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)
As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming to Genre Cinema as a respectable artform or it’s due to the wider home video distribution of Possession in particular, Adjani’s horrific mid-film freakout is now cited as artistic inspo for actresses as wide ranging as Sidney Sweeney (in her self-produced nunsploitation film Immaculate) and Reinate Reinsve (in the much classier schoolboard-meeting drama Armand). Even Rowlands’s recent passing hasn’t lessened Adjani’s ascent in influence. In either case, it might be nice to hear a few other performances from those immensely talented actors’ oeuvres cited as influences from time to time, so that Adjani is not only remembered for smashing her groceries against a tunnel wall and Rowlands is not only honored for coming up with that thumbs-up raspberry tic.
Luckily, Isabelle Adjani does have at least one other major role in which she’s tasked to perform manic mental anguish to great success. She does such a stellar job embodying the violent psychosis of unrequited love in the 1975 classic The Story of Adele H. that it often feels as if she’s being directed by Ken Russell instead of François Truffaut. The French New Waver mostly behaved himself behind the camera, shooting the anti-romance period piece with the made-for-TV aesthetics of a Masterpiece Theatre episode – complete with TV-friendly screen wipes. Adjani initially appears to be on her best behavior as well, arriving on the scene as a lovelorn romantic tracking down the traveling soldier who once proposed marriage to her against her family’s wishes. However, the more we come to understand just how obsessed she is with making this romantic connection happen (and just how little affection the soldier has expressed in return), it quickly becomes apparent that she’s a woman possessed. Then she gets worse, scarily so. Adjani’s ecstatic performance as a globetrotting stalker gone mad works in direct contrast to her director’s muted browns-and-greys historical aesthetics, so that all you can focus on is the immense power she wields as a screen presence. It was an incredible feat for the still-teenage actress, and it’s admittedly even more incredible that she somehow pushed her craft even further in Possession.
For his part, Truffaut is seemingly more preoccupied with the real-life historical spectacle of the story he’s telling than he is by the filmmaking mechanics of telling it. Stepping away from the more obvious visual & artistic trickery of his preceding film Day for Night, he instead reassures his audience with onscreen text, archival photographs, and vocalized diary excerpts that the events depicted are real things that happened to real people. The only overt trickery of the picture is hiding the full name of his subject from the audience, as the titular Adele H. is better known to the public as Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous French novelist Victor Hugo. As in the film’s narrative, the real-life Adele Hugo did travel to Canada & Barbados against her father’s commands to chase an unlikely romance with a fuckboy soldier who spurned her. It was a passionate, one-sided obsession that eventually drove her to the madhouse just as performed by Adjani in her first starting role – often expressed in the exact words of her personal letters & diary. Outside a couple double-exposure sequences in Adele’s sweaty nightmares, however, Truffaut never matches the mania of his subject in the film’s visual palette. He instead leaves that task entirely in Adjani’s scarily capable hands, which she uses to feverishly scribble endless love letters in her cramped Nova Scotian apartment instead of resting her mind with sleep.
Just in case the connection to Adjani’s now career-defining performance in Possession wasn’t already top-of-mind, Adele H. does include a brief scene in which the actor performs a manic episode against the brick walls of an urban tunnel – this time while being attacked by a wild dog. It’s just one of many jaw-dropping moments of ecstatic physical performance in the film, but it is still a visual reminder that Adjani’s one of the best to have ever performed that total breakdown routine in the history of the medium. Before Rowlands was the go-to citation for that manic extreme of the craft, I’m sure Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsionmade the publicity rounds in the same way. Maybe someday Elizabeth Moss’s work in titles like Queen of the Earth, The Invisible Man, and Her Smell will get its turn. For now, though, Isabelle Adjani is the reigning queen of melting down onscreen, and that icon status is well earned (in more films than one).
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.
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-Lewisas 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.
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.
It’s become something of a meme complaint over the past couple years that too much Queer Cinema is pervasively about white women longing for each other in period costumes. Sometime between the ecstatic praise for Portrait of a Lady on Fire and the collective yawn over Ammonite, pro critics & hobbyist bloggers decided that the biggest threat to the artform of cinema wasn’t Disney’s IP-hoarding or Netflix’s refusal to license its films to libraries & universities; it was white women sharing intense eye contact in a historical setting. Google “lesbian period drama” and you’ll find infinite hit-piece articles with titles like “Why Are All Lesbian Films Set in the Past?”, “Shoehorning Lesbian Scenes into Historical Dramas is Anything but Progressive”, “Lesbian Period Dramas: Have We Seen Enough?”, and “Enough With The Lesbian Period Dramas” from publications high and low. Personally, I understand this subgenre fatigue when it’s applied in broad strokes to a wide range of films, but not so much when it’s aimed at individual titles as if they were a cultural scourge. The problem isn’t that mediocre WLW romance dramas like Ammonite exist; it just sucks that other kinds of queer stories aren’t getting greenlit in bulk beside them.
I assume the relatively tepid response to The World to Come is a result of its arrival after this particular strand of Online Film Discourse had already run its course. It’s a great film, presuming you aren’t burnt out on the prospect of another lesbian period drama (or its pre-loaded critical baggage) at first sight. A delicately sweet romance contrasted against a brutal, unforgiving backdrop, The World to Come is splendid & bleak in equal measure. Its tale of secretive queer romance in a time of intense scrutiny & oppression is so familiar it’s almost regressive. Still, its historical environment at least rings true. It reminded me a lot of a college course I took on the literature of women’s travel writing in 19th Century America. The women in those real-life journals and this fictional novel adaptation share the same two threats to their freedom, happiness, and well-being: the cruelty of Nature and the cruelty of their husbands. It’s a shame how rare it is to see queer people flourishing in friendlier environments on the page & screen, but the romance & misery portrayed here still feels true to life on the American “frontier.”
Katherine Waterston stars as a hopelessly lonely housewife on an isolated, flailing New England farm. She has a rich internal life, furiously reading & journaling in her idle hours but unable to express herself aloud when the center of attention. While nursing her own grief over the loss of a child, she meets her exact opposite: Vanessa Kirby as a bold, brassy lush with no discernible talent for the intellectual arts. They hit it off in ways that Waterston’s journals struggle to describe. She confesses “There is something going on between us that I cannot unravel,” as if the concept of genuine sexual attraction is so foreign to her life that she doesn’t have the language to express it. Eventually, the two women do find the physical language to express their attraction to each other, even if it takes longer for the words to arrive. Unfortunately, the respective prisons of their marriages to cruel, repressed nerds and their shared prison of harsh, American wilderness prevent that romantic spark from reaching its full flame. Waterston’s careful, whispered language & passion is in direct opposition to the cold, uncaring environment she occupies. She finds her perfect fit in Kirby. It does not go well.
While the broader details of The World to Come may sound blandly generic in a post-Portrait of a Lady on Fire world, I found its in-the-moment effect to be impressively distinct & chilling. Its frontier setting might as well have been repurposed for a woodland A24 horror film, given its harsh digi cinematography and its frightfully unnerving score (which during one especially horrendous storm sounds like seagulls imitating jazz). It’s a highly subjective film that follows the tones & moods of Waterston’s journals as she flips through the pages of her life. There are great jumps in time when she has nothing exciting to write about, as well as loopy, unfocused entries when she self-medicates herself through depression with laudanum. Her voiceover narration is wonderfully overwritten, with Waterston delivering pained line-readings of confessions like “We were the very picture of anguish” and “I have become my grief.” Even when it releases the delayed flood of romantic & sexual bliss that always accompanies these films’ early stretches of pent-up longing, it’s in the most devastating possible context, undercutting the two women’s passion with a deeply felt loss & despair. This is an unrelentingly cold, somber film, and I respect that truthful brutality even if I agree that it’s not the only kind of queer story that deserves to be told.
Long before Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet attempted to modernize Shakespeare merely through hip choices in casting & costuming, Derek Jarman did much the same for The Tempest . . . with much uglier results. The arthouse British auteur interpreted the classic Shakespeare play as a series of gorgeous & grotesque tableaus set against a Gothic horror backdrop. The Tempest is a little drier & more text-faithful than I would have wanted from Jarman tackling such familiar, academic material, which might be the major way in which Luhrmann’s over-the-top Hollywood Spectacle excess has it bested. Still, the lurid imagery & spiritual decay that flows throughout all of Jarman’s films manages to make the Bard’s culturally over-saturated work his own distinct interpretation.
It would be beside the point to recap the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest here, at least not when a link to a Wikipedia article or CliffsNotes refresher would get the gist across just as well. This is less a re-interpretation of the text than it is a 70s-contemporary staging of its exact dialogue. Something I always appreciate about Jarman’s films (especially in my recent watches ofThe Garden & Jubilee) is how they feel like watching punks play dress-up: a muted, grotesque pleasure that The Tempest dwells on from start to end. I can’t say that any of the performer’s line readings reinvigorated Shakespeare’s words with any newfound fervor, but watching Jarman-regular Jack Birkett eat raw eggs & cackle at his own fart jokes as Caliban is the exact kind of Royal Theatre Geek Show you’d want out of this kind of material. It’s a very dry, calm, by-the-books production for the most part, which only makes its punk-scene casting & occasional absurdist outbursts more of a grotesque intrusion on the material by contrast.
I’ll be honest and admit that the well-behaved, academic approach to Shakespeare’s original text was somewhat of a letdown for me here, as I’m sure I would’ve fallen in love with the film if it were a little more blasphemous in the face of tradition. I’ll even admit that the shamelessly corny glam rock musical interpretation of The Tempest in Hunky Dory was a lot easier for me to latch onto as an audience; ditto Luhrmann’s empty-headed excess in Romeo+Juliet. If you have any affection for Jarman’s arthouse abstractions & debaucherous punk provocations, though, this is an interesting curio within that larger catalog. Just don’t bother with it if you haven’t already fallen in love with the much sharper, more wildly playful Jubilee.
The premise for Albert Serra’s latest #slowcinema provocation was too alluring of a hook for me to pass up, even though my patience was stretched beyond its limits in his previous film. In The Death of Louis XIV, Serra captured the boredom of waiting for death, filming French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as the titular monarch in his dying days, practically passing away onscreen in real-time. In its follow-up, Liberté, Serra captures the boredom of an unenthused orgasm, framing sex as the same kind of tedious bodily function as he previously framed death. I naively assumed meaningless sex would be more interesting to watch than a meaningless death, but Serra manages to make them equally boring & spiritually empty. To be fair, both movies are about boredom; I just don’t find that an especially rich subject, turns out.
In this glacially paced period drama, a small group of pre-Revolution French Libertines in exile take political refuge in the woods, passing the time by diddling each other and members of a nearby convent. There are no character beats or plot points to speak of, just bored old men seeking debaucherous sexual thrills over an unfulfilling, never-ending night in a “cursed place in the woods.” Figures don’t arrive on the scene so much as they materialize like ghosts, haunted by their philosophical commitment to seeking orgasms as an act of political rebellion, even though the going-through-the-motions drudgery suggests their hearts aren’t really in it. Throughout, Serra contrasts the gorgeous & the grotesque, the obscene & the serene. Quiet shots of the eerie woods are scored only by crickets and the rustling of pantaloons. That nature footage alternates with depraved, often unsimulated sex acts like analingus & piss play, presented with the same lack of urgency. There’s no purpose or direction for this monotonous, half-hearted activity, and it only ends because the sun eventually, thankfully rises.
It’s difficult to know what to do with a movie that aims to shock and bore audiences in equal measure. Liberté dwells in an awkward, liminal space between amoral debauchery & art cinema refinement. It’s like watching Salò hold out its pinky out while taking dainty sips of tea, perverse both in its content and in its own self-conflicted nature. I’m not sure that it adds much to the themes & textures of explicit provocations about the self-destructive nature of meaningless sex, though, especially since that canon is populated by much more exciting, exquisite titles: Salò, We Are the Flesh, In the Realm of the Senses, Stranger by the Lake, etc. There’s a sense of humor to the exercise at least, detectable in the way the Libertines stumble between sexual partners like Romero zombies in a shopping mall, or in the way one participant declares “Open the gates to Hell!” before rimming a nun-in-training. However, I gather that most of Serra’s amusement is rooted in intentionally boring himself & his audience, which is not at all my speed. This is a provocation fit only for #slowcinema aesthetes; more hyperactive trash gobblers like myself need to seek our own perverse thrills elsewhere.
It’s incredible that I didn’t catch Bright Young Things when it was still fresh in the mid-aughts. I was in college at the time, and hopelessly attracted to mid-tier indie films about queer libertines who made fabulously debaucherous lives out of indulging in drugs & gender-fuckery: Party Monster, Breakfast on Pluto, The Naked Civil Servant, etc. (as well as their better-funded equivalent in titles like Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig & The Angry Inch). A portrait of wealthy 1930s socialites enjoying the lull between wars with some lavish drag parties, booze, and cocaine, the semi-historical biopic Bright Young Things would have majorly appealed to me at the time. It’s basically a slightly classier, extremely British version of Party Monster — distinguished only by its staggering cast: James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, Emily Mortimer, Stockard Channing, Dan Aykroyd, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Peter O’Toole, Richard E. Grant, Jim Carter, and one-time director Steven Fry. Even watching it for the first time now, I enjoyed the film far more than I should have. If I had seen it as an impressionable young lush in desperate need of fabulous, crossdressing wastoids to look up to, I almost certainly would have worn that cheap-o second-hand DVD to dust.
Smartly, the film chooses an outsider who aspirationally looks up to the Bright Young Things as its audience-surrogate protagonist, matching the wide-eyed admiration of its target audience. It’s easy to piss away your youth and inherited wealth if you’re born into affluence. It’s a much more difficult trick to pull off for a starving artist who’s living a Bohemian lifestyle because of their class rather than their whims. The best our protagonist writer in search of a steady paycheck can hope for is to be taken in as an amusing pet by his fabulously wealthy friends (while scrounging up some chump change publicizing their decadence in the tabloids under the pseudonym Mr. Chatterbox). It’s a grift that can only last so long, which works out fine since the Bright Young Things themselves could only use London as their personal playground for as long as the world was willing to sit idle between wars. It’s a brilliant POV for the film to take, since the writer’s main motivation is to tag along as his crossdressing, gin-guzzling friends quip and party-hop from one novelty amusement to the next. His “journey” as their adopted working-class pet lands close enough to the ideal audience’s POV to highlight the film’s main attractions (boozy fancy dress parties where jaded artsy types complain “I’ve never been so bored in my entire life” despite the never-ending carnival enveloping them), while also bland enough to not get in their way.
There’s probably an excellent movie to be made about how privileged, unfulfilling, and spiritually toxic the real-life Bright Young Things’ debauchery truly was, but this isn’t it. It makes some last-minute gestures towards that kind of criticism as the party inevitably ends, but its heart really isn’t in it. The movie is much more vibrantly alive in its earliest stretches where everything is champagne, cocaine, drag, and roses, which makes it more of an aspirational wealth fantasy than anything genuinely critical or introspective. And that’s okay! The cast is brimming with delightful performers, all allowed by Fry’s hands-off direction to be as exuberantly charming as they please (with only Tennant being tasked to play a slimy turd so that there’s a vague shape of a villain to feign conflict). I might have been charmed to the point of obsession had I caught this aspirational lush fantasy as a teenager, but even now I was charmed to the point of enjoying the film far more than it likely deserves. Everyone loves a good party, and unfortunately it takes a certain amount of money & lack of self-awareness to throw one. As a frivolous adult who has worn a tuxedo & lipstick combo to a party this year (pre-COVID, mind you; I’m not a monster), I was helpless to enjoying the spectatorship of these staged parties in particular, despite my better judgement.
When Boomer reviewed Autumn de Wilde’s recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, he approached it from a state of deep genre fatigue. He wrote, “Its biggest weaknesses are not in the film itself, but in its timing. If it wasn’t nipping at the heels of Little Women and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I’d be spending a lot more time gushing over its color palette and period costumes, but despite the vibrancy and the spectacle of virtually every piece of clothing, I wasn’t as blown away as I would have liked to be.” This is certainly a valid POV in approaching the film. At least, it’s one I’ve seen validated by many other critics’ & audiences’ response to the movie – citing it as one of this season’s lesser specimens of its “genre” or, worse, an admirably solid adaptation of a book & character most people don’t seem to like to begin with. No matter how many times I see this sentiment repeated, though, it’s one I cannot match in my own, much more enthusiastic appreciation of Emma. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit, but I found a stronger personal connection to Emma. than I did with any one of the more Prestigious films of recent years on a similar wavelength: The Favourite, Little Women, Love & Friendship, etc. I liked all those movies a great deal and understand that any one of them would be a more respectably Intellectual choice as a personal favorite, but I really can’t help it. In my eyes, Emma.is a great work of that same caliber, if not higher.
Even from Emma.’s (admittedly mild) detractors who might dismiss it as a decent 3-star frivolity, you’ll hear concessions that it looks great. Its confectionery production design and deviously playful costuming are too intoxicating to ignore, even if you find the comedy of manners they service to be a bore. That visual achievement is no small, ancillary concern in my estimation. Its confectionery aesthetic is a significant aspect of its substance as a work of art, not least of all because cinema is an inherently visual medium. Director Autumn de Wilde is primarily known as a portrait photographer – making a name for herself shooting musicians’ album covers before transitioning into filmmaking through the music video. A strong, precisely defined visual style is essential for an artist of that background (consider the stylistic hyperbole of Hype Williams’s Belly) and it’s a genuine thrill to see that crisp, modern formalism applied to a period piece (consider Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette), given how stuffy & buttoned up the costume drama can feel at its laziest. There’s a tendency to devalue the visual artistry of fashion design & carefully curated color palettes as secondary concerns in cinema, as if they only exist to serve more Important criteria like performance & plot. Personally, I often find them far more exciting than those more frequently discussed concerns – especially in the “costume drama,” where costuming is emphasized right there in the name. When, for instance, Emma wears a free-floating lace collar as if it were an S&M-inspired choker or wears an overly frilly perfumed ornament that dangles from her hair like a mace, it’s more thrilling to me than any action sequence in Fast & Furious or Mad Max: Fury Road could ever be.
Of course, Autumn de Wilde’s precise eye for visual composition extends from what her characters are wearing to how they are positioned in the frame. Emma. is largely a story about the politics of social hierarchy among wealthy 19th Century fops (dressed up as a tittering rom-com about a misguided matchmaker), so much of its minute-to-minute conflicts are hinged on microscopic social cues in both spoken dialogue & performed body language. The film dutifully allows Austen’s dialogue to speak for itself on this highly stylized stage, but it does add its own spin to the source material by paying careful attention to blocking. Characters are constantly maneuvering their bodies in private parlors & public spaces to communicate unspoken dominance & conflict with their social adversaries. Emma Woodhouse herself has more perceived adversaries than most, as someone who constantly plays with social configurations as an idle pastime, so she’s the most obvious example of this purposeful body language display. When she spies through a store window that a new person is entering the room, she prepares by positioning her body in the most advantageous position she can manage, like a war general seeking higher ground. When she greets a potential beau who she finds romantically intriguing in her private greenhouse, she shifts her position to where the glass pane with the best lighting hits her just right with an artificially warm glow. Seemingly simple conversations in the film visually play out like complicated dances as characters mechanically shift around each other in closed-off rooms, an attention to blocking that’s emphasized by an elaborate ballroom scene where those body language politics become unavoidably explicit. It’s framed as being deliberate choices made by the characters themselves, but I think it also reflects the film being the vision of a director with an eye for how figures are arranged in photographic compositions.
As sharp as de Wilde’s visual compositions are in this debut feature, I can see how detractors could believe the movie falls short as an adaptation in its unwillingness to tinker with the source material. Emma. will not win over any naysayers who were already displeased with Austen’s novel or Emma Woodhouse as a character. This is a faithful translation from page-to-screen in terms of narrative content, only asserting its own voice on the material through visual style & comedic performance. It works for me, but I was already a fan of the novel before I arrived. Emma Woodhouse is a deeply flawed brat whose lifelong idleness in comfort & wealth has trained her to treat people’s private lives like playthings. Anya Taylor-Joy was perfect casting for the role in that she’s already been walking a tightrope between quietly sinister & adorably sweet since her breakout performance in The Witch. Her dips into thoughtless cruelty at the expense of her social inferiors hit just as hard as the physical comedy of the goofier subordinates she’s adopted as pets (the MVPs in those roles being Mia Goth as her absurdly naive protégée & Bill Nighy as her hypochondriac father). Both Emma’s icy manipulations of her social circle’s hierarchy (disguised as playful “matchmaking”) and her closest family & friends’ pronounced goofiness are majorly enhanced by the buttoned-up tension of the setting, where the smallest gesture or insult can mean The World. The laughs are big; so are the gasps when Emma fucks up by allowing her games to hurt “real” people’s very real feelings. When Clueless modernized the character for the 1990s, it softened the blow of these thoughtless miscalculations by making Emma something of an oblivious Valley Girl ditz. De Wilde’s film makes no such accommodations, sketching her out as a very smart, sharply witted person who should know better (and ultimately learns from her mistakes). Continuing to like her in that context is a bigger leap than some audiences are apparently willing to make.
I really like Emma., both the movie and the character. Autumn de Wilde seemingly likes her as well, even if she can’t resist ribbing her for not being half as smart or talented as she believes herself to be (most hilariously represented in her limitations as a painter & musician). I wish I could fully hinge my appreciation for this movie on its exquisite visual artistry or its shrewdness as a page-to-screen adaptation, but the ultimate truth is that it’s a comedy that I happened to find very, very funny from start to end. Whether that’s because the physical humor hit me just right in its stuffy setting or because I just happen to generally get a kick out of Women Behaving Badly is anyone’s guess. Similarly, I wonder if critics who were underwhelmed by the film in comparison with fellow costume dramas of its artistic caliber just simply didn’t find it humorous, as there’s no rationale that can intellectually save a comedy you simply don’t find funny. No one seems willing to argue that Emma. isn’t accomplished as a visual feat, so I suspect it’s the specificity of the humor or the thorniness of Emma Woodhouse as a character that’s weighing down its initial reputation. Personally, both the quirky character humor and the thoughtless dips into ice-cold cruelty worked for me, and I consider Emma. to be a major work. I doubt I’m the only one.
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