Barbara Hicks (Miss Avery) and Peter Cellier (Colonel Fussell) aré made alive to every nu ance of dialogue, to their func tion in the over-all scheme. If Howards End, like all the Ivory adaptations, is denied the highest accolades, It is because of its curious sense of being a secondhand artefact. It is as though the Ivory team is too daunted by the eminence of James or Forster to impose itself on the material. Maybe Ivory is too effacing as a direc tor to do so, but, if so, the result may be that he will never achieve anything comparable with the greatness of Orson Welles’ dealings with Shake speare (as in Chimes at Mid night) or Booth Tarkington (The M agnificent Am bersons). Tasteful and perceptive as Howards End (like its predecessors) is, it seems all too consciously aimed at a middle-class audience which will ap prove the decorums and the fidelity to the medium it really prefers. n ensuring that his adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is no safe, respectable ver sion of a “classic” (however little read today), Derek Jarman has - unsurprisingly - chosen to foreground the gay relationship at its heart. Jarman’s homosexual orientation colours his entire reading of the play. Edward (Steven Waddington) and his “favour ite” or “minion” as the play refers to his low-born lover, Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), are rep resented with far more overt and pervasive sympa thy than Marlowe accords them. When Edward has been forced to subscribe to Gaveston’s exile, the two, pyjama-clad, dance to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Every time we say goodbye”, sung by Annie Lennox. There is here the pathos of starcrossed lovers that overrides the impression Marlowe suggests of the King’s weakness and Gaveston’s opportunism. They are typically presented in a golden light (until fortune has turned wholly against them), whereas the opposition to their affair, in the per sons of a “Chorus of Nobility”, is made to appear as the forces of darkness. Jarman has said he was drawn to the play’s “story of love versus responsi bility” and to its dramatizing of the “clash between gay desire and public morality”. He has, that is, established what is for himself the play’s core and made his film render that core in terms which stress its contemporary and per sonal significance. He has re-imagined the original in ways that imply a grasp of the precursor text’s conflicts and brings it lurching forward four centu ries with new - and renewed - power. Opposition to the central lovers is depicted in almost entirely unsympathetic terms. Edward’s queen, Isabella (Tilda Swinton), has a hard ruth lessness of demeanour that denies her the sympa thy Marlowe allows her, and her lover, Mortimer (Nigel Terry), is a brutal figure, dressed in com mando uniform. The film’s satire is directed at a
I
EDWARD II (STEVEN W ADDINGTON) AND GAVESTON (ANDREW TIERNAN). DEREK JARMAN'S EDWARD II.
society which sanctions heterosexual infidelity and reserves its obloquy and hatred for the King’s obsession with Gaveston. (Jarman has reduced Marlowe’s dozen or so ambitious nobles and bish ops to an anonymous gaggle of braying predators, including two women.) The child of Edward and Isabella is finally represented as androgynous. Earlier in the film he has been a little boy playing with a sword as if it were a machine-gun; by the end, on top of the play pen which encloses his mother and her lover, he commands the situation in navy suit, high heels and dangling earrings that recall his mother’s. Arbitrary sexual divisions have been elided follow ing the death of the young prince’s father as a sexual martyr. There will probably be criticism that Jarman’s reworking of Marlowe is simplistic, and there is some truth in such a view. As the film cuts between Isabella addressing her band of thugs, armed for combat and protected with riot shields, and Edward receiving the support of a militant gay crowd wav ing banners (“Get Your Filthy Laws Off Our Bod ies”), it is easy to feel that the issues have been over-simplified. For instance, in aligning himself so unequivocally with the King and his lover, Jarman risks underestimating the other forces at work, such as those of class and the quest for political ascendancy. However, it is the intense politiciza tion of the sexual drama that makes Jarman’s film a genuine adaptation of Marlowe. By comparison, Ivory’s Howards End looks like the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers. And it is largely the stress on gay politics - and its place in a wider context of oppression - that allows Jarman’s version of a four-hundred-yearold tragedy to seem pertinent today. Neither the spectacle of gay demonstrators nor the sound of a radio voice telling us that “The King’s life is drawing rapidly to a close” (recalling the announcement of the death of George V) strikes a discordant note because the film has established its credentials for such cross-centuries allusion. Costumes, which include dinner jackets and evening gowns, modern combat dress and vaguely Renaissance garb, are part of such credentials. Characters are dressed for psychological associa
tions rather than for realism or for a rigid regard for consistency. This is not a new approach (Michael Bogdanov’s brilliant production of Henry IV, out here a few years ago, for the English Shakespeare Com pany invoked such eclecticism to similar dramatic ends) but it is worked out with rigorous care and effect. Settings, similarly, do little to confine the film to a particular time and place. It is mostly set in a strange empty castle, with stony halls and echoing corridors, a place of dan gerous corners and threatening shadows, brilliantly lit by camera man Ian Wilson. The result is a genuine fluidity in the film’s dealings with time and space that is at one with its sense of the timeless impor tance of its conflicts. More serious than his attractive adaptation of The Tempest, Jarman’s latest brush with classic drama estab lishes him as one who can read literature and make “something new”, who can respect what he has read without being over-awed by it. At his best, he exhibits a storyteller’s drive lit by a poet’s daring. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO Directed by Gus Van Sant.
Producer: Laurie Parker. Executive producers: Allan Mindel, Gus Van Sant. Line producer: Tony Brand. Script writer: Gus Van Sant. Directors of photography: Eris Allan Edwards, John Campbell. Production designer: David Brisbin. Costume designer: Beatrix Aruna. Editor: Curtiss Clayton. Composer: Bill Stafford. Cast: River Phoenix (Mike Waters), Keanu Reeves (Scott Favor), James Russo (Richard Waters), William Richert (Bob Pigeon), Rodney Harvey (Gary), Chiara Caselli (Carmella), Michael Parker (Digger), Jessie Thomas (Denise), Flea (Budd). Fine Line Pictures. Australian distributor: Newvision. 35mm. 105 mins. US. 1991. HOW ARDS END Directed by James Ivory. Producer:
Ismail Merchant. Executive producer: Paul Bradley. Scriptwriter: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Director of photogra phy: Tony Pierce-Roberts. Production designer: Luciana Arrighi. Costume designers: Jenny Bevan, John Bright. Editor: Andrew Marcus. Composer: Richard Robbins. Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Ruth Wilcox), Anthony Hopkins (Henry Wilcox), Helena Bonham Carter (Helen Schlegel), Emma Thompson (Margaret Schlegel), Prunella Scales (Aunt Julie), Adrian Ross Magenty (Tibby Schlegel), Sam West (Leonard Bast), James Wilby (Charles Wilcox), Jemma Redgrave (Evie Wilcox), Susan Lindeman (Dolly Wilcox), Nicola Duffet (Jacky Bast). Merchant Ivory Film in association with Film Four International. Australian distributor: Hoyts. 35mm. 142 mins. U.K. 1992. EDW ARD II Directed by Derek Jarman. Producers: Steve
Clark-Hall, Antony Root. Executive producers: Sarah Radclyffe, Simon Curtis. Scriptwriters: Derek Jarman, Stephen McBride, Ken Butler. Based on the play by Christopher Marlowe. Director of photography: Ian Wilson. Production designer: Christopher Hobbs. Editor: George Akers. Composer: Simon Fisher Turner. Cast: Steven Waddington (King Edward II), Andrew Tiernan (Gaveston), Tilda Swinton (Queen Isabella), Nigel Terry (Mortimer), Kevin Collins (Lightborn), Jerome Flynn (Kent), John Lynch (Spencer), Dudley Sutton (Bishop of Winchester), Jody Graber (Prince Edward), Annie Lennox (Singer). Working Title Production. Australian distributor: Newvision. 35mm. 90 mins. U.K. 1991.
CINEMA
PAPERS
89
• 35