TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.61

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 17KB | 309 lines

                                                                                September 7, 1981

CINEMA

When Acting Becomes Alchemy


THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

On that blustery March day in 1867, when Sarah Woodruff stood
on the Lyme Regis jetty and turned slowly to stare at the young
gentleman rushing to her aid, she burned her gaze into popular
literary history. Sarah may have been jilted by her fickle
French lieutenant, but she seized the imaginations and won the
hearts of the novel-reading public.

Since its publication in 1969, John Fowles' multileveled
romance sold about 4 million copies and been translated into 18
languages. It is easy to see why. Against a backdrop of the
lush Dorset landscape, two young lovers scale the Wuthering
Heights of passion and despair. Charles Smithson, a kind and
restless and resolutely ordinary gentleman of his day, meets
Sarah Woodruff, once a genteel governess, now an outcast for her
shameless "affair" with a capricious foreign sailor. That first
gaze is enough. He abandons his wealthy fiancee, his friends
and his good name to be with her--and, when Sarah mysteriously
abandons him, to live with her memory.

A "hot" property, a spellbinding story, a pedigree of raves and
awards, and just enough sex to set the toes acurl--with all
these assets, a movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman
might have seemed inevitable and immediate. It was not to be.
For Fowles had cloaked Sarah and Charles in a cunning
conundrum. This Victorian novel is also a meditation of the
novel form, and on a hundred other subjects that occupy the
teeming mind of the book's 20th century narrator. He sprinkles
references throughout, not just to Marx and Darwin but to
latter-day prophets like Roland Barthes and "the egregious
McLuhan."  His scenic route through the Dorset flora and fauna
includes side trips into the thickets of political and social
theory. He announces his presence at every plot turn--probing
his characters' thoughts on one page, shrugging genially that
he's no mind reader on the next. And finally, this most
dextrous of card sharks trumps his story. He provides three
contradictory endings to his tale; in the first, Charles
marries his fiancee, in the second Charles and Sarah are
blissfully reconciled, in the third they part, never to see each
other again.

It was just this aromatic blending of Victorian and modern
sensibilities that made reading the novel such an exhilarating
experience. The reader became a dolphin, swimming through the
period story, then leaping up for 20th century air. In
fiction, the narrator can achieve this feat simply by changing
tenses: "They did this, I say that."  But film lives in the
eternal present; everything that happens happens right now. To
be faithful to the structure of The French Lieutenant's Woman
would run the risk of dislocating the moviegoer--right out the
theater.

Fowles knew better that anyone else that filming his book would
be a daunting process. He had been less that ecstatic about
William Wyler's interpretation of his first published novel.
The Collector; and though Fowles wrote a script for the movie
version of his second, The Magus, he--and many critics--thought
the film a disaster. The  third time, he would play it safe:
he would retain veto power over the director. In fact, Fowles
had just the man for the job: Karel Reisz, whose films (Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, Morgan) dealt with intelligent
outsiders like Sarah Woodruff, and who was then completing a
period film on the life of Isadora Duncan. But Reisz, after
reconstructing the early 20th century for Isadora, was reluctant
to plunge into Victoriana.

And so the options multiplied, the screenplays accumulated, the
frustrations mounted. Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning
director of From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons, had
a script by British Television Playwright Dennis Potter; but
Zinnemann could not find the right actress. (Fowles' own choice
at the time was Venessa Redgrave.)  Mike Nichols tried, and so
did Franklin Schaffner. Recalls Fowles:  "A Hollywood
scriptwriter came over to do that one. I'm told he had a
nervous breakdown after six weeks."  Finally, in 1979 Reisz
reconsidered and invited Harold Pinter, Britain's master
playwright, to collaborate with him on the project.

Harold Pinter carves theatrical art from minimalist melodrama:
his plays' silences have the whipcrack of menace. He is also
a screenwriter whose adaptation of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between
examined the tensions between the entrenched upper class and
the emerging educated proletariat, between the fond, painful
past and the remorseless present. Karel Reisz is the technician
as artist: he makes films with taste, scope and, always,
discretion. He is an ideal "reader" for the script or novel to
be filmed; he makes writers' visions his own, to help the viewer
see more clearly. Together they could perhaps make something
faithful and original out of the book.

For three weeks Pinter and Reisz haggled over a table in
Hampstead, London. Finally they hit upon the notion of a
parallel secondary plot:  "Suppose we had a modern relationship
that started in bed and went from there?"  Fowles' narrative
would be stripped and varnished to Pinter's specifications; and
a modern story would be interpolated, describing the affair of
the actors playing Charles and Sarah in a film adaption of The
French Lieutenant's Woman. Says Reisz:  "The novel is a science
fiction--a Victorian story and a modern speculation about
fiction. Take away that acknowledgment of the 20th century, and
the story doesn't add up. Our sense of Sarah's sexual awareness
is a modern thing; inside her head, during the story, she jumps
from the 19th century to the 20th century." By the end of 1979,
Pinter had completed his weaving of two centuries, two
stories--and Reisz had found his heroine. The following May,
Meryl Streep walked onto the Lyme Regis set, and the filming of
The French Lieutenant's Woman began at last.

The slap of a clapper board indicates the start of a "take,"
and of this film. Few will note that the names on the slate
are fictitious, not those of Reisz and his cinematographer
Freddy Francis; but it is the first hint of the life-to-be
outside the walls of the period story. The audience will learn
soon and often enough: 14 times, the "present"
film-within-the-film will give way to the "past"
film-within-the-film-within-the-film. Inside the deepest box
it is 1867, and Charles Smithson is again living out his
perplexed obsession with the Scarlet Woman of Lyme.

Containing this plot is another box marked 1981, when The
French Lieutenant's Woman is being filmed in Lyme Regis. Mike
(Jeremy Irons), a young British actor, is playing Charles; Anna
(Meryl Streep), an American actress, is playing Sarah. Mike,
we soon learn, is in love. To Anna, he is little more than an
electric blanket--something to keep her warm in bed while on
location. And so the two play out a familiar film-set romance:
Mike pressing, Anna depressing; Mike the Method actor living
out his role, Anna the detached professional. Is Mike
infatuated with Anna or Sarah? by the end of the film he will
not know--for Mike is an up-to-date, slightly callower version
of the character he is playing. He is the eternal man-boy in
love with enigmatic modern woman--who has evolved into a complex
creature beyond the comprehension of Mike or any other man.

Anna seems almost alarmingly controlled, unreachable--as modern
as any Cosmo girl. But what about her Victorian twin?  Is
Sarah, as Irons describes her, "the breath of a new century"?
Or is she simply mad--driven to psychosis by the conflicting
pulls of passion and repression?  "I hope by the end she
establishes that she's probably not insane," muses Fowles. "Or
if she is, it's a fruitful kind of insanity."  Mad or just
modern, it hardly matters, for Sarah is above all an actress.
In one of the film's most powerful scenes, we find Sarah in her
room, at her mirror. One hand clutches her shawl, the other
furiously sketches self-portraits--anguished cartoons of the
madwoman of Lyme Regis. They could be rough drafts for an
asylumed future, or rehearsals for her climatic meeting with
Charles, but they are certainly the carefully fevered
preparations an actress makes for her big scene.

Formally, The French Lieutenant's Woman may be remarkable for
its shuffling of tenses and tensions; it is also a film of
meticulous attention to the details of the 1860's and today.
But its potentioal appeal for the broad audience rests on the
chemistry of its cast--on the attractive night music played in
this quartet for two voices:  Sarah-Anna and Charles-MIke.

In his first major film role, Jeremy Irons must carry both
stories and the audience with him; he must lay the tracks that
lead Charles and Mike to their fateful folly. Says Reisz:
"Jeremy has the authority of a leading man without the
narcissism that so often goes with it."  Indeed, there is
something of the fervid adolescent in his playing of these
serious young men. It takes doomed love to test, toughen and
mature Charles--and a compelling actor-personality to play him.
Irons is equally persuasive as performer and fond lover. As
Reisz notes, "Jeremy does have his Heathcliff side."

On the stage Meryl Steep is shooting-star bright; on-screen she
has won kudos without having to stretch herself. This is the
first film that depends crucially on her light a
sexual-intellectual flame, and wit--and considerable resources
of mystery--to create two utterly different characters.

Here is Sarah, in the sloping forest, her back to Charles, as
she spins out the story of her liaison with the French
Lieutenant Varguennes. With every new piece of information,
each wisp of fact or filament of fantasy, Streep's expression
and bearing change. She seems to be thinking on-screen, sorting
through a hundred nuances before lighting on the one she
uses--for just that moment. Sarah recalls the attentions paid
her by Varguennes:  a sweet, girlish, closemouthed smile
illuminates her face, then fades with reticence and the next
sentence. Sarah tells of the wine her lover urged on her--"It
did not intoxicate me, I think it made me see more clearly"--and
the voice rises, at once intoxicated and embarrassed. She has
been toying nervously with her hair, and now, as she describes
her seduction at the officer's hands, she loosens a knot of hair
and caresses it down her shoulders, as Sarah would have done
that night. By the end of her declaration, the night music in
her voice has been replaced by bass tones, and a final loathing
growl:  "I am the French Lieutenant's ...whore!"

Fowles, who would drop by the film's location once or twice a
week during the five weeks of filming in Lyme Regis, recalls
that "Meryl had a copy of the book that she'd read just before
the cameras turned. I was touched by that."  Any viewer
familiar with the novel will touched too--by Streep's eerily
exact translation of Fowles' descriptions into screen life. She
does indeed speak "with odd small pauses between each clipped,
tentative sentence."  Her cheeks do rouge at a vivid
recollection of her lover. But this is more than Xeroxing
emotions. It is the creation of a film character that does
precise and breathtaking justice to Fowles, to Sarah and the
actor's art. Streep fully merits Sarah's proudest
self-appraisal:  "Yes, I am a remarkable person."

Intelligent passion on the screen, two passionate intelligences
behind it:  a provocative combination. At times, though, the
mixture of Streep and Irons, modern and period tales is like a
garden party of charming strangers who never quite hit it off.
At these moments the parallel-story device looks both
cumbersome and timid. Pinter has pared away to the core of
Fowles' novel, and saved only the skin; Reisz has withheld the
emotional wallop without quite doing justice to the formal
complexities of film narrative. The period story takes up about
three-quarters of the film's running time and, like Sarah, is
often troubling and sensuous and gravely beautiful. But
whenever this story starts to pick up its skirt and run, it
trips over the lever on the time machine, and the film flips
forward into the less riveting present. Perhaps, if the movie
dealt solely with the period scenes, or if the 20th century
framing story had been more subtly with it...

A suspicion begins to form in the viewer's mind. What if this
French Lieutenant is designed to do more than tell two stories?
What if it means to be a demonstration of actors' alchemy, not
just into the identities of the characters they play, but into
artists?  Early in the film, Mike and Anna are rehearsing a scene
that takes place in the wood; Sarah slips and falls into
Charles' arms. The first run-through is perfunctory. Anna
says, "Let's do it again, O.K.?"  She walks back to her mark,
turns his way, catches his eye--and this time there's
electricity. She walks toward him and, suddenly falls--and as
she falls we are transported with her into 1867, into the
sequence as shot into an actor's intelligence and urgency.

But the film is still more cunning, for it deals as well with
the seductive ways a story's characters can become the actors
playing them. In one respect, this simply acknowledges star
quality:  the audience adds to Sarah's history all they know of
Streep from seeing her earlier films and reading about her
private life. But in the final meeting of Charles and Sarah,
three years after she has vanished, the film becomes something
else--more than a recreation of the separate fictional realities
of then and now.

This is the book's "happy ending," in which the lovers are
reconciled after Charles learns that Sarah has been caring for
the child conceived in their one night of consummation. But in
the film, everything seems slightly "off."  The lighting, which
in the earlier period scenes was dense and murky, is bright and
unrelenting. The camera stands back too far to encourage the
viewer's involvement in an intimate scene. The acting is oddly
strident and ragged, as if a failed first take had somehow made
it into the final cut. Sarah falls in this scene, but she lands
with an indecorous thud and giggles nervously, as the modern
Anna might. Charles is hitting his emotional keys too hard; he
sputters and foams out of control. There is not even mention
of their child, no real explanation for Sarah's disappearance.
The moment when the lovers finally embrace--the climax awaited
by every reader of the novel, anticipated by every new viewer
of the film--seems ruinously flat.

But wait. Those who find it so may have been seduced by the
expectations the film raised. For this sequence is neither
period nor modern, neither the Fowles story nor the framing
story, but a third dramatic level. Look at it this way:  the
viewer is in the screening room of Mike's fevered imagination.
This is Mike playing Charles, and Anna playing Sarah. But the
film has followed Mike's obsession to the point where he can no
longer distinguish between the two. Mike has become not only
the on-screen lover, but the off-screen lover and the film maker
as well, and this French Lieutenant's Woman is the film he would
have made.

And then, in the final modern scene, Mike's film world falls to
pieces. This is the Pinter-Reisz equivalent of Fowles' unhappy
ending:  a "wrap party" to celebrate the film's completion.
Mike cannot bear the prospect of losing Anna. Where can she be?
She is in the room where the final period sequence was shot,
examining herself in one of Sarah's mirrors. But Anna engages
in no searching of soul or image--just a glance and a primp and
she's off. Mike reaches the room as the car motor's rev signals
Anna's departure. He calls out for her:  "Sarah!"  It is too
late. Mike, the modern man, has lost his French lieutenant's
woman. Charles, the Victorian aesthete, has been deserted by
a surpassing actress. A heart is broken, the mirror is cracked,
the film spins off its real.

It was John Fowles who suggested that the film's final line of
dialogue be "Sarah!"  He deserves to share credit with Pinter
and Reisz for assembling this multilayered meditation on the
blurring lines that connect actor, character and audience. But
the creation might have remained stillborn without the
contribution of Meryl Streep. This Sarah, this Anna, this
warring family of sirens demands an incandescent star. With
this performance, Streep proves she is both. Virgin, whore,
woman, actress, she provides the happy ending to The French
Lieutenant's Woman and new life to a cinema starved for shining
stars.

By Richard Corliss. Reported by Arthur White