ENCHANTED APRIL - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in May 2009. It's being reprinted unedited with its original jokes intact...just because.

Of course, the obvious snarky question is why Enchanted April didn't come out on DVD until May, and I'd say the snarky answer would involve something to the effect that it felt like the 93-minute movie took a month to watch, so being a month late would just be par for the course.

Truth is, Enchanted April fans have waited much longer than that for the movie to come to disc in North America. Despite having won two Golden Globes in 1993 and getting nominated for multiple Oscars, this Mike Newell-helmed picture has not been on DVD before now. When I worked at a video store a couple of years ago, it was one of the most regularly requested titles amongst the customers. Perhaps this delay has built up too much expectation in me, given me too long to inflate my perceived appreciation of Enchanted April in my mind. I know I saw it during its theatrical run, and then at least once more on home video a couple of years later, but I'd wager it's been more than a decade since I last sat through it. The movie has gotten older, I've gotten older, and we've grown apart.

Enchanted April is a period piece set in the 1920s. It is the story of four British women and the Italian castle that provides them with a bucolic getaway for what is to be a month of no socializing, no husbands, nothing but the sea, the air, and the trees. The trip is initially organized by two bored housewives, Lottie Wilkins (Josie Lawrence), the wife of a gastronomically self-satisfied London-based solicitor (Alfred Molina), and Rose Arbuthnot (Miranda Richardson), who is married to a man (Jim Broadbent) who writes scandalous novels under an assumed name. To offset the costs of their holiday, the two advertise for vacation mates, eventually scoring a stuffy older woman (Joan Plowright) and a much-desired flapper (Polly Walker). As a little wrinkle of irony, the flapper, Lady Caroline, is trying to get out of town to escape the lecherous men who pursue her, and one of them is Mr. Arbuthnot. Uh-oh! Trouble's a-comin'!

Except, no, there will be no trouble. None at all. Rather, there will just be a month of relaxation and rehabilitation in the country, a month of quietly rediscovering oneself, and eventually of rekindling love. It's also a month of sheer boredom, a slow burn that never catches flame.

Enchanted April, even back when it seemed good, always came off as a bit of a sub-par take on Merchant Ivory territory. Written by Peter Barnes (the one-time much sharper writer of the satirically daring The Ruling Class) from a 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, the movie details the kind of humdrum, repressed lives that many a James Ivory character has so expertly burst in his many great movies, and given that Enchanted April originally hit the Cineplex somewhere in between Howard's End [review] and Remains of the Day, it tied many of us over in terms of satisfying our yen for costume drama. Peter Barnes is no Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, however, and I doubt Ms. von Arnim is in the same league as Henry James. Likewise, Mike Newell is certainly no James Ivory; rather, he is the director of such middle-ground material as Mona Lisa Smile and Love in the Time of Cholera. His best-known movie (not counting his time at Hogwarts) is Four Weddings and a Funeral, another film that may not have aged well. After Enchanted April, I'm a little scared to find out.

It's not that Enchanted April is simply god-awful. It has some truly lovely locations, and I rather appreciated its use of multiple points-of-view, giving each lady her own voiceover in order to chronicle her inner thoughts. Polly Walker is as alluring as her part demands, affecting ennui and managing to be irresistibly attractive while doing so, and Miranda Richardson gives a subtle and nuanced performance that brings far more to the material than the filmmakers could have possibly hoped for. Looking out at the sea, pondering her life, she says more with her face than any of Barnes' dry narration ever could. The actress was really the only thing that kept me watching to the closing credits.

The problem is that Enchanted April takes its dispassionate stance far too seriously. The women are all supposed to change, transformed by their new surroundings, their blood once again boiled by the shining Italian sun--and yet, even as they change, the movie remains bloodless. Lots of light, but no heat and so no boiling. I didn't find the changes to be believable, instead they just came off as predictable, relying on audience expectation that the metamorphoses must happen rather than making the effort to inspire similar feelings within everyone watching. This is Merchant Ivory by the numbers, a costume drama going through the motions. The end result is that Enchanted April turns into a dreary pit stop rather than a life-changing experience. Rather than being the good thing we were waiting for to transport us to a better place and time, it's just more impetus to keep looking.

A TASTE OF HONEY - #829

“I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice....”

Morrissey or Shelagh Delaney?

As most fans of the Smiths know, it’s both. Though, those with a big nose who know, know that the lyricist ripped it from the playwright, just as Moz lifted much from Delaney’s texts and nodded to her often. The above lyric is from A Taste of Honey and was embedded in the early Smiths track “Reel Around the Fountain;”  another song from the same period, “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” not only borrows more lines from Honey, but the plot as well. Morrissey makes no secret of this. On the contrary, his sampling from Delaney, as well as putting her picture on album and singles covers (Louder than Bombs and “Girlfriend in a Coma”) helped drive many a dark youngster to her work. I read the original A Taste of Honey stageplay in high school, and finally found the film version many years later. The vocabulary theft made me predisposed to be a fan.

Shelagh Delaney on "Girlfriend in a Coma"

Rita Tushingham on the Sandie Shaw/Smiths EP

The movie adaptation of A Taste of Honey was released in 1961. Directed by Tony Richardson, it is considered part of Britain’s “kitchen sink” movement, so named not because the filmmakers in that school threw “everything but...” into their cinema, but rather they showed us how folks lived, kitchen sinks and all. Examining the working class citizens as they struggled to get by and potentially change their lives, Criterion fans can see the storytelling style in films as different as This Sporting Life [review], Billy Liar [review], and Victim [review], or even later, we can see how it influenced Ken Loach (Kes [review]) and Mike Leigh.

One hallmark of the kitchen sink films was the appearance of the angry young man (Harris in This Sporting Life, McDowell in If.... [review]--both in films by Lindsay Anderson, whom Shelagh Delaney collaborated with on The White Bus [review]). This makes A Taste of Honey a bit of a stylistic revolutionary, as its protagonist is an angry young woman. Starring Rita Tushingham (Doctor Zhivago, Girl with Green Eyes), A Taste of Honey tells the story of Jo, a teenager frustrated with her life of squalor and limited prospects. Jo lives alone with her mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), a woman with many lovers but never two shillings to rub together. This means the pair moves a lot, running out on one landlord after another. They also squabble constantly, tearing one another down, breaking up and making up because, begrudgingly, they are all they’ve really got.

This changes when Helen meets Peter (Robert Stephens) and decides to remarry. Though Jo is reluctant to finally let go of the apron strings, Peter is a much younger man than his new bride and not interested in having a grown daughter. So, Jo moves out on her own, getting a job in a shoe shop and a new roommate of her own. Also, she’s gotten pregnant by a sailor who has since left to sail the seas.

An unmarried teenager having a child all by her lonesome would have been social scandal enough, but Delaney--who co-wrote the screenplay with Richardson--was a progressive writer whose vision took in all aspects of life in urban Manchester. Jo’s lover, Jimmy (Paul Danquah), is a black man, and her roommate, Geoffrey (Murray Melvin), is gay. These facts are both approached delicately. No one comments on Jimmy and Jo being together, but the color of his skin is a factor in Jo’s anxiety about the impending birth. For instance, should she even want to take Geoffrey up on his offer to marry, people will know he’s not the father when they see the child. That’s if the gossips and wags buy their relationship to begin with. Though no one but Jo ever confronts Geoffrey outright about his sexuality, everyone looks at him sideways. They all sense the truth.

Which is always fascinating to see in an older film, since anyone with parents and grandparents born in “the good old days” knows that some members of those generations often tend to pretend that gays and lesbians weren’t around until that demonic disco music magically spawned them. But that’s what art is for--and history books--to show us what many would rather we not see. There’s a reason A Taste of Honey opens with a censorship board certificate indicating it’s only suitable for viewers over the age of 16. Much of the dialogue is frank about things that just weren’t acceptable: sex out of wedlock, abortion, alcoholism. Yet, Delaney avoids pushing a message. She and Richardson just want to show life as they’ve witnessed it and let the audience empathize or reject on their own.

Though Tony Richardson’s generation of filmmakers is often referred to as the British New Wave, their early work has little of the experimentalism inherent in the movies of their French contemporaries laboring under the same name. Rather, the Brits had more in common with the Italians in that realism was more important than style. Hence the director and his cinematographer Walter Lassally (who went on to shoot many of James Ivory’s lesser pictures) filming in the streets of Manchester, inside real apartments, and walking the boardwalk by the seaside. This was an existence that could not be re-created in a studio without adding a touch of glitz, so better to go where it was actually happening. The excursions out into public have an air of documentary, including a trip to the country where the child-like Geoffrey and Jo frolic with elementary school-aged kids. The mountainside expanse emphasizes how small they really are in the grand scheme of the universe (“I’m not happy and I’m not sad”), and the company they keep exposes just how young they are, too. Neither is really in a place where they should be having kids of their own.

It’s a great sequence, actually, with Geoffrey trying to prove he can be the husband and father Jo needs by awkwardly kissing her. The “traditional” roles are reversed with these two. Geoffrey probably feels too much, while Jo doesn’t quite know how to access all that is going on in her head and her heart. Back at their flat, Geoffrey cooks and cleans, while Jo goes out and earns a wage. One assumes it will all go wrong for these two, that somehow tragedy awaits, but A Taste of Honey sidesteps our expectations. Sure, it ends on a down beat, and everything isn’t necessarily okay, but we do leave with the sense that it will be. Lessons are being learned, and these characters will all carry on and get along in some fashion. Some ties bind so tightly, they will never be broken.

Criterion’s new restoration is, I believe, the first time A Taste of Honey has been available on disc in the States. The image quality is remarkable: crisp and clear, with strong blacks and an excellent level of detail. Supplements include interviews old and new, including vintage clips with Richardson and Delaney, and new chats with Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin.

We also get a 1956 short film collaboration between Richardson and Lassally, co-directed by Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Made as part of the Free Cinema Collective that Richardson and Reisz formed with Lindsay Anderson, Mama Don’t Allow is a 22-minute documentary that displays the realist roots that Richardson and Co. grew from. Set inside and outside a jazz bar, with cutaways to some of the attendees preparing for an evening on the town, it’s a simple portrait of a particular nightlife. With a live soundtrack by the Chris Barber Jazz Band, including Lonnie Donegan, a.k.a. the King of Skiffle, a successful British rock musician that influenced the Beatles, Mama Don’t Allow is a winning snapshot of a specific scene, giving us a look at music and youth culture before the advent of rock ’n’ roll.

The screengrabs here are from an earlier DVD given away free with the Sunday Telegraph fifteen years ago and not from the Criterion Blu-ray.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

MAURICE - THE MERCHANT IVORY COLLECTION

It’s kind of funny that I first saw James Ivory’s 1987 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Maurice back in my college days, because rewatching the movie some 20 years later, I realize that Maurice somewhat illustrates what was my father’s worst nightmare at the time. In the early 1900s, young Maurice (James Wilby) went to Oxford where he was exposed to radical ways of thinking that made him doubt his religion while also opening up his understanding about his own sexuality, leading to clandestine dalliances with one of his school chums (Hugh Grant) and basically allowing Maurice to embrace his dormant homosexuality.

It’s like all the liberal education bogeymen that haunt conservatives have crawled out from under the dormitory beds.

Of course, to blame Oxford for transforming Maurice is to miss the truth of Forster’s story. At one point, when arguing with his mother about his changing opinions, Maurice defends himself by basically saying, “This is who I am. I am not my father, I am me. I was made this way.” Though dear ol’ mum has no idea that her child is queer, the coded language of the exchange could not be more clear, or more potent. Despite the progress made in the century since Forster published his then-controversial book (homosexual acts were illegal in England, as illustrated by the arrest of another of Maurice’s classmates), or even since Ivory’s film was released, well ahead of the indie revolution of the 1990s that helped give queer cinema a new platform, opponents of gay marriage and the regular appearance on our Facebook timelines of stories about kids coming out to intolerant parents have sadly allowed Maurice to remain contemporaneously relevant and not just a document of a certain period of history.

But then, good stories never lose their punch, and Ivory and co-writer Kit Hesketh-Harvey find the essential emotion in Forster’s tale of a naïve, upper-middle class student having his eyes and heart opened to the world. Maurice is both sensitive and insightful, finding the universality of coming-of-age coming-out stories and detailing how internal shame and external prejudice affect the individuals who suffer from them. Maurice and Clive (Grant) find friendship and then love in college, but family demands and social persecution push them apart. While Clive gives in and gets married, Maurice struggles to maintain his secret life, while also carrying the torch for his first romance. Eventually, he finds affection with one of Clive’s groundskeepers, Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), but that also has its own complications.

One thing that is both timeless and universal in Maurice’s difficult early adulthood, and one that most adolescents can relate to be they straight or gay or whatever, is feeling like an outsider. Maurice’s most palpable and familiar trait is the air of the different. Be it religion, class, or social mores, Maurice is always on the outside. Because he doesn’t fit in what might be considered the most elemental of manly roles, he ends up finding comfort in little else. Unable to accept himself, he rejects religion, education, and the more humiliating aspects of societal expectation. Not apologizing to his headmaster for sneaking off with his lover allows Maurice a rebellion only he understands. He’d rather draw an invisible line and be tossed from school than reject what he’s found. Naturally, this position is hard to maintain, but one that Maurice must find the strength to carry on with, because the more he gives in to expectation and tries to get along, the more he struggles and the less happy he becomes. Things flip when he exploits another for his desire, indulging with the servant Scudder...though there is some question of who is exploiting whom. Forster has quite keenly observed that the oppressed can easily become the oppressor, and they can also be taken advantage of for the same.

Maurice also illustrates how certain hokum has always held sway and may never go away. Ben Kingsley shows up for a couple of scenes playing a hypnotist Maurice hires to divest him of his forbidden desires. This has about as much success as religious groups who think that homosexuality is something that can be cured through rehabilitation and prayer. Attempts to repress one’s true feelings tend to only give added strength to their triggers.

Such a delicate story requires a delicate touch, and Ivory is well suited for it. I’ve noted in the past that part of the Merchant Ivory appeal is a near absence of style, and Maurice shows the team at their most Masterpiece Theatre-like. There is little to distinguish this film from any variety of BBC literary dramas, except maybe the sexy love scenes between Grant and Wilby and Wilby and Graves. It’s certainly not the kind of thing one expects to see in a TV miniseries based on Austen or Dickens. There’s something normalizing, however, by approaching these couplings with the same even keel as Ivory and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme approach everything else. Theirs is nearly invisible cinema. There are no sweeping pans or emphatic zooms to underline emotion. Rather, Ivory allows for character and setting to maintain the spotlight. A meeting in the woods, or ducking from a rainstorm--these are tropes from romance novels, but also just the stuff of life and circumstance. When it comes to describing the films of Merchant Ivory, “plain” is not pejorative. Much in the same way an author might use clear language to make sure there is no confusion amongst his readership, Ivory leaves the flourishes to happen within the scene, even as he encourages his performers to adopt a like-minded restraint. Seeing a young Hugh Grant be dashing without mugging for the camera is a good reminder of why we all actually liked seeing him in movies once upon a time.

While this poise and reserve means James Ivory is considered by some to be the most quintessentially British of directors, the truth is that he’s an American who actually grew up and went to college in Oregon, from whence I currently hail. This connection is what prompted me to give Maurice a spin, as on Friday, October 10, Ivory will be appearing at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland to present Maurice as part of the Mid Century Oregon Genius series.

It’s a rare appearance, and to go along with this screening, Ivory has also chosen to air his rarely seen 1977 film Autobiography of a Princess, starring James Mason and available on Criterion’s OOP Heat and Dust DVD. The filmmaker selected Princess as complement to Oregon-native James Blue’s The Olive Trees of Justice showing later the same day and followed by a panel discussion focusing on Blue’s filmography.

For details on all of these showings, visit the Hollywood Theatre website.