James Ivory’s The
Golden Bowl , from a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel
by Henry James, and produced by Ismail Merchant, reunites the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala
team on a cinematic adaptation of a Henry James classic-reportedly for the last
time, though this will probably not deter the pseudo-brutalists from their
sneering condescension toward the alleged sins of gentility and formality,
summed up in the catch-all epithet ” Masterpiece
Theatre .” Indeed, the firm of Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala seems never to have
been forgiven for demonstrating, in A
Room With a View (1986) and Howards
End (1992) particularly, that there was money to be made and awards to be
won for bringing to the screen reasonable replicas of great literary works for
viewers who don’t move their lips when they read.
This is not to say that the new movie version of The Golden Bowl is beyond criticism
because of the good intentions of its makers. Far from it. That the film came
out as well as it did, considering that the novel is perhaps James’ greatest,
densest and most exquisitely articulated work, is itself little short of a
miracle. I was particularly worried in advance by the casting of Nick Nolte as
American widower Adam Verver and Uma Thurman as American expatriate Charlotte
Stant. They just didn’t sound right for the parts, somehow; they just sounded
available. As it turned out, they were just fine, even though their characters
were made subtly more dominant in the end than those of the more aptly cast
Kate Beckinsale, as Maggie Verver, and Jeremy Northam, as Prince Amerigo. In
the process, the original point of the James story has been interestingly
blurred.
For people who have not read the book-and they have always
greatly outnumbered the people who have, even in the select ranks of art-house
patrons-I should try to explain what I think the point of the story was for
James. According to the production notes, the plot of the novel “was inspired
by an anecdote James heard concerning a young woman and her widower father who
learned that their spouses were engaged in an affair.” Over the years, there
have been movies in which two people discover that their respective spouses are
cheating on them with each other. Usually, the betrayed pair get their own back
by completing the adulterous quadrille. This is not possible with a father and
a daughter. Still, the relationship between Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie
comes very close to incest in terms of emotional intimacy and rapport.
In fact, the relationship between Maggie and her father is
more extensively developed than that between the father and Charlotte, the
young stepmother; between Maggie and her husband, Prince Amerigo; between
Maggie and Charlotte, her school friend; or between Charlotte and the Prince,
who had been intimate before Maggie’s marriage and after. As a result, Maggie
and Charlotte end up in a mutually constructed web of deception and
manipulation. If there is a feeling of loss at the end of the book, it is most
strongly felt by Maggie and her father over their enforced separation to save
her marriage to the Prince.
The Golden Bowl is
James’ most thinly populated novel, with but four major characters and only one
go-between, Anjelica Huston’s Fanny Assingham. Though Fanny’s omnipresence has
been somewhat reduced in the movie, she does get to smash the golden bowl, as
in the book, to eliminate the metaphorical evidence of the Prince’s betrayal of
Maggie with Charlotte, but to no avail. Maggie knows, but she does not want
Charlotte to know that she knows-partly for Charlotte’s sake, partly for the
sake of her marriage, but mostly for the sake of her beloved father. That is
why the movie should end with Maggie and the Prince in a troubled embrace as in
the book, and not with a black-and-white projection of Adam and Charlotte
arriving in America with all his art treasures, like the beneficent robber
barons of old, the J.P. Morgans and Andrew Carnegies and such.
I suspect that Mr. Ivory
was driven to his alternate ending because of his weariness with the enervating
Europe of Henry James. Certainly, Adam’s art treasures and his dreams of a
magnificent museum in an “American city” are there in James’ novel, and one can
make of these dreams what one will, but the heart of the drama is the ultimate
triumph of Maggie over Charlotte, at whatever cost.
I suspect also that Mr. Ivory and Ms. Jhabvala were
uncomfortable with the suggestion in the James novel that money does indeed
make the world go around-and indeed, as much in matters of the heart as in
matters of state. When you think about it, The
Golden Bowl is a case of the rich, seemingly innocent Americans brilliantly
manipulating a cash-poor Italian prince and a Europeanized but also poor American
beauty. Thus, the only true love in the story-that between the Prince and
Charlotte-is thwarted by the sheer weight of the money involved. Maggie is not
at all humiliated by her awareness that she has purchased a Prince with her
father’s immense wealth. This is the way of the world, though not the way of
most movies. Yet that seeming crassness is what makes The Golden Bowl such an original story for the cinema.
A curious addition to the movie I do not recall from the
book is a violent period flashback-that is, much earlier than James’ early 20th
century-of an abduction, with swordplay, of a woman sleeping in the Prince’s
Roman palace. It may be a joke played by Merchant-Ivory on their more
bloodthirsty critics: You want violence, we’ll give you violence-and now back
to our more customary civilized graces.
I must say that Ms.
Beckinsale, whose star in the movie firmament seems to be rising, comes close
to capturing the sublimity of Maggie, despite the obvious fact that no movie
can capture the elegant copiousness of James’ prose. I for one am grateful to
the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala troika for even trying to climb a literary Mount
Everest like The Golden Bowl . Their
zest and taste is particularly refreshing when so much of filmmaking has
descended to the most vulgar level of the bottom line. They deserve better in
the way of critical reaction, and I hope they get it.
The Invisible Women
Jafar Panahi’s The Circle ( Dayereh ), from a screenplay by Kambuzia Partovi, based on an
original idea by Mr. Panahi, suggests for a time that the plight of women in
Iran is almost comparable to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. The
misogynistic persecution begins in the maternity ward of a Teheran hospital,
where a woman in a chador waits before a closed rectangular panel for news of
her daughter’s delivery. The ultrasound test had promised a boy, but a nurse
opens the panel to announce that the daughter delivered a girl instead. The
woman in the chador turns for the first time toward the camera, and we see her
face: sorrowful, almost terrified. It is the face of a woman who knows her
son-in-law’s family will abandon her daughter. The woman flees as the in-laws
arrive. She is but the first victim of an institutionalized oppression of women
in Iran and other Muslim countries. In a circular narrative, Mr. Panahi tracks
the separate but similar predicaments in which eight women find themselves on
the streets of Teheran.
Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani), after escaping from prison,
flees her home for fear her two brothers will kill her for disgracing the
family-and they don’t even know that she is pregnant and unmarried. Pari
searches through the city for someone who can perform an abortion, which can be
obtained legally only with the written permission of a husband, father or other
male relative. (It was news to me that abortions were permitted in Iran at all,
with or without permission.) She seeks the help of Elham (Elham Saboktakin), a
nurse married to a doctor in her hospital but estranged from her family because
of her prison record. But Elham cannot
help Pari without incriminating herself with her husband. Indeed, all the women
in The Circle have prison records of
one kind or another, but we’re never told why they were sent to prison in the
first place. A movie in which the eight women characters are either escaped
convicts or ex-convicts would not seem to qualify as a fair cross-section of
Iranian women. Still, it is through the misadventures of these women that Mr.
Panahi illuminates several of the restrictions that apply to all Iranian women.
Mr. Panahi credits the inspiration for the story to a
journalistic source: “One day I noticed a small article in the newspaper: A
woman committed suicide after killing her two daughters. There was nothing
about the reasons behind the crime or suicide. Perhaps the newspapers did not
see any need, since in many communities, women are most deprived. Their freedom
is limited to the point it seems as if they are in a big prison. This is not
only true for a particular class of women, but for all of them. As if each
woman could replace another in a circle, making them all the same.”
Hence, it matters little whether the character is named
Arezou (Maryiam Parvin Almani), Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh), the hardly seen,
hapless mother of a despised daughter at infancy in the beginning of the
picture (Solmaz Gholami), Monir (MonirArab),Nayereh (Fatemeh Naghavi), who
abandons her daughter in the hope that she will find an enlightened family to
care for her, or Mojgan (Mojgan Faramarzi), who “adjusts” after a fashion to
the injustice. The society itself is the villain. And, as in The White Balloon (1995), Mr. Panahi
displays great skill in directing non-actors.
