychurch – The siblings’ mother might get in a few great laughs with her passive aggressive jabs at “Poor, poor Charlotte,” but she doesn’t make much impact outside that mockery of her sister.  I also couldn’t tell if the actor looked at all familiar, or if she just had a vague resemblance to Kathy Bates.

10. Julian Sands as George Emerson – Has Julian Sands ever delivered a good performance in anything?  He’s at least laughably bad in films like Boxing Helena & Argento’s Phantom of the Opera.  I foolishly assumed he landed those jobs because he was impressive in the Merchant Ivory costume dramas that predate them, but holy shit, his overly mannered performances don’t even feel at home in the overly mannered past.  It’s a testament to DDL’s movie-making performance as the ridiculous cad Cecil Vyse that George Emerson comes across as HBC’s best option for love & marriage.  You could replace Sands with a cardboard cutout of a romance-novel cover model and the movie would be exactly the same.  He’s reliably useless.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mad Women’s Ball (2021)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The latest of many actor/director co-credits from Mélanie Laurent, The Mad Women’s Ball, is a solemn period drama set in a prison-like mental institution in 19th Century France.  It’s a formulaic film in a lot of respects, touching on every dramatic cliché you’d expect in its women’s sanitorium setting.  There’s nothing new here you won’t see in goofier, better-publicized works like Girl Interrupted, Cosi, Unsane, or your local drag scene’s cabaret parody of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  And yet, those clichés are all performed so earnestly in The Mad Women’s Ball that their familiarity hardly matters.  At the risk of repeating a cliché observation myself, Mélanie Laurent’s extensive background as an actor shows in her filmmaking’s focus on performance & characterization, two details that add enough specificity & emotional impact to the central drama that it avoids backsliding into tedium.

It helps that the ghost story half of The Mad Women’s Ball actually does manage to feel novel, in that it takes the existence & presence of “spirits” seriously without forcing an illustration of them onscreen or tipping the tone into horror.  Our POV character (Lou de Laâge) is the kind of stubborn, free-thinking intellectual who would routinely get institutionalized for “hysteria” by their embarrassed, cold-hearted families in this era.  Except, she also suffers the burden of constant communication with spirits of the dead which, as you can imagine, are in no short supply in her new asylum/prison/home.  She slowly earns her way out of confinement by proving her supernatural connection with these spirits to her nurses & guards (including Laurent as her sole kind-hearted advocate), helping them reconnect with ghosts of their past in exchange for the promise of freedom.  Meanwhile, she finds uneasy, unlikely sisterhood with her fellow “patients,” who range from genuinely ill to politically troublesome, like herself.

As the title implies, The Mad Women’s Ball culminates in a grand masquerade where the local wealth class is invited on asylum grounds to gawk at (and sexually violate) its patients as they dressed in costume – apparently a very real, very fucked up tradition in some mental institutions at the time.  Until that physical convergence of life inside & outside the asylum, Laurent contrasts their parallel timelines with an aggressive crosscutting effect, her one major stylistic imposition on the plot.  Otherwise, the film’s aesthetic recalls the melancholic Bates-in-prison episodes of Downton Abbey, with the chaotic echoes of unwell women resisting “therapy” (i.e., torture) echoing throughout its dank, joyless hallways.  This is a long, somber, delicate film with only occasional flashes of musical accompaniment.  The contrasting crosscuts between life inside & outside the asylum are absolutely essential to giving it a sense of vibrancy, and it makes total sense that its narrative would have to resolve with those two worlds crashing into each other.

Outside those crosscuts, I’m not sure Laurent does much to call attention to her craft as a filmmaker here.  She mostly just provides a stage for her characters & performers to shine, treating their individual quirks & personae with full respect – whether they’re a bipolar pickpocket with a wicked mean streak or a spiritual medium whose genuine talent for communication with the dead is misunderstood for madness.  Laurent chose to direct a film set in a time that was brutally unkind to women, seemingly so she could extend kindness & empathy to them in retrospect.  It’s surprisingly heartwarming, despite the institutional cruelty & cultural familiarity of its setting.

-Brandon Ledet