Merchant-Ivory goes shopping in Paris.
Let's face it: the reason people tolerate Merchant-Ivory's lugubrious literary adaptations has always come down to Anglophilia and tchotchkes. Working with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory have misread (or misrepresented) both Henry James and E.M. Forster. But they give audiences the high-life, richly appointed homes and period-costume finery that some people have mistaken for art. Le Divorce, based on a novel by Diane Johnson, suggests Henry James Lite, which uncovers Merchant-Ivory's penchant as something closer to the glibly avaricious Sex in the City series. The moral issues get tangled (or treated desultorily), but conspicuous consumption is front and center.
As the divorce issue puts the American and French families in conflict (their interactions involve dubious politesse and abasement), Merchant-Ivory keep one thing key: property. The contested assets include a Georges de la Tour painting and, eventually, the younger sister's virtue. Kate Hudson as Isabel Walker prostitutes herself to her sister's uncle-in-law as a way of spying for her family's advantage. Isabel's degradation is presented as uncritically as the whorishness of the Sex in the City girls. Her behavior is sanctioned by the hypocrisy it reveals in the ultra-sophisticated French. (Leslie Caron portrays its matriarch, and Thierry Lhermitte as Uncle Edgar represents its snotty, right-wing patriarchy.) But Isabel's amorality is bolstered by the many sequences of five-star restaurant dining and high-fashion shopping. A running gag involves a red crocodile Hermes purse she receives from Uncle Edgar ("Is it a payment or a bribe?") and carries everywhere with Daisy Miller gaucheness. Merchant-Ivory add no meaning to this symbol because they're too covetous of its chic. Godard definitively satirized such class-weakness in Weekend (1968) when a French woman who survives a traffic smash-up lets out a blood-curdling scream for the Hermes pocketbook left burning in the wreckage.
Here we are: years after Tina Brown coronated Nancy Reagan and her court designer Valentino. And Merchant-Ivory are still laying lust-eggs, showing off Caron's startlingly sumptuous loveseat, lunches enjoyed under a canopy, celebrating materialism as the essence of a sex-farce and a distillation of Jamesian psychology. As ever, M-I are laughably maladroit; they go in for wipe-dissolves and montages, although they apparently know nothing about pace or narrative momentum. This undercuts the movie's last hope?the sensuousness of life lived very well?with a story structure that doesn't pulsate.
Le Divorce could still be a big hit with the non-discriminating public that gets off on Sex in the City's nonconscientious luxe; M-I's disregard of political economy is fashioned for today's ignorant escapism. Le Divorce isn't as silly as Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies & Gentlemen (which also featured Thierry Lhermitte), but it's less interesting than M-I's last?and best?Jamesian film The Golden Bowl. The family conflicts reminded me of Andre Techine's wondrous French Provincial?a film that begs to be revived as a badly needed meta-cinema treatment of class and sexual politics not, as Merchant-Ivory would have it, about furniture.
There was greater cultural and emotional nuance in Rudolph's Trixie (2000) and an extraordinary mix of social, familial and religious sensibility in Mullan's Orphans (2000). The failure of critics and public to respond well to those movies?by not making them into must-see occasions?has resulted in a distorted view of modern life's most complex circumstances. Both were boldly original movies: Rudolph achieving a rare combination of screwball comedy with family melodrama and Mullan approximating the ribaldry and psychological depth of Joyce's Ulysses. These new films exploit a more popular vein of storytelling that fails to advance our understanding of family life and parochial temperament.
Presented as an historical horror movie?with resemblance to lurid female prison dramas?Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters characterizes the troubling history of Ireland's Magdalene Asylums, which were built in the 19th century and operated until 1996. It's estimated that 30,000 girls and young women were imprisoned in the Catholic Church-run asylums (named for the Bible's repentant figure Mary Magdalene) as a control of female sexual behavior. Inmates performed punitive-cum-slave labor in the Magdalene laundries without access to the outside world. It's a troubling history that, through the gift for provincial atmosphere that Mullan displayed in the Scotland-set Orphans, is turned into hyperbolic Grand Guignol: Each innocent girl is terrorized by her patriarchal community and then by savage nuns who humiliate, beat and harass them. A movie version of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" couldn't be more harrowing, and the film's timely coincidence with the recently exposed sexual abuses among Catholic prelates gives Mullan's tale an additional, unshakeable layer of dread.
Despite Mullan's artfulness, the film's unrelenting terror feels insufficient, almost exploitative. Apprehension overwhelms our understanding of how the Magdalene abuses were sanctioned within Irish Catholic society. Pointing an insistent, aggrieved finger, or making audiences share the terrified girls' despair, doesn't answer one's bewilderment. When one girl is finally rescued, years later, by her younger brother, she snaps, "What took you so long!" Her anger is understandable, but the question lingers?although it's not a question Mullan poses. He prefers a more simplistic mode of baroque expose.
Mullan's sorrowful depiction puzzled me until I saw the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, a film (only recently released here by the Cinema Guild) whose 1997 broadcast inspired Mullan to make The Magdalene Sisters. Directed by Steve Humphries, Sex in a Cold Climate had absolute qualities?regional authenticity and emotive personalities such as made Orphans so special. The talented actresses in The Magdalene Sisters always seem to be acting, but the actual women who survived the Magdalene asylums tell their stories to Humphries with an emotional clarity, openness and dignity that is much more powerful. Victims of their culture, they are also unimpeachable representatives of Irish Catholic naivete, frustration, anger, history and beauty. As the O'Neill line goes, "the map of Ireland" is on their faces and its tradition in their voices; the film is so culturally pure that one's response is to contemplate Irish Catholic culture rather than feel Mullan's instant, simplistic recoil.
While the shadowy, gothic trepidation of The Magdalene Sisters is easily absorbed as just another variation on horror-movie conventions (similar to the feminist Iranian movie The Circle), Sex in a Cold Climate commands attention. The moment Magdalene inmate Christina Mulcahy describes having her baby taken is wrenching. Mullan's drama can't match Mulcahy's quiet description of how her baby's father was put out of reach: "I lost out on him. I would have married him. I loved him." It's impossible to shake off Phyllis Valentine's account of being beaten, shorn, then forced by a nun to look into a mirror: "I'll never forget what looked back at me in that mirror."
Brigid Young and Martha Cooney also share heartbreaking, accusing stories and rationale: "The Church ruled the roost. The Church was always right. You never criticized the priests. You never criticized them holy nuns. You did what they said without questioning the reasons why," says one. "I didn't see anything Christlike [in the nun's behavior]...just a bunch of bullies," says another.
These women reiterate what Mullan only shows when a grotesquely damaged girl shouts to a priest "You're not a man of God!" Sex in a Cold Climate provides clearer understanding that it's people who are the institution. Humphries and his interview subjects prove that the Magdalene offense is one of misread and harshly imposed doctrine and that the psychological damage (and cultural after-effect) lingers past a horror movie's running time.