![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
And that's my parting gift to you—that doubt!
Realistically, I know I've delivered more than 4 x 500 words on film this month—my post on Max Ophüls' Caught (1949) would have handled the wordcount all on its own, if that were all I was keeping track of. Pedantically, I want to have written four actual posts for my Patreon, because it feels like the one intellectual endeavor I have left these days and because I guaranteed it. The problem is that this month has been a nightmare of interacting stressors and despite seeing any number of interesting films mostly in theaters, I've recorded very little about any of them. I've written no poems and no fiction. It just hasn't been a very contemplative August. I really did want to write about David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I saw for the first time a few weeks ago: it has a reputation as a trainwreck and much to our surprise we didn't find it so. Consider these notes toward a review of Ryan's Daughter. I'll come back to the real thing when I have time.
It is not actually the film's fault that it's not an epic. In many ways, it doesn't present itself as one; it has the deliberately small scope of a character study, observing a few months in the life of a small community in which everything changes for the major players and nothing at all for the wider world. If Lean had filmed it with the monochrome intimacy of Brief Encounter (1945), I don't think it would have received half the opprobrium it did on release. He was coming off a streak of epics, however—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965)—and so he gives a political love story the full 70 mm treatment, including a leitmotiv-heavy score to whose charms I was impervious. The cinematography, however, knows what it's doing. Because the film is set in a small village in the west of Ireland in 1916, because nothing about the plot makes sense without the tense current of nationalist politics and the claustrophobic isolation of fictional Kirrary, the Irish landscape needs to register on the audience as vividly as any of the human figures that populate it. The panoramic approach is immersive, tactile, and in the case of a spectacular storm scene, disorienting, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring. It's not unlike an Omni film of a novel. I'm willing to believe that critics expected the same kind of breathtaking sweep from the narrative and excoriated the film when instead they found something much more human-sized. It's on the writer, the director, and the editor, however, that the script feels like it could have used one more pass. It's not shapeless, and it pays off emotionally with startling intensity, but we found curious ellipses and late-mentioned details that felt like either casualties of editing or signs of a troubled production, information that could have shaped the story more effectively throughout. There's some question as to whether the copy we had access to was missing scenes, in which case I'd like to get hold of a recent DVD and rewatch before making any definitive statements; even if we got a truncated version by mistake, I can say in its favor that it never felt like a three-hour slog. Something is always happening onscreen, and it's always worth watching, whatever it is.
Robert Mitchum, for example. Normally he looks like film noir or terrifying Americana and here he's both plausible and poignant, cast against type as widowed schoolmaster Charles Shaughnessy, whose marriage against his better judgment to the much younger Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles, then married to scriptwriter Robert Bolt) is the beginning of both their troubles. His character is a kind, shy, erudite man with a melancholy look in his heavy-lidded eyes; he inspires passion in the restless Rosy, but he can't give it to her. Her wedding night is a painful contrast between bawdy shivaree in the street below and unsatisfying lovemaking in the bedroom above: she's a virgin, he's conventional, and the rapidity with which he falls asleep afterward is almost a punch line. She lies to him a little, telling him that he's all right; she lies awake afterward, staring at the rain cracks in the ceiling. She didn't know what she was expecting, but it wasn't that. He's aware almost as soon as she is of the indifference that has settled over their marriage where at first it looked like a fairy story—the retiring older man drawn out by the fierce love of a barefoot girl—but he keeps it to himself with a strange hopeless wistfulness, as though naming the problem will make it real and enduring it silently might make it imaginary enough to bear. By then she's met Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), however, and made a dangerous decision in Ireland of the Troubles: when the handsome British soldier crumples with shell-shock in her father's pub, she not only offers him a hand out of the darkness, she kisses him impulsively and does not resist him when the emotion of the moment converts itself instantly into physical desire, wanting her as blindly and passionately as her husband never did.1 Their affair is so gobsmackingly stupid that it hardly needs a case of informing and mistaken identity to endanger them both. It goes wrong faster than they think it will; not so the audience, but we've had the advantage of screaming at the screen from the second act.
With one striking exception, the affair itself is always seen from Rosy's perspective.2 It's a kind of tight third person and it fascinates me. Her first experience of sex and her first experience of fulfilling sex are each an astonishing combination of the explicit and the symbolic: unambiguously physical action surrounded by more customary implication. On their wedding night, we know exactly when Charles enters her for the first time: her face tightens with pain, she makes a noise that is almost protest and flinches away from his rhythm, and the rest of the act's unsuccessful nature is indicated by the traditional shorthand of the wife gazing listlessly over her husband's shoulder. When she trysts with Doryan in a glade of bluebells, we know exactly when she experiences sexual pleasure for the first time: her face opens with shocked delight, she grips his back to press him more deeply into herself, and the rest of the act's rapturous nature is indicated by evocative shots of the sun glimpsing through trees, the rubbing of boughs together, a spider's crystal web trembling in the breeze. Usually directors pick one mode or the other. I'm curious whether I can attribute the mix to the year of filming, as the need for suggestiveness gave way to the ability to show. If you can get past the bluebells, it actually works.
Here is where I stop for the night. Short version short: despite its reputation, the movie doesn't suck. It has gorgeous cinematography, complex doubling, and an impressive amount of female gaze on its sex scenes, considering its director was a dude born in 1908. John Mills as grotesque village idiot and local doppelgänger Michael deserves a post of his own. I have to sleep first. This sketch sponsored by my understanding backers at Patreon.
1. Doryan is one of the script's stumbles for me, unfortunately. The actor is undeniably beautiful, with a masklike symmetry reminiscent of Hurd Hatfield in the 1945 Picture of Dorian Gray; the trouble with his damaged imperturbability is that we get almost no sense of him as a person except during his shell-shock episodes, when the mask comes unglued and he looks desperately frightened and very young, recoiling in memory from earth-showering explosions, hiding his head from mortar fire that can't touch him, and none of that tells us what Rosy sees in him when he's in command of himself and only limping from the most visible of his war wounds. It's possible that he's intentionally one-dimensional. Rosy gets conversation, affection, stability from her husband; what she does not get is sexual satisfaction and that's all she cares about with Doryan. She doesn't need to know about his childhood or his war record. The intensity with which he wants her is attraction enough. But there's so much implied to the audience in those few destabilizing moments, it struck both me and Rob as weird never to follow up on any of it. Barry Foster is onscreen for maybe fifteen minutes total as an IRB leader and we know nothing about him beyond what he's willing to do to get weapons for his cause and he's arresting. You can have conversations about him afterward. Christopher Jones is pretty and shell-shocked. At least Rosy likes him.
2. The one exception is marvelous: Rosy and Doryan in each other's arms on a windswept hillside, the music swelling around them; cut sharply to Charles, watching them from inside the house, on the other side of a closed window from the hillside and the wind, and there is silence. He does not share the music or the romance. He is cut out, shut in, excluded. You don't get the offstage chorus when you're not the one who's loved.
derspatchel and I saw for the first time a few weeks ago: it has a reputation as a trainwreck and much to our surprise we didn't find it so. Consider these notes toward a review of Ryan's Daughter. I'll come back to the real thing when I have time.It is not actually the film's fault that it's not an epic. In many ways, it doesn't present itself as one; it has the deliberately small scope of a character study, observing a few months in the life of a small community in which everything changes for the major players and nothing at all for the wider world. If Lean had filmed it with the monochrome intimacy of Brief Encounter (1945), I don't think it would have received half the opprobrium it did on release. He was coming off a streak of epics, however—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965)—and so he gives a political love story the full 70 mm treatment, including a leitmotiv-heavy score to whose charms I was impervious. The cinematography, however, knows what it's doing. Because the film is set in a small village in the west of Ireland in 1916, because nothing about the plot makes sense without the tense current of nationalist politics and the claustrophobic isolation of fictional Kirrary, the Irish landscape needs to register on the audience as vividly as any of the human figures that populate it. The panoramic approach is immersive, tactile, and in the case of a spectacular storm scene, disorienting, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring. It's not unlike an Omni film of a novel. I'm willing to believe that critics expected the same kind of breathtaking sweep from the narrative and excoriated the film when instead they found something much more human-sized. It's on the writer, the director, and the editor, however, that the script feels like it could have used one more pass. It's not shapeless, and it pays off emotionally with startling intensity, but we found curious ellipses and late-mentioned details that felt like either casualties of editing or signs of a troubled production, information that could have shaped the story more effectively throughout. There's some question as to whether the copy we had access to was missing scenes, in which case I'd like to get hold of a recent DVD and rewatch before making any definitive statements; even if we got a truncated version by mistake, I can say in its favor that it never felt like a three-hour slog. Something is always happening onscreen, and it's always worth watching, whatever it is.
Robert Mitchum, for example. Normally he looks like film noir or terrifying Americana and here he's both plausible and poignant, cast against type as widowed schoolmaster Charles Shaughnessy, whose marriage against his better judgment to the much younger Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles, then married to scriptwriter Robert Bolt) is the beginning of both their troubles. His character is a kind, shy, erudite man with a melancholy look in his heavy-lidded eyes; he inspires passion in the restless Rosy, but he can't give it to her. Her wedding night is a painful contrast between bawdy shivaree in the street below and unsatisfying lovemaking in the bedroom above: she's a virgin, he's conventional, and the rapidity with which he falls asleep afterward is almost a punch line. She lies to him a little, telling him that he's all right; she lies awake afterward, staring at the rain cracks in the ceiling. She didn't know what she was expecting, but it wasn't that. He's aware almost as soon as she is of the indifference that has settled over their marriage where at first it looked like a fairy story—the retiring older man drawn out by the fierce love of a barefoot girl—but he keeps it to himself with a strange hopeless wistfulness, as though naming the problem will make it real and enduring it silently might make it imaginary enough to bear. By then she's met Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), however, and made a dangerous decision in Ireland of the Troubles: when the handsome British soldier crumples with shell-shock in her father's pub, she not only offers him a hand out of the darkness, she kisses him impulsively and does not resist him when the emotion of the moment converts itself instantly into physical desire, wanting her as blindly and passionately as her husband never did.1 Their affair is so gobsmackingly stupid that it hardly needs a case of informing and mistaken identity to endanger them both. It goes wrong faster than they think it will; not so the audience, but we've had the advantage of screaming at the screen from the second act.
With one striking exception, the affair itself is always seen from Rosy's perspective.2 It's a kind of tight third person and it fascinates me. Her first experience of sex and her first experience of fulfilling sex are each an astonishing combination of the explicit and the symbolic: unambiguously physical action surrounded by more customary implication. On their wedding night, we know exactly when Charles enters her for the first time: her face tightens with pain, she makes a noise that is almost protest and flinches away from his rhythm, and the rest of the act's unsuccessful nature is indicated by the traditional shorthand of the wife gazing listlessly over her husband's shoulder. When she trysts with Doryan in a glade of bluebells, we know exactly when she experiences sexual pleasure for the first time: her face opens with shocked delight, she grips his back to press him more deeply into herself, and the rest of the act's rapturous nature is indicated by evocative shots of the sun glimpsing through trees, the rubbing of boughs together, a spider's crystal web trembling in the breeze. Usually directors pick one mode or the other. I'm curious whether I can attribute the mix to the year of filming, as the need for suggestiveness gave way to the ability to show. If you can get past the bluebells, it actually works.
Here is where I stop for the night. Short version short: despite its reputation, the movie doesn't suck. It has gorgeous cinematography, complex doubling, and an impressive amount of female gaze on its sex scenes, considering its director was a dude born in 1908. John Mills as grotesque village idiot and local doppelgänger Michael deserves a post of his own. I have to sleep first. This sketch sponsored by my understanding backers at Patreon.
1. Doryan is one of the script's stumbles for me, unfortunately. The actor is undeniably beautiful, with a masklike symmetry reminiscent of Hurd Hatfield in the 1945 Picture of Dorian Gray; the trouble with his damaged imperturbability is that we get almost no sense of him as a person except during his shell-shock episodes, when the mask comes unglued and he looks desperately frightened and very young, recoiling in memory from earth-showering explosions, hiding his head from mortar fire that can't touch him, and none of that tells us what Rosy sees in him when he's in command of himself and only limping from the most visible of his war wounds. It's possible that he's intentionally one-dimensional. Rosy gets conversation, affection, stability from her husband; what she does not get is sexual satisfaction and that's all she cares about with Doryan. She doesn't need to know about his childhood or his war record. The intensity with which he wants her is attraction enough. But there's so much implied to the audience in those few destabilizing moments, it struck both me and Rob as weird never to follow up on any of it. Barry Foster is onscreen for maybe fifteen minutes total as an IRB leader and we know nothing about him beyond what he's willing to do to get weapons for his cause and he's arresting. You can have conversations about him afterward. Christopher Jones is pretty and shell-shocked. At least Rosy likes him.
2. The one exception is marvelous: Rosy and Doryan in each other's arms on a windswept hillside, the music swelling around them; cut sharply to Charles, watching them from inside the house, on the other side of a closed window from the hillside and the wind, and there is silence. He does not share the music or the romance. He is cut out, shut in, excluded. You don't get the offstage chorus when you're not the one who's loved.
no subject
The whole gunrunning/village idiot/Robert Mitchum/entire rest of the plot just leaves me...ehh. I also feel this way about Doctor Zhivago. Maybe it's that Lean doesn't seem to work that well with epic casts -- he seems to be at his best focused tightly in on two or three people with really complex relationships. When he has to present a lot of people interacting all together, a community George-Eliot style, on a big canvas, it gets muddied. (Did you see Blithe Spirit? I think you'd really like it.) Bergman, OTOH, is really good at moving a lot of people around in a scene and showing you their various relationships to each other. It's kind of like a Dostoevsky-Tolstoy thing.
And it's amazing this is the film that basically ended his career, until Passage to India and Hollywood said okay, you can come back in -- it's NOT THAT BAD! Jesus. -- Side note, Christopher Jones was married to Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee and Paula, and he was apparently a wild gorgeous violent junkie Jim Morrison type with a really rough life -- he wasn't a bad actor per se, but for one thing he was being drugged on the set, and he was also drinking heavily, and he was very Method and Lean....wasn't. -- But the film is explicitly really Romantic, with a capital R, I think Lean even says he meant everything to be from Rosy's point of view, "through rose-coloured glasses." It's like the opening of Tender is the Night. Maybe if Richard Burton had been in it instead of Mitchum it might've gone a little better. But nobody would have believed Burton as an un-Romantic figure! (Okay, there is Virginia Woolf, but besides that....)
I also have to cynically wonder how much bludgeoning the film got was because it is so focused on Rosy -- it's not about Mitchum, not about the British officer, not about her Da, it's about her, her life, her environment, the choices she makes, how she reconciles herself to them. The men are more symbols or waystations in her life, the way the female characters are in French Lieutenant's Woman.
Anyway tl;dr I love your writing on films and how you think about them and am hoping to give something to your Patreon soon, when we're not flat broke.
no subject
. . . I am not sure why it took until now for me to see this comment, but thank you!
I like your point that the men in Ryan's Daughter are not meant to take center stage in the same way as Rosy; Charles comes the closest of all of them to having an interior life of his own rather than an effect on hers and it's mostly because of that one poignantly disorienting switch in perspective, which shows you that a Romantic universe seen from the outside looks like—anywhere, really.
I don't like D. H. Lawrence very much, but you're right that it's weird that David Lean never adapted him.
no subject
Wait a minute, who doesn't like Fanny and Alexander?!