literature

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

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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

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova (1965)

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The second part of Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part adaptation of War and Peace contrasts and serves as companion to the previous film, which focused primarily on the “war” of the title, while Part II: Natasha Rostova, instead gives us a portrait of “peace,” as much as such a thing can exist in the heartland when war is at the borders. Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva) played a fairly minor role in the first film, where she appeared as a young girl at a fête hosted in her family home in honor of her older brother Nikolai, before he went off to the war effort alongside Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov). There, her childhood innocence was a counterpoint to the war that we would soon see, and served as a reminder of what the war was meant to protect. Here, she is still naive, but is reaching adulthood. When she goes to her first ball, we hear her internal monologue as she panics that no one asks her to dance. Encouraged by Pierre (Bondarchuk), who is now officially Count Bezukhov, Andrei takes his “protege” for a spin around the parquet, and it only takes one waltz for sixteen year old Natasha to be utterly smitten with him. 

Andrei, who has been in a state of depression after recovering from his near death in the last film only to arrive home in time to watch his wife die in childbirth, ponders an apparent dead oak in early springtime, and compares himself to it, a hollowed shell that only seems alive. After meeting Natasha, he is reinvigorated, and passes the same tree, only to discover that it has put out new green leaves for the spring. He appears at the Rostova’s home and asks for Natasha’s hand, but states that they should not announce their engagement and instead delay marriage for a year, ostensibly so that Natasha can have some life experiences and decide if marriage to an older man is really what she wants for herself. (It’s worth noting here that I have no idea how old Andrei is supposed to be, but Tikhonov was almost forty.) He goes away to further convalesce abroad, and she goes nearly mad with missing him. Pierre has made some kind of peace with his wife Helene, and she attends the Moscow Opera with Natasha in tow, which leads to the girl meeting Helene’s brother Anatole (Vasily Lanovoy). Anatole was part of Pierre’s old drinking crowd with Dolokhov (Oleg Yefremov), the man Pierre wounded but did not kill in a duel in part one, and is an utter cad. At Dolokhov’s suggestion, he begins to pursue Natasha, despite already having married a foreign woman while serving abroad. When confronted about this by his sister, he declares that either the other marriage is irrelevant in Russia, in which case he gets what he wants, or he’ll be found to be a bigamist and driven out of polite society, in which case he will still get what he wants, which is Natasha’s innocence. Eventually, Natasha’s hostess learns of her plans to elope with Anatole and chastises her, and Natasha breaks down in tears; Anatole’s attempts to abscond with Natasha are repelled by Andrei’s watchmen. When Pierre sees Anatole’s eyes light up at the prospect of being bought off, he calls him a “vile, heartless brood.” 

Andrei is, ironically, no prince either. In the first film, he tries to convince Pierre to never marry, citing his unhappy union with the very pregnant Lise, whom he completely abandons in order to join the war effort despite there being no expectation of him to do so. Textually, it’s a good thing that he did, as he will prove invaluable to the war and a great leader later, but that’s immaterial to his motivations. He returned from the Battle of Austerlitz just in time to bear witness to Lise dying in childbirth and tell her that he loved her and regretted leaving her alone. This time around, he immediately falls in love with a child (the standards of the time notwithstanding), tells her he’ll marry her but not for a year, and then disappears again. (It appears that this delay was a demand by Andrei’s father in the source text, but no explicit reason is given in the film other than the one cited above, that she should be allowed to gather some life experiences before getting hitched to an older man.) When she does become excited at the prospect of marrying him, after spending weeks yearning for him to return to the Rostova family compound, we get to see him react in real time as his affection turns to disgust the moment that the marriage proposal is accepted. I’m not sure if this is an intentionally ugly portrait of Andrei, to show that he’s a man who immediately stops desiring something the moment that he actually has it, but whether this is a deviation from the source text or something that was not considered in the novel is irrelevant; it’s textual here. In the film’s closing minutes, Pierre reminds him of a conversation that the two had in St. Petersburg regarding morality and ethics. “I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven,” Andrei admits, “but I didn’t say that I could forgive her; I can’t” (emphasis added). As someone going into this adaptation with no real knowledge of Tolstoy’s novel, I had assumed that Pierre was one of its heroes, but I’m not so sure now. 

As Natasha breaks down, declaring her life to be over, Pierre cheers her up by telling her that if he were younger and single, he would beg for her hand, and this appears to break her out of her funk. Immediately after, Pierre is taking a sleigh ride when he sees Napoleon’s Comet overhead, and that narration informs us: “It seemed to Pierre that this falling star was a symbol of what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul.” An image of the comet in the night sky is suddenly harshened by the crashing of a loud, dramatic scare chord, then some peasants crossing themselves, which was a delightful transition. The year “1812” rolls up onto the screen as ominous music plays, and the final image that we see is of Napoleon’s forces invading the western Russian frontier, promising more hideous war in the immediate future, “contrary to human reason, and human nature.” 

After the explosive, violent nature of Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky, Part II: Natasha Rostova is a bit of a breather, which makes the pacing of the whole thing feel slightly less thrilling in comparison. Despite being nearly an entire third shorter than Andrei, Natasha feels longer. The less dense narrative events are given some space to stretch out; it is, perhaps, too much breathing room. Internal monologue is a tricky thing to adapt to film as a medium, and one of the go-to failed examples that always comes to mind is David Lynch’s Dune, in which different characters’ thoughts are shared with the audience via whispery voice over. That’s not a novel idea in and of itself, but everything gets a bit muddied when the audience is bombarded with the thoughts of dozens of people. That tactic was also present in Andrei, but that film was cramming so many things into its long runtime that one didn’t have time to contemplate it. Here, we find the Rostova women preparing for a ball at around eight minutes into the film, and there’s an unfathomably complicated tracking shot as they all get ready, and then at about nine minutes in, they arrive to the gala, where we get another extremely impressive tracking shot that moves from the grand staircase in the entryway of a palace, goes up the stairs in order to watch Natasha and her cousin ascend, then enter the ballroom and wind through the various corridors, and it’s four minutes without a single cut. It’s beautiful and masterful, but we spend a lot of time at this party, to the point that one starts to have a little too much time without anything progressing. One becomes a bit tired of the pageantry and starts to wonder when we’re going to just get on with it, especially since there are still many hours left to go in this story. 

Where the film does see great success is in its style. One gets the feeling that Bondarchuk was delighted to get to play indoors after what must have been a miserable shoot on the first film. There are several sections in which the film becomes a split screen, divided between warm and cold colors, as characters have conversations that parallel one another. It makes for a beautiful tableau:


On the beauty of its images alone, this film safely rides into “excellent” territory, despite not living up to the standard set by Andrei. The ominous cliffhanger ending is a delight, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the following segments. You can find Part II on Mosfilm’s YouTube channel here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky (1965)

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How do you adapt a novel like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a tome so notoriously lengthy (587,287 words) that, for over a century, merely having read it was considered a badge of honor, a sign of elite literary prowess? If you’re Paramount Pictures in the 1950s, you cast Audrey Hepburn as the teenaged ingenue Natasha Rostova opposite fifty-year-old Henry Fonda and forty-year-old Mel Ferrer, and you try to cram as much of the novel as you can into 208 minutes (admittedly a runtime not to be scoffed at). Not to be outdone, however, the Soviets decided that a Western War and Peace simply could not be allowed to be the film adaptation that everyone would remember, so they set out on a half-decade journey to create and release four different films, each roughly adapting one of the novel’s volumes. Four Soviet War and Peace films were released between 1965 and 1967, totaling over seven hours of runtiy. Having already seen what masters some of the Soviet filmmakers were, and what stunning pieces of filmmaking they created with The Cranes are Flying and Soy Cuba, when a friend suggested we pursue this massive undertaking, we leapt in with both feet. 

The three primary characters about which the narrative circles are Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk, who also directed all four films), Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), and Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), although Natasha’s involvement with the narrative of Part 1 is minimal. Pierre, the bastard son of an unfathomably wealthy Russian count, has just returned to St. Petersburg after having been educated in France; both his illegitimacy and his more French way of thinking make him socially awkward, especially as Napoleon is leading France against Russia’s allies at the time of Pierre’s homecoming. At a ball, he reunites with his friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is at the crux of an existential crisis after growing disillusioned with the life of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg and bored with his socialite wife. To that end, he plans to join the war effort as an aide-de-camp to a Russian general, leaving his very pregnant wife in the care of his eccentric father, the elder Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and his religious sister, the Princess Maria.

Despite Andrei’s warnings that Pierre should avoid the company of drunken roustabouts Anatole Kuragin and Fedor Dolokhov, Pierre ends up involved in an embarrassing bit of public drunkenness in which the three of them strap a policeman to a bear and throw him in a river (we do not get to witness this on screen, but we do see them drinking with the bear at a party immediately prior), resulting in Anatole and Pierre being expelled from St. Petersburg and Dolokhov being demoted in rank in the Russian army. When Count Bezukhov dies and recognizes Pierre as his legal heir, the new count becomes a desired party guest (and potential husband for any number of voluptuous aristocrats) overnight, and he finds himself courted by Helene Kuragin, Anatole’s sister, and the two wed despite Andrei’s admonitions against marriage in general. 

Dolokhov, Andrei, and Nikolai Rostov (the older brother of Natasha, who, like his sister, is less important here but becomes more so down the line) are all present at the Battle of Austerlitz, where Andrei is presumed to have died in battle. On the home front, Pierre becomes obsessed with the rumors that Helene and Dolokhov are having an affair, challenging Dolokhov to a duel. Despite Dolokhov’s military training, Pierre manages to shoot him, albeit not fatally, and Dolokhov misses his return shot. Pierre is horrified by the fact that he very nearly took another man’s life, becoming introspective and philosophical. Andrei, for his part, has had similar revelations in the field of war, and is revealed to his family to be alive when he returns home, just in time to witness his wife die in childbirth, realizing too late that he did truly love her, or so he says. 

It may not seem that this outline, although fairly complex (and admittedly oversimplified), could fill nearly two and a half hours of screentime, but it does, and marvelously. I’m writing this review after having only watched the first two parts, and while Part Two is more about the “peace” part of the original text’s title, Andrei Bolkonsky is very much about the war. Weary generals arrive to tell their Russian counterparts about their complete defeat in other campaigns, the war and its justifications (and the narcissistic self-justifications of those who participate) are a constant topic among every rung of society that we witness, and we are treated to a very protracted depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz. It’s the last of these that’s most fascinating, as it’s long been a topic of film criticism that the depiction of warfare, especially in American and other Western films, often tries to articulate an argument against war but fails because it cannot help but depict war as glorious and honorable because of the very nature of filmic language. (If you’re too online, you may recognize a shadow of this in the now ever-present “depiction equals endorsement” fallacy that will be a product of discourse from now until we’re all dead.) Or, to paraphrase an old Lindsay Ellis video, a movie might make war look bad, but doesn’t it also make it look kind of badass? 

Counter-examples to this thesis are usually films of extreme misery, like Come and See or Threads, and although War and Peace is not interested in forcing the audience to suffer like those films, it makes for a very effective piece of anti-war art. It’s also a reminder that, for most of human history, warfare was a straightforward affair of armament, topography, and the sheer number of human bodies one army could throw at the enemy’s own masses. This was the most expensive film that the Soviets ever made, and every penny (or ruble, as the case may be) is on screen. Twelve thousand actors march toward each other on a series of hills, shrouded in fog and gun smoke, and when they meet, they fight to the death, brutally and without sentimentality. Soldiers break under the pressure and flee while others die in pursuit of their own glory, but all of them are men who have been led to believe that fighting and dying for Mother Russia is all adventure and excitement, only to realize too late that war is only ever death and despair. It’s technically impressive and gorgeously shot, capturing what feels like an endless field of battle, stretching as far as the eye can see, and what that eye beholds is hell on earth. Andrei’s revelation of the fact that he rejected a life of leisure at home with his loving wife because he believed in the fantasy of glorious war is paralleled in Pierre’s horror at himself and the fact that he nearly allowed something as petty as his own insecurities to drive him to kill. 

It’s all very good stuff, and the film is inarguably a masterpiece, an epic made with machine-like precision that unfolds like a series of blooms, one after another. There are elements of its visual style that I think become even more clear in the following film, and I’ll talk about them as they become more concrete. As of the time of this writing, Mosfilm has the entire series, remastered from 70mm just a few years ago, up on their YouTube for free; Part One is here. If you love movies, do yourself a favor, and watch it right now. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995)

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I have never been more creatively or spiritually fulfilled than I was for the few brief years when my biggest weekly priority was an academically rigorous poetry workshop. Still, I gave up the practice as soon as I graduated college, realizing that sticking with it would mean a life-long professional dedication to academia, something I had no interest in pursuing. I was fondly reminded of those days while watching the documentary A Litany for Survival, though, which features several scenes of its subject—activist-poet Audre Lorde—running a poetry workshop at Hunter College in New York City. She’s tough on her students’ work in a productive, fully engaged way that you can see improving their art in real time. Other formidable poets like Adrienne Rich & Sonia Sanchez appear in interviews to reminisce about how Lorde improved their own work through a similar kind of collaborative criticism, pushing them to sharpen their ideas through revision. It’s difficult to write meaningfully without that kind of peer-to-peer friction, which is largely why I gave up on the medium of poetry entirely to work on this silly movie blog instead. And that’s not even taking into account how increasingly niche & insular the world of poetry has continued to become in recent decades. Anyone who’s still out there making a full life out of that kind of work is superheroic, since this 90s-era documentary already feels like a time machine trip back to the last moment it was considered societally Important in any way.

Audre Lorde was tough on everyone: her students, her colleagues, her children, her nation, herself. Which is to say that she continuously fought for a better world the entire time she was alive, applying her skill for ruthless revision to societal structures the same way she applied it to her own poetry, through political activism causes like Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Feminism. She billed herself as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” rising to prominence in the literary world in the 1960s & 70s, when those identity markers had a real-life chance to either get you killed or change the world. Her writing and her activism were both heavily fixated on Intersectionality, drilling down into the particulars of what made her a distinct social outsider while also seeking commonality among comrades who were fighting similar struggles. By the time documentarians Michelle Parkerson & Ada Gay Griffin told her life story in the 1990s, she had shifted to fighting a very different fight: battling cancer instead of oppression. A Litany for Survival is a very straight-forward, made-for-PBS style production, but it took nearly a decade to complete, so a significant chunk of the footage features Lorde wheezing through her final days while suffering from lung cancer, no longer able to perform her poems with her usual fierceness. Thankfully, they were around for her healthier days too, when she could still provoke & incite with the best of ’em.

In both form & content, the movie Litany most reminded me of was the more recent documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Giovanni occupied such a similar place in American literature that Litany only passingly references her by her first name, “Nikki”, since you presumably already know who she is if you’re watching this profile of her contemporary. Both films exceed their limitations as PBS-style documentary profiles of activist-poets by drifting through different phases of their lives instead of strictly following a linear birth-to-death biography. We meet Lorde in her final years of illness, when she can barely speak. Earlier, more forceful interviews about her life story then mix with audiobook readings of her prose autobiography Zami, live readings of her most iconic poems, and candid domestic scenes shared with loved ones in the final decade of her life. None of these conversations or monologues feel complete in representation; the edit crossfades between them like overlapping waves, illustrating the images evoked by Lorde’s past with still photographs from her personal albums and vintage NYC stock footage. It’s a full life retold in out-of-context snippets, with the only incomplete element being that we never see the world through Lorde’s own handheld camcorder, which she points around her home garden in her final days as a new way to capture images for her art.

A newly restored version of A Litany for Survival recently saw its local premiere at the Patois Film Festival, screening at the Joan Mitchell Center instead of the fest’s usual home at The Broad. That venue choice was . . . suboptimal for appreciating what the new scan might have offered as a pure sensory experience, but it did contribute to my personal nostalgia for college-level poetry workshops. It was projected onto a scuffed-up screen that unrolled from the ceiling; every shifting body in the packed room’s hard-backed chairs could be acutely heard & felt; and the presentation concluded with a panel discussion about how Lorde’s work was an effective form of political activism. It was a perfect simulation of a college classroom environment, like a VR headset experience of what it might be like to have Audre Lorde sit across a workshop table from you, pushing you to do better work and to make a better world. I’m still not convinced that I should quit my desk job and enroll in grad school just because I miss participating in those workshops for real (if not only because the guaranteed outcome would be me getting another desk job after graduating, with only more debt to show for it), but it was a pure pleasure to return to that headspace, and it made for an easy argument that Lorde improved the life & work of everyone she ever collaborated with.

-Brandon Ledet

Emeralds in the Attic, or Promising Young Petals

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Before I got a chance to see Emerald Fennell’s recent “adaptation” “Wuthering Heights,” I stumbled across this social media post in the wild: 

I had just recently completed my own most recent rewatch of 1987’s Flowers in the Attic, and I became fixated on this idea. I’ve been down the Flowers in the Attic rabbit hole more times than I’d care to remember, but at its core, I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between Emily Brontë’s and V.C. Andrews’s novels. I don’t know if there’s any academic discussion of this out there, but I have no doubt in my mind that Andrews drew inspiration from Wuthering Heights, from naming her protagonist “Cathy” to making the implied, sublimated incest of Heights (I’ve always subscribed to the theory that Heathcliff is Earnshaw’s bastard son, meaning he and Catherine are half-siblings) explicit and pervasive in Flowers in the Attic and its sequels. 

When I did get around to seeing “Wuthering Heights,” my major criticism of it ended up being that it doesn’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, be Wuthering Heights at all. The most interesting characters in that film are Alison Oliver’s Isabella and Hong Chau’s Nelly, and one could have done a Rosaline style film about the former or even gone full-tilt into the “Nelly is the villain” concept and made a Cruella style picture about the latter, and either one of them would have been infinitely more interesting than watching “Wuthering Heights” bash two sexy Australian Barbie dolls at each other while reenacting a half-remembered SparkNote. In essence, both Flowers in the Attic and “Wuthering Heights” are both unfaithful mutations of the same source material, which means that Fennell might actually be the perfect person to make a Flowers in the Attic adaptation. Right? 

I don’t think so… however, I do think that she would be the ideal person to adapt the first follow-up novel, Petals on the Wind. It would be incorrect to say that Petals is an easier novel to read than Flowers. While it may eschew most of the more taboo elements that made Flowers so salacious, adult Cathy finds herself in just as dire straits in Petals, where she is constantly subject to sexual danger regardless of which of her husbands is exerting force over her. Based on the overall negative reaction to Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (which I didn’t share), I don’t think that she has the sensitivity needed to present Flowers. This is, after all, a director who looked at the same source text that Andrews did and, where Andrews saw both the tenderness and the danger of Heathcliff and Cathy together and the way that it would affect future generations, instead got horned up by imagining them getting off to voyeuristic observation of a couple of servants going at it in a barn. But also, don’t worry, in this version Cathy and Heathcliff definitely aren’t half-siblings, so don’t worry, it’s okay if you get aroused!

For those who are interested, Flowers in the Attic (the novel) doesn’t end in the same way that the ‘87 film does. The latter includes a hastily-shot death scene for Corrine Dollanganger after being confronted by her children during her wedding to Bart Winslow, her late father’s lawyer, as producers felt that the book’s ending, which occurs when the children simply escape the house after learning that their grandfather is dead and Bart and Corrine have been married for over a year. This big confrontation scene seems like it would be right up Fennell’s alley, and the equivalent scene, in which Cathy crashes the Winslow family’s Christmas party at Foxworth Hall to reveal to Corrine that she has (a) seduced Bart and (b) is pregnant by him, is the climax of Petals on the Wind. Of course, this is between her first marriage to an abusive narcissist and her second marriage to the doctor who fostered the children following their escape. Petals also borrows from Brontë, although it’s Charlotte this time, as Paul, the aforementioned doctor, initially pretends that his wife is dead before revealing that she’s actually in an institution, such that his initial overtures toward Cathy when she is of age are much like Rochester’s towards the title character in Jane Eyre. It’s all very, very messy, a true soap opera, and that’s the wheelhouse that Fennell would most bloom in if she took that opportunity. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

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Brandon has already written about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” and although I was forewarned, my own love for the source material meant that, sooner or later, I was going to have to check this hot mess out for myself. And what a mess it is! Not as hot as one would expect, though, given that the director’s stated intention with this adaptation has been to recreate the horniness that she presumes is the universal experience of all first time readers. The thing about ”Wuthering Heights” is that the text I found myself thinking about most often while watching it wasn’t the novel itself or any of the prior adaptations, but Wicked: For Good. In writing about that film, I posited that its greatest flaw is also its greatest weakness: it only exists as a commercial product because of its connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its offshoots, sequels, and adaptations as a brand. The first half of the play (and the earlier film that adapted only that opening half) is allowed to find all sorts of fun things to explore within the “canon” of Oz, since the only thing it carries over is the necessity that, at some point, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch must eventually become enemies, in the public eye if not in reality. Everything else is fair game. In the second half of the play, which became For Good, every action exists in service of putting the characters from Wizard of Oz into the positions that they will be when Dorothy meets them upon her arrival in the fairy land, so characters march lock-step toward their places in the canon regardless of whether that works on a narrative, character, or even emotionally meaningful level. “Wuthering Heights” has the same problem. I’m not going to say it’s a bad movie because it’s a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which it most certainly is, but it’s a bad movie because it’s an attempt at adapting Emily Brontë’s novel at all. 

Widower Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the tenant of farmhouse Wuthering Heights, returns home from the city with a young boy in tow, whom he “rescued” from a life of being abused by a drunken father so that he can come to the Heights and be abused by a drunken stranger instead. He gives the boy to his daughter, Cathy, who names the child “Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” and the two form a fast friendship. Also present in the household is Nelly, who as the bastard daughter of a lord is not entitled to recognition or shelter, but is welcome to act as the formal companion to Cathy; this relationship is challenged by Cathy’s burgeoning devotion to Heathcliff, who absorbs some of Earnshaw’s parental abuse. Some years later, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) watch as a procession of carriages deliver their new neighbors, The Lintons, to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy, who has been raised with no mother and is thus somewhat as wild and unmannered as her lowborn foster brother, sneaks up to spy on Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his “ward” Isabella (Alison Oliver) and ends up injuring her ankle and being hosted at Thrushcross Grange for several weeks to recuperate. She returns to Wuthering Heights “quite the lady” and admits to Nelly (Hong Chau) that she has fallen in love with Linton and will marry him; she says aloud that she cannot marry Heathcliff because of their vast social class gap, and Nelly, knowing that Heathcliff has overheard this, keeps this information to herself. Linton and Catherine marry, Heathcliff leaves, Catherine becomes pregnant, and Heathcliff returns, at which point Catherine learns that Nelly allowed him to believe that Catherine didn’t love him. Heathcliff marries Isabella, but he and Catherine begin a brief, torrid affair that ends in tragedy. 

If you’re familiar with the novel (or any of its more faithful adaptations, although there are surprisingly few), then that synopsis undoubtedly feels strange to you. It’s like Brontë’s in some ways; the character names are the same and some of the larger events from the novel are present. The exclusion of Hindley, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s primary tormentor (and thus also his wife and child), is very jarring, as is the complete absence of Mrs. Earnshaw. Earnshaw family employee Joseph has also been aged down and cast with a handsome actor (Ewan Mitchell), eschewing the novel Joseph’s characterization as a religious zealot and instead giving him the chance to engage in kinky, largely unseen BDSM with one of the housemaids so that Heathcliff and Cathy can observe them surreptitiously in a way that sets both characters’ sexual imaginations ablaze. Most adaptations focus solely on the Cathy/Heathcliff story and leave out the entire plot about the second generation that constitutes the entire second half of Wuthering Heights, so its excision here isn’t surprising, but knowing that it doesn’t need to take that into consideration, “Wuthering Heights” decides to instead have Cathy not only die, but miscarry her child with Linton, since there’s no reason to have a living child if the story isn’t going to continue. I also can’t fault the film for choosing to narratively manifest the “Nelly is the villain” theory. Although I have personally never accepted that in my reading of the text, it has become the prevailing literary lens for the novel’s academic criticism since James Hafley first posited this thesis in 1958. (If you have JSTOR access, his essay can be found here; it’s a good read even if you, like I, remain unconvinced.) 

If you’re not familiar with the novel, none of this may seem like it changes that much about the text, but I can assure you: it does. My distaste for the film could be said to be either (a) entirely predicated on, or (b) have nothing to do with my love of Wuthering Heights, by which I mean that I don’t particularly care that this is a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights—in fact, the number of faithful adaptations is rare, and I prefer some of the less faithful adaptations over the more detail-oriented ones—I just don’t think this needed to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specifically. It almost feels as if Fennell responded to critics’ dismissal of Saltburn as a lesser Talented Mr. Ripley by deciding to take her Wuthering Heights-inspired erotic fiction and—in an inverse of E.L. James filing the serial numbers off of her Twilight fanfiction and publishing it as Fifty Shades of Grey—direct an adaptation of that and call it “Wuthering Heights.” I’m not frustrated with this movie as a fan of Brontë’s; I’m frustrated with it as a movie lover, the part of me that just wants to go to the movies and have a good time. Where this ties into Wicked: For Good is that like that film, “Wuthering Heights” goes awry in having to fall in line with the text that it is branded, meaning that the film is inexorably tied to the text from which it takes its name, when liberating it from that title would have allowed this to go in more interesting directions.

Robbie is very good as Cathy (Elordi is fine), but our two lead characters are so boring. In the film’s second act, we get to see some of the home life of Heathcliff and Isabella, and it’s the best stuff in the movie. Instead of being a victim of Heathcliff’s abuse, Isabella is all-in on his weird degradation play; she gets off on sending letters to Cathy and Nelly lying about how horrid Heathcliff is to her while also clearly enjoying being chained up and treated like a dog. We’ve already gotten a clear look into her bizarre psyche earlier in the film, in which we learn that she has an entire room devoted solely to her hair ribbons, and we get to see her create a fun murder scene in miniature by venting her frustrations at Cathy herself on the doll she made of the woman instead, with a dollhouse tableau that’s as funny as it is disturbing. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but think about how much better a movie “Wuthering Heights” would be if it realized that its most interesting character was Isabella, and the movie had been made about her instead. I fantasized about the film taking a sudden turn into being about Heathcliff realizing that Isabella truly could match his freak and the two of them falling for each other. “Wuthering Heights” could never go in that direction because it’s called “Wuthering Heights,” rather than “[Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi].” The first time that we meet Isabella, she’s sitting in the garden and delivering an excruciatingly detailed recap of Romeo & Juliet to Linton. For a moment, I really was naive enough to think that Fennell was going to do something truly audacious, and that the mention of the play would draw attention to something crucial that Shakespeare’s play and Brontë’s novel share: they are decidedly tragic, non-romantic stories that the general public perceives as romantic. Alas, this was not to be the case, and the director’s much-vaunted “audacity” was once again constrained to the erotic consumption of another person’s bodily fluids (and occasionally egg yolks). Ho-hum.

Where Emerald Fennell does allow herself to get really freaky with things that she adds from outside the text are the moments where the film does actually shine. When she first arrives to live at Thrushcross Grange, Cathy is ushered into a room that Linton has prepared for her by having the place painted “the most beautiful color in the world, the color of [Cathy’s] flesh.” As we enter the room, it looks tasteful enough, but as the camera moves closer we get to see that Linton has had the decorators recreate not only her freckles but the light, almost imperceptible blue veins beneath. It’s delightfully grotesque. The film also occasionally goes for utter camp in a few fine moments, with the standout being the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw dies, surrounded by a physically impossible stack of empty wine and liquor bottles. The film also features very beautiful tableaux; there are several nearly-still chiaroscuro images of characters lit solely by the natural light streaming through a window, calling to mind Rembrandt’s Anna and the Blind Tobit or the Rembrandtian A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room. Evoking the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an easy go-to for Heathcliff’s return, but it’s also an effective choice. Visually, the film’s depiction of Thrushcross Grange having strong juxtapositions of white and blood-red are striking, even if the choice doesn’t seem to have a deeper meaning other than the most superficial symbolism. Any one of those things would have been a delight to see in [Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi], in which Fennell wouldn’t have felt the need to remain bound to “adapting” Wuthering Heights and instead been able to go full bore into the story she really wanted to tell. Instead, we have this disappointment.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Unfaithful Mutations

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Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorite works of art. Emily Brontë’s 19th Century novel is a shockingly horrific read for anyone who’s ever been assigned it in a high school or college-level literature course, expecting it to be a melodramatic romance (matched only in its homework-assignment shock value by her sister’s novel Jane Eyre). Wuthering Heights is not a traditionally tragic love affair; it imagines romantic attraction as a form of life-destroying doom that compels all involved to viciously tear each other apart out of the insatiable hunger of yearning, never to be satisfied through physical touch. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest, loudest adaptation of that novel would receive equally loud criticism for the ways it reduces its source text to a more familiar, better-behaved romance, as if it were a dime store paperback instead of a great work of Gothic lit. Personally, I can’t conjure the energy to care. To my knowledge, no movie version of Wuthering Heights to date has approached anything near faithful adaptation. They tend to leave the business of adapting the novel’s second half—in which a second generation of interfamilial combatants continue the first half’s vicious games of yearning & revenge—to be retold only via BBC miniseries, which are too tonally genteel to convey the full, feral nature of the source text. So far, what we’ve seen is a story dutifully half-told, with no real personal imposition on the text by the filmmakers behind the camera (besides maybe Andrea Arnold’s race-conscious adaptation from the 2010s, which gets specific in conveying the novel’s themes of “otherness,” usually left more vaguely defined). They tend to be more transcriptive than interpretive. So, I find myself in the embarrassing position of being impressed by the crassly unfaithful adaptation of one my favorite novels for at least engaging with the material in a transformative way, even if it’s more deimagined than reimagined. “Death of the author” means allowing our sacred texts to become entirely new beasts in afterlife.

Despite all the prepackaged backlash, “Wuthering Heights” proved to be another erratically entertaining piece of lurid pop art from Emerald Fennell, whose previous works Saltburn & Promising Young Woman were also loudly scrutinized in their own time for their thematic carelessness. Fennell appears eager to get ahead of the criticism in this case, adding the titular scare quotes in an effort to defuse any expectations that she might be sincerely adapting Brontë’s novel. Every image is prefaced with a wink, signaling to the audience that it’s okay to have fun this time instead of getting too hung up on Heathcliff & Cathy’s recursively lethal, semi-incestuous attraction to each other. It’s not so much an adaptation of Wuthering Heights as it is an adaptation of the horned-up dreams a teenager might have while reading Wuthering Heights — often illustrated in fancam-style montages that insert bodice-ripping sex scenes into a story that used to be about the destructive nature of unconsummated lust. Jacob Elordi & Margot Robbie are cast more for their paperback-romance cover art appeal than their appropriateness for the source material. Charli XCX is employed to soundtrack the music video rhythms of the edit to rush the story along before the discomfort of any one cruel moment has time to fully sink in. Even when destroying other women’s lives in order to get Cathy’s attention, Heathcliff seeks enthusiastic consent, turning what used to be domestic abuse into a kind of elaborate BDSM game. It’s all in good fun (give or take the obligatory tragic ending), staged entirely for the purpose of hiring movie stars to play dress-up and dry hump, supplementing the wet sounds of actual sex with bizarrely chosen surrogates like fish heads, snail slime, egg yolks, and raw dough. As goofy & half-considered as it is, it’s also Emerald Fennell’s best work to date. She continues to improve as a populist entertainer with every picture, but she has also suffered the great misfortune of being immediately successful, so everything she does is met with obnoxiously loud scrutiny. Hopefully all of her generational wealth serves as a small comfort in this difficult time.

The same week that Wuthering Heights topped the US box office (proving yet again that online backlash has no tangible effect outside your Twitter feed), I saw another domestic release of an unfaithful literary mutation. The new anime film Scarlet restages Hamlet as a sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic in a Hell-adjacent afterlife, seemingly combining the characters of Hamlet & Ophelia into one newly imagined, feminist action hero. I’m no Shakespeare scholar but, like Wuthering Heights, Hamlet does fall into the category of great literary works I was assigned to read multiple times throughout high school & college, and I don’t remember the bard describing the young Dane being groped by countless hands of the undead under a sky of black ocean waves in his stage directions. By the time Scarlet interjects a title card that drags the story back to 16th Century Denmark, I couldn’t help but treat it as a visual gag. I laughed, but I was the only one laughing in that theater, because I was the only one in the theater at all. Director Mamoru Hosoda is relatively well known among anime nerds for earlier works like Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but recently he’s been on a kick where he reinterprets literary classics as high-fantasy adventure films featuring heroic warrior princesses. With Belle, he relocated characters from Beauty and the Beast to a Virtual Reality other-realm where violence & power is wielded through pop songstress supremacy and it online follower counts. With Scarlet, he reinterprets Hamlet as a warrior princess saga about the value of forgiving yourself instead of seeking revenge, set in a timeless afterlife where the souls of 16th Century nobility can fall in love with 21st Century hunks who have working-class jobs but angelically noble hearts. Unlike with “Wuthering Heights”, no one appears to be especially angry about these far-out reinterpretations of their source texts, likely for two very obvious reasons: 1. Hamlet & La Belle et La Bête have already enjoyed multiple faithful movie adaptations while Brontë’s novel hasn’t and, more importantly, 2. Way fewer people are watching them.

As of this posting, roughly 9,000 people have logged Hosoda’s unfaithful Hamlet mutation on Letterboxd, compared to the 570,000 who have logged Fennell’s unfaithful mutation of Wuthering Heights. That’s an imperfect metric when measuring these two films’ audience reach (not least of all because “Wuthering Heights” has been review-bombed by angry social media addicts who haven’t yet seen the film themselves), but those two numbers are extremely disparate enough to mean something. Some people are mad at Emerald Fennell for not adhering to one specific interpretation of Brontë’s book as if it is the only objectively correct one (i.e., the Arnold-friendly interpretation in which Heathcliff’s otherness is based more in race than class). Others are mad at her for having no interpretation at all, using a half-remembered impression of what the book is kinda-sorta like as an excuse to stage a series of images that make her horny. I find both criticisms to be misguided. No movie owes fealty to it literary source text; all that matters is the distinctness of the vision that literature inspired. For all of her consistently reckless flippancy, Fennell’s vision gets increasingly distinct every picture. We’re also getting a clearer picture of what she personally finds erotic, which I’d argue is one of the best uses of the cinematic artform any director can pursue. Forget using the art of moviemaking as a machine that generates empathy; it’s much more useful as a window into the unresolved psychosexual issues of artists who don’t know how to effectively express themselves through any other medium. In Fennell’s case, that window appears to be attached to a candy-coated dollhouse with an immature brat trapped inside, which she expresses here by re-working Catherine Earnshaw into an indecisive woman-child who suffers through attempts to have her cake and eat it too. She even employed the official mascot of Brat culture to sing on the soundtrack, continuously underlining the point. While prettier to look at and grander in scale, I don’t know that Hosoda’s films are useful as a window into anything especially personal about his hang-ups or worldview. The images are more pleasant and the ideas are more carefully thought out, but to what end? Maybe the other obvious reason that fewer people are talking about them is because there’s just not as much to say.

-Brandon Ledet

Maddening Odysseys

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Let’s ignore for a second who’s directing it. It’s insane that hordes of young movie nerds are buying tickets to an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey a full year in advance of its release date next summer. Of course, what those nerds are actually buying tickets to is The New Christopher Nolan Picture, as they’d show up to just about anything with that director’s name on it, in blind faith. There’s nothing culturally current or relevant about Homer otherwise, at least not in the decade since JLo was wooed with a thrifted “first-edition” copy of The Iliad in the  dipshit erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. So, there’s something incredibly funny about Nolan leading Dark Knight die-hards into Greek Lit scholarship for the next year, studying ancient verse and Wikipedia summaries in anticipation of the biggest summer blockbuster of 2026. I won’t be purchasing an advanced Odyssey ticket myself (partially because they’re already selling out), but I can’t pretend I’m above that kind of literary hoodwinking either. In fact, in the past week I’ve watched multiple 3-hour epic adaptations of ancient literary texts that I wouldn’t have any personal interest in if they weren’t repackaged as Movie Nerd fodder. Whether I was lured in by the director, the genre, the screengrabs, or—my biggest weakness—a physical media flash sale, I found myself spending hours getting lost in maddening odysseys into literary adaptation every night after work this week, finding way more academia than usual in my cinematic escapism.

Watching Federico Fellini’s 1969 adaptation of the ancient Roman epic Satyricon, it becomes clear why humanity bothered to invent the film camera in the first place: pornographic opera, operatic porno, and everything in-between. Every image elicits a “Whoa,” while every sound earns an “Eww,” splitting the difference between Hollywood Babylon extravagance & Grand Guignol grotesquerie. It’s also an impossible adaptation, as entire chapters of its source text have been lost to time, leaving gigantic holes in the story Fellini dared himself to tell. What’s left is a long journey in which our hero Encolpius attempts to reclaim a lost love slave who was stolen & sold by his best frenemy, Ascyltus. Much like Odysseus finding his way home after the Trojan War, Satyricon is an episodic adventure in which Encolpius repeatedly fails to reclaim ownership of his beautiful boy-slave while repeatedly running into Ascyltus having the time of his life no matter what perils the former bros find themselves in from scene to scene. There’s often no connective tissue between the individual set pieces, since entire chapters of the book are missing. So, it mostly functions as a collection of living tableaux, with Fellini striving to create images as beautiful and, to quote him directing the background actors on-set, “as wild & crazy as possible!” In some scenes, characters lament that fine arts like poetry, painting, and sculpture are not what they used to be while chatting in the ancient Roman equivalent of an art gallery. Other scenes are built around fart jokes & sexual farce in which the cure for impotence is getting your tush spanked by a harem of late-60s hippie babes. For your sanity, it’s best not to pay too close attention to the beat-to-beat progress of the story and instead save that energy for planning the next decade of Mardi Gras costumes around what lewks the hundreds of extras are modeling in the background.

Paying too close attention to every narrative avenue of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript would also drive an audience insane, which in that case is entirely the point. A Polish adaptation of an early-19th Century novel written in French but set in Spain, it’s already a Russian nesting doll of international post-modern contexts before you get into the particulars of the plot. In the first framing device, Spanish & French officers on opposing sides of The Napoleonic War find the titular manuscript in a home that’s crumbling under gunfire. Illustrated with surrealist art & vulgar erotica, the manuscript appears to tell the story of the Spanish officer’s own grandfather, baiting him to continue reading with promised insights into his own heritage. Roaming a countryside populated almost exclusively by demons & “evil ghosts,” the Spaniard in the manuscript finds himself listening to the endless anecdotes & half-remembered dreams of fellow travelers (each with their own characters who have stories to tell), mapping out an impossible labyrinth of framing devices within framing devices so absurdly complex even Guy Maddin couldn’t find the exit. By the time he’s five or so layers deep into anecdotes within dreams within tales within sagas, the Spaniard complains that he has lost track of the border “where reality ends and fantasy takes over,” which fellow listeners helpfully compare to abstract concepts like Poetry and The Infinite. Nothing especially exciting happens in The Saragossa Manuscript. The story involves demons, ghosts, Spanish Inquisitors, dream-realm polygamists, and swashbuckling swordplay, but it’s all just as mundane as listening to a friend describe a dream they had last week (in which a dreamed-up character recounted their own half-remembered dream). The most thrilling plot development is a moment when the Spaniard within the manuscript places his hands on a copy of the manuscript himself and starts reading the book of his own life, making it clear that the audience is being relentlessly fucked with without mercy.

The narrative shape of Marcell Jankovics’s animated epic The Tragedy of Man is much easier to define than either Satyricon‘s or Saragossa Manuscript‘s. It’s just as maddening in its narrative ambition & scale, however, as it attempts to recount the entire history of everything — from the birth of the universe to its inevitable future collapse. Completed over several decades of hand-drawn animation, The Tragedy of Man is a psychedelic infographic that illustrates humanity’s entire existence through the visual art, philosophy sermons, and methods of power in each era depicted. It’s as visually stunning as it is intellectually exhaustive, not least of all because it is adapted from a 19th Century play cited as the pinnacle of Hungarian literature. It’s difficult to imagine what a staging of that play might look like based on the constantly shifting psychedelia rendered here, in which early humanity is depicted in a series of cave paintings, ancient Egypt is depicted in animated hieroglyphics, modern times are depicted in Ralph Bakshi-style pop art, and the distant future is depicted in unfathomable science fiction speculation. The stage-play source text makes sense in the constant dual-voiced dialogue between the Biblical figures of Adam & Lucifer, however, who spend the entire three-hour runtime narrating the evolution of man’s self-destructive introspection & philosophy. No matter how harshly the art style or historical circumstances shift from segment to segment, it’s a constant refrain that humanity’s main folly is our ambition for everlasting fame, which leads us only to harm ourselves & each other instead of being happy with our current, temporary lot in life. What’s staggering about the film is its millennia-spanning quest to prove that point with visual & historical citations across the entirety of time, which is too large of a scale for the human brain to fully comprehend, let alone contain in a single work of art.

Each of these epic-scale literary adaptations were immensely satisfying as self-contained art films, but I’m not convinced that they’re effective as advertisements for their source texts. I’m no closer to reading Petronius’s Satyricon now that I’ve enjoyed the perverse visual delights of Fellini Satyricon. Likewise, I doubt Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to spark a renewed cultural interest in ancient art & poetry beyond inspiring a few opening-weekend clickbait articles. These unwieldy, impossible-to-fully-adapt literary source texts are much more useful to filmmakers than they are to the resulting films’ audiences. They inspire grand-scale, abstract storytelling in a medium that’s at its best when it reaches for Poetry & The Infinite instead of getting mired in pettier concerns like Logic & Plot. According to The Tragedy of Man, that kind of transcendent ambition is corruptive to the human spirit, but since all we’re doing here is telling stories and making pretty pictures, I guess it’s okay in this case. Hopefully, adapting a saga as immense & sprawling as The Odyssey will help break Nolan away from the more clinical, reserved approach he generally takes to blockbuster filmmaking. And if he happens to sell a few paperback copies of The Complete Works of Homer in the process, all the better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Age of Innocence (1993)

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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

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

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Sometime recently, I was telling a friend of mine (a fellow freak, if you will) a story that I had just read in an interview with one of Yukio Mishima’s former lovers. The person was a sex worker, and Mishima picked them up at a gay bar with the intention of having something longer term, but they ended up only meeting twice, because the sex worker was so disturbed by the scene that Mishima wanted. In essence, he didn’t want a partner; he wanted a witness, someone to watch as Mishima committed play-seppuku – complete with a false dagger and a red sash that took the place of Mishima’s entrails and blood. According to the account, Mishima came to complete erection and ejaculated at the time that he drew the false blade across his stomach, all without ever touching his genitals. I haven’t been able to find that interview again, but it crosses my mind often. Mishima was an awful man, but he’s nonetheless fascinating, and it’s an endless source of fascination to me whenever I stumble across some incel fascist on the internet who worships Mishima but is bigoted against queer people; it’s a truly fascinating compartmentalization of ideological conflicts. As a result of recounting that anecdote, there’s been a lot of Mishima talk in the friend group lately, which culminated in a recent screening of Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. 

The film, which features a score composed by Philip Glass (when his name appeared on screen, one of my friends declared “I knew it! He loves arpeggios!”) and which was executive produced by both Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, is a true technical achievement. The narrative takes place in three different segments, some of which break down further into smaller sub-sections. There are the biographical sections, which include everything prior to the fateful day that Mishima attempted his coup (all in black & white) and the day of said sad little effort (in color). Although there is factual information in these sections—like the fact that Mishima was isolated from the rest of his family as a child by his grandmother, who forbade him from sport, sunlight, and playing with other boys—the film has very little interest in the elements that make up a traditional drama about a real person. This isn’t a biography of Mishima so much as it is a portrait of him, and it’s an expressionistic one at that. 

Where this is most apparent is in the way that Schrader adapts, with extreme brevity, parts of three different Mishima novels. The first segment is based upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which was loosely based upon the arson of the golden pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto. In it, a boy named Mizoguchi, who is afflicted with a debilitating stammer, becomes an acolyte of the titular temple but comes to hate it and ultimately burns it down (this is an oversimplification of the plot, but so is the retelling in the film). The second segment is based loosely on one of the four characters who populate the novel Kyoko’s House, in which a young actor named Osamu agrees to sell himself to a woman who is part of the yakuza in exchange for the cancellation of his mother’s debts; he and the woman become lovers, and they begin to partake in sadomasochism that ultimately leads to both his death and hers. The third adapts part of Runaway Horses, a 1930s-set period piece about a young man named Isao who, trained in the samurai code by his father, resents the apparent Westernization and materialism of his community and nation, so he plots to assassinate several key government figures in order to halt the spread of capitalism and its influence upon Japan. 

Although the biographical segments are shot in a more realistic style (the black & white “history” being filmed very traditionally, while the “day of the coup attempt” segments are all done with handheld cameras to add a kinetic energy to the proceedings), the narrative adaptation sections have a lovely artificiality. The room that Osuma and his lover share is a vaporwave lover’s nest in a black void, and Mizoguchi and his friend walk a constant path around a scale replica of the temple on stones that imply a path across a body of water that is no more than a painted floor. Isao and his friends plan their assassinations within another room in a void, but when their plans are stopped by the authorities, this is represented by all of the panels comprising the room’s walls being pulled outward and collapsing as police surround them from all sides. It’s a bold stylistic choice, but one that pays off, as these are the coolest and most interesting parts of the film, and as a metaphor for Mishima himself, it’s also very clever. Each of the men who populate these narratives represent some part of Mishima’s psyche. Pavilion’s Mizoguchi is obsessed with an ideal of beauty and longs to set it free just as Mishima was obsessed with the traditional Yamato-damashii (Japanese cultural traditions and values) and was willing to commit destructive acts to see it unshackled; Osuma represents Mishima’s devotion to his ideal, imperialist vision of Japan and his willingness to be hurt or even killed in a masochistic relationship with that vision; and Runaway Isao’s ultranationalism is Mishima to the core, down to the eerie way in which Mishima predicted (or perhaps announced) his death, as he and Isao share the same fate. 

If you’re looking for a scholarly work about Yukio Mishima, this isn’t it. One of our friends (the same one who identified Glass’s arpeggios) asked if she would need to know anything about Mishima before watching the movie, and we told her “no” before the screening, but I’m not sure I’d say the same thing now. From a narrative perspective, having no knowledge about Mishima (and especially not knowing how he died) makes the ending more shocking and perhaps more powerful, but I’m also not sure how much one would get out of this if this was their first introduction to him. If anything, as the film does little to elaborate on the extent to which Mishima’s views were utterly fascistic, it could end up making him more of a figure of admiration for his life (which is, uh, bad) and not for his literature (which is fine, in my opinion). The man wrote a play entitled My Friend Hitler, after all, and although scholarship is split on whether it’s a fascist work or an anti-fascist one, I’m going to make Roland Barthes roll over in his grave a little on this one and say that, in this case, what we know of the author is relevant to interpretation of the text. On the whole, that’s a bit of a Paul Schrader specialty—the line between apologia and empathy is always fuzzy in his work—but it’s worth noting that his first choice was to adapt Forbidden Colors, arguably Mishima’s most overtly homosexual work, was rejected by the Mishima estate, which led to the inclusion of Kyoko’s Room instead, so the extent to which he was able to craft a fuller portrait of the man was undeniably curtailed. 

The movie is vibrant, and, as an impressionistic telling of the life of a … let’s say “conflicted” writer, it’s beautiful and impressive. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but it’s certainly a cool one, and it’s worth checking out if you have any interest in Mishima and his work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond