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Tell me that's not a heathen
Every time I have tried to write about a movie lately, something else politically awful has happened and eaten my time and attention; then there has been life to deal with and no chance to catch up on sleep. On the assumption that this pattern is not likely to change any time soon, here's a movie anyway.
In the spring of 1817, a young woman was discovered wandering the village of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire. Her dress was outlandish, her manners graceful but obviously foreign. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, attractive and expressive. She appeared neither disoriented nor unintelligent, but she did not react when addressed in English, except to the speaker's gestures and tones of voice. No one understood the language she spoke. She was briefly jailed in Bristol for vagrancy, retrieved by the wife of the same unimpressed magistrate who had sent her away. Eventually, through a combination of pantomime, interpretation, and the imaginative assistance of her listeners, the mysterious stranger made it understood that she was a daughter of the king of Javasu near Sumatra, stolen from her native island and sold into slavery by pirates; having been traded ship to ship across the oceans, she had finally escaped by jumping overboard while off the coast of England and made her way alone across the countryside, eventually fetching up in Almondsbury. She could write in her native language and demonstrated its characters, which looked a little like Chinese and a little like Greek and a lot like nothing ever before seen in England. She observed a vegetarian, teetotal diet and prayed daily to her monotheistic God, whom she addressed as "Alla-Tallah." She liked to practice archery, fence, and dance. From the start, she called herself by the name of "Caraboo." Residing for ten weeks with Samuel and Elizabeth Worrall at Knole Park, Princess Caraboo became something more than a nine days' wonder, especially after experts in the languages and culture of the East Indies were unable to break her story—the more she was studied, in fact, the more convincing her presentation became. She became the latest craze of fashionable society, receiving visitors in Bath, sitting for portraits in Bristol; articles about her were published and republished in the local papers, at which point her description was recognized and the exotic fantasia collapsed. In reality, "Princess Caraboo" was the confabulation of twenty-five-year-old Mary Baker from Witheridge in Devonshire, an itinerant serving girl with a quick ear for languages and a genius for theater. She had fabricated the customs of her country from sailors' tales, travel books, and free-floating Orientalism; her imperious, flowing foreign tongue was a mixture of Malay, English Romani, and her own invented language. She had taken everyone—scholars, adventurers, high society—in. Unpunished by the law despite the seriousness of her offence, still fêted by her public despite the reveal of her deception, the ex-princess took passage for America at the end of the summer. The fullest contemporary account of her imposture was written and published later that year by John Mathew Gutch of Bristol as Caraboo: A Narrative of a Singular Imposition, and almost two centuries later it formed the basis for the script of Michael Austin's Princess Caraboo (1994), which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I watched over the weekend.
The film is a romanticized version of the story, but not, it turns out, in ways that I mind. Rather than relying on is-she-or-isn't-she ambiguity for its narrative pull, the script wisely opts for lightly observed social satire, treating Caraboo's effect on the surrounding cast as a kind of Rorschach of their characters and Regency England in general. Kind-hearted, discontented Mrs. Worrall (Wendy Hughes) is captivated by the romance and mystery of Caraboo's plight, adopting her guest's taste in brightly patterned calicos and sparking a fad for turbans and bangles among her social set; her efforts to make the princess feel at home include redecorating rooms in a lavish silken style and flying a homemade gold-and-crimson flag over Knole Park as if it were the Javasu embassy. Nouveau riche banker Mr. Worrall (Jim Broadbent) has less imagination than a radish and a lot higher alcohol content and can't believe the deference his wife is extending to some weird vagabond in breeches with her hair tied up in a scarf, but even he isn't too slow to cotton on to the lucrative business opportunities presented by close acquaintance with an authentic princess of the Spice Islands. To the sour magistrate Haythorne (Roger Lloyd-Pack), all foreigners are vagrants and wastrels and not understanding the language in which a trial is conducted is no object to receiving a sentence from the court; to the jaded Lord and Lady Apthorpe (Peter Eyre and Jacqueline Pearce), a foreigner this quaint and beautiful is a diversion worthy of presenting to the Prince Regent (John Sessions! We drove ourselves crazy trying to recognize him until the credits). Kevin Kline gets a chance to exercise both his Greek accent and his air of weary condescension as the snippy butler who has the newcomer judged as a fraud right up until the moment she bites him for trying to look up her skirts. John Lithgow briefly and piercingly steals his scenes as a supercilious philologist who comes from Oxford to debunk Caraboo and leaves with both his assumptions and his heart in pieces. At the center of all of their fascination is the princess herself, like a cipher of the Orient that none of them have ever seen but everyone knows when they see it. Here the film has a great asset in Phoebe Cates, who I understand is extremely famous for some teen movies I've never seen. As both Caraboo and her creator, she is almost never offscreen and for much of the runtime has the difficult job of holding the audience's interest and sympathy while being almost opaque to interpretation—the script is not constructed to tip its hand any sooner than history did. The actress' ability to look the part with her dark, delicate looks and her lightly folded eyes, her unapologetic carriage and her startling dazzle of a smile would count for nothing if she were actually a blank. Instead, in every interaction, we realize that behind the attentive gravity that is her most common expression we can always see her thinking; what we can't see is whether we're watching a fish out of privileged water working to comprehend an entire new culture on the fly or a con artist calculating her next strategic move. When she weeps at a performance of Schubert's Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, the emotion is naked and unfeigned and tells us nothing about the nature of the woman with tears on her cheeks except that she's got good taste in piano trios, even anachronistic ones. She can't be what she claims. No real person from the Indonesian archipelago would so match in every particular the English fancy of an "Oriental princess." So then what is she?
That's the line of inquiry pursued by the film's version of J. M. Gutch, played by Stephen Rea as narrator, adversary, and eventual co-protagonist of Caraboo's story. He's the script's greatest departure from history, although I can see how he evolved from the admiring tone of the real Gutch's narrative, which the film uses to bookend its action. An Irish printer and journalist for Felix Farley's Bristol Journal—"none too successful financially and, I will admit, none too fortunate in love, either"—he's taking notes in the gallery when Caraboo comes up before the assizes for vagrancy; he asks a snarky question, gets a prompt snub, and is left curiously touched and intrigued by a woman he's seen for all of five minutes, standing straight-backed despite her chains with all the poise of royalty waiting for some tiresome but requisite ceremony to be over. At first the Worralls want nothing to do with him, especially since his paper has been publishing what Mr. Worrall blusterously considers libels about his bank; presently an appeal to their Christian charity, not to mention his ability to publicize it, wins them over sufficiently for an audience with the princess. The viewer may recognize him as a danger. He's suspicious and he's smart. He cuts a nice ambiguous figure among the brightly dressed gentry, conspicuously out of fashion in his black coat that doesn't show the ink; his disheveled dark hair gives him the initially misleading air of a Romantic poet rather than the put-upon publisher Coleridge can't be bothered to pay. It's a good part for Rea's lanky slouch and wry deadpan—he's a bruised romantic in a cynic's trade, a boy who dreamed of far-off islands with names like poetry grown up into a man who makes his living from muckraking and monotony, disillusioned with himself and resigned to it. "As a journalist," he comments with stinging prescience, "I know people will believe two things—what they read in the newspapers and what they want to believe. And that's the way of the world." Predictably, he's soon as obsessed with the elusive Caraboo as the rest of the countryside, but with a lovely twist: surrounded by people who have staked their self-images, their social success, and even their financial futures on the truth of a stolen princess from the far side of the world, Gutch wants her to be a fraud, not because he resents her impersonation or even because it will make a better story for his paper, but because he's enchanted with the idea of "an ordinary girl with an extraordinary imagination," tricky and clever enough to reinvent herself as exotic royalty, take the ton by storm, and make her social betters pay through the nose for the privilege. He was never that brave himself. But he has to know, either way, and so we watch his investigations progress as Caraboo's star rises in society, culminating in an all-night fancy-dress ball at which she dances till dawn with the Prince Regent while Gutch, who wouldn't be invited dead to a party of this quality, gate-crashes recklessly in hopes of making her understand that what he can discover, others will soon learn, and rich people don't take well to being made fools of. He calls her by the name he believes she was born with. She gazes at him with wide, dark eyes and says nothing, in English or otherwise.
At times the performances are stronger than the script. It was co-written by the director with John Wells, who also contributes a supporting turn as the decent, credulous parson who first brings Caraboo to the Worralls' attention; it has some nonfatal but noticeable trouble finding its way to the right ending, and while its broad jabs at English hypocrisy generally land ("And as Christians, we are taught, 'Blessed are the merciful'"–"Rubbish!"), its attempts to highlight the harsh social conditions behind its narrative of glittering imposture meet with only partial success. The score doesn't help—pace Richard Hartley and his fine work with Richard O'Brien, it's Hollywood fairy tale where a more period sound might have grounded things better. Maybe I've just developed an allergy to the celesta. Fortunately, the movie fires on all cylinders exactly where it needs to, and that is its deft and steady skewering of Orientalism. I really need to read more postcolonial theory.
As mentioned earlier, Mary as Caraboo is not impersonating an individual so much as an idea of "the East." Her performance is convincing in no little part because it affirms what her audience already believes about the world she represents; indeed, she might be less credible to an English audience if she were authentically Malay or Filipino or Javanese.* The kind of otherness she presents is exotic and appealing, not so actually different that she risks putting her audience off—dietary laws and rooftop prayers chanted daily to the accompaniment of a small gong look and sound Eastern as billy-o, especially to people who have almost certainly never met a Muslim in their lives, but also serve to reassure her hosts that she is pious after the fashion of her people. She has a charming gesture of her hands for every greeting or farewell, matching the clear, high tones of her voice that deepens only in rare moments of insulted anger; they are exactly the sort of pretty courtesies expected from a land where everything is intricate, decorated, artful. Her ability to read and write makes her educated, just as her reluctance to uncover her hair in public makes her modest, but she is also regarded as something of a noble savage, possessing a spontaneous, childlike, primitive quality that expresses itself playfully in the face of English dignity, as when she answers Gutch's courteous but ironic kiss of her hand by blowing into his ear or blackens her front teeth with ink in order to point out the disrepair of Dr. Wilkinson's dentistry, and violently when her personal space is invaded. Frixos will later show off the teethmarks she left in his arm as incontrovertible proof of her nature, even more telling than the blue tattoo he uncovered on her thigh: "That is not the bite of a civilized woman." English ladies practice archery as a regular pastime, but when the epicene Lord Motley (Murray Melvin, whom I love even in three-line walk-ons like this role) observes the princess' skill with a bow and arrow, he declares that she must come from "a tribe of woman warriors" and archly adds, "Just as well she wasn't with Napoleon at Waterloo." No attempt is made to introduce her to a native or at least fluent speaker of her Majindano dialect once it is supposedly identified, but neither is any effort made to teach her English; she is left as if in a state of nature, an object of academic study and fashionable admiration, a microcosm—perhaps a little museum—of Javasu.
It is in this role as curiosity that she fits right into the Regency style. The Prince Regent's fancy-dress ball is a slam-dunk of Orientalizing fads, with the royal person himself presiding in a waistcoat of phoenix-embroidered Chinese brocade, a gold-splashed jacket, and an imperially cinnabar hat; on being introduced to his "new cousin," he voices a desire to install her as the centerpiece of his Royal Pavilion in Brighton, then undergoing renovation into its present state of Indo-Chinoiserie. Caraboo at the time is dressed in high-waisted European fashion, complete with gloves and spangled white-on-white embroidery and a tiara styled like laurel leaves in silver. From the fascinated perspective of the other guests, the contrast only makes her more foreign, more exciting. A woman who embodies the East is easily fetishized. Her features are scrutinized as if they will provide a clue to the truth of her Englishness or the manner of her otherness, her beauty much remarked on once the latter is decided to be royal. One of her first encounters in Almondsbury is with a veteran of the Peninsular War who, claiming an abiding danger of Corsican spies, grabs her by the crotch to disprove her gender and finds himself furiously seized by the throat in return. Finding no ink on Caraboo's arms, Frixos is all too readily persuaded to widen the scope of his search. When she unselfconsciously displays the tattoo in question to Dr. Wilkinson, his transported response is both very funny (caught in the act, he is reproved by Mrs. Worrall with the shocked "Mr. Wilkinson—it's Sunday!") and wincingly vulnerable, his painstaking taxonomy of her dialect and origins suddenly exposed as a hopeless effort to quantify the uncontainable and bewildering. His besotted departure prompts Mr. Worrall to complain coarsely that "it's like having a bitch on heat in the house!"
Even Gutch is susceptible, seeing her for the first time at close range: "Wherever she comes from, she's certainly exquisite." What salvages him as an ally and a potential romantic partner is not his boyhood daydream of "sailing down the trade routes to those Spice Islands" where he would "carve a fortune and marry a potentate's daughter," which is just a storybook version of Mr. Worrall's cigar-puffing colonial ambitions, but his adult insistence on knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, like the saner kind of Minnelli protagonist, and treasuring both the places where they cross and where they diverge. Especially because the audience is given only the same ambiguous clues that fuel his hopes and worries about the person behind the masquerade of Princess Caraboo, it is immensely satisfying to meet her at last. We are used to the Oriental bricolage of Caraboo, with her chiming voice and her speaking hands and her demure habit of covering her mouth when she laughs. Mary Baker has a broad, rough, low voice and a belligerent tilt to her chin, no little cynicism in her outlook and a kind of defiant satisfaction when she reviews her performance. "I'm sorry to have deceived Mrs. Worrall," she admits to Gutch, "'cause she was deceived 'cause she was kind, but them others—Mr. Worrall and them others—I don't mind about them." Cates' Devon accent may be shaky, but I'll live with it for Mary's total shift in body language, the way she lightly mocks Gutch for being impressed by the kind of storytelling she has always done without effort and then shape-shifts again to tell him one last spellbinding tale, this one in English rather than impersonation:
"'Land ho!' cries the sailor. Now the princess don't know what that means, but she sees land that is green and sweet as the ocean is salt and blue. 'England,' one of the sailors sang, like a man sings to the girl he loves. And the princess is so happy at the sight of this land that she starts to weep. And the captain, he puts his hand on her to send her back below, and she shouts—" a rolling, imperious command that draws a smile from Gutch, sitting cross-legged like a child to watch her act out each character in turn. "And that means, 'Unhand me, you indelicate rogue. I am a personage of royal blood that is bluer than the deepest blue of a sapphire.' And she dived over the side and swam strongly to shore . . . You're laughing at me, Mr. Gutch."
"Not in the least. It's very beautiful. Go on with it, please."
"And when her tears had dried so that she could see, she saw England—a land of unhappiness and misery, with folks a-begging and hungry. The princess wandered across the country from village to village, and people was mostly kind and fed her and gave her shelter, but then she came to a village where they reported her for begging. But she weren't begging, you see? 'Cause princesses don't ever beg. Even when they're dying of hunger, they don't beg. So she done nothing wrong, and that's the truth. I done nothing wrong."
I am delighted by the script's final twist on the idea of the exotic, which it saves for its next-to-last scene, the reunion of Gutch and Mary aboard the barque Kaskelot, bound for Philadelphia. Even making, at last, an impulsive, adventurous gesture as romantic as any of his boyish fantasies, he looks still like the "ink-stained printer and journalist" in his unremarkable black as he comes aboard, his hair curling damply with sea-mist. When they parted at the harbor, he called farewell to her in her made-up language of Javasu. Now he raises his face to her and addresses her with words she does not know: "Tá tusa ansin; tá mise anseo." Her face breaks into a grin: "What language is that?" Matter-of-factly, coming up the stairs to the quarterdeck, he answers, "It's Irish. It means, 'There you are; here I am.'" And he smiles. The credits suggest the continuing adventures of Princess Caraboo and her faithful journalist in an America as fantastic and fictitious as the Asia she did not come from after all.
* Cates' real-life mixed Southeast Asian ancestry—Chinese Filipino on her mother's side—plays like a curious shadow to her character's assumed ethnicity or a slight fourth-wall break; I am not entirely sure how to unpack it. Princess Caraboo looks like the only movie in her short filmography where she was cast in even a fictionally Asian role. Having grown up on Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968), I thought first of the unicorn at the Midnight Carnival, where she can be recognized in her true aspect only when disguised as the popular false version of it. Then I was reminded of Drunk History's Globe Theatre, where the boy actor doing Desdemona was played without comment by a woman, which was actually pretty cool.
I am sorry that I missed this film in theaters; the only extant DVD has been formatted to fullscreen and in addition to all the spatial and character information that gets lost when that happens, there are some lovely shots that I suspect would have really benefited from 1.85:1 Technicolor, like a dockside view of Bristol Harbour that even on my computer looks like an early nineteenth century painting. Freddie Francis did the cinematography and it's not like The Elephant Man (1980) looked amazing or anything. It furthers my affection for Stephen Rea, whom I honestly think I encountered for the first time in the script of Brian Friel's Translations (1980); it makes me wonder what else Phoebe Cates might have done if she had not retired from acting after Princess Caraboo; it never loses its theme even when the plot occasionally wobbles. It would double-feature quite handily with Charles Sturridge's FairyTale: A True Story (1997), another sweetly pointed period piece about fakery and narrative and belief that I missed in its first run. At this point I have movies like Busby Berkeley's Bright Lights (1935), Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) on my conscience and would really like to get around to them sometime soon. Between the news and Thanksgiving, this week really disappeared. I am thankful that I got this thing written at all. This imposition brought to you by my imaginative backers at Patreon.
In the spring of 1817, a young woman was discovered wandering the village of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire. Her dress was outlandish, her manners graceful but obviously foreign. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, attractive and expressive. She appeared neither disoriented nor unintelligent, but she did not react when addressed in English, except to the speaker's gestures and tones of voice. No one understood the language she spoke. She was briefly jailed in Bristol for vagrancy, retrieved by the wife of the same unimpressed magistrate who had sent her away. Eventually, through a combination of pantomime, interpretation, and the imaginative assistance of her listeners, the mysterious stranger made it understood that she was a daughter of the king of Javasu near Sumatra, stolen from her native island and sold into slavery by pirates; having been traded ship to ship across the oceans, she had finally escaped by jumping overboard while off the coast of England and made her way alone across the countryside, eventually fetching up in Almondsbury. She could write in her native language and demonstrated its characters, which looked a little like Chinese and a little like Greek and a lot like nothing ever before seen in England. She observed a vegetarian, teetotal diet and prayed daily to her monotheistic God, whom she addressed as "Alla-Tallah." She liked to practice archery, fence, and dance. From the start, she called herself by the name of "Caraboo." Residing for ten weeks with Samuel and Elizabeth Worrall at Knole Park, Princess Caraboo became something more than a nine days' wonder, especially after experts in the languages and culture of the East Indies were unable to break her story—the more she was studied, in fact, the more convincing her presentation became. She became the latest craze of fashionable society, receiving visitors in Bath, sitting for portraits in Bristol; articles about her were published and republished in the local papers, at which point her description was recognized and the exotic fantasia collapsed. In reality, "Princess Caraboo" was the confabulation of twenty-five-year-old Mary Baker from Witheridge in Devonshire, an itinerant serving girl with a quick ear for languages and a genius for theater. She had fabricated the customs of her country from sailors' tales, travel books, and free-floating Orientalism; her imperious, flowing foreign tongue was a mixture of Malay, English Romani, and her own invented language. She had taken everyone—scholars, adventurers, high society—in. Unpunished by the law despite the seriousness of her offence, still fêted by her public despite the reveal of her deception, the ex-princess took passage for America at the end of the summer. The fullest contemporary account of her imposture was written and published later that year by John Mathew Gutch of Bristol as Caraboo: A Narrative of a Singular Imposition, and almost two centuries later it formed the basis for the script of Michael Austin's Princess Caraboo (1994), which
derspatchel and I watched over the weekend.The film is a romanticized version of the story, but not, it turns out, in ways that I mind. Rather than relying on is-she-or-isn't-she ambiguity for its narrative pull, the script wisely opts for lightly observed social satire, treating Caraboo's effect on the surrounding cast as a kind of Rorschach of their characters and Regency England in general. Kind-hearted, discontented Mrs. Worrall (Wendy Hughes) is captivated by the romance and mystery of Caraboo's plight, adopting her guest's taste in brightly patterned calicos and sparking a fad for turbans and bangles among her social set; her efforts to make the princess feel at home include redecorating rooms in a lavish silken style and flying a homemade gold-and-crimson flag over Knole Park as if it were the Javasu embassy. Nouveau riche banker Mr. Worrall (Jim Broadbent) has less imagination than a radish and a lot higher alcohol content and can't believe the deference his wife is extending to some weird vagabond in breeches with her hair tied up in a scarf, but even he isn't too slow to cotton on to the lucrative business opportunities presented by close acquaintance with an authentic princess of the Spice Islands. To the sour magistrate Haythorne (Roger Lloyd-Pack), all foreigners are vagrants and wastrels and not understanding the language in which a trial is conducted is no object to receiving a sentence from the court; to the jaded Lord and Lady Apthorpe (Peter Eyre and Jacqueline Pearce), a foreigner this quaint and beautiful is a diversion worthy of presenting to the Prince Regent (John Sessions! We drove ourselves crazy trying to recognize him until the credits). Kevin Kline gets a chance to exercise both his Greek accent and his air of weary condescension as the snippy butler who has the newcomer judged as a fraud right up until the moment she bites him for trying to look up her skirts. John Lithgow briefly and piercingly steals his scenes as a supercilious philologist who comes from Oxford to debunk Caraboo and leaves with both his assumptions and his heart in pieces. At the center of all of their fascination is the princess herself, like a cipher of the Orient that none of them have ever seen but everyone knows when they see it. Here the film has a great asset in Phoebe Cates, who I understand is extremely famous for some teen movies I've never seen. As both Caraboo and her creator, she is almost never offscreen and for much of the runtime has the difficult job of holding the audience's interest and sympathy while being almost opaque to interpretation—the script is not constructed to tip its hand any sooner than history did. The actress' ability to look the part with her dark, delicate looks and her lightly folded eyes, her unapologetic carriage and her startling dazzle of a smile would count for nothing if she were actually a blank. Instead, in every interaction, we realize that behind the attentive gravity that is her most common expression we can always see her thinking; what we can't see is whether we're watching a fish out of privileged water working to comprehend an entire new culture on the fly or a con artist calculating her next strategic move. When she weeps at a performance of Schubert's Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, the emotion is naked and unfeigned and tells us nothing about the nature of the woman with tears on her cheeks except that she's got good taste in piano trios, even anachronistic ones. She can't be what she claims. No real person from the Indonesian archipelago would so match in every particular the English fancy of an "Oriental princess." So then what is she?
That's the line of inquiry pursued by the film's version of J. M. Gutch, played by Stephen Rea as narrator, adversary, and eventual co-protagonist of Caraboo's story. He's the script's greatest departure from history, although I can see how he evolved from the admiring tone of the real Gutch's narrative, which the film uses to bookend its action. An Irish printer and journalist for Felix Farley's Bristol Journal—"none too successful financially and, I will admit, none too fortunate in love, either"—he's taking notes in the gallery when Caraboo comes up before the assizes for vagrancy; he asks a snarky question, gets a prompt snub, and is left curiously touched and intrigued by a woman he's seen for all of five minutes, standing straight-backed despite her chains with all the poise of royalty waiting for some tiresome but requisite ceremony to be over. At first the Worralls want nothing to do with him, especially since his paper has been publishing what Mr. Worrall blusterously considers libels about his bank; presently an appeal to their Christian charity, not to mention his ability to publicize it, wins them over sufficiently for an audience with the princess. The viewer may recognize him as a danger. He's suspicious and he's smart. He cuts a nice ambiguous figure among the brightly dressed gentry, conspicuously out of fashion in his black coat that doesn't show the ink; his disheveled dark hair gives him the initially misleading air of a Romantic poet rather than the put-upon publisher Coleridge can't be bothered to pay. It's a good part for Rea's lanky slouch and wry deadpan—he's a bruised romantic in a cynic's trade, a boy who dreamed of far-off islands with names like poetry grown up into a man who makes his living from muckraking and monotony, disillusioned with himself and resigned to it. "As a journalist," he comments with stinging prescience, "I know people will believe two things—what they read in the newspapers and what they want to believe. And that's the way of the world." Predictably, he's soon as obsessed with the elusive Caraboo as the rest of the countryside, but with a lovely twist: surrounded by people who have staked their self-images, their social success, and even their financial futures on the truth of a stolen princess from the far side of the world, Gutch wants her to be a fraud, not because he resents her impersonation or even because it will make a better story for his paper, but because he's enchanted with the idea of "an ordinary girl with an extraordinary imagination," tricky and clever enough to reinvent herself as exotic royalty, take the ton by storm, and make her social betters pay through the nose for the privilege. He was never that brave himself. But he has to know, either way, and so we watch his investigations progress as Caraboo's star rises in society, culminating in an all-night fancy-dress ball at which she dances till dawn with the Prince Regent while Gutch, who wouldn't be invited dead to a party of this quality, gate-crashes recklessly in hopes of making her understand that what he can discover, others will soon learn, and rich people don't take well to being made fools of. He calls her by the name he believes she was born with. She gazes at him with wide, dark eyes and says nothing, in English or otherwise.
At times the performances are stronger than the script. It was co-written by the director with John Wells, who also contributes a supporting turn as the decent, credulous parson who first brings Caraboo to the Worralls' attention; it has some nonfatal but noticeable trouble finding its way to the right ending, and while its broad jabs at English hypocrisy generally land ("And as Christians, we are taught, 'Blessed are the merciful'"–"Rubbish!"), its attempts to highlight the harsh social conditions behind its narrative of glittering imposture meet with only partial success. The score doesn't help—pace Richard Hartley and his fine work with Richard O'Brien, it's Hollywood fairy tale where a more period sound might have grounded things better. Maybe I've just developed an allergy to the celesta. Fortunately, the movie fires on all cylinders exactly where it needs to, and that is its deft and steady skewering of Orientalism. I really need to read more postcolonial theory.
As mentioned earlier, Mary as Caraboo is not impersonating an individual so much as an idea of "the East." Her performance is convincing in no little part because it affirms what her audience already believes about the world she represents; indeed, she might be less credible to an English audience if she were authentically Malay or Filipino or Javanese.* The kind of otherness she presents is exotic and appealing, not so actually different that she risks putting her audience off—dietary laws and rooftop prayers chanted daily to the accompaniment of a small gong look and sound Eastern as billy-o, especially to people who have almost certainly never met a Muslim in their lives, but also serve to reassure her hosts that she is pious after the fashion of her people. She has a charming gesture of her hands for every greeting or farewell, matching the clear, high tones of her voice that deepens only in rare moments of insulted anger; they are exactly the sort of pretty courtesies expected from a land where everything is intricate, decorated, artful. Her ability to read and write makes her educated, just as her reluctance to uncover her hair in public makes her modest, but she is also regarded as something of a noble savage, possessing a spontaneous, childlike, primitive quality that expresses itself playfully in the face of English dignity, as when she answers Gutch's courteous but ironic kiss of her hand by blowing into his ear or blackens her front teeth with ink in order to point out the disrepair of Dr. Wilkinson's dentistry, and violently when her personal space is invaded. Frixos will later show off the teethmarks she left in his arm as incontrovertible proof of her nature, even more telling than the blue tattoo he uncovered on her thigh: "That is not the bite of a civilized woman." English ladies practice archery as a regular pastime, but when the epicene Lord Motley (Murray Melvin, whom I love even in three-line walk-ons like this role) observes the princess' skill with a bow and arrow, he declares that she must come from "a tribe of woman warriors" and archly adds, "Just as well she wasn't with Napoleon at Waterloo." No attempt is made to introduce her to a native or at least fluent speaker of her Majindano dialect once it is supposedly identified, but neither is any effort made to teach her English; she is left as if in a state of nature, an object of academic study and fashionable admiration, a microcosm—perhaps a little museum—of Javasu.
It is in this role as curiosity that she fits right into the Regency style. The Prince Regent's fancy-dress ball is a slam-dunk of Orientalizing fads, with the royal person himself presiding in a waistcoat of phoenix-embroidered Chinese brocade, a gold-splashed jacket, and an imperially cinnabar hat; on being introduced to his "new cousin," he voices a desire to install her as the centerpiece of his Royal Pavilion in Brighton, then undergoing renovation into its present state of Indo-Chinoiserie. Caraboo at the time is dressed in high-waisted European fashion, complete with gloves and spangled white-on-white embroidery and a tiara styled like laurel leaves in silver. From the fascinated perspective of the other guests, the contrast only makes her more foreign, more exciting. A woman who embodies the East is easily fetishized. Her features are scrutinized as if they will provide a clue to the truth of her Englishness or the manner of her otherness, her beauty much remarked on once the latter is decided to be royal. One of her first encounters in Almondsbury is with a veteran of the Peninsular War who, claiming an abiding danger of Corsican spies, grabs her by the crotch to disprove her gender and finds himself furiously seized by the throat in return. Finding no ink on Caraboo's arms, Frixos is all too readily persuaded to widen the scope of his search. When she unselfconsciously displays the tattoo in question to Dr. Wilkinson, his transported response is both very funny (caught in the act, he is reproved by Mrs. Worrall with the shocked "Mr. Wilkinson—it's Sunday!") and wincingly vulnerable, his painstaking taxonomy of her dialect and origins suddenly exposed as a hopeless effort to quantify the uncontainable and bewildering. His besotted departure prompts Mr. Worrall to complain coarsely that "it's like having a bitch on heat in the house!"
Even Gutch is susceptible, seeing her for the first time at close range: "Wherever she comes from, she's certainly exquisite." What salvages him as an ally and a potential romantic partner is not his boyhood daydream of "sailing down the trade routes to those Spice Islands" where he would "carve a fortune and marry a potentate's daughter," which is just a storybook version of Mr. Worrall's cigar-puffing colonial ambitions, but his adult insistence on knowing the difference between fantasy and reality, like the saner kind of Minnelli protagonist, and treasuring both the places where they cross and where they diverge. Especially because the audience is given only the same ambiguous clues that fuel his hopes and worries about the person behind the masquerade of Princess Caraboo, it is immensely satisfying to meet her at last. We are used to the Oriental bricolage of Caraboo, with her chiming voice and her speaking hands and her demure habit of covering her mouth when she laughs. Mary Baker has a broad, rough, low voice and a belligerent tilt to her chin, no little cynicism in her outlook and a kind of defiant satisfaction when she reviews her performance. "I'm sorry to have deceived Mrs. Worrall," she admits to Gutch, "'cause she was deceived 'cause she was kind, but them others—Mr. Worrall and them others—I don't mind about them." Cates' Devon accent may be shaky, but I'll live with it for Mary's total shift in body language, the way she lightly mocks Gutch for being impressed by the kind of storytelling she has always done without effort and then shape-shifts again to tell him one last spellbinding tale, this one in English rather than impersonation:
"'Land ho!' cries the sailor. Now the princess don't know what that means, but she sees land that is green and sweet as the ocean is salt and blue. 'England,' one of the sailors sang, like a man sings to the girl he loves. And the princess is so happy at the sight of this land that she starts to weep. And the captain, he puts his hand on her to send her back below, and she shouts—" a rolling, imperious command that draws a smile from Gutch, sitting cross-legged like a child to watch her act out each character in turn. "And that means, 'Unhand me, you indelicate rogue. I am a personage of royal blood that is bluer than the deepest blue of a sapphire.' And she dived over the side and swam strongly to shore . . . You're laughing at me, Mr. Gutch."
"Not in the least. It's very beautiful. Go on with it, please."
"And when her tears had dried so that she could see, she saw England—a land of unhappiness and misery, with folks a-begging and hungry. The princess wandered across the country from village to village, and people was mostly kind and fed her and gave her shelter, but then she came to a village where they reported her for begging. But she weren't begging, you see? 'Cause princesses don't ever beg. Even when they're dying of hunger, they don't beg. So she done nothing wrong, and that's the truth. I done nothing wrong."
I am delighted by the script's final twist on the idea of the exotic, which it saves for its next-to-last scene, the reunion of Gutch and Mary aboard the barque Kaskelot, bound for Philadelphia. Even making, at last, an impulsive, adventurous gesture as romantic as any of his boyish fantasies, he looks still like the "ink-stained printer and journalist" in his unremarkable black as he comes aboard, his hair curling damply with sea-mist. When they parted at the harbor, he called farewell to her in her made-up language of Javasu. Now he raises his face to her and addresses her with words she does not know: "Tá tusa ansin; tá mise anseo." Her face breaks into a grin: "What language is that?" Matter-of-factly, coming up the stairs to the quarterdeck, he answers, "It's Irish. It means, 'There you are; here I am.'" And he smiles. The credits suggest the continuing adventures of Princess Caraboo and her faithful journalist in an America as fantastic and fictitious as the Asia she did not come from after all.
* Cates' real-life mixed Southeast Asian ancestry—Chinese Filipino on her mother's side—plays like a curious shadow to her character's assumed ethnicity or a slight fourth-wall break; I am not entirely sure how to unpack it. Princess Caraboo looks like the only movie in her short filmography where she was cast in even a fictionally Asian role. Having grown up on Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968), I thought first of the unicorn at the Midnight Carnival, where she can be recognized in her true aspect only when disguised as the popular false version of it. Then I was reminded of Drunk History's Globe Theatre, where the boy actor doing Desdemona was played without comment by a woman, which was actually pretty cool.
I am sorry that I missed this film in theaters; the only extant DVD has been formatted to fullscreen and in addition to all the spatial and character information that gets lost when that happens, there are some lovely shots that I suspect would have really benefited from 1.85:1 Technicolor, like a dockside view of Bristol Harbour that even on my computer looks like an early nineteenth century painting. Freddie Francis did the cinematography and it's not like The Elephant Man (1980) looked amazing or anything. It furthers my affection for Stephen Rea, whom I honestly think I encountered for the first time in the script of Brian Friel's Translations (1980); it makes me wonder what else Phoebe Cates might have done if she had not retired from acting after Princess Caraboo; it never loses its theme even when the plot occasionally wobbles. It would double-feature quite handily with Charles Sturridge's FairyTale: A True Story (1997), another sweetly pointed period piece about fakery and narrative and belief that I missed in its first run. At this point I have movies like Busby Berkeley's Bright Lights (1935), Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) on my conscience and would really like to get around to them sometime soon. Between the news and Thanksgiving, this week really disappeared. I am thankful that I got this thing written at all. This imposition brought to you by my imaginative backers at Patreon.
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And (having googled) so that's what happened to Phoebe Cates, swept off her feet by the Greek butler to become Mrs Kevin Cline - which sounds like the prototypical Kevin Kline part!
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Thank you! I knew the general lines of the history going in, but very few of the details; I read Gutch's Caraboo: A Narrative afterward and was generally surprised and pleased at how little the script had to change. Mostly it amplifies figures and events rather than whole-cloth inventing them; its major alterations are the way it ties Gutch into the story from the start, which changes the timeline of information available to the viewer as well as building in a romantic possibility, and then the ways he's written as a character. I don't believe the historical Gutch was Irish, but it plays just fine with the film's themes of colonialism and otherness—he's another outsider to good English society and not the kind that gets taken up and petted by the gentry, either. Even sympathetic Mrs. Worrall makes an unwarranted crack about the journalist's nationality when she feels nettled by him. But he's also the one with a native language up his sleeve.
- which sounds like the prototypical Kevin Kline part!
Fair enough!
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it makes me wonder what else Phoebe Cates might have done if she had not retired from acting
Me too, though I hadn't pinned it to this film (not having known about it!).
Funny--the only film for which I remember Stephen Rea is Michael Collins. (I remain uncertain about whether I've seen Crying Game.) Pedestrian and ignorant, I am.
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I really recommend it—I just wish there were a better DVD!
I had heard of Baker, though.
I had also, but I have no idea why. I assume I read about her when younger, but my brain is full of this kind of thing: facts and narratives I have no idea of the sources for.
Funny--the only film for which I remember Stephen Rea is Michael Collins. (I remain uncertain about whether I've seen Crying Game.) Pedestrian and ignorant, I am.
Uh huh.
(I've never seen Michael Collins. My introduction to Liam Neeson was Schindler's List.)
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the only extant DVD has been formatted to fullscreen
AUUUUGH THAT IS SUCH A CRIME
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Thank you.
AUUUUGH THAT IS SUCH A CRIME
I know! Why do people do it? I have literally never seen a movie that was better fullscreen than in its original aspect ratio!
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The start of your second paragraph reminds me very much of the stories that Lady Pole tells in /Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell/. My first impression was that you were trying to do a deliberate reference to it and that this wasn't the actual movie review ;-)
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Thank you! It is worth tracking down.
The start of your second paragraph reminds me very much of the stories that Lady Pole tells in /Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell/.
I can see how that happened! In the world of Strange and Norrell, she might well have lived with fairies in a kingdom with an un-English name.
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I can only hope I enjoy the film as much as this review.
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I hope so!
Thank you.
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I really liked it! I can't understand why there's not a decent DVD.
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Thank you for another of your fine fine reviews.
Nine
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If I had some 35 mm prints and a theater—!
Thank you for another of your fine fine reviews.
You are welcome. I did not want to let this film pass unremarked.
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You're welcome. I'm glad it was there to be added!
Teen movies you haven't seen
Re: Teen movies you haven't seen
That's good to know. There is a wave of cultural touchstones from the '80's that I missed almost entirely and it appears to be six of one, half dozen of what the hell if they work for me or not. I have not connected with anything by John Hughes, for example. Martha Coolidge's Real Genius (1985), on the other hand, I loved.
What is her character like?
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You're welcome! I am happy to be informative. (Have you pictures of the stunning view?)
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And that's **very** interesting about Cates's actual ethnic background. It really is just like in The Last Unicorn! How weird!
It's fascinating how ordinary things appear when passed through the filter of "exotic." What you say about archery--how all the gentry ladies practice archery, but somehow it becomes a marvelous accomplishment when someone like Princess Caraboo does it--not in the sense of, "Oh look, a savage can shoot/paint/sing/whatever" but more, "How much more magnificent archery is when **she** does it, with her mysterious foreign archery skills." I see this all the time in present-day life: something with a fairly exact equivalent in mundane life is hugely valorized when it comes from someplace "exotic."
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I would love to hear what you think of it on rewatch.
Yes: I really loved how it played into the English imagination of what an "Oriental princess" would be like.
It certainly made me want to read more about the reception of the real Princess Caraboo. John Wells appears to have written a book about her, which I would like to get hold of.
And that's **very** interesting about Cates's actual ethnic background.
I am inclined to assume it was a factor in her casting, but since I can find almost no information about this movie online, I don't yet know? I couldn't locate more than a handful of contemporary reviews, either, which I think is a result of the film having been released in the nascent internet age; I would probably need to look at actual newspapers from the autumn of 1994 to see what most critics thought. A lot of reviewers on Amazon.com like it and also wish Phoebe Cates had done more acting and TriStar would give the film a proper widescreen home release.
I see this all the time in present-day life: something with a fairly exact equivalent in mundane life is hugely valorized when it comes from someplace "exotic."
"I know, but the way she washes dishes—"
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Thank you.