The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears 9781501320330, 9781501320361, 9781501320354

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Introduction
1. Introduction
General introduction
Biographical sketch
Frears on direction
Auteur malgré lui
Part 2: Unclassifiable Love: My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things
2. My Beautiful Laundrette
3. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
“Fear in a handful of dust”
Hope amidst the ruins
4. “Multi-whatever-it-is”: Dirty Pretty Things
The world in London
Multi-genre Dirty Pretty Things
Comedy and mystery
Dirty Pretty Things and Alfred Hitchcock
Dirty Pretty Things as a problem film: social commentary
Design
Multi-Okwe
Conclusion
Part 3: Love, Power, and Pleasure: Dangerous Liaisons and Chéri
5. Dangerous Liaisons: Pride, Passion, and True Love
6. Chéri
Part 4: Two Families: The Snapper and Liam
7. The Snapper
Sharon and Dessie
Design
Sex and Barrytown
Brief conclusion
8. Liam
Liam and his family
Music, design, camera work
Conclusion
Part 5: Love, Media, and Memory: The Queen and Philomena
9. The Queen
Elizabeth II and Tony Blair
Diana
Crowds
Media
10. Philomena: Love and Evil, Truth and Forgiveness
Part 6: Acceptance, Forgiveness, and Love: Mary Reilly
11. Mary Reilly
Coda: actions without consequences
Notes
Video/Filmography as of March, 2016
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears Lesley Brill

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Lesley Brill, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Names: Brill, Lesley, 1943- author. Title: The ironic filmmaking of Stephen Frears / Lesley Brill. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016003591 (print) | LCCN 2016006284 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501320330 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501320347 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501320354 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Frears, Stephen—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.F745 B76 2016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.F745 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003591

ISBN:

HB: 9781501320330 PB: 9781501340161 ePDF: 9781501320354 ePub: 9781501320347

Cover image © WARNER BROS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Part 1  Introduction 1

Introduction

3

General introduction

3

Biographical sketch

9

Frears on direction

12

Auteur malgré lui

20

Part 2 Unclassifiable Love: My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things

2

My Beautiful Laundrette

37

3

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

51

“Fear in a handful of dust”

51

Hope amidst the ruins

65

“Multi-­whatever-it-­is”: Dirty Pretty Things

71

The world in London

71

Multi-­genre Dirty Pretty Things

72

Comedy and mystery

72

Dirty Pretty Things and Alfred Hitchcock

75

Dirty Pretty Things as a problem film: social commentary

80

Design

83

Multi-Okwe

85

Conclusion

88

4

Part 3  Love, Power, and Pleasure: Dangerous Liaisons and Chéri 5

Dangerous Liaisons: Pride, Passion, and True Love

6

Chéri

93 107

Contents

vi

Part 4  Two Families: The Snapper and Liam 7

8

The Snapper

121

Sharon and Dessie

121

Design

128

Sex and Barrytown

133

Brief conclusion

136

Liam

139

Liam and his family

140

Music, design, camera work

151

Conclusion

158

Part 5  Love, Media, and Memory: The Queen and Philomena 9

The Queen

161

Elizabeth II and Tony Blair

163

Diana

173

Crowds

175

Media

177

10 Philomena: Love and Evil, Truth and Forgiveness

181

Part 6  Acceptance, Forgiveness, and Love: Mary Reilly 11 Mary Reilly

201

Coda: actions without consequences

221

Notes Video/Filmography as of March, 2016 Bibliography Index

225 237 239 247

Acknowledgments I am grateful to friends and colleagues who helped bring this project to fruition. Megan Parry read virtually the entire manuscript and both offered helpful suggestions and prevented the inclusion of whole murmurations of embarrassing gaffes. Carol Vernallis found time in her busy life to offer enthusiasm and useful comments on the “Introduction” and a number of the discussions of individual films. I am especially grateful to Katie Gallof, Editor for Film Studies at Bloomsbury Academic, for her unfailing support and valuable advice. Her assistants, Mary Al-Sayed and Michelle Chen, kept me on track with prompt, helpful information and assistance. The referees for my book proposal to Bloomsbury Academic made a number of thoughtful observations. Professor Charles Barr made an online introduction of me to Stephen Frears, who graciously looked over the brief biography in the “Introduction,” and offered several corrections. Thanks to Diane Sybeldon, the film librarian at Wayne State University, for obtaining DVDs and books important for my study. Research librarians in the WSU PurdyKresge library provided difficult-­to-find articles and reviews. Maureen Kinder helped tracking down sources on the internet. T. C. Charlie kept me company during most of my work on this project. In discussions with students at WSU I learned much of what this study attempts to articulate; I am grateful for their insights and for stimulating mine. Errors of fact and tact, omissions, and obscurities are mine.

Part One

Introduction

1

Introduction

General introduction This study has four principal aims: First, it may be useful as an introduction to Frears’s films for readers who have little familiarity with most of them. Second, it presents extended discussions of ten of his movies. In doing so, it attempts to show some of what one can learn from Frears’s filmmaking about the possibilities of cinema and of being human. These readings, detailed as they are, should not be taken as complete or definitive; the richness of Frears’s films, and their persistent ambiguity, make even extended interpretations tentative and partial. I hope they will serve to further open rather than close discussions of the movies they address. The third purpose of this study might be the most controversial. As Deborah Allison noted in 2007, “For many years, his critical reputation has been divided between the two camps of those who . . . afford him auteur status, and those who regard him as a competent metteur-­en-scène” (Allison 2007: 35). I argue for the coherence of Frears’s career as a cinematic author, both as a stylist and through his thematic preoccupations. Finally, I hope to suggest that Frears has produced an excellent and enduring body of work. This last argument can be made only indirectly, by something like association or implication; otherwise, it simply becomes a rehearsing of my tastes and prejudices. Careful study of the films I have selected reveals their depth and complex resonance, and the imagination and care with which Frears brings their screenplays to life. Their density, originality, lively irony, and meticulous direction typify virtually all of Frears’s work. They stand, in short, as representatives of his entire oeuvre, not as exceptional instances. Readers of this book can decide for themselves whether his films seem to them as superb as they do to me. “De gustibus,” finally, “non disputandum est” (Taste isn’t arguable). I should add that I am not a wholly uncritical admirer of everything Frears has directed. A few of his films strike me as below his usual standard: the HBO production of Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013), for instance, or Fail Safe (2000)—though it was nominated for a number of awards, a couple of which it won. So the problem with my response to that movie is likely my watching rather than the film’s. Lay the Favorite (2012) has more to recommend it than a first viewing might suggest; but it could plausibly be classified in Frears’s total work as an amusing bagatelle. These judgments, of course, are personal, and as directly unarguable as more positive evaluations. My taste as regards those movies, too, is “non disputandum.”

4

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Discussions of Stephen Frears routinely describe him with adjectives like “distinguished” and “celebrated”; and he has recently been awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship, “the highest honor the organization can bestow” (Barraclough 2014). In its biography, The New York Times (2013) called him “renowned as one of his country’s most vibrant and recognizable filmmakers.” Yet he attracts surprisingly modest extended attention, either from academics or from public critics and intellectuals. Most of the essays that have addressed his work, moreover, focus on just a few of his films, those that have at their centers the social plights of immigrants: My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things. This relative neglect may have in part to do with the decline of the “auteur theory” from a dominant position in cinema studies to a co-­dominant one, shared with cultural studies, film history, film theory, feminist film studies, queer theory, and so on. In part, it may have to do with Frears’s diffident self-­presentation as a journeyman teller of tales not of his own making. More likely, it may have to do with the vast variety of genres, settings, tones, characters, and themes in his films of over more than four decades. Allison, in her superb essay on Frears’s career, also notes “the unusual level of stylistic hybridity found in the cinema of Stephen Frears” (Allison 2007: 35). Commentators on Frears agree that his movies “resist classification.”1 This resistance applies, in most cases, to his films individually as well as to the totality of his oeuvre. It makes for difficulty in assessing the director’s purposes, his orientation to his material, and his artistic personality in a single film, let alone in the considerably more than forty he has directed to date. Another quality contributing to his neglect is the inconspicuous subtlety of his direction, the denseness of the visual and thematic textures of his movies, and the life-­ like ambiguity of their characters. Directors whose hands are more obvious and whose artistry is more conspicuously displayed make easier subjects for auteurist analysis. Across all his work, he remains a wonderful storyteller. Uncharacteristically, he once admitted, “I’ve got an eye for a story. I think that’s what’s protected me” (French 2010). Frears has so mastered the art of storytelling—among his other virtues—that his films have about them a sense of ease and inevitability. Their surfaces seem abundantly sufficient, the progress of their plots self-­evident. Additionally, Frears has a gift for integrating the stories he tells and his characters with their social and geographical settings. The consequent rich interdependence of persons, places, and actions generates multiple meanings in sometimes surprising directions. Coming to a definitive count of Frears’s directed work is difficult. A number of his early television features are either unavailable or hard to see, and for other television work it is not always clear whether one is talking about feature-­length productions or something shorter. “Sunset Across the Bay” (1975) runs seventy minutes; does that classify it as a feature or as a short? Since My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) propelled him into international celebrity, he has directed about twenty-­six feature-­length movies— but even that tally depends upon how one counts a film like Loving Walter (1986), which is a conflation of two television films. Should one include December Flower, which has apparently never been available after its television broadcast in 1987? Does one exclude the co-­written, co-­directed “A Personal History of British Cinema by

Introduction

5

Stephen Frears” (1994 TV documentary) or put it in italics along with his fiction films? And somewhere there may still be a few of his music videos and commercials. Such counting doesn’t much matter. What does matter is the undeniably substantial body of work he has achieved over his career and its consistently high quality. Since Gumshoe (1971), Frears has been an imaginative, often daring, thoroughly independent-­ minded, prolific, and thoughtful maker of popular (and sometimes not so popular) cinema. From almost any perspective—the development of compelling narratives and characters, mastery of technical means, richness of visuals, sophisticated use of audio, thematic complexity, resourcefulness of design—his films, early and late, seem to me and to his many admirers to stand with the best bodies of work in cinema for the last half-­century. To these strengths, he adds a pervasive sense of humor. “Humor is a good way of telling a story,” he has remarked, “It makes difficult things acceptable” (Lucia 2003: 12). Even his most dismal, dangerous narratives—Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Mary Reilly (1996), or Liam (2000), say—are often humorous; not in a boisterous way, but in the way of a film like Hitchcock’s Psycho, a movie that its director once declared, surprisingly but accurately, to be very funny. In his comic movies—The Snapper (1993), The Van (1996), or High Fidelity (2000), for example— Frears can be boisterous indeed. In all his movies, he creates much of his humor through editing, usually via the kind of incongruous juxtapositions of shots that must be planned in advance, during shooting. Among prominent stylistic consistencies we may count his nimble, inventive camera work; indeed, his camera in a number of movies acts as another character along with its role as a recorder of settings and events. Imaginative packing of the mis-­ en-scène with inconspicuous significance characterizes all his films; this will become evident in the close inspection of specific movies that constitutes the greater part of this study. His handling of color—in collaboration with designers, costumers, and cinematographers—is usually schematic, but rarely simply so. Chromatic rhythms are at once subtle and strong. He favors split screens or camera setups that achieve effectively the same thing via mirrors or other reflections. Consistent use of parallel lines in his films, usually indicating simultaneous protection and constraint, is another characteristic visual motif. Again, these tendencies are best observed in careful analyses of particular films. (In order to avoid unilluminating repetition and excessive length, I have not traced the same techniques or motifs across every film I discuss in detail. If a stylistic feature has pervasive importance, I attend to it in several of my analyses.) I have already mentioned Frears’s sense of humor, manifest in editing, in the screenplays (on which, it appears, he generally collaborates at some point, though he never takes a writing credit), in his use of music tracks, and in his direction of actors. His films never lack wit. Across the body of his work thematically, he displays a fascination with exceptionally diverse kinds of love, and also, somewhat paradoxically, he usually portrays sex as problematic. His approach to his plots, characters, and situations almost invariably favors the sort of encompassing irony that leads to discussions full of such expressions as “yes, but,” “on the other hand,” and “however.” Almost every hypothesis one makes about a movie

6

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

directed by Stephen Frears needs immediate qualification. Such are the ways of incongruity—sometimes humorous, sometimes not, and often balanced between. The contrariety that pervades his movies also manifests itself in their mixtures of genres. No genre, with formulaic characters and plots, can contain the complexity of Frears’s vision of cinema or of human life. Nor the skepticism, often wry, that underlies both. Frears always directs, to a greater or lesser degree, as an ironist. His ironies are carefully controlled. Frears does not simply throw a bouquet of meanings and motifs at the audience and leave us to put them into some sensible arrangement. Possible meanings are limited, in clear relation to each other, and usually left without anything guiding the viewer to a strong preference. When ironies are less equivocal, his films nonetheless leave some problems unsolved or possibilities open. Nothing is finally simplified or entirely without its facing antithesis. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote in discussing Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Frears’s movies are replete with “moments of bafflement” (Spivak 1993: 248). In their complexity, his films maintain diverse perspectives on the multiplicity of human life while preserving their own coherence. A nearly constant refrain in his interviews consists of Frears expressing his desire to learn new things about people he doesn’t know well and situations with which he is unfamiliar. He has spent his professional life exploring, as William Stafford put it, “what the world is trying to be.”2 Consistent with those desires, he takes obvious pleasure in expanding his mastery of filmmaking. Discussing Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), for example, he commented on the difficulty of learning to make a musical in the style of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He clearly welcomed the challenge. As is evident from both his films and his interviews, he has a horror of repeating himself. One gathers that he would much prefer death by stress over death by boredom—a word that repeatedly comes up when he describes his childhood. This fondness for going in new directions comprises another of the attractions of studying Frears’s films—and another of the reasons that he resists classification. He repeats himself only in quite general ways; each of his films introduces much that is new, or varies unpredictably from some earlier narrative or set of themes. Since he consciously seeks out situations previously unfamiliar to him, this multiplicity of matter and form is hardly surprising. Indeed, the very inconsistency of Frears’s output itself constitutes a sort of signature. What Aristotle said about characters—if inconsistent they should be consistently inconsistent—we might also apply to Frears’s consistently unpredictable output across the breadth of his career. Selecting the films for extended discussion was difficult. If it was not quite arbitrary, it nonetheless leaves out many movies as excellent, as important in Frears’s career, and as engaging as those it includes. I have slightly leaned toward favoring his more recent or popular movies on the assumption that they are most likely to be familiar to my readers. Among the splendid titles that I am especially sorry not to give extensive analysis are several of his American productions (some of which he occasionally cites as evidence that he can’t do big studio films successfully): Hero (1992), The Hi-Lo

Introduction

7

Country (1998), and High Fidelity. His first feature length directorial effort, Gumshoe, has an exuberance and inventiveness in bending the conventions of Film Noir that continue to repay repeated viewings. Prick Up Your Ears has its partisans, as does the less well known Bloody Kids (1980), a TV movie that was briefly shown theatrically. Criterion has recently released a new DVD and Blu-Ray of The Hit (1984) along with an essay by Graham Fuller arguing for its excellence and its influence on later films, worldwide, of the 1980s and 1990s. Tamara Drewe (2010) embodies Frears’s skill in giving complex unity to diverse themes, plots, and characters in a single film. It is also, like most of its director’s movies, beautifully photographed. The films I chose form groups with related settings and main themes that display at once some of Frears’s consistencies—especially his interest in unusual love stories and in characters who dwell somewhat outside the bounds of ordinary society—and the imaginative variations he achieves among them. My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things (2002) form one such group, focusing as they do on what cultural critics call characters with hybrid identities. The second of those films adds increased political content to the portrayal of characters and social setting that it shares with the first; and the third adds elements of thriller and romance to the genre of socially engaged filmmaking. Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Chéri (2009), his historical costume dramas, make a mutually illuminating pair, although separated by more than twenty years in production and set in different centuries. They illustrate especially well Allison’s assertions that “social and sexual relationships, be they explicitly political or not, have always been central to the films of Stephen Frears” (Allison 2007: 38) and that “his own input can be readily discerned across the full range of his films in a way that cannot be attributed to any other party” (Allison 2007: 36). The Queen and Philomena portray strong women “of a certain age,” brought to life in powerful, subtle performances by Helen Mirren and Judi Dench respectively. They further share, like a number of other Frears movies, a strong thematic interest in the complex intersections of media with both national culture and private memory. The Snapper and Liam are dramas of family love prevailing or failing in difficult circumstances. As in several other Frears films, Irish characters and culture have great importance. Talking about the Leicester in which he grew up, Frears remarked, “It’s much more like an Irish town than an English town” (Judell n.d.). Mary Reilly is included because I experience it as magnificent: rich, beautiful, mysterious, and moving. Thematically and visually, as well as performatively, it compendiates much of what makes Frears a compelling director. Frears himself, though he has remarked, “I never should have done Mary Reilly,” does acknowledge that “It was full of great design and photography” (IMBD biography, source of quotation unattributed). The films that I analyze have all been released theatrically, though a number of them began as productions for television, and all are available as DVDs—with one exception, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.3 At the time I am writing, it can be accessed only online. Despite that inconvenience, I’ve included it because, as mentioned above, it is part of the loose trilogy dealing with the lives of immigrant characters. One hopes that it will soon be more easily viewed.

8

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

About Frears’s influences, I must be reticent. British New Wave-Free Cinema and Angry Young Man theater (with considerable overlap) gained international audiences in the 1960s, while Frears was in his late teens and early twenties. Films like Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962), The L-Shaped Room (Brian Forbes, 1962), and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) probably made a strong impression on him. His television documentary “gimme shelter: Report St. Ann’s” reflects the socially committed filmmaking of such movies. Additionally, Frears’s clearly had great respect for such directors as Ken Loach, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson, the last two of whom he assisted on films early in his career. But his taste in cinema seems always to have been international and responsive to many kinds of movies, perhaps especially American ones. He loved film from an early age—in school, he once took a disciplinary beating rather than miss a Marx Brothers movie—and he is consistently enthusiastic in his estimation of the movies he grew up with and those produced by his contemporaries. He does not identify himself as “a British filmmaker.” John Hill writes, “His films have often sought to combine a certain commitment to realism with a stylization more characteristic of Hollywood” (Hill 1996: 228). Similarly Allen Meek, “Frears himself occupies something of a middle position between the apparent alternatives of commercial imperative and political localism” (Meek 2003: 11). After making Tamara Drewe, the director remarked, “I found that I could get away from the tyranny of realism” (Heath 2010). He calls himself “a rather odd combination of somebody enmeshed in British society but with a sort of yen for American movies” (Hill 1996: 228). The influence of Alfred Hitchcock, himself an English-Hollywood hybrid, is persistent in Frears’s practice of filmmaking and in his remarks about his own movies, others’, and Hitchcock’s. (I consider Hitchcockian aspects at some length in my discussion of Dirty Pretty Things.) My approach consists of letting the films guide me to what is important, to what they mean, to how they cohere. That is, as Frears often frames it, to an understanding of how each film “has an independent life” (Thomson n.d.). I avoid coming to any of Frears’s movies through ideas external to them, other than thoughts about narrative in general (especially useful to me are those of Northrop Frye) and some of Elias Canetti’s writings about crowds and their relation to power when they illuminate Frears’s depictions of them. Many scholars have approached Frears’s work through strongly held political or sociological positions. There are a few exceptions—notably Allison’s essay and a book by Christine Geraghty (2005) that offers a comprehensive account of My Beautiful Laundrette as a work of art in the context of its production and reception. But in general, criticism of Frears’s films invokes cultural analysis, a tendency that has been very much the case for My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things. Those films have mostly been treated as illustrating cultural change and its dilemmas in a globally connected, post-­colonial world where persons with hybrid identities have increasing importance.4 Of course, all three do that, and analyses with that emphasis are illuminating. But that is only part of what they do, and to focus too exclusively on their post-­modern cultural features risks distorting them as wholes and impoverishing them by depleting their rich contexts.

Introduction

9

I should also mention, briefly, my attitude toward Frears’s comments on his own works and his role in their production. As to the former, he often functions, in interviews and in “Director’s Commentary” sections of DVDs, as a shrewd viewer of his films. But while his remarks may be especially interesting, they carry no more intrinsic authority than do the remarks of other discussants. They must be judged, as all commentary is, on their capacity to illuminate and accurately represent the cinematic texts to which they are attached. About his role in the making of his works, he can be quite illuminating; but he can sometimes also be an excellent model for the famous dictum D. H. Lawrence offered in his Studies in Classic American Literature: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (Lawrence 2011: 42).

Biographical sketch5 Though described by Nick Frazer as “a man so determinedly private,” and by himself as “slippery,”6 Frears has actually been forthcoming in some of the multitude of interviews he has granted over the course of his long career. The details of his life, as they can be learned from these interviews and other sources (many available online), allow a reasonably inclusive chronology. Whether these details illuminate his films to any significant degree may be questionable; but they do sketch the background from which he moved into the career he eventually found. He was born June 20, 1941, into a middle class family in Leicester, England, a Midlands city and urban area currently of about half a million people. During World War II, in which his father was posted to South Africa, Frears recalls a life of austerity: The food we ate was quite odd. Powdered eggs. There was rationing. Most of the rooms in our house were closed because there wasn’t the coal to heat them, so I basically sat with my mother in the kitchen for five or six years. I used to have baths in front of the fire, like a working-­class child.

His empathy for the subjects of “gimme shelter, Report St. Ann’s” (Thames Television, 1969) and Mrs. Henderson Presents might to a degree derive from his wartime childhood. After returning from World War II, his father, previously an accountant, enrolled in medical school and studied to be a physician. His mother had been a social worker. Frears’s father was in London much of the time, so that Stephen saw relatively little of him. Frears recalls being “very, very bored” during his early youth, with his father away first in South Africa and then in London studying medicine, and with his two brothers away at boarding school. “When I was eight . . . [I] went away to boarding school for five years.” Then he attended Gresham’s School in Norfolk, a public school—Americans would call it private—after which he went to Trinity College, Cambridge University. There he studied law, which, he says, did not much interest him: “Because I come from a family

10

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

of professional people, you just sort of assume you’re going to be some sort of a professional person.” At Cambridge, he found university theatrical life more interesting than law; among his contemporaries were John Cleese “and all those other people from the Monty Python show,” the director Michael Apted, David Frost, “and most of the people who now [1988] run the BBC.” After graduation he sought employment in the theater or media. He “drifted for about a year,” working briefly in a repertory theater in Farnham, Surrey, before he went to the Royal Court theater as an apprentice director. There he worked on plays including “Waiting for Godot,” and he saw others by Joe Orton, the central character of his biographical Prick Up Your Ears. The directors at Royal Court included such important figures as Lindsay Anderson and Bill Gaskill. In 1965, in what he has noted as a pivotal moment in his life, he was hired as an assistant by Karel Reisz. He worked with Reisz on Morgan (1966), with Albert Finney on Charlie Bubbles (1967), and with Lindsay Anderson on If (1968). Following those assignments, he directed a short film, The Burning (1968). Largely shot from the point of view of a little boy, it looks forward in that respect to Liam. Both that film and “gimme shelter: report St. Ann’s,” his second directorial effort, anticipate his ongoing interest in social and racial issues across his career. Commenting on the rebroadcast of “gimme shelter” in 1993, Time Out wrote, “Frears’ directorial tone (lucid, unsentimental, unassertive) is displayed here already fully formed” (Time Out 1993). He made his feature film debut with Gumshoe. Along with Albert Finney, the cast includes Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finley, and other notables including Neville Smith, who co-­wrote it with Frears. It features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (then twenty-­three) and cinematography by Chris Menges. It was well reviewed but did not lead to additional feature film assignments—partly, perhaps, because of the precarious state of the British film industry at that time, and partly, according to Robert Lindsey, because “Alan Bennett asked Stephen Frears to direct a television film he had written [A Day Out]. That led to a collaboration that would keep Frears busy much of the next decade.” During the 1970s and 1980s he worked on various television projects. “I was brought up at the BBC. I met so many people cleverer than myself in those years.” Among his colleagues were the directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, an important influence on what he calls “socially acute” filmmaking. Loach’s presence, Frears has said, “was like having God working down the corridor.” Describing this time, Frears remarks, “The black hole that people talk about in my career in the 70s, when I didn’t make any films—in retrospect, what I was doing was learning my job.” Between 1968 and 1983, when The Hit was released, Frears made fifteen or so films for television and directed a number of shorter pieces. Lester Friedman observes, “Frears’s ‘invisible’ style remains indebted to the unobtrusive techniques that characterize television aesthetics” (Friedman 1993: 222). Allison’s understanding of the effect of Frears’s television work on his development is more complex, “The extent of the impact of Frears’s experience as a television director on his subsequent theatrical work is hard to gauge.” His television work contains a “mixture of flamboyant cinematic flourishes with more conservative shooting and editing styles that is notable in a number of his television films.” At the same time, television

Introduction

11

influenced filmmaking in Britain, she continues, and currents flowed in both directions: “The British ‘Free Cinema’ movement of the 1960s can be seen as an equal influence on both the television drama of the era and Frears’s individual development as a director” (Allison 2007: 37). Frears connected during those years with many fine writers, cinematographers, and musicians, with some of whom he was to repeatedly collaborate and from all of whom he learned “his job.” Michael Palin observed, “The group of technicians—cameramen, make-­up, sound, editors, etc.—with whom he works are the best in the business, painstakingly collected by Stephen over the years” (Palin 2006: 242). Among the writers he worked with were Alan Bennett, Adrian Mitchell, Tom Stoppard, and Peter Prince, who would later write the screenplay for The Hit. Prince’s play, Television Times, was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 1980, with Frears directing. Equally important were other artistic collaborators with whom he would work and maintain connections as his career developed beyond the BBC. Not long after going to work at the BBC, he married Mary Kay Wilmers, one of the founders of The London Review of Books, of which she has been editor since 1992. They had two children, Sam, an actor, and Will, a film and stage director. The marriage ended in 1975. He then lived with Anne Rothenstein, a painter, whom he married in 2005. She and he have two children together, Lola and Frankie. In a rare speculation about the connections between his personal life and his filmmaking, Frears spoke about: something that happened to me in the 1970s . . . in my mid-­twenties. I discovered that I was Jewish, that my mother was Jewish. . . . I was still making films about Anglo-Saxon people, very English people, but around that time I stopped. . . . In my middle age, I found two new subjects—I found America and I found non-English subjects.

He remains unsure about the connection between this new knowledge of his background and his loss of interest in films “about white English people.” Britain started to change, he adds, “and other people also stopped making those kinds of films.” To Naomi Pfefferman (2001), he offered details of how he came to this knowledge: His brother blurted out the news during his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party, not long after Frears had married a Jewish woman. “He said how pleased our grandmother was that I had married a Jewish girl—and that our mother was Jewish,” recalls Frears. “Of course I was surprised that something like this had been concealed from me for so long.” The revelation came out of left field. Frears and his mum had regularly attended Church of England services in his gritty hometown of Leicester, where, he recalls, “there was simply no evidence that Jews existed.” Frears’ mother never revealed why she chose to conceal her background.

About his mother’s hiding her Jewish identity, Frears remarked:

12

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears I don’t think it was the product of anti-Semitism. I suspect it was a form of rebellion against her own parents. But when I found out I was Jewish I found it . . . not consoling, exactly, but a big part of the puzzle dropped into place.

It partly explained, he said, a “sense of outsiderness” he had always felt. Frears has two houses, one “in London [Notting Hill] where I live in a multicultural world, and one in the country [Dorset]. When I go to the country, it’s like the 1940s. . . . If I take a black friend, [people] stare. Britain is very, very divided.” Frears dramatized this division in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid when Rafi and Danny/Victoria are regarded with suspicion in Cockfosters, Alice’s relatively suburban neighborhood. Between films, Frears taught at the Beaconsfield National Film and Television School. He has spoken positively about this part of his career: Marty Mapes:  Do you get antsy when you don’t have a project? Stephen Frears:  Well, I teach. MM:  What do you teach? SF:  Well, I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. It’s not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-­how, I suppose. Do I get antsy . . .? Something has always come along. When I go and teach it sort of opens me up in some way. And when you’re open, you’re more receptive. When I was teaching I found My Beautiful Laundrette, I found Dirty Pretty Things. Good things happen when I’m teaching. Mapes n.d.

Frears on direction What I really need is some good material. Frears in Lindsey 1988

In interviews and on DVD “Director’s Commentary” sections, Frears has frequently spoken about what he does as a director. His comments are generally illuminating; sometimes—as when he says on the commentary to Dirty Pretty Things that he is not a visual person—they can be startlingly misleading. Most frequently, he talks of wanting to give lifelike energy to the scripts he has chosen. Discussing what he regards as his principal role in making a film, he repeatedly uses the word “alive” and the phrase “bring to life.” At the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) in 2010, he spoke of success “if the film has an independent life” (Thomson n.d.). He has insisted on the importance of writers in his filmmaking. In selecting scripts, he eschews self-­conscious intellection. The process of selection, he says, should be “as unconscious as it’s possible to be.” Regarding his decision to make Dirty Pretty Things, “it seemed to have helped that I didn’t talk about it. It came from somewhere

Introduction

13

unconscious” (Thomson n.d.). One of the few times Frears admitted that he might have some talent occurred when he allowed, “I think that’s what I’m good at: recognizing a good script” (Judell n.d.). Having chosen a script, his job, he says, consists mainly of transforming its words into a living film. Though this can never be a simple matter, he often speaks as if it were. He seems to suggest that directing a film amounts to little more than baking a loaf of bread: assemble the ingredients, mix thoroughly, bake in the oven, and take out the bread—that is, the finished movie, which may, with some luck and promotion, produce its own bread. Frears participates in revising the screenplays he selects. We should take this into account when we consider the question of his authorship. Frears himself is fulsome in praise of the writers he has worked with and reticent about his contributions to their screenplays. But one notes that he likes to have his screenwriters on the set during filming, so that he can ask for (and contribute to) rewrites and additions when he deems them necessary. To Cynthia Lucia’s query, “Do you become a part of the writing process?” Frears answered: I question—which is part of my function in all parts of the filmmaking process: Why are you doing that? Why are you playing it that way? You conduct an intelligent conversation with everybody. That’s different from saying, this is what you should do or this is what you should write. So it’s hard to claim credit. Lucia 2003: 11

Accounts of Frears’s preproduction involvement with his screenplays are suggestive. Discussing Philomena, the credited screenwriter Steve Coogan makes clear Frears’s collaboration: The writing “changed after Frears got involved because he wanted the script tighter and more focused” (Gray 2013). “We did a few rewrites based on Stephen’s notes on the script” (Hernandez n.d.). David Gritten’s (2013) report is similar: “He . . . worked with Coogan and Pope on rewrites of their script over a three-­ month period until he was happy with it.” Frears, too, is clear: “The whole time you’re rewriting” (Rose n.d.). About this aspect of his work, he maintains his modesty. “All I did,” he said about his contribution to the script of Dirty Pretty Things, “was to take out the boring bits” (Thomson n.d.). As any writer knows, however, there can hardly be a more crucial part of revising than such surgery. Kureishi describes his and Frears’s decision to downsize My Beautiful Laundrette: I started to rewrite. Stephen and I had long talks, each of us pacing up and down the same piece of carpet, in different directions. . . . The film started off as an epic. It was to be like The Godfather, opening in the past with the arrival of an immigrant family in England and showing their progress to the present. . . . We soon decided it was impossible to make a film of such scale. Kureishi 1996: 4–5

14

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

The Kureishi–Frears writing collaboration resumed early in the shaping of the screenplay for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. “What Frears and I do, as we talk . . . is invent new elements to bind the story together” (Kureishi 1988: 73). Kureishi having written “an entirely new draft,” “Frears comes over. I sit opposite him as he turns over the pages of the script. We talk about each page” (Kureishi 1988: 5). Responding to the question of why he chose to make Mary Reilly, Frears noted that in addition to his fascination with its psychology, “it was also another chance to work with Christopher Hampton, after Dangerous Liaisons. Its scenario was already written; then, to be sure, we reworked it, but without bringing in major modifications” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 36, emphasis added). Discussing the making of Chéri, he remarked, “Writing is an endless process” (Ciment 2009: 29). Scriptwriter Peter Morgan, author of The Queen and The Deal, who can be considered an auteur in the sub-­genre of the British Heritage Film, reports further on Frears’s involvement in the writing: “There are those terrible rows at 5 AM, when things aren’t right” (Frazer 2010). On one occasion, Frears takes credit for a bit of the writing. During a summative moment in Dirty Pretty Things, the courier of illegally harvested organs says to Okwe, Julia, and Senay, “How come I’ve never seen you people before?” Okwe answers, “Because we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms, (pause) and suck your cocks.” On the DVD’s commentary, the director inserts, “That was mine, that was my joke. I’m very, very proud of it.” I am not arguing that Frears’s collaboration with his writers has been of less than great importance to his work across the decades; I am suggesting that he is more involved in the writing of his movies from an early stage than he is sometimes credited for. His contribution goes well beyond simply working as “the bloke who gets hired” to transform a finished screenplay into a movie—however brilliantly.7 Similarly, one can infer that Frears’s involvement with other artisans in his filmmaking begins early and involves his teaching them as well as learning from them. Testimony comes from the cinematographer Brian Tufano, with whom Frears worked on four BBC television films in the mid-1970s: I became more interested in using the whole frame rather than just following the action. Sometimes we would film in such a way that the action was subservient to the frame. Also, Stephen taught me about breaking the golden cinematic rule of “crossing the line”, which again was a liberating discovery. Metzstein 2001: 12, quoted in Allison 2007: 50

Similarly Oliver Stapleton, who worked with Frears on eight movies and a television episode, “I pretty much learned everything that I know about shooting films from Stephen Frears” (Interview on Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of My Beautiful Launtrette, 2015). While he was “learning my job” in television directing, Frears was assigned seven plays by Alan Bennett. The first was A Day Out (1972) a fifty-­minute TV play that was its author’s initial attempt in that medium. Frears directed six more of his television scripts: “Sunset Across the Bay” (1975), Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), A Visit

Introduction

15

From Miss Protheroe (1978), Afternoon Off (1979), Doris and Doreen (also known as “Green Forms,” 1979), and One Fine Day (1979). Bennett also wrote the screenplay for Prick Up Your Ears. Frears produced a Bennett TV script, The Old Crowd (1979), which was directed by Lindsay Anderson, whom Frears recruited, and which received almost universal excoriation from critics when it was broadcast in early 1979. With the exception of One Fine Day, which Frears was credited for producing as well as directing, all the Frears-­directed Bennett scripts were produced by Innes Lloyd.8 We can guess that Frears learned a good deal from directing these scripts, which avoid clichés, and which are compact, often surprising, and clearly structured—all qualities that he has favored in screenplays across his career. It is perhaps worth diverting a moment to discuss A Day Out, since it anticipates in its textures and straightforward but inconspicuously rich storytelling much of what was to become characteristic of Frears’s later work. Quietly adventurous and innovative in a Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” sort of way, A Day Out portrays a bicycling club of men who make a Sunday excursion on a May morning in 1911. Various minor conflicts, adventures, and even a tryst arise as the day passes, but all fade inconclusively away. “In the script editor’s view,” Bennett notes, “the play . . . didn’t go anywhere” (Bennett 2003: vii). In fact, nothing much happens, but interestingly and often unexpectedly. In the announcement of the date at the opening of the film and in some of the dialogue the prospect of World War I looms. The town square, shown at the beginning and end of the film also suggests the looming blood bath, since such locations typically memorialize those who fell in “The Great War.” But the men on holiday have no sense of any gathering storm; indeed, one of them dismisses the possibility of future wars. A Day Out was shot in black and white, and the cinematography is adventurous without drawing attention to itself. An early thirty-­second shot, for example, tracks and pans over the contents of a middle-­class home. Accompanied by the dull wailing of a baby, who appears briefly just before the end of the shot, it shows such not-­verydramatic things as a potted geranium, open music on a piano, flowered wallpaper, a starfish shell, ceramic trinkets, and so on. It stops on a woman in bed, evidently the unhappy child’s mother, then jump-­cuts in time and place to her fixing sandwiches to sustain her husband on his outing. Bennett’s screenplay reads: Close shot of mustard being spread on sandwiches. A sleepy, plump young woman in a nightgown, her hair down, is cutting the sandwiches and wrapping them in paper. She pops a bit in her mouth. Behind her, two young children are asleep in bed in a corner. The house is untidy, full of objects, stuffed birds, pictures, books, butterflies. An upright piano. Bennett 2003: 5

The changes that Frears effected on Bennett’s description, both in the form of his rendering it and the order of its details, exemplifies the sort of transformation an imaginative director (working, one assumes, with an editor) can have on the screenplay

16

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

A Day Out (Frears, 1972) © BBC. before him. In this case, the characterization of the house and its contents—somewhat similar to Bennett’s description, but far from “untidy”—precedes the appearances of any human figures, and characterizes them indirectly. The traveling camera also anticipates the day’s bicycling excursion, and the supple cinematography that will be an important stylistic feature. Revealing banalities characterize most of the rest of the film, from its survey of the bicyclists’ preparations, through their touring, their stopping for lunch and local explorations, and their return. Among the high points are some mild conflicts among the riders, an aborted cricket game, and a sexual encounter that leaves an attractive woman partly undressed and bewildered when her casual paramour rejoins his departing fellows: “Can’t stop. We’re a club.” On the way back, the founder and oldest member of the club appears to be having a heart attack, but then recovers and continues. Though the tele-­film doesn’t seem to go anywhere, it compactly characterizes most of its many participants and displays the beauty of early spring in the English countryside (despite what was actually inclement weather during filming). The trip out and back is full of incidents and images that are neither profoundly consequential nor without charm and that carry an engaging cultural significance. There are a few of Frears’s admirers—among them David Thomson—who assert that he did his best work for the BBC in the 1970s.9 However one feels about that claim, this quietly eloquent black and white television play reflects the imagination,

Introduction

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“Can’t stop.” A Day Out (Frears, 1972) © BBC. craftsmanship, and combination of clarity and complexity that characterizes Frears’s direction for the next forty-­two years. Along with writers, Frears collaborates with visual and acoustic artists. With them, too, interviews and other sources contain evidence of extensive cooperation from early stages. It was Frears, Kureishi relates, who took “the patriotic hymn ‘I Vow to Thee my Country’ . . . from the Tory broadcast, and played it over the eviction scene, giving it a ritualistic quality” (Kureishi 1988: 121). That he participates in the composition of at least some of the sound tracks of his films we can infer from his remarks about working with the music composer on Mary Reilly: “During the last months [of producing the film] I worked a great deal with George Fenton . . . I have worked with him so long that there is scarcely any need for discussion” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 38). In fact, Fenton has been the collaborator who has worked longest with Frears as well as most frequently (eighteen times). Their first collaborations were half-­a-dozen television films made in 1978 and 1979; the most recent was for Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, thirty-­five years later. Similarly, Frears worked frequently between 1985 and 1998 with cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. These films include some of his most visually striking early works, among them My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and The Grifters. Other frequent collaborators in less prominent roles include costume designer Consolata Boyle, who has worked with Frears on eight films in the last twenty years; casting director Leo Davis, ten films over the last seventeen years; and Lucia Zucchetti,

18

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

who edited four films during the first decade of this century. For all that Frears has had frequent repeat collaborators, the look and sound of his films has remained remarkably constant, whether he is working with one of his regular partners or with others. What most of his interviewers have taken to be Frears’s extreme diffidence may be part of his creative strategy. He denies any pretentions to “making art,” a possible trigger-­warning for many of those who finance movies. Indeed, he occasionally says that he wishes simply to make pure popular entertainments. In bringing a story to the screen, he emphasizes narrative over personal style. Brandon Judell remarks “you seem to change your style from one film to another,” a point often made, occasionally as a criticism of his directorial limitations. In response, Frears replies, “It seems to me that’s doing good work. You get on with whatever’s in front of you.” As becomes evident when one looks at his entire oeuvre, he has enormous—and conscious—technical skills and imagination in applying them. But ultimately he chooses intuitively, whether his choice is technically simple or elaborate. As Bardet and Caron wrote about Dangerous Liaisons, “Even if he uses all the resources of cinematographic language in composing his screens, he leaves us looking at an image as clean and readable as possible” (Bardet and Caron 2008: 165). Above all, he tries not to get in the way of his stories, to muddle them with too much directorial intervention. “Sometimes,” he told Lester Friedman, “by standing back, things come out more clearly” (Friedman 1993: 222). Always Frears maintains his focus on his work, not his celebrity. Famously self-­ effacing, disinclined to speak in anything but the most casual terms about himself or his career, Frears is sometimes unkempt to the point of looking, as Glenn Close said, “like a stadium after the game” (Curtis 2005). In the valuable diary he kept during the making of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Kureishi remarks, “While he hates words like ‘artist’ and ‘integrity’, since they smack of self-­regard, he is immensely skilled and talented” (Kureishi 1996: 63). Like other great filmmakers, other artists in other media, and most successful people who play a game or practice a profession, he has managed to control the distractions of ego while doing his job. For anyone of prominence connected with the movie business, that is no small achievement. According to Frazer, “Scriptwriter Peter Morgan, author of The Queen and The Deal, is still amazed by the degree to which he is driven.” At the same time, Frears has said, “As a director, my job is to protect. I protect scripts, actors, cameramen, designers” (Frazer 2010). To this he might have added, “and my instinctive sense of when things are or aren’t what they should be.” In sum, as Frears declared, a director is “both involved and detached” (Thomson n.d.). Similarly, he remarked, “Part of the job of being a film director is to be quite objective about things, even while you’re deeply involved in them.” Terrence Rafferty continues,“He is a filmmaker who has over the years developed a mixture of passion and hardheaded practicality” (Rafferty 2009: 15). Frears has asserted, “I can only do what I’m supposed to do, which has to do with narrative, which has to do with acting, which has to do with the human values around the whole edge of the film” (Friedman 1993: 235). Put another way, “A film of his, he suggests, may ‘spin off into fantasies and B movies . . . but it has to have some sort of emotional truth and some reality to it’ ” (Hill 1996: 229).

Introduction

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Michael Palin described him as directing “briskly but not autocratically” (Palin 2006: 242). During the filming of Three Men in a Boat in 1975, when Frears had been directing for about a decade, Palin wrote in his diary, “He lives for films. . . . He seems to have life pared down to essentials. Clothes, cocktail parties, awards, purely prestige jobs don’t interest him, and he doesn’t let them occupy his time or divert his efforts” (Palin 2006: 255). The dedicated professional Palin encountered forty years ago has maintained his focus throughout a now nearly fifty-­year career. After Frears has picked scripts and assembled companies of producers, actors, designers, cameramen, other technicians, editors, and so on—which does not always happen in that order—he is inclined to let his colleagues do their jobs and make their contributions without micromanaging. “You trust people” (Dirty Pretty Things DVD Director’s Commentary). “I just expect everyone to be very good” (Simon 2008). Frears often speaks of falling in love with the people in his movies, both the actors and the characters they portray. How to make good films? “One should never work with people who aren’t wonderful” (Buckmaster 2011). Many teachers discover that they teach best when they are learning most. For Stephen Frears, the same dynamic applies to filmmaking. He remarks, again on the DVD of Dirty Pretty Things, “I always make films to learn things.” In directing, “All you’re trying to do is to see things clearly” (Buckmaster 2011). “You read a script, you like it. You think, ‘Oh, this is great,’ then you slowly start to discover what it is you are doing. . . . The whole process is a progression toward clarity” (Thomson n.d.). Again, “I wouldn’t be interested in making a film about something I know about. It’s the finding out that makes it exciting” (BFI n.d.). Frears has an extraordinary ability to obtain excellent performances from accomplished and inexperienced actors alike. Michelle Pfeiffer and Glenn Close received Best Actress Oscar nominations for their work in Dangerous Liaisons, and other Oscar nominations have gone to Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters, and Judi Dench in Mrs. Henderson Presents. Helen Mirren won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role in The Queen. “I take a lot of trouble when I cast people,” Frears told Friedman, “But having cast them, I let them get on with it” (Friedman 1993: 236). According to Sarah Radclyffe, one of the producers of My Beautiful Laundrette, “Stephen did most of the casting on his own” (Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of that film). John Malkovich has said, “Of all the directors I’ve worked with, he’s probably the one who pays the closest attention to acting” (Lindsey 1988). This close attention perhaps accounts for his reputation for doing multiple takes, the only aspect of working with him that anyone murmurs about.10 Much of his attention, he declares, is auditory: “I direct with my ear. John Huston used to direct with his ear. . . . You can hear when it’s right” (Rose n.d.). Asked about his method for eliciting fine performances, Frears replied, “Oh, we communicate through a series of grunts.” The costar of Chéri, Rupert Friend, remarked, “Stephen is a great conductor of humans without ever really saying anything” (Abeel 2009). Tracey Seward, who has served as a producer on half-­a-dozen of Frears’s recent films, says, “He talks in riddles” (Frazer 2010). On the other hand, Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter for Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, and Chéri, who was

20

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

present during the filming for all three movies, offers a different account: “He worries terribly at things. Everything was discussed” (Lindsey 1988). Frears’s own assessment of his direction of actors falls somewhere between: “Cast well and keep out of the way. I mean, if doesn’t make sense to you, then you say so, or you conduct an intelligent conversation about what they’re doing” (Simon 2008). Kureishi saw various sides of Frears’s relations with actors: “He can get along with actors. . . . he sits down and talks gently with them” (Kureishi 1988: 94). “Today Frears rails at the actors for lacking flair, for thinking too much about their costumes, for being too passive and not helping him enough” (Kureishi 1988: 98). Frears is carefully and patiently teasing out the power and subtlety in Shashi [Kapoor] by getting him to act simply and underplay everything. . . . After eight or nine takes Shashi . . . is at his best, though he himself prefers the first few takes when he considers himself to be really “acting”. Kureishi 1988: 103

Like the characters in his films, Frears contains multitudes, and which individual one sees depends upon the angle from which one is looking, and on the day, the film, and the actor. Oliver Stapleton perhaps provides a clue that may unify some of these conflicting impressions: “He said, ‘Oh, I always give the actor Take 1 . . . Then the director comes and shapes it to the take they want’ ” (Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of My Beautiful Laundrette).

Auteur malgré lui As a critical theorist about himself, Frears comes down in an anti-­auteurism camp. He says things like, “People come and ask me questions as if I were an auteur, but I’m not—I’m just the bloke who gets hired” (Heller, quoted in Hill and McLoone 1996: 227). More vehemently, he recently declared, “I loathe the auteur theory” (Hernandez n.d.). In its dogmatic and judgmental forms, as an excuse for promoting one’s taste and for propounding amateur psychiatric diagnoses, some varieties of the “auteur theory” are easy to despise. But such an approach is less easily dismissed when it is based on a modest assumption: We can gain insight into films—and film—by looking at a director’s (or writer’s, producer’s, composer’s, actor’s, cinematographer’s) total work, with an eye toward discovering consistencies within it. And we can perhaps more easily recognize aspects of individual films when we have observed them in other works. With a few exceptions, in interviews Frears has denied that he has a set of consistent preoccupations and has demurred when interviewers attempt to confer on him the title of cinematic author. “I don’t really have a ‘vision’, ” he says. “I have a few fanciful notions. Half the time on set I genuinely don’t know what I’m doing.” Presented with a question that hinted at some consistency in his career, Frears quickly moved to head off the conclusion toward which it might have been leading: “Don’t try to construct a theory according to which I make films only about the marginalized” (Ciment 2009: 28).

Introduction

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Recently, he has been somewhat less dismissive about the possibility of his being something approaching an auteur. In the interview with Colin MacCabe included in the Criterion Blu-Ray edition of My Beautiful Laundrette, he concedes, “I can see that auteurism operates on an unconscious level.” Later in the discussion, he volunteers: From the Laundrette through to The Grifters, I think they’re all in a sort of straight line. Somewhere in my unconscious—and I can promise you it was in my unconscious—there was a connection between gay people, immigrants, women, and some sort of oppositionism. . . . For all those films, they all seemed to be taking the same point of view of these people. If you make films about these people, they’re all an affront to the establishment.

His choice of films is governed largely by instinct: “It’s usually only some years later that I work out why I was interested” (Brown 2010). Again with a few exceptions, those who have commented upon Frears’s work tend to agree with his self-­assessment, labeling him a “gun for hire” (Rafferty 2009), a journeyman, or otherwise indicating that he is a fine, workmanlike metteur en scène, but one who has no particular voice, look, or set of themes with which he can be identified. Here the critic needs to save not only the tale from the author but also the author from himself and most of his commentators. For strong directors like Frears, who have over a long career made many movies that generously repay close attention, the label of “auteur” can scarcely be avoided. Moreover, there are good reasons not to flee it; for the influence of such directors on their movies is not only ascertainable but illuminating for understanding them, both as parts of a total body of work and individually. That directorial auteurs are greatly aided by co-­creators does not reduce their roles; indeed, it is a mark of such directors that they surround themselves with talented co-­ creators, many of whom can be considered auteurs in their specialties as well. Frears’s collaborators enrich and help to shape his films, and he justly acknowledges them. The selection of scenarists, cinematographers, designers, composers, and editors (among other collaborators), and—especially crucial—the casting of actors, constitutes much of a director’s most important work. There are some dissenters to the view of Frears-­the-non-­auteur—occasionally, if rarely, including Frears himself. Introducing her 1993 interview with Frears, Zöe Heller wrote, “His oeuvre may seem unusually various in style and subject, but the sensibility with which he approaches his films, American or British, does, he insists, remains constant” [emphasis added]. On another occasion, Frears acknowledged the degree of control he maintains: “I can work my way through a film keeping a lot of people in the dark about what’s going on” (Friedman 1993: 225). What Leonard Quart wrote about My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid applies to Frears’s work generally in the years since those films appeared: “Frears and Kureishi maintain an ambiguous and ironic perspective on society, and most of the characters inhabiting the films are people of conflicting and contradictory parts” (Quart 1994: 242).

22

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Even when Frears had been working mostly in television, there were critics who took notice of his distinctive directing. Writing for The Times (London), Peter Waymark observed: In his careful, unshowy way, Frears is one of television’s stylists. Tune to the Song of Experience on BBC2 tomorrow and it is apparent in almost every frame—the precise placement of the camera, the feel for landscape and the sure handling of actors, who in this case are youngsters who have never been in front of a camera before. . . . Song of Experience, too, is an archetypal Frears subject, a low key drama, laced with humour but also pain, about ordinary people in an everyday setting. Waymark 1986: 1, 2

Looking back from 2012 at the 1969–70 series, Parkin’s Patch, David Rolinson (2012) made similar observations: There are two superb episodes directed by Stephen (credited at one point as “Steven”) Frears: “The Deserter”, which pits Moss’s policing against army discipline, and ‘Boys’. . . . These are distinctive episodes, in particular “Boys”, which could stand as a one-­off play in its own right and shares so many elements with Frears’s early pieces (from the short film The Burning (1967) to his exemplary opening episode of Follyfoot, “Dora”) as to tempt me into exactly the sort of auteurist placing of square pegs in round holes that I’m trying to avoid.

As has often been the case with other Anglophone directors, French critics have more quickly recognized consistencies in Frears’s career than have his fellow English speakers. Bardet and Caron assert, “The course of his career, so prolific, is always characterized by great originality and serious risk-­taking” (Bardet and Caron 2008: 146). Writing in what we now can call the middle of his career, 1994, Eithne O’Neill declared, “Violent and funny, provocative and tender, his oeuvre is only apparently fractured. It follows a single route, figures forth a single reality: its vision of humanity” (O’Neill 1994: 10). Frears’s countryman Neil Sinyard observes that he “has managed to be both director for hire and director as auteur.” One could make a strong case for the thematic consistency Sinyard identifies: A lot of Frears’ films are about the dynamics of power in relationships and as seen in carefully observed social landscapes. . . . Many of his films are about dangerous liaisons . . . dangerous because one could be the nemesis of the other. For all the variety, then, is this the auteurist thread that binds the films together? Sinyard 2004

Allison has a similar view: “Social and sexual relationships, be they explicitly political or not, have always been central to the films of Stephen Frears, who has characterized his oeuvre as being about sex, power and money (Connors 1991)” (Allison 2007: 38).

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On the occasion of Criterion’s release of The Hit, Fuller (n.d.) argued: Because Frears’s story choices—embracing American, French, and Irish subjects— have been so diverse, he has come to be regarded as a gifted craftsman, dependent on writers, rather than an auteur, which is to sell him short. The Hit and his other key British films—My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Dirty Pretty Things, The Deal, and The Queen—comprise an extended inquiry into the national inability to communicate, which has political as well as social ramifications. The British “are repressive, small-­minded, and insular.” . . . The critic David Thomson has alighted on “the various subterfuges that block candor” in Frears’s English films.

To what has already been noted, one can add more specific observations of Frears’s authorial consistency. Even critics who do not consider him an auteur, note his mixing of genres within films as characteristic. (The insertion of mysterious magic into the otherwise realistic My Beautiful Laundrette makes a striking example.) A number of identifiable stylistic and thematic elements recur across most of his movies. He characteristically handles opening expository sequences, for example, with remarkable economy, conveying the information the viewer needs in an action that simultaneously sets the plot in motion. The importing of other media—archival or simulated archival television clips and newspaper headlines or books contemporary with the setting—conveys information and provides transitions between places and times. Broader categories of media— posters, billboards, radio and television shows in an acoustic background—also contribute to self-­reflexive aspects.

The Grifters (Frears, 1990) © Miramax.

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Juxtapositions of characters, whether by split screens or, more commonly, by mirrors and other surfaces, reflect complex relationships and contrasting personalities. Typically, Frears reserves lap-­dissolves for especially telling or climactic moments. In a number of his films, as I observed earlier, he gives an agile, semi-­independent camera something approaching the status of another character. Color is almost always systematically deployed, though particular associations and connotations vary from film to film. With the more abstract use of color, as a part of what gives films structural coherence and compelling formal rhythm, Frears takes particular care. (I once showed a class a non-­representational late Stan Brakhage film before the Frears we were seeing that day, and the parallels between Brakhage’s structuring of color and Frears’s were startling.) The chromatic design of his films typically includes consistent associations of certain colors with specific characters and themes; but it also plays with more abstract patterns, often in support of the rhythms of the plot. One might label the first Frears’s semantics of color and the second his chromatic syntax. Doors, which he uses in a distinctly cinematic as opposed to theatrical manner, often carry symbolic significance. From Alfred Hitchcock, whose influence on Frears is extensive, he may have taken his fondness for stairs as settings for confrontations. The importance of motifs of food and eating may reflect the same influence. William Rothman noted the significance in Hitchcock’s movies of a visual motif of parallel lines, which he labels “////,” that “recurs at significant junctures in every one of [his] films.” That graphic design, he argued, is consistently connected with “sexual fear and the specific threat of loss of control or breakdown” (Rothman 1982: 33). Frears has expanded it, adding images of grids, and given it a different significance, generally associating it with simultaneous protection on one hand and restraint or entrapment on the other. Varying Rothman’s label, I will sometimes refer to this motif in my analyses of Frears’s films as “//##.” Such associations occur in films other than Frears’s; but he handles this visual motif consistently across his career, with especial subtlety, and with some unexpected variations. Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, and Liam contain clear examples of this imagery—and of Frears’s adaptations of it to particular contexts. The Hit provides an early example. There, the graphic figure appears in the parallel lines of pines and other trees in which crucial actions are repeatedly set. (A similar setting occurs in the final sequences of Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest.) In The Grifters, O’Neill asserts, the figure (including grids as well as parallel lines) has the signification of self-­imprisonment: “The predominant image is the cage: of the elevator, the hospital, or the motel (O’Neill 1994: 59). In his television days, Frears directed the first episode of the long running series Follyfoot, “Dora,” (July 28, 1971). Notable in “Dora,” are some elaborate tracking shots, and shots through grids of window panes and slats of fences—both setups that became important in his later work. Frears’s narratives consistently favor irony. Since I use the word “irony” here and throughout this study in the broad sense defined by Northrop Frye, a brief explanation is in order. Frye identifies four “pregeneric elements” or “proto-­genres”: romance, irony, comedy, and tragedy. They can be conceptualized as occupying the axes of Cartesian coordinates:11

Introduction

Tragedy Romance 



25

  Irony (“Realism”)

Comedy

Tragedy opposes comedy; and irony opposes romance. The features of the first pair are generally well known and need only a little review here. Comedies move protagonists toward social integration, while tragedies progressively isolate their heroes. Tragedies are driven by fate and necessity, while comedy thrives on benignant, improbable coincidences. The harmless incidental humor of comedy diminishes and becomes more threatening as plots bend toward the tragic. The heroes of tragedy are often oversize, with powers approaching the superhuman; the humbler protagonists of comedies have ordinary talents and capacities. Comedies conclude happily; tragedies end in catastrophe or misery. Romance, though well-­known experientially to everyone, is a protogenre we’re not so aware that we know; it needs a little more explanation. Romance includes the fabulous, adventurous sort of narrative we associate with folklore and fairy tale. It appears undisguised in film in such works as Cocteau’s and Disney’s (among others) Beauty and the Beast, or in the host of vampire, zombie, horror, and sci-­fi films that have long been popular cinematic entertainments. In romantic narratives, the ordinary constraints of natural law are somewhat loosened as reality mixes with projections of desire and anxiety. Characterization develops according to relatively simple dialectics: hero/heroine versus villain/villainess. The former, though often in the grip of dreadfully compromising circumstances, retain or attain a courage and straightforward innocence that contrasts sharply with the latter, sneaky malefactors who reek of demonic fires. Romantic plots usually involve some kind of quest, proceed from one perilous adventure to the next, include something approaching death and rebirth or a descent to infernal regions and a return, and openly display a considerable degree of artificiality: “Once upon a time. . . .” Time in romance moves in circular, fertile cycles akin to those in nature: dawn follows darkest night, spring and summer succeed fall and winter, age gives way (often through progeny) to youth, and metaphorically—sometimes literally— life displaces death. Because of the powerful sense of presence that moving images create, cinema tends to domesticate romantic fantasies into sublimated versions of their mythic or folkloric forebears; but they continue to provide a structural basis. Westerns, many of which recreate in modern terms the dramatic genre known as Pastoral Romance, exemplify this tendency toward sublimation of underlying romantic configurations. However, the “black hat, white hat” cliché (among other aspects) to which they lend themselves, reveals their underlying proto-­generic alliance. Frears makes limited use of romantic plots, settings, and characters in this broad sense of “romantic.” When he does, it’s often to set up contrasts to the predominantly ironic mode elsewhere in a film. The characters Danny/Victoria and Okwe in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Dirty Pretty Things, respectively, are to a considerable degree romantically heroic characters inserted into predominantly ironic fictions. A

26

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

remarkable variation occurs in Hero, an ironic comedy, in the character of John Bubber (Andy Garcia), at once an opportunist and liar and, finally, an entirely sympathetic figure. A neat trick, if you can do it. Irony reverses romance. In varying degrees, it is always important in Frears’s films. Even in those with ostensibly romantic conclusions, a trace of uncertainty or an ironic countermovement remains. In strongly ironic fictions, cynicism, corruption, and death dominate innocence, health, and fertility. The strong divisions between the good and evil characters of romance become blurred, as do clear moral distinctions. Time is linear and unprogressive, neither returning to origins nor getting anywhere new: “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . signifying nothing” (Macbeth, V. v.). Knowledge leads to truth and clarity in romantic fictions; in ironic ones—and this is especially important to keep in mind in discussing Frears’s films—increasing information usually produces increasing uncertainty. Where romantic miracles deliver redeeming grace, ironic coincidences undo what is hopeful. Structurally, ironic narratives do not so much conclude as simply stop, often at some arbitrary-­looking moment, with little resolution. All four proto-­genres are comparative, never absolute. Narratives are ironic or romantic in relation to other narratives; similarly, they are comparatively comic or tragic. Virtually all stories have elements of each of the four proto-­genres, and we categorize them according to those which predominate: romantic comedy, ironic tragedy, ironic comedy (often satire or parody), and so on. The energy of suspense to a considerable degree derives from tension among them. When we wonder, “How is this going to turn out?” we are simultaneously wondering—perhaps less consciously— “What kind of a movie is this going to be?” Most of the films of Stephen Frears have a persistent bias toward irony. (They vary from film to film along the comedy-­tragedy axis.) Gumshoe, Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Prick Up Your Ears, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and Liam are among Frears’s especially ironic films, with hopes destroyed or doubtful at their conclusions and the conflicts that have propelled their plots mostly unresolved. At the other end of the irony-­romance spectrum, we find The Snapper (1993), High Fidelity, Mrs. Henderson Presents, Tamara Drewe, and Lay the Favorite. In all of those films, however, ironic twists and implied or explicit uncertainties remain, getting enough attention to leave the final tone of the movies slightly unsettled. In the case of Lay the Favorite—based on “true events”—a self-­conscious overstatement of the implausibility of the ending, rather than any uncertainty of outcomes, complicates its tone. Between these extremes, we find films like My Beautiful Laundrette, Loving Walter, Mary Reilly, The Hi-Lo Country, and Dirty Pretty Things, all of which are more balanced in terms of their romantic-­ironic tendencies. They vary greatly as to their comic-­tragic proportions. My Beautiful Laundrette and Dirty Pretty Things have modestly upbeat endings. Walter hovers between the social integration of comedy and the isolation of tragedy; and Dangerous Liaisons, Mary Reilly, and The Hi-Lo Country have predominantly tragic configurations. The aspect of irony most evident in Frears’s films is their complexity, their refusal to simplify their conflicts, central issues, or characters. In discussing Frears’s movies, as I noted earlier, one requires a plentiful supply of qualifiers: “however,” “but,” “on the other

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hand,” and so on. His antagonists rarely lack meliorating qualities or they act in contexts that make simple condemnation unpersuasive. “Life would be so much easier if the villains didn’t have these enjoyable sides,” Frears has remarked (Lucia 2003: 12). Protagonists have a depth, a balance of strengths and weaknesses that renders them human in their complicated mix of qualities and actions. Among other aspects of his films, Frears’s career-­long exploration of the multiple kinds, ways, and byways of love measure the unity of his career. Equally distinguishing, his cinematic thinking about love is characteristically complex and generally ironic. A few of Frears’s films, to be sure, have little to do with love; but a profound and engaging frame that cements his career as a director can be discovered in his portrayal of the many, mostly surprising, paths taken by extremely diverse manifestations of human love and by his characteristic refusal to allow those paths to lead to a definitive end. Love provides the cinema with one of its great subjects; indeed, it has always been one of the great subjects of all human musings on ourselves. In the movies, love is generally romantic, in the popular sense of that word. It occurs, usually, between a man and a woman; both fairly young, occasionally older; sometimes between an older man and a younger woman; and with increasing frequency in the contemporary cinema, between persons of the same sex, a modern development of which Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears were early examples. Love plots tend to be fairly straightforward and conventional: lovers-­to-be meet, often contentiously; they develop an attraction; they separate or are driven apart; they regain faith or achieve understanding (sometimes at the last, cliff-­hanging moment). Finally, they reunite, prospectively for a long time, something like “happily ever after.” The “Comedy of Remarriage,” named and anatomized by Stanley Cavell, provides an especially interesting example among a number of identifiable subsets of cinematic love stories.12 One could add the Back-­stage Romance, stories of Love in Times of War, accounts of Star-Crossed Lovers contending with ethnic, tribal, familial, or racial proscriptions, and so on. Frears’s films contain some conventional romantic love, but the love he portrays is more often unconventional, frustrated, or complicated in singular ways. To repeat, it is the wide variety of human love that distinguishes Frears’s oeuvre from that of the many other directors whose careers show a recurrent focus on that theme. To get a sense of how consistently love occupies the center of his films, and in what various forms, we can take a few pages to gallop across the surface of his career. Frears’s preoccupation is perceptible in both the television work that comprises most of his output from 1968 to 1983 and in works that have had theatrical releases. Since he had less freedom to choose his projects for television, however, and since they are less well-­known or available than those that have shown in theaters (some of which began as TV movies), I include in this brief survey only the theatrically distributed films. The first feature Frears directed was Gumshoe. At its end, an amateur detective turns over to the authorities a woman he loves, who probably loves him too. But at the same time she is trying to set him up, and she is his corrupt brother’s wife. This ending, though more complicated, is basically lifted from The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941). Another crime film, The Hit, develops a robust subplot of an assassin’s enigmatic,

28

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

apparent affection and admiration for a young woman whom he has abducted and imprudently refrained from killing. Surprisingly, he finally lets her go free and, as a result, she fatally betrays him to the police just before he can escape to safety. Saigon: Year of the Cat began as a TV movie but has been released theatrically. It follows a struggling couple (Judi Dench and Frederic Forrest) during the chaotic end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It falls painfully into the genre of love in time of war. An early Vietnam film, it restages quite spectacularly the American evacuation from Saigon, and the U.S. desertion of many of its erstwhile South Vietnamese allies. Typically for Frears, it ends ambiguously as to the future connection, or not, of the central couple. An unpredictable exploration of love began as two television films, Walter, 1982, and Walter and June, 1983. Slightly re-­edited, they were released as a single movie, Loving Walter, three years later. An uncherished man (Ian McKellen) with a learning disability tries to adapt to normal life. After his father and mother die, he is removed to a psychiatric institution where he is somewhat out of place and where he experiences and witnesses a variety of traumas. But he also finds there a useful role helping the overburdened staff. After some years, he falls in love with an attractive fellow patient and the two attempt to live together outside. When she leaves him and then dies trying to return, he goes back to the institution, alone. My Beautiful Laundrette (discussed in Chapter 2) has at its center the homosexual love of an ambitious young man of a Pakistani immigrant family and a lower class, former schoolmate and sometime skinhead. The exploration of power relationships, of which Sinyard spoke, greatly complicates Frears’s portrayal of both the relationship between the gay lovers and a heterosexual affair between a middle-­aged, married immigrant Pakistani and his English mistress. Prick Up Your Ears traces the corrosive, ultimately lethal same-­sex companionship of the playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his jealous, increasingly unbalanced partner, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina). As Orton becomes famous, Halliwell fails to find similar success and begrudges his partner’s growing renown. As in My Beautiful Laundrette, but more severely, a change in the relative power of the protagonists destabilizes their emotional and sexual relationship, leading finally to Halliwell’s murder of Orton and his suicide immediately thereafter. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (discussed in Chapter 3), anatomizes the strains not just of sexual love of conventional and unconventional flavors but also of thwarted or failed familial love. At its center is the question of the simultaneous strength and fragility of love in the marriage of the two title figures. Dangerous Liaisons (discussed in Chapter  5) was Frears’s first film made with a mostly American cast and with largely American financing; but it was scripted by his frequent collaborator, Christopher Hampton, from the theatrical adaptation he had written of the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. A dedicated seducer (John Malkovich) undertakes an especially challenging seduction, and he makes a bet on his success in order to regain the favors of his former lover, a female seductress (Glenn Close) very much his counterpart. He wins the bet, but also falls in love with his victim (Michelle Pfeiffer). As a result, his jealous former lover refuses him. He commits what

Introduction

29

one might call “suicide by duel,” and posthumously brings down the villainess. His abandoned victim, whose true and passionate love her seducer can barely recognize and to which he can’t manage a coherent response, also dies. The Grifters includes an avaricious attempt at an incestuous seduction of her son Roy (John Cusack) by his still fairly young mother, Lily (Angelica Huston), along with other monetarily motivated amorous relationships hardly less bizarre, if less archetypally horrifying. Another of the central characters, Myra (Annette Bening), relentlessly uses her sexual attractiveness for grifts large and small. Such love as the film has—other than the love of money that consumes all the principal figures—may be found in Lily’s maternal concern for her son; but that is finally overwhelmed by her desire for his money, which she needs to escape the ruthless pursuit of her employer, a gangster whom she has betrayed for, of course, money. Hero (an egregiously underrated film, in my view) has at its center the love of the crowd, which has fallen for the embodied idea of a hero, John Bubber (Andy Garcia), an impostor who has assumed that mantle more or less unwillingly. It contains as well the steadfast love for his young son of an otherwise mostly contemptible father, Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman). Its third main character, the reporter Gale Gayley (Geena Davis), spends much of the movie torn between her ordinary human sympathies and her desire to exploit spectacular news stories, without regard to consequences. Comically tumultuous familial love makes up one of the main subjects of The Snapper (discussed in Chapter 7) and The Van, films based on adaptations of two of the novels of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy. Dessie Curley’s (Colm Meaney) paternal love—somewhat equivocal—for his pregnant daughter Sharon (Tina Kellegher) provides much of the energy for the first of these films. The friendship between Bimbo (Donal O’Kelly) and Larry (Colm Meaney) occupies the center of The Van, with Bimbo’s relationship to his wife Maggie (Ger Ryan) also of considerable importance. Between The Snapper and The Van, Frears made Mary Reilly (discussed in Chapter 11), a big budget movie starring John Malkovich, with Julia Roberts in the title role, and with a strong supporting cast. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Valerie Martin and scripted by Christopher Hampton, it gave the much-­filmed story of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” both a new point of view—that of a maid in the Doctor’s house—and a deeper, more complex psychology than most earlier versions. Very much about love, it focuses on the bizarre triangle of a woman’s desire for two men, who are the same man, and the very different modes of their desire for her. The Hi-Lo Country (1998) develops a love-­triangle, with complications that leave it better described as a love quadrilateral or pentagram. Familial love and love among men, deep if not physical, further complicate this complex, original film. As in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid—though radically different in setting and details—loving connections among its central characters are obstructed and often thwarted by crosscurrents personal, familial, and involving local cultures, in this case Anglo and Latino. At the center is the intense friendship between Big Boy Matson (Woody Harrelson) and Pete Calder (Billy Crudup). Big Boy carries on a passionate affair with a married woman, Mona Birk (Patricia Arquette), for whom Pete harbors an intense attraction. His conflicted feelings for Mona impede his relationship with a Latina,

30

The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Josepha (Penélope Cruz), who loves him and whom he also apparently loves. As the film’s narrative ends with Big Boy’s death and burial, Pete leaves the Hi-Lo Country for California, in surprisingly optimistic spirits, evidently hoping to rejoin Josepha. The last shots of the film, in a complex parody, evoke the clichéd “riding into the sunset” endings of traditional Westerns. High Fidelity, as its name suggests, focuses on love between a young man and a young woman and their amorous temptations toward other people. The title also refers to the male protagonist’s obsessive passion for popular music. Adapted from a novel by Nick Hornby and transplanted from London to Chicago, it details the on-­again off-­ again relationship of its central characters, Rob (John Cusack) and Laura (Iben Hjejle). They break up and reunite; in the interim, Rob tries to understand his amorous past and his present feelings by encountering the women from his “top five breakups.” Back with Laura, he finally commits to that relationship, no longer with “one foot out the door.” A box office success, it is perhaps Frears’s most conventional love story. In Liam (discussed in Chapter 8), familial love is shaken by a collapsing economy and the fascism to which it gives rise. The point of view of the story comes frequently from a boy (Anthony Borrows) of about seven years, the title character. Of nearly equal importance are his sister Teresa (Megan Burns) and father (Ian Hart). Like The Snapper, it focuses on an Irish family; but it has only incidental comedy and ends in tragedy. With Dirty Pretty Things (discussed in Chapter 4), Frears returned to a movie that examines the lives of “Others” in English society. Made from an original script by Stephen Knight, it mixes the genres of love story, mystery-­thriller, and problem film (that is, a film that examines a significant political or social question). Its central characters, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Senay (Audrey Tautou) struggle with the illegal immigration status of the first, the legal but absurdly restricted status of the second, and various state and criminal persecutors. The most notable of these is the manager of the hotel in which both work, Juan/“Sneaky” (Sergi López), who has set up an exploitative business of harvesting organs from immigrants in exchange for providing fake documents that give them an apparently legal identity in “this beautiful country,” England. Predictably, Okwe and Senay fall in love and ultimately thwart the designs of Sneaky. But, as in Saigon: Year of the Cat, the future of their love is uncertain as the film ends. The Deal (2003) follows the relationship between Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and Gordon Brown (David Morrissey) from their first meeting until Blair assumes leadership of the Labour Party. A narrative of recent British politics, it portrays personal emotions between the principals that arise from political alliances and maneuvering and that end with a betrayal—somewhat equivocal, as is usual for Frears. The relationship between Blair and Brown can hardly be called love, but it resides in an adjacent emotional space. Again recalling some aspects of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, it portrays obstacles to friendship and fidelity arising from political convictions, ideology, and personal ambition. Frears realized Mrs. Henderson Presents (another egregiously underrated movie) as a distinctly unusual version of a musical backstage romance. Mrs. Henderson (Judi Dench), an upper class widow of a certain age, falls in love with a married Jewish man

Introduction

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(Bob Hoskins), a producer-­director whom she hired to manage what begins as a frivolous theatrical hobby intended to fill the years of her widowhood. They quarrel throughout the film, but come to feel deeply for each other. Set in the time of the London blitzkrieg, it includes the tragic deaths of the young star of their show and, retrospectively, that of Mrs. Henderson’s son in World War I. The film ends like a traditional romantic comedy, with a penultimate crowd scene in which the fruit of the alliance of the central pair is legitimized and affirmed, followed by an intimate moment for the conclusion, as they dance together alone. But their coming together is qualified by their and our understanding that this is as far as their romance can go. That slight melancholy is itself undercut, however, by their continued comic quarreling, the note on which the story ends. Its conclusion recalls the broadly similar ending of The Great McGinty (1940) by Preston Sturges, a revered influence for Frears. Michael Sheen reappears as Tony Blair, now prime minister, in The Queen (discussed in Chapter  9), which has some of the structure if not the particulars of another unconventional love story, in this case partly involving the conflicted passions toward Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) of the crowd mourning the death of Princess Diana. The feelings of the Queen, her husband (James Cromwell), Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), and the rest of the Royals toward the Princess are also of considerable importance, as is the eventual closeness between the Queen and her youthful co-­leader at the head of England’s government. They achieve a degree of mutual trust by the end of the film, despite the structural conflict built into their roles by British polity. Chéri (discussed in Chapter 6) was adapted by Christopher Hampton—his third screenplay for Frears since their work together at the BBC—from two Colette novels about the love between a retired courtesan (Michelle Pfeiffer) and the much younger son (Rupert Friend) of one of her colleagues (Kathy Bates). Because neither lover anticipates, desires, or recognizes their profound love, they separate. When they later understand the intensity and permanence of their feelings for each other, too much time has passed for them to reclaim what they have lost. In its topic of love recognized too late, Chéri resembles Dangerous Liaisons. It shares with that film the screenwriter and one star, Pfeiffer; but other artistic collaborators differ from the earlier film. Nonetheless, it has very much the look and feel of Dangerous Liaisons. In Tamara Drewe, Frears returned to the modern world for a story that might be described as an outdoor drawing room comedy of love recovered, with complications and tragic undertones and subplots. Enormously rich thematically, and persistently if indirectly self-­reflexive, it distributes its meditations on love among half-­a-dozen protagonists. Overlapping love triangles involve a self-­satisfied, faithless writer of popular fiction (Roger Allam), his wife (Tamsin Greig), the Hardy scholar who quietly dotes on her (Bill Camp), the eponymous heroine (Gemma Arterton), the still enamored lover of Tamara’s youth (Luke Evans), a rock star (Dominic Cooper), and his teeny-­bopper, would-­be groupie (Jessica Barden). These characters sort themselves into various mismatched couples who pirouette entertainingly through the film until, like so many pegs seeking their proper places, they fall in with the partners they needed and deserved from the start. On the music track, an incongruous few bars that sound like a classical nocturne evoke Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). It joins that

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

movie and Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) in a sub-­genre that probably derives from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, itself repeatedly filmed. Lay the Favorite proves to be a comic meditation on the possibilities of selfless love. Dismissed and/or panned by reviewers and most of its audience (4.8 rating out of 10 on IMDB and an astonishingly low 19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), it is richer and more thoughtful than it first appears. It has an excellent cast that includes Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Joshua Jackson, a script by D. V. DeVincentis, one of the writers of High Fidelity, and the lively cinematography typical of Frears’s films. With a formula that would seem to all but guarantee box office success, it nonetheless crashed critically and commercially. Thematically, it plays with reflections among the improbabilities of comic plots, underdog victories, and love itself, which, it implies, is the most improbable and yet most desired, convincing, and common of human outcomes. Recently, Philomena (discussed in Chapter  10) tells the story of a woman (Judi Dench) whose child was stolen from her when she was young and who has been “looking for him ever since.” She is partnered by an unemployed journalist (Steve Coogan, who co-­wrote the screenplay). Midway through the film, they learn that her gay son died of AIDS. Despite this devastating discovery, she nonetheless continues to extend her maternal relationship with her son posthumously, through the memories of his friends and his lover. At the same time, she and the journalist develop an increasingly close friendship. As a number of reviewers observed, Philomena may be considered a somewhat off-­beat version of a “Road Movie,” in which characters develop growing affection for each other as they travel. “The primary ingredient in psychological health is love, the ability to give love and to receive it” (Huston 1980: 125). John Huston came to understand this in the making of Let There Be Light (1945), his documentary about a psychiatric hospital that treated what we would now call PTSD in returning World War II veterans. Frears evidently arrived at a similar insight early in the course of his filmmaking career. But as an unequivocal outcome for the characters in his films, its achievement remains rare. Traditionally, comedies end with the protagonists relaxing into their love, which in the last or penultimate sequence enjoys the authorization and celebration of a large group of people or a whole society, often transformed by the central couple. Singin’ in the Rain (Donen, 1952) provides a popular example of such an ending. It is approximated in Frears’s films by Hero, The Snapper, High Fidelity (in which the crowd includes virtually all the developed characters of the film), and Mrs. Henderson Presents. But those films are exceptions, and the happy endings of High Fidelity and Mrs. Henderson, as we have seen, retain a measure of counterbalancing uncertainty or melancholy. At the end of Hero—this strikes me as quietly daring—the nascent love story simply disappears. With the startling decision of Sharon at the end of The Snapper to name her new born daughter “Georgina,” thereby confirming the identity of the incongruous father she has been at pains to conceal, Frears/Doyle unravel the entirety of the preceding action.

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Rob and Laura, crowd, in next-­to-last sequence. High Fidelity (Frears, 2000) © Touchstone Home Entertainment.

A couple of the narrative films Frears made since 1983 do not focus on love: Fail Safe (a TV film of 2000, adapted from the same novel as Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film of the same title), The Deal (as noted above), and Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2012), made for HBO and never released theatrically. But the remaining twenty-­one either are strongly focused on love of vastly varying kinds or include it as a co-­focus. Whether Frears is aware of it or not, he has devoted most his career as a feature film director to the subject of love, broadly defined. Surprisingly, given his focus on love of various sorts, Frears throughout his career has portrayed sex as problematic, and often detached from whatever love is at the center of a particular film. It is sometimes, as in Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and The Hi-Lo Country, for example, positively destructive. In the film that brought him international attention in 1985, My Beautiful Laundrette, the central sexual relationship is doubly the love that cannot speak its name, because it transgresses both conventional sexual boundaries and ethnic ones. The affair between the married Pakistani businessman and his English mistress is also doubly transgressive. Prick Up Your Ears, released two years later, again portrays a homosexual relationship (a subject then much rarer in movies than it has become).13 Its protagonists descend through promiscuity and acute jealousy to alienation, murder, and suicide. As its title suggests, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is very much about sex, all of it thorny: inter-­racial or -ethnic, married or unmarried, gay or straight. In The Hi-Lo Country, the intense sexual attraction the narrator-­protagonist feels for the mistress of his best friend (itself a troubled relationship, since she is married) disrupts his relation to his friend, leads to rape, and all but destroys a woman who loves him and whom he loves in return.

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

For the central figures of Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, sex is a tool. In the former, they employ it to achieve power, social status, and revenge; in the latter, they use it to get money. Similarly, in Dirty Pretty Things, sex is expressed as money and power. The house prostitute and the “popular lady” who infects the hero’s fellow cab drivers with gonorrhea make a living from it. Much more viciously, one boss blackmails the heroine to coerce her into performing oral sex and the other exploits her legal vulnerability to take her virginity. No one in The Snapper knows initially quite how to feel about the pregnancy that results from a drunken sexual encounter between radically inappropriate partners, though most of its characters eventually opt for acceptance. The connections among sex, love, rejection, and commitment perplex the protagonist of High Fidelity; but he begins to sort them out by the end of the film. The same may be said of some but not all of the principal characters of Tamara Drewe. The title character of Philomena conceives a child that neither she and her family, nor her society, know what to do with. The nuns, however, have worked out how to profit from the situation, indenturing the single mothers and selling their young children to Americans. Without having been taught “anything about babies,” the title character guesses from her first experience of sex that it must be a sin: “anything that feels so lovely must be wrong.” The Catholic Church all too eagerly confirms her suspicion. To repeat, Frears is distinguished from other directors who sustained career-­long preoccupations with love by the variety of the kinds of love he has portrayed, their independence for the most part from sex, and by his avoiding or parodying the standard formulae of love stories. In putting on screen multiple sorts of love, he figures forth a comprehensive understanding of human life. Across his career, as I have argued, Frears remains an ironist. No situation is only what it at first appears to be; it’s always richer and more complicated. Actions and characters reveal oblique facets, sometimes mutually contradictory, usually ambiguous. Love and life in Frears’s movies is complex, multi-­layered, and constrained by a world that never fully accommodates human desires, including the desire for simple answers to profound questions. Nonetheless, Frears is no cynic. The ironies that shape his films do so in contrast, usually implicit, with less equivocal truths and aspirations. Those things may not be fully realized even in his happiest movies, but they have a hovering existence, even in his most bitter tasting ones, as possibilities regretfully unattained.

Part Two

Unclassifiable Love: My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dirty Pretty Things These three films, though in many ways quite different, share protagonists who are among the “Others” of late twentieth and early twenty-­first century British society. Most commentary addresses these movies as exemplars of fiction films depicting “hybridity,” and therefore as useful for illuminating various theoretical approaches to that concept of identity.1 My Beautiful Laundrette, with immigrants and with a homosexual love affair, has attracted theorists of contemporary urban culture, diasporas, and gender. Similar themes in Sammy and Rosie and Dirty Pretty Things have provoked similar discussions. Commentators have addressed all three, as Vincente Ortega writes about Dirty Pretty Things, as “exemplifying . . . the social problematic of today’s Europe” (Ortega 2011: 23). Ibrahim Abraham’s description of My Beautiful Laundrette typifies the usual perspective taken by the majority of critics on all three films: “In exploring hybrid ethnic and sexual identities, every aspect of the characterization . . . places the film in an overdetermined borderland, [Homi] Bhabha’s ‘third space’ ” (Abraham 2008: 147). Focusing primarily on the post-­modern cultural features of these films, as I acknowledge in the Introduction, is often illuminating; but it risks overlooking other important aspects and can sometimes weaken our understanding of cultural themes by depleting their often paradoxical contexts. Exceptionally, Geraghty’s (2005) study of My Beautiful Laundrette approaches that film as a work of art, worthy of examination in itself.2 Illuminating as all three films are as sites for cultural criticism, all contain other themes, elegant formal design, and characters whose interest includes but also goes beyond their status as hybrid participants in post-­colonial social economies.

2

My Beautiful Laundrette

The spinning titles near the opening and at the conclusion of My Beautiful Laundrette suggest both the motion of washing machines, with the starts and stops of their agitators, and the mode of the film. The actions, emotional responses and inclinations of characters, their ethnicities and other affiliations, are turned around and mixed up, blended and separate. Sexes and gender roles are repeatedly confused or confusing. Continents, nations, tribes, and families come together and fragment, cooperate and contest. Love and hatred, protectiveness and attack, acceptance and despair alternate or act out ambiguously. Similarity and difference pull against each other in almost every sequence of My Beautiful Laundrette, within a scene or via cross-­cutting. Nothing is simple. Love is achieved and thwarted, sometimes sufficient to hold antagonisms in suspension and sometimes inadequate. All human relationships appear tumultuous and needful of constant attention. In this they resemble Omar’s (Gordon Warnecke) laundrette.1 The film begins, pre-­credits, with contrasting images: a quiet morning is suddenly interrupted by a violent “unscrewing” invasion to rid Salim’s (Derrick Branche) building of its squatters. We see Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) sleeping in his clothes in a chair while his sick friend coughs under a quilt in bed. When the bouncers break into the building, he avoids violent confrontation with them and assists his friend out the window and across the yard, collecting a pair of pants and underpants from a line. The neglected backyard blooms with daffodils among the weeds. Like Salim’s brief appearance here, this bit of laundry and the unexpected sparks of beauty introduce elements that will be important to the film. Later, in a retrospective ironizing of this sequence, Johnny will be employed as an unscrewer by this very uncle of his lover and employer.2 A sequence just before the grand opening of the gentrified laundrette begins by cross-­cutting between images of Rachel (Shirley Anne Field) and Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey), an ethnically mixed couple, waltzing to the new sound system, and Johnny and Omar, also a mixed couple, kissing and undressing each other in the office behind them. After several cross-­cuts, the camera insists still more strongly on the similarity/ difference of the couples by including both in a shot from behind Omar and Johnny, showing them in the foreground and, through a large one-­way glass window, Nasser and Rachel. This shot introduces suspense: will the adulterous but heterosexual couple discover the gay lovers in flagrante? Nasser almost does. Indeed, he seems to come to an accurate conclusion about his nephew’s relation to his employee. The

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985) © MGM Home Entertainment.

sequence ends with a shot that is still more emphatic in its conflation of the different: the superposition, via a reflection in the window glass, of Johnny’s and Omar’s faces. (Frears uses a related reflection shot, one that must have taken considerable setting up, twenty-­eight years later in Philomena, for much the same purpose of connecting emphatically different characters. As Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) awaits the arrival of Philomena (Judi Dench) and her daughter, Frears photographs them in a shot that looks very much like a split screen, a technique he employs in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Grifters, and Tamara Drewe. In reflection, but in perfect focus, on the left third of the screen, Sixsmith watches Philomena and her daughter, directly photographed as they approach the restaurant where they are to meet.) Less striking, but equally insistent, almost all the scenes of parties and other gatherings in My Beautiful Laundrette include contrasting persons brought together by circumstances and economic interests: Asian and British, old and young, men and women, wealthy and hopeful, the Ali’s central extended family and outsiders. At the same time, differences are difficult to reconcile, boundaries hard to cross. When Salim first approaches Omar about picking up drugs for him, he says, “You’re one of us now.” Genghis (Richard Graham), effectively the second in command of Johnny’s pack, tells him, “Don’t cut yourself off from your own people. There’s no one else who really wants ya. Everyone has t’ belong.” Ironically, Frears immediately cuts to Johnny and Omar kissing in Omar’s convertible under a full moon—a romantic cliché upended by the single sex of the kissers and their different ethnicities. The deeply affectionate love affair of Rachel and Nasser founders when Nasser’s wife Bilquis (Charu Bala Chokshi), aided by his daughter Tania (Rita Wolf), breaks them up and presumably returns an unwilling Nasser to his “own people.”

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Editing, imagery, Oliver Stapleton’s superb cinematography, and the color palate of My Beautiful Laundrette work to create a pervasive sense of menace, of tenuously repressed conflicts. “We decided the film was to have gangster and thriller elements,” writes the screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi, of his collaboration with Frears, “since the gangster film is the form that corresponds most closely to the city, with its gangs and violence” (Kureishi 1996: 5).3 As Allison observes, “My Beautiful Laundrette is characterized by a striking visual intensity that largely derives from its non-­naturalistic use of lighting and colour” (Allison 2007: 47). Charlotte Brunsdon notes Frears’s “expressionist use of color” (Brunsdon 2007: 17), and Fuller remarks, “The film has a dreamlike quality that suits its mythic structure” (Fuller n.d.: 2). The sense of danger or, alternatively, passion is often underscored by strong reds in the set—as is frequently the case in color films worldwide. Both Nasser’s English mistress and his brother’s late wife are redheads, Cherry (Souad Faress), the significantly named wife of Salim, has auburn hair and wears a brilliant red sweater when Omar meets her. Nasser makes love with Rachel in a room suffused with red light. The interior of the car carrying Omar and some of his family is filled with red light when they are menaced by skinheads. Disrupted by a drunken Johnny, Nasser’s annual party is lit with red lights. An especially emotional scene between Nasser and his brother Hussein begins with Nasser entering through one of a pair of bright red doors. And so on. Less conventionally, contrasting strong blues do not so much suggest calm as emotional cold. When Tania arrives at the grand opening of the laundrette, for example, the hot reds of passionate love and anger are not contrasted with soothing cool colors, but augmented by blues that appear to signal rage. The neon sign of the refurbished launderette flashes its name, “Powders,” in blue; and the laundromat is the site of the most violent expression of hatred in the film, the revenge attack of Johnny’s mates on Salim. Additionally, as O’Neill remarks, “The laundry, crowned by a neon arc, also gives the establishment a poke in the nose. Its name, Powders, recalls the powdery white drugs that contributed to its financing” (O’Neill 1994: 20). Backed by scarlet pillows in front of blue blinds, Omar telephones Johnny from Salim’s home. A scene that began with his uncle cordially welcoming Omar—and taking from him the drug-­laced video cassettes—ends with him brutalizing his courier, who has innocently tried to play one of the tapes. An ambivalent mix of red and blue— danger and/or love mixed with hatred or sorrow—occurs elsewhere in similar mixed circumstances: in the disco where Johnny sells the drugs Omar has stolen, in the noisy, defiant party in the building Johnny manages for Nasser, and at the bar where Rachel reluctantly ends her relationship with her heart-­broken lover. A remarkable crane shot early in the film sets blue and red in dissonant, menacing proximity. The camera tilts and pans down from a high shot of a passing train into an underpass filled with flashing lights, red and blue. There Omar and some of his family, stuck in stopped traffic, are harassed by a disreputable-­looking gang of young men who turn out to be what Johnny calls “my good friends.” Scary as this scene is, it also reunites Omar and Johnny, friends from childhood, and leads to their working partnership. Further complicating this blue and red, hostile and cordial

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985) © MGM Home Entertainment.

scene, we learn that Omar’s mother killed herself last year when she “jumped onto the railway lines” (Omar) and “all the trains stopped” (Johnny). Later, outside Powders while Johnny and Omar renovate it, Johnny’s friends hang about, evidently awaiting an occasion to express a fury and an energy for which they have no outlet. Prosperous immigrants from Pakistan offer a target. In the nightmare sequence described above when these young English “fascists” swarm Salim’s car, a pair of brief shots from inside the car show grotesquely distorted faces in a red fog—a malign spirit of Britain’s past returning for revenge. Seven or eight times during the first post-­credit sequence, trains thundering to and fro and crossing each other pass the flat of Omar and his father Hussein (Roshan Seth)—identified only as “Papa” in the closing credits. They run repeatedly through the film, a motif that will anticipate our learning, and then remind us, of the suicide of Omar’s mother. It also suggests going and coming, places equivocally here and there. When she meets Omar, Salim’s wife Cherry exclaims, “I’m sick of hearing about these in-­betweens! People should make up their minds where they are.” But virtually all the major characters of My Beautiful Laundrette are in-­betweens, one way or another. The trains, racing back and forth in diverse directions, emphasize the point.4 During the railroad-­saturated early scene with Omar and Papa, a brief pan across a bookshelf in Hussein’s flat begins with a framed photo of a woman, she who jumped onto the tracks. Our view of this obviously Caucasian woman—Papa’s marriage made up another mixed couple—is occluded when Omar’s head comes between it and the camera, which then pans onto Hussein’s face and tracks back as he empties the last of a bottle of vodka into his glass. From the beginning, these trains that rush to and fro

My Beautiful Laundrette

41

from unknown places are associated, however subtly or retrospectively, with sorrow, abandonment, despair, and death. As one would expect of a film entitled My Beautiful Laundrette, images of washing and closely related ones of water and rain run through the film. Less predictably, these complexes of imagery (and action) are associated with sex and include an especially dangerous liquid, alcohol. The opening credits are introduced and the movie ends with spinning images that, as we have seen, imitate the motion of washing machines; a burbling sound track reinforces the visuals. At a bathroom sink in the first shot after the credits, Omar washes his father’s dirty clothes. He hangs them to dry on a balcony past which trains are running. For his first assignment in his uncle’s parking garage, Omar shampoos cars. As he moves up Nasser’s job ladder to become manager of the run-­down laundromat, his uncle assures him that “there’s money in muck.” For a while, it appears not. He begins his management facing an overflowing, noisily wobbling washer and a clientele of homeless persons, delinquent boys, and a man (who will reappear throughout the film) making endless explanations to his girlfriend from the payphone. His father expresses contempt for his new occupation and Salim tells him that his uncle has stuck him with “a dead duck.” But once Omar has hired Johnny to do “a variety of menial things,” the business begins to turn around. His friend’s first assignment is to “clean those bastards out,” and Johnny immediately boosts two boys and their friend out of the laundry and into the street. Omar’s sex life is attached to his eventual career. Speaking with his brother to ask for employment for his son, Hussein adds that Nasser might “try and fix him up with a nice girl. I’m not sure his penis is in full working order.” More coarsely, Salim makes clear his opinion of the absence of young women in Omar’s life. “Can you wash a car?” he asks Omar. “You just get a rag and rub. You know how to rub, don’t you?” A suggestive shot a little later from inside a car converts the double entendre into visual terms: Suds dribble down a windshield as we see Omar “rubbing.” After hiring Johnny, Omar’s personal life as well as his economic prospects improve, though not in the direction anticipated by Salim and Papa. The collaboration of the two young men starts or restarts (perhaps) a love affair which becomes strongly connected to their work. When Omar is on the brink of firing his recalcitrant employee, who is sulking because of Salim’s malicious announcement to him that “Omar’s getting married,” the barely dressed Johnny moves close to his angry employer and lover in defiance of Omar’s “I don’t want to see you for a little while.” Johnny murmurs, “What about today? It’s been the best day.” His statement comprehends both the achievement of opening Powders and their intensifying amorous relationship. As much as his statement, his physical closeness seems to mollify Omar (“Yeah, almost the best day”), and Johnny returns to the laundromat. After his mates beat him up, Johnny again attempts to walk out on his role in Powders. Omar reassures him with embraces and washes his wounds. Earlier, when Tania arrives at the updated laundry carrying her suitcase and invites Johnny to join her in “going away,” he declines with words that imply loyalty equally to his business and his personal relations with Omar: “I’ll stay here with me friend, and fight it out.

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

I couldn’t leave him, not now. Don’t ask me to. (Pause, smiles) Have you ever touched him?” In response to Johnny’s question, Tania lowers her eyes and walks away, her red scarf brilliant against the blue signs of Powders. Extending the imagery of laundry and washing, a related general motif of liquids— water, rain, urine, alcohol—elaborates the complex mixture of motives, ethnicities, and passions that make My Beautiful Laundrette so concentrated and so hard to summarize. From the puddles on the street when Nasser takes Omar for his first look at the decrepit establishment—“A constant boil,” Nasser says, “on my bum”—to the aquarium installed in the transformed version, images of water accompany most significant developments in the plot. Especially rain, a device Frears uses throughout his career for emotional intensification. (This tendency reaches a peak in High Fidelity.) When Tania propositions Omar at his uncle’s home, the noise of rain shares the sound track with her words: “I think we understand each other.” Nasser’s annual party, the occasion for multiple revelations and critical turns in the plot, takes place in a heavy storm. Conventionally, it underscores the tumultuous emotions it accompanies. Tania and Johnny take an out-­of-control bike ride through the downpour—a dark inversion, perhaps, of the idyllic bicycle ride that Paul Newman and Katharine Ross take in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). Frears’s rendering makes literal the song that accompanies this scene in Hill’s movie, “Rain drops keep fallin’ on my head.” It ends with them crashing into Salim and Omar, who is getting “a lesson” in family loyalty. The chaotic scene precipitates the revelation that Nasser has gambled his fortune “down the toilet.” (After quarreling with Rachel, Nasser ducks into an off-­track betting establishment adjacent to Powders.) It also brings forth the declaration from Tania, now interested in Johnny, that she would sooner “drink my urine” than marry Omar. This relieves Omar, who had earlier told Johnny that he couldn’t see how to escape marrying his cousin. His response to her taunt comes quickly and cheerfully: “I hear it can be quite tasty with a slice of lemon.” Tania’s welcome insult and Salim’s announcement that Nasser’s wealth has gone “down the toilet” invoke another liquid, piss. Omar returns late to his father’s flat to find him peeing on the balcony. When he remarks that his parent should have waited to be taken to the bathroom, Hussein upbraids him, “My tool would drop off before you show up these days.” Less literally, urine is associated with hostility. “Piss off back to the jungle, wog-­boy,” Genghis tells Omar. After leaving Nasser’s party in his car with Omar and Johnny, and still driving through rain and fog, a drunken Salim runs down Johnny’s friend Moose, declaring, “What this scum needs is a taste of their own piss!” The most dangerous of the fluids that stream through My Beautiful Laundrette, as Salim’s assault shows, is alcohol. Though drinking usually takes place in ambiguous situations, there’s nothing ambiguous about Hussein’s descent from a celebrated journalist in Pakistan to an isolated, semi-­bed-ridden alcoholic in England. When asked about Hussein’s career, Nasser answers that it is, like his brother, “lying down.” Returning from kissing with Johnny, Omar touches his sleeping father affectionately. The lights of a passing train flicker over Papa’s face, then over Omar’s as he takes a pull

My Beautiful Laundrette

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from a vodka bottle by the bed. He finishes it and flings it against an adjacent railway embankment with a cry of rage, for the destruction it is wreaking on his parent and perhaps also for his mother, dead on the train tracks.5 Elsewhere, alcohol plays a more ambiguous role. Usually the characters of My Beautiful Laundrette drink on occasions that are, or should be, celebratory, but that at the same time anticipate conflict. In “a high class place,” after Nasser has promoted Omar from car washer to accountant, they drink sparkling wine with Rachel, while Nasser tells his nephew, “In this country, which we hate and love, you can get anything you want. . . . You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.” A comic echo of Nasser’s words comes from his daughter a bit later, when Tania pulls up her sweater to show Omar her breasts through a window overlooking the room in which her father and his friends are drinking. Besides Omar, a family friend and business associate, Zaki (Gurdial Sira), sees her and chokes on his whiskey. The sequence continues with what sounds like music for a graduation march playing on the sound track, while Salim drunkenly declares Omar “our future.” Omar and Johnny drink champagne in the disco where Johnny sells the drugs Omar has stolen from Salim. The proceeds will allow them to refurbish the laundrette. As the strong blue and red lights of the scene signal, however, the transaction is fraught. Annoyed that Omar has hired Johnny without “my permission,” Nasser smoothes over that and a brief contretemps later by proposing an equivocal toast, “We’ll drink to Thatcher and your beautiful laundrette.” Johnny drinks in anger at Nasser’s party, and he has recourse to the same remedy after Salim tells him of Omar’s coming marriage. As Johnny and Omar arrive to attend Nasser’s yearly festivities, the license plate on a parked car comically anticipates the boozing, anger, and revelations that are in store: “YUCI” (yucky). Relations among men in My Beautiful Laundrette involve struggles for power and its surrogate, money. (Most of the masculine contentions in The Hi-Lo Country pivot on the same axis.) Even the amorous connection of Omar and Johnny intermittently reverts to that conflict. “I want big money,” Omar declares to Johnny: I’m not gonna be beat down by this country. When we were at school, you and your friends kicked me all round the place; and what’re you doing now? Washing my floor. That’s how I like it. Now get to work. (Cut to Johnny, casually defiant, taking a swallow from a whiskey bottle. Cut back to Omar.) Get to work, I said, or else you’re fired!

The women are mostly omitted from such clashes, because they are excluded from the possibility of gaining power or making their own fortunes. The one struggle they do have, the attack of Bilquis on Rachel, comes during a contest over a man and his money. When Tania upbraids Rachel, mostly on behalf of her mother, the powerless confronts the powerless. “I don’t mind my father having a mistress,” Tania announces, “I don’t mind my father spending our money on you. . . . But I don’t like women who

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

live off men; that’s a pretty disgusting, parasitical thing, isn’t it?” Rachel rejoins, “But tell me, who do you live off?” Provoked at least partly by this painful question, Tania tells Omar, “I wanna leave home. I need to break away.” But Tania can only turn from one man to another, “You’ll have to help me, financially.” When a drunken Omar then asks her to marry him, her reply—in view of the exchange she’s just had with Rachel—is ironic and pathetic: “If you can get me some money.” Shut out of the rooms in which men negotiate power and distribute cash, women serve as housekeepers, watch the actions of the men, or—as Tania and Rachel finally do—leave for an uncertain future “away.” Mostly they serve husband or father and hover in the background, unspeaking witnesses to the behavior of voluble men. When Omar and Johnny go to meet Salim on a matter of business, Tania says, “Take me.” They simply ignore her. Omar’s “Auntie Bilquis” stays “at home with the kids,” as Nasser says to his nephew’s mischievous question, while he and his mistress meet Omar for a drink. Omar has received a frankly erotic kiss from Rachel earlier, so there may be some undertones of old-­man-young-­man rivalry in his implicitly pointing out Nasser’s married state. In any case, the disruptive intent of Omar’s inquiry becomes clearer at the opening of Powders, to which he invites Tania, thereby setting up the confrontation between her and Rachel. Listening and watching when Tania interrogates Omar about Nasser’s mistress, Bilquis remains in the background. As a gathering in her home concludes, she stands silently behind the open front door while Cherry enlists Omar’s help for her drunken husband. The next time we see Bilquis, she is again a silent witness to an exchange between Omar and Tania. At “Nasser’s annual party”—not, of course, their annual party—she is once more in a door frame, quietly observing. Salim’s wife Cherry opens the door to Omar when he delivers the drug-­loaded cassettes. After notifying her husband, she removes herself from the scene. At the end of the visit, she stands silent in a door frame, like Bilquis, watching Salim push his heel into Omar’s face. Surreptitiously, she later watches through yet another door while Omar gives Salim the fake beard from which he and Johnny have stolen the contraband; and she continues to watch as her husband threatens his untrustworthy courier. These sequences participate in a broader visual motif, as Fuller points out, in which “characters hover in doorways, symbolic thresholds of imminent emotional change or stasis” (Fuller n.d.: 5). Nasser commands Omar, “When I say marry her [Tania], you damn well do it.” But Tania rebels. She understands and resents her exclusion from power and money in a country where the latter is the only thing that matters, as Salim tells Omar. She informs her cousin, “He [Nasser] adores you. I expect he wants you to take over the businesses. He wouldn’t think of asking me.” Her father (as Sammy tells his mistress in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which Kureishi and Frears made two years later) has no children, “only girls.” We see Tania’s two sisters briefly; they are stroking their father’s forehead and toes, like in-­house masseuses. For Tania and Rachel, women who do not accept the life that men offer them, the only alternative is to leave—Tania her family, Rachel her lover. Tania vanishes mysteriously and Rachel, more conventionally, breaks with Nasser. The young Asian

My Beautiful Laundrette

45

My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985) © MGM Home Entertainment. girl who descends the stairs in her nightie while Johnny and Omar are robbing her home may serve as an emblem for most of the women in My Beautiful Laundrette: Before she can raise the alarm, Omar seizes her and clamps his glove over her mouth. Related to the silent watching of women are frequent mirror shots.6 Like the women’s eyes, the mirrors in which the men are reflected (there are few mirror shots of women) offer another view of them and imply a sort of double perspective, a reflection “on” as well as “of.” The second viewpoint they provide invites us to think again, as do the watching women. This is especially true when both direct shot and mirror reflection are on screen simultaneously. The character most frequently reflected is Omar, who is introduced passing a mirror in his father’s flat, in front of which he later spruces up, preparing to go to his uncle’s home. Salim consistently appears in mirrors while pursuing his trade in illegal drugs. He stands in front of a bathroom mirror when Omar makes his first delivery. In multiple reflections, he discovers that the false beard Omar picked up has been emptied of its packets. When Omar peeks in, he too is reflected. Shortly after this sequence, Omar and Johnny visit a club to sell the drugs; the scene is full of mirrors, which most frequently reflect a young woman dancing—suggesting, perhaps, an alternative use for the drug money. The gentrification of Nasser’s pain-­in-the-­ass laundry is financed by this deal, and Powders also appears in mirror shots. Omar is seen both directly and in the rear view mirror of his car as he arrives there. In another car mirror, Salim watches Omar, Johnny, and his mates outside the property. Johnny, in the mirror of Omar’s convertible, watches outside another laundromat as his friend Moose hobbles by on a crutch. Inside

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985) © MGM Home Entertainment.

Powders, a mirror reflects the party celebrating its opening. In addition to the fact that the laundrette’s incongruous glamorizing has been fueled by drug money, the mirror may be one of many signals that Powders serves as a place both where people come together and where pent up conflicts explode. Mirrors are also associated with problematic romances. A reflection conveys Rachel and Nasser into the bar where Omar awaits them, watching for them, himself, in a mirror. As Rachel embraces Nasser in the laundrette, their mirror reflection evokes a possibly more troubling side of their relationship. When she breaks up with her lover, she does so in another mirrored setting, her reflected image disappearing as she leaves. When Nasser discovers his nephew and Johnny hurriedly putting on their clothes (and realizes the answer to his question, “What the hell are you doing?”), a mirror shot puts Johnny and him in reflection along with direct views of both of them and Omar. As noted earlier, the opening of the laundrette includes a moment when Omar’s reflected face fuses optically with Johnny’s. The closing shot of the two reconciled lovers splashing each other also takes place before a mirror. That staging might remind us that even in this happy moment, their relationship remains precarious, its future uncertain. The gay love of Omar and Johnny dare not speak its name in multiple ways; it violates family, class, and ethnic strictures as well as socially acceptable sexual ones. It affects not only its principals but also the tension-­riddled groups surrounding them. To a degree, both Omar’s family and Johnny’s friends seem willing to look the other way. In front of his mates, but his gesture concealed from them, Johnny licks Omar’s neck— affectionately, comically, satirically, or all at once.7 One is surprised not that his friends finally attack Johnny, but that they wait so long to do so. Tania, like Nasser, guesses the

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truth. Nonetheless, she appears eager to marry Omar or, later, to run off with Johnny. On the other hand, Salim tells Nasser “That joker’s [Johnny] a bad influence on Omar.” Heterosexual love is represented chiefly by the relation between Nasser and Rachel, whom we see having sex while a grinning Omar listens with his ear against the door of their room. They are sundered by the combined efforts of Tania’s shaming and Bilquis’s quantum-­physics-like curse at a distance, which sets in motion with no apparent cause the furniture in Rachel’s flat and inflicts a nasty rash on her torso. “They hate us in England,” declares Omar’s father, “All you can do is to kiss their asses, think of yourself as a little British. . . .” The hatred is reciprocated by the immigrants from the subcontinent, most mildly by Papa, whose sense of rejection and betrayal expresses itself as “such a great disappointment” in “the working class,” and most viciously by Salim. Complicating this mutual hatred is mutual baffled admiration, frustration, and acutely felt rejection, the last as much between classes as between ethnicities. Half-­jokingly, half insultingly, Omar explains to Tania in front of Johnny, who has been left to wait outside Nasser’s home, “He’s lower class. He won’t come in without being asked—unless he’s doing a burglary.” On the other hand (a signal phrase for discussing this ironic, multivalent film), there appears to be no tension between the upwardly mobile immigrants and their middle-­class British friends. Moreover, Hussein had a British wife and Salim’s wife Cherry, though born in Pakistan, looks English, to further mix and complicate identities. The Ali family and the pack of Johnny and his mates provide staging sites for ethnic and class hatred; but both are also internally unstable. Johnny’s companions eventually turn on him and Omar’s extended family is torn within by jealousy, rifts between generations, and differing degrees of assimilation. Tania says bitterly, “Families. I hate families.” Hussein calls his brother “that crook.” Salim plays Cornwall to Omar’s Gloucester, pushing his heel into his eye socket. The triply cross-­cut penultimate sequence of My Beautiful Laundrette brings to a climax much of the anger and sorrow that pervades the film. The sequence begins when Johnny, having refused to be in the same place with “that scum Salim,” arrives at Powders. There we see his friends setting an ambush for Salim, who soon drives up, hoping to speak with Omar. He awaits him inside the laundromat. Frears then cuts to a shot of Nasser arriving on a visit to his brother. The third part of this sequence, less emphasized, shows Omar and Zaki walking peacefully en route to the laundromat, discussing Omar’s possible management of Zaki’s cleaning establishments. As Nasser enters Hussein’s apartment, a shot from his point of view leads him (and probably the audience) to fear for a moment that Papa may have passed on; but Hussein awakens, delighted to see his brother. (Frears inserts a similar action at the end of a memorial video in Philomena, when what looks to be a shot of a character’s face in death ends with him opening his eyes and smiling.) As the sequence continues, the film cuts among the three scenes, often staying on each for some time. At the laundrette, Johnny’s mates begin by demolishing Salim’s car, then its owner. In Papa’s flat, a despairing Nasser tells his brother that Rachel has left him “and I don’t know what to do.”

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

His affair with Rachel is a serious thing for Nasser. With her, he seems to be attempting to create an alternative family, suggested when he tells Omar to “kiss Rachel,” as one would instruct a child to “kiss your mother,” or “kiss your aunt.” A little later, he tells his nephew “You’re like a son to me,” then he immediately adds “To both of us.” He interprets Rachel’s leaving him as the loss of his future. He and his brother witness the disappearance from their lives of another woman in whom they’ve invested their hopes, Tania. Immediately after they speak of the possibility of her marriage to Omar, they see her dressed for travel and standing with a suitcase on a platform across the tracks. A passing train conceals her for a few seconds; when it is gone, so, mysteriously, is she.8 The opening sequence includes several shots of and through windows, shots related to those including mirrors. As Lester Friedman and Scott Stewart observed, My Beautiful Laundrette contains a great many such shots. Responding to their observation, Frears remarked, “In My Beautiful Laundrette, I was always intrigued with the window shots. . . . [They] intuitively expressed what the film was doing, what the film was about; crossing over and integrating through separation” (Friedman and Stewart 1994: 226). In the same interview, the director offered a related thought, “It’s extraordinary having a colonial past, which is what my films are all about” (Friedman and Stewart 1994: 231). He exaggerates; but we might remember that the first film he directed, The Burning, focused on an uprising of blacks in colonial, apartheid South Africa. As the narrative begins, Omar is doing the laundry of his alcoholic father. His love is reciprocated by his parent, who fondly tells him, “I’m fixing you up with a job with your uncle. . . . If your face gets any longer here, you’ll be overbalanced.” Love, at the beginning of the film, is sympathetic and protective. For Omar, the primary sources of nurturing love are his father and his extended family. For Johnny, such support appears to come from his “mates.” Salim, the angriest figure in the movie, vacillates among confronting Omar, supporting him, and promising him familial backing. Salim’s attentive wife tries to calm her husband and arrange for his safety when he is inebriated. When Tania leaves her home and family, neither her departure nor the heartening scene between Johnny and Omar at the film’s end can entirely wash away the anger, mistrust, and sorrow that permeate much of the action. Nonetheless, as Kureishi writes, “The film was to be an amusement, despite its references to racism, unemployment and Thatcherism. Irony is the modern mode, a way of commenting on bleakness and cruelty without falling into dourness and didacticism” (Kureishi 1996: 5). “This damn country has done us in,” Hussein says to Nasser. Nasser contests his remark, saying of England, “compared with everywhere, it’s a little heaven here.” But his argument, that it is a place where religion doesn’t interfere with making money, is not entirely reassuring—nor is the cut immediately after this remark, to one of Johnny’s friends smashing Salim’s face with a board. It appears likely that Salim will be beaten to death, but Johnny steps in to save his life. Since he has little reason to feel concern for Salim, he evidently intervenes from loyalty to Omar and to keep his mates out of prison. Beaten in turn by his friends, one

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of whom saw him in the back seat of Salim’s car when it hit Moose, he is rescued by the sound of police sirens and the arrival of Omar and Zaki. More reassuring is the affection between the brothers and the support they offer each other. Similarly, Johnny and Omar manage to lead each other back from the violence they have experienced to a cheerfully erotic reconciliation. For all the conflict, ambivalence, hatred, and rage that perfuses My Beautiful Laundrette, the film ends with an action of love and rejuvenation. Omar helps the bloodied Johnny into Powders. As he is washing him after a brief spat, they begin splashing each other playfully, the water running down their torsos. The door through which the camera is viewing them slowly swings closed, apparently of its own accord, or in accord with the filmmaker’s desire to protect the privacy of his protagonists.9 A spinning “The End” comes up, and the closing titles run while the sound track elaborates a musical theme that blends conventional instruments with the burping gurgle of a washing machine.10 The editing that leads to this end is typical of My Beautiful Laundrette. Its cross-­ cutting juxtaposes characters who are different and similar, deeply involved emotionally with each other, mutually implicated in their plights, at once conflicted and conflicting. As the brief closing scene implies, My Beautiful Laundrette is not simply about anger and conflict but also about the small mysteries of love, the unexpected energy that keeps antagonistic persons, classes, and perhaps nations at least intermittently together. Love can be cleansing and healing and can sometimes overcome jealousy. Along with that of Omar and Johnny, the relationship between Nasser and Hussein is illustrative of this power. In despair, Nasser seeks his brother, who embraces and comforts him, and who confesses in turn his own despair. We recall that Papa described his brother as a “crook,” and we witness Nasser telling his friends a comic risqué anecdote featuring Hussein as the butt. But in their sorrow, the brothers’ love for each other prevails. A brief exchange when Rachel tells Nasser that she is leaving him sums up, without “dourness and didacticism,” the limits of love, its pleasures, and its power to bring people together, if only temporarily: Rachel:  We’ve had a time. Nasser:  A short time. Rachel:  A nice time.

The closing sequence of My Beautiful Laundrette merges nurturing, supportive love with affection that is also sexual. Both are important and, as at the end, sometimes inseparable. Occasions of love—caring, familial, gay or heterosexual—provide spaces of joy and calm adjacent to human tempests. The washing machines pause regularly in their agitation; fish swim tranquilly in the aquarium decorating the renewed laundrette. As the film ends, the tensions and resentments, ethnic antagonisms and sensitivities, and the sorrows brought about by struggling homes and lost persons remain. But to qualify these unhappy facts once more in this film of recursive reversals and re-­ reversals, love comes as well as goes; and when it goes, it leaves a residue of hope that it may return. Or even, as for Omar and Johnny, persist.11

3

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

It’s complexity that I think I’m interested in.

Hanif Kureishi in Higson 1995

“Fear in a handful of dust” Sammy and Rosie Get Laid unfolds as an anatomy of disconnection. Volatile slums sink into chaos while stable middle-­class neighborhoods persist unchanged. Wealthy white businessmen bulldoze mixed-­race, classless settlers off an area moneyed interests wish to develop. The grandiloquent oratory of Margaret Thatcher regarding “the big job to do in some of those inner cities” is heard as “domestic colonialism” by those who dwell there and feel that they have no say in running their neighborhoods. On the level of persons as well as of politics and social strata, disconnects are equally pervasive. Sammy (Ayub Khan-Din) declares that he and Rosie (Frances Barber) are not English but Londoners. The old and the young struggle—or refuse—to understand each other. Heterosexuals and lesbians express mutual hostility. With a few exceptions, men and women relate to one another as if they were separate species. Families fracture. Profoundly and consistently, underlying most failures to come together, love miscarries or is absent. It is lacking or fatally obstructed in both social and personal life in London and, by extension, in contemporary England. About Sammy and Rosie Hanif Kureishi, the screenwriter, noted, “The film is about the relations between men and women in Britain and has political content” (Kureishi 1988: 75).1 That “political content” drives disconnection and impedes attempts at coming together. It constitutes a formidable obstacle to finding or expressing love. The unfolding revelations about the past of Rafi Rahman (Shashi Kapoor), Sammy’s father, and its continuing effect on his life despite his attempts to leave it behind, comprise only the most extreme example in Sammy and Rosie of the devastation that politics can inflict. Sammy and Rosie exemplifies, as Neil Sinyard finds to be typical of Frears’s films, “the dynamics of power in relationships and as seen in carefully observed social landscapes” (Sinyard 2004). On his first night in London, Rafi rushes out of the apartment into the rioting neighborhood with Sammy in pursuit, telling him that he’s “jetlagged.” So he is, in more ways than one. He is as much thrown back into his tangled past as he is stuck for the moment in an Asian time zone. And his past pursues him, especially his past with women. It is his hallucination of flames burning under a photo

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

of the bisexual, feminist icon Virginia Woolf that drives him out of Rosie’s study into the rioting street, where he’s plunged into another nightmare. “I’ve seen war!” he exclaims to his trailing son. Much of what we learn or infer about Rafi’s political career is embodied in an ambiguous figure labeled “Ghost” (Badi Uzzaman) in the closing credits. (His existential status, however, is less clear than that label would suggest.)2 He first appears as an evidently foreign-­born cabbie with a large bandage around his head and over one eye. Much later, he identifies himself as an opposition figure whom Rafi gave the order to torture. (That episode is probably Rafi’s nightmare.) Whatever or whoever he is, he reappears in Rafi’s London life associated with his contentious political past and its most horrific events. Rafi requires a cab because Sammy, in order to extend an adulterous interlude with his present lover, breaks his promise to pick his father up at the airport. Besides the inconvenient and wounding absence of his son, the sequence contains another unpleasant surprise for Rafi: the neighborhood in which Sammy and Rosie dwell, where a riot is brewing. Rafi:  My son is a very successful accountant. Ghost:  And he lives here? Rafi:  I’m afraid so.

At this point we have no reason to connect the cabbie with Rafi’s past, nor to imagine him as somehow ghostly; but he is associated with unpleasantness, and with Sammy’s passive-­aggressive expression of indifference toward his father. The cabbie next appears across the street below Sammy and Rosie’s apartment, in a shot (complete with parting curtains) that imitates the threatening glimpse Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has of a lurking antagonist near the end of The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941). He returns immediately after Rosie reads to Sammy a first-­person account of torture by one of Rafi’s political enemies. (She does so in response to Sammy’s partly accurate but naïve description of his father as “a cheerful bastard with great spirit.”) The cabbie’s reappearance thus associates him with the narrative Rosie has just read. We see the mysterious figure from Sammy’s point of view, which seems to eliminate our supposing him a projection of Rafi’s guilty conscience. Is he an assassin, a confirmation of Rafi’s claim to his son that he is “in great danger?” It is unclear if the Ghost ever physically threatens Rafi, but here he is again associated with painful relations between Sammy and his father. Immediately after seeing this figure, Sammy worries about the “do” he and Rosie have promised Rafi, “We can’t let a little torture get in the way of a party, but who will we invite?” The mystery man begins to look considerably more mysterious as he stands watching on the street during Rafi’s traumatic, partly comic escape from the angry lesbian couple of Rani (Meera Syal) and Vivia (Suzette Llewellyn). When a pair of unfriendly looking policemen enters the scene, the Asian in the Brown suit—a name by which he is called in the screenplay—walks away, dissolving as he goes. Rafi apparently sees him and follows his departure with his eyes, witnessing his evaporation.

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Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears, 1987) © Lorimar Home Video.

The Ghost is again suddenly present during Rafi’s dismaying basement exchange with Alice (Claire Bloom). After Rafi asks if he can live with her, she leads him down to show him the memorabilia of her protracted waiting for his promised return. These include notebooks in which “I told you everything.” After she winds up her diatribe, Rafi mutters, “How bitterness can drive a woman!” It’s not clear whether he is speaking to himself, to Alice, or to the Ghost. What is clear, again, is that the hovering man in the brown suit is associated with personal pain and intimate injury, in this case emerging from Rafi’s past political life. Alice denounces him: “I wanted a true marriage and you wanted power. Now you must be content with having introduced flogging for minor offenses, nuclear capability, and partridge shooting into your country!”3 A slight pan away from Rafi and the Ghost renders the end of the scene ambiguous as to whether the latter dissolves again or is simply left in the shadows by the camera. When Rafi leaves Alice’s home, he sets out to find Danny/Victoria (Roland Gift). He is tripped passing a recumbent line of derelict men, and limps on without one of his shoes. The Ghost follows, carrying the shoe. After Rafi has found Danny/Victoria’s caravan (house trailer, in the U.S.) and is drinking tea, he sees the man in the brown suit just outside. The Ghost raises Rafi’s discarded shoe—an enigmatic, possibly insulting gesture. That night, when Rafi is alone, the Ghost approaches, barefoot and no longer in his suit; he is semi-­transparent, as during his disappearance earlier.

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Inside the caravan, Rafi pours warm water into a basin. As he swishes it about, his hand and the water turn bloody; alarming, inarticulate vocal music rises on the sound track; and the water level sinks, revealing what the screenplay calls “human blood and hair and bone” (Kureishi 1988: 52–3). This Macbeth-­like image (one of several echoes of that play) recalls the scene in which Rafi goes to a restaurant with Sammy and Rosie, who confronts her father-­in-law with accusations of torture. When Rafi bites into a breadstick, it seems to turn into a finger, and he removes what looks like a fingernail from his mouth.4 The bloody tub also picks up a motif of water as a substance associated with dissolution. Rosie discovers one of her clients dead in a full bathtub in his apartment, a shot that is repeated as she lets the tub drain. During a sequence that begins with apparent rapprochement between Sammy and Rosie as they bathe together, Rosie proposes separating, “Sammy, all this is false, isn’t it? I think we should try not living together. I think we should try being apart now.” Anna (Wendy Gazelle) hectors Sammy about his treatment of women while threatening him with a long drop into dark water. The next morning, as he bathes in her apartment, Anna asks where she might find Danny/Victoria. Sammy answers with quiet bitterness, “On top of my wife, I expect.” As Rafi stares horrified into the basin that culminates this imagery, a voice behind him says, “I’m sure you recognize me, though I don’t look at my best.” Rafi turns and sees the Ghost, now without his bandage, covered with lacerations, and wearing a helmet with dangling wires and electrical connectors. “You said to Rosie that I was the price to be paid for the overall good of our country, yes?” “Forgive me,” answers Rafi. The Ghost asks, “How could that be possible now?”—a rhetorical question that may refer to the intensity of the pain he has suffered, the fact that he is dead, or both. Rafi’s attempts to evade the Ghost’s accusations reveal the injuries that realpolitik exacts on both its victims and its enablers: “It is not I that did the mischief. I was not there, if it happened at all.” The Ghost answers, “You were not there, it is true, though you gave the order.” This exchange recalls Rafi’s argument with Rosie, when he declared, “A man who sacrifices others for the benefit of the whole is in a terrible position, but he’s essential.” Neither Rosie nor the Ghost accepts Rafi’s rationalizations. The Ghost concludes the discussion, “All of human life you desecrate, Rafi Rahman!” Rafi’s suicide testifies to his possible agreement with that indictment. As they speak, the Ghost pulls off his helmet, a torture apparatus, and attaches it to Rafi’s head and eyes. The sequence ends with the sound of crackling electricity, smoke rising from Rafi’s head, and his screams. Frears then cuts to a bulldozer beginning to raze the settlement under the highway—another fiercely destructive exercise of power. Then back to Rafi, awakening with a cry in the jolting of Victoria’s retreating caravan. Was his encounter with the Ghost a dream? Is the Asian in the Brown Suit a figment of Rafi’s tormented imagination? Yet we have seen him, independent of Rafi, in the flesh as well as in various degrees of evanescence. His existential status finally doesn’t much matter. One way or another, he figures forth what Canetti called “the anxiety of command” (Canetti [1962]1973: 308):

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A command marks not only its victim, but also its giver. . . . He feels that all those to whom he has given commands, all those he has threatened with death are still alive and still remember. . . . This endless torturing awareness of danger . . . is strongest in the mightiest. . . . It can increase until, as with certain of the Roman emperors, it suddenly manifests itself as madness. Canetti [1962]1973: 308–9

We recall the Ghost’s rebuttal of Rafi’s pleading, “You gave the order,” and Rafi’s declaration to his son that he is in great danger from people who wish to kill him. He hangs himself next to a gathering of women—hostile judges, perhaps, in his mind. He has victimized and abused women, most obviously by his desertions of Sammy’s mother and of Alice. We can infer others from the Ghost’s accusations of “adulterous ass slapping” and his own paranoid terror and hatred of lesbians. Quoting Shakespeare’s hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek when he glimpses the Ghost on the street, Rafi mutters, “I was adored once, too” (Twelfth Night, II. 3. 171). But that once, we gather, was upon a time before he chose to follow the avenues of rule. A hybrid person moving back and forth between England and his unspecified native land and culture, Rafi justifies his brutal exercise of power by speaking as a product (or victim) of Western colonialists, which “my government expelled. . . . I come from a land ground into the dust by two hundred years of imperialism. The Western dominators and you reproach us for using the methods you taught us.” But those methods, as Rosie points out, destroy lives. And they make loving other people, or even approaching them, difficult and dangerous. As Canetti argued, those who exercise power require distance and isolation, not intimacy (Canetti [1962]1973: 203 ff). For Rafi, returning to ordinary closeness with others proves frightfully difficult. As Rani asserts on the occasion of their first meeting, “You could never be a purely private person.” At the party, two of the guests recognize him, with hostility: Omar:  Sammy’s our accountant. He never said his father was Rafi Rahman. He kept that quiet. Asian Accountant:  I was in Dacca when their army came in. How do you think my father was killed—falling out of bed?

Rafi is a colonialist as well as a victim of colonialism. Besides his distinctly imperialist political actions, his attitude toward the local man known to his friends as Victoria reveals a person used to domination. After Danny/Victoria escorts him to Alice’s house, Rafi tries to shoo him away. (Eventually, he succumbs to his guide’s persistence and introduces him to Alice.) Later, Rafi sits with his feet up while Danny/ Victoria, at his direction, wrestles with Sammy’s heavy TV set. Coming out of a liquor store where he’s gone to get supplies for the party Sammy and Rosie have arranged for him, Rafi again encounters Danny/Victoria, who is carrying a small child. Rafi greets him warmly; but he also automatically hands him the bags he is carrying, despite the fact that Danny/Victoria is already holding the child. Rafi then ambles along empty handed, followed by his doubly burdened acquaintance.

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

The barriers raised between people and against love by political convictions pertain not just to Rafi but also to most of the other characters. Ostensibly demonstrating the “different social and political meaning” of various kinds of “snogging,” Rosie pecks her husband, then gives Danny/Victoria a long, passionate kiss. This dismays Rafi, who is generally distressed by Rosie’s free-­spirited sexual behavior, both on his own behalf and his son’s. Comically and relevantly, the narrator of a nature show on the television in the acoustic background adds a biological perspective: “The female is asking him to mate with her. She bites him gently, then rubs her body against his [as Rosie is doing]. Females often give off a special smell when they’re ready to mate.” Cut to Rafi, looking disgusted. The demonstration Rosie mounts also disturbs Sammy, who cannot but notice that its sexual and emotional content goes well beyond its “social and political meaning.” But Sammy is unable to complain or perhaps even to acknowledge to himself his disquiet, for he and Rosie have agreed to a marriage of “freedom plus commitment.”5 As Sammy tells Anna in lines treated like a voice-­over, “There’s two things my main squeeze Rosie doesn’t need: getting the dinner on and sexual fidelity. She thinks that jealousy is wickeder than adultery.” Nonetheless, both Rosie and Sammy experience ordinary sexual jealousy. Partly because of these politically incorrect feelings and partly because their contractual terms inevitably interfere with each other, neither “commitment” nor “freedom” seems to be fully working in their relationship. Though both still love each other, their sex life has slid into non-­existence because, Rosie guesses, of “boredom, indifference, repulsion”; and they are both looking, she says, “for a way out.” In a scene that reverses the tenor of the kissing in Sammy and Rosie’s flat, explicit passion provides an occasion for implicit politics. Rosie kisses Danny/Victoria when he returns her after they’ve spent the night together in his caravan. Watched by a pair of disapproving policemen and by an equally disapproving Rafi, Rosie and Danny/ Victoria perform an extended, conspicuously sexual kiss. The ostentation of Rosie’s second exhibition is not lost on Rafi, whom she further provokes with an arch question referring to his having gone home with Alice: “Up all night?” Rafi angrily reverts to the role of conservative, domestic colonialist, “What the hell do you think you are doing, kissing that useless, filthy street-­rat in the middle of the road?” To whom Rosie, still demonstrating what a prejudice-­free-sexually-­liberated life looks like, “I find that street-­rats have an aphrodisiac effect on me, Rafi.” At this moment, two other sexually political actors, Rani and Vivia, having driven Rafi from the flat, emerge to continue their pursuit of him and his “withered sperm-­factory.” The passing Asian in a Brown Suit further enriches the politics of the scene. The political-­sexual conflict between Rani and Rafi began with their first meeting. When a feminist gathering in Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat breaks up, Rani stays behind. She wishes to meet and question Rafi. As her partner Vivia turns to leave, Rani gives her a perfunctory caress. She then notices Rafi looking on and pulls Vivia back for a lingering, open-­mouthed kiss, watching Rafi to gauge his response. Seeing his disapproval, she protracts the embrace. Rafi takes the bait, shaking his head as he turns away.

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Rani’s confrontations with Rafi have at once to do with his dislike of her sexual behavior and her knowledge of his past as a cabinet minister. (Rani unearths incriminating accounts of Rafi’s involvement with torture.) During the encounter that ends with Rafi fleeing down the drainpipe, sexual and political energies are inseparable. That their yelling at each other is done in subtitled Punjabi emphasizes the politics of what begins as a scene of unwelcome discovery—on both sides—when Rafi walks in on Rani and Vivia in bed: Rafi:  What are you doing? You perverted, half-­sexed, God-­accursed lesbians! Rani:  Fuck off, you old bastard! I’ll tin-­snip off your foreskin! . . . Who the fuck do you think you are?

Rani’s question is more than rhetorical for Sammy and Rosie as a whole. One of its central questions has to do with who Rafi is, was, and hopes to be.6 The conflict between homosexuals and heterosexuals extends beyond Rani and Rafi. Overhearing Rosie and Sammy talking about their stalled sex life, Rani offers her view of heterosexual intercourse: “the woman spends the whole time trying to come but can’t, and the man spends the whole time trying to stop himself coming but can’t.” A little later, while she and Vivia are embracing, she says, “Rosie calls the house ‘The Hedgehogs,’ because there are so many pricks around.” Passing, Sammy hears her and remarks, “Yeah. But not all pricks are men.” As if to confirm Sammy’s retort, Rani dances with and kisses another woman, at the same time declaring her love for and fidelity to Vivia, who watches jealously and then walks away in anger. Rani seems to be acting out the “freedom plus commitment” script that has worked so poorly for Sammy and Rosie, with Vivia taking the part of the distressed Sammy. The socio-­political content of sexual orientation is manifest during the demolition of the settlement. Entering on the bed of a pickup truck, the supervisor of the attack, the Property Developer, follows a bulldozer with a public address horn in hand: “Here we go, here we go, here we go! . . . That goes for you gays and fuckin’ lesbians as well.” In the screenplay, the Property Developer’s first lines are “Fuck off, you lesbian communists!” (Kureishi 1988: 55). Alice represents the sexual politics of the previous generation, but the power imbalance between men and women, and the cultural expectations of her time, disrupt love and intimacy as surely as do loosened contemporary relations. Talking with Vivia, Alice explains, “We believed in not lying to each other. Loyalty and honesty were the important things to us. Not attraction. Not something called pleasure.” Later she continues, “We didn’t have exaggerated expectations of what sex and love could offer. So we didn’t throw each other over at the first unhappiness.” What Alice describes sounds like “commitment” without much “freedom.” It came at a high price. “Like most women,” she begins to tell Rafi before he interrupts her, “my life has been based on denial, on the acknowledgement of limits.” We learn, too, that for a time approaching thirty years she has been waiting loyally for Rafi to take her away, as he said he would—waiting for “a true marriage.”

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The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Because of his neglect and his disloyalty, her view of relations between women and men has begun to bend toward the more contemporary. Before she and Rafi make love—which she hasn’t done for “years” and Rafi does “when I can”—she remarks: Women like Vivia are unnatural, (pause) and odious, of course. There’s something I’ve noticed about men that she would understand. One is constantly having to forgive men. Always they’re wanting their women to see into them, understand them, absolve them. Is there anything in that line you’d like me to help you with, Rafi dear?

Her observation suggests why lesbians so threaten powerful men like Rafi and the Property Developer, who will not find forgiveness or absolution with them, but will perhaps find too much insight. When Alice makes her observation, she approaches the view of another contemporary liberated woman, Rosie, who casually calls men “the unfair sex.” Without much modification, Rosie’s label describes Rafi. As already noted, her father-­in-law loathes lesbians and disapproves of her friends and behavior; he sarcastically refers to her as “Lady Chatterley.” He preferred power over Alice. He deserted Sammy’s mother and is deserting another wife in favor of his male heir. When Anna asks Sammy if Rafi has any other children, he replies, with obvious irony, “Not really. Only daughters.” A stereotypical sexist male, Rafi remembers England for “hot buttered toast on a fork in front of an open fire and cunty fingers.”7 (To Rosie, however, he declares, “For me, it [London] is the center of civilization—tolerant, intelligent, and completely out of control now, I hear.”) He has no reply to the Ghost’s accusation that he was “slapping women’s arses adulterously.” For him, “a kiss is just a kiss,” not a social or political act, let alone some sort of emotional commitment. Just before they make love, when Alice tries to tell him about her life, he cuts her off with, “Christ Alice, let’s just have fun.” The next morning, as she notices, “You couldn’t leave quickly enough. . . . There was barely a heartbeat between your eyes opening and the tube [subway] doors shutting.” More damningly, love for Rafi has become tangled with lethal power. Intensely, he lectures Rosie, “A man who hasn’t killed is a virgin, and doesn’t understand the importance of love.” Confronted by the Ghost’s accusations, he responds, “I’ve tried to love people.” But love is hardly possible for Rafi, who supports in theory the laboring class and downtrodden revolutionaries; but who, past and present, fits only too well as a conservative power broker into what Colette Lindroth calls a vision of “England as Eliot’s Waste Land . . . fear in a handful of dust” (Lindroth 1989: 95). As Stan Brakhage wrote, “There can be no ultimate love where there is fear” (Brakhage 2014: 63). But Rafi is trying to gain, if not love, at least “human feeling” from his son and his daughter-­inlaw, and from Alice. When he hangs himself, in telling isolation from the group of women chatting in the next room, he perhaps receives a little of that human feeling from the audience. Northrop Frye observed, “The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual . . . from a social group to which he is trying to belong” (Frye [1957]1967: 39). Despite

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all that we know of his past as power-­abuser, hypocrite, and womanizer, and of his present as a manipulator of his son’s feelings and a bigot, he gains some sympathy in the anguish of his final act. “The only true villain,” Quart notes, “is Margaret Thatcher” (Quart 1994: 242). Compared to his father, Sammy represents a less stereotypical, more complex, and more liberated character, at least superficially. Though he has signed on to the “freedom plus commitment” pact with his wife, he is handling it with difficulty, especially when Rosie avails herself of the first term. He enters Sammy and Rosie lying next to Anna, who has a small “w” tattooed on each cheek of her naked rump. (She explains the significance, “When I bend over, it spells ‘wow.’ ”) He assures her that Rosie is “knocked out” by what he tells his wife of his current mistress. Later though, he has second thoughts about his own freedom. He declines Anna’s invitation to spend the night with her (even though Rosie is doing that with Danny/Victoria), “I’m trying to go into a whole new regime. . . . My prick keeps leading me into trouble.” Testing his self-­ diagnosis, Anna reaches over his shoulder to stroke the offending member; the result confirms his analysis, for we next see Sammy in her flat. Once she and his prick have led him into her apartment, however, she upbraids him about his promiscuity: Anna:  You must be thinking about Rosie right now. (Sammy bows his head.) How completely odd and freakish for husband to think about his wife when he’s with his lover! (She throws him down, his head hanging in space, over water below.) How many lovers have you had in the past two years? Sammy:  About, about, about . . . [As he speaks, a helicopter search light illuminates him and Anna, as if they represent a threat.] A:  Yeah? S:  Twelve or so. A:  For you, pursuing a woman is like hang-­gliding! They’re a challenge, something to be overcome! It’s fuckin’ out of date, man! It’s about time you learned how to love someone! That’s what fuckin’ life is, baby!

Without transition, we next see them reconciled, as Sammy massages Anna’s foot. He asks her a painful question, one that he seems unable to ask his wife: “What would you do if you discovered that someone close to you, a parent say, had done some stuff that was horrific and unforgivable?” Anna’s answer, ultimately, is “commere,” and they make love. During what follows, which Kureishi refers to as “the fuck sequence,” the GhettoLites sing the Temptations’ “My Girl” and the film cuts with increasing rapidity among Anna and Sammy, Rosie and Danny/Victoria, and Alice and Rafi making love, along with shots of the singers bopping past Danny/Victoria’s caravan. We may view the Ghetto-Lites as an upbeat Chorus here and elsewhere. They appear as a sort of happy-­go-lucky, peace-­and-friendship band in the tube station when we first see Danny/Victoria; they cross the motorway and descend to the settlement as Sammy drives home from Anna’s; they briefly dance past the rioters the night of Rafi’s

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arrival; and they provide more happy-­hippie vibes in the tube station when Danny/Victoria has rescued Rafi from the chaos of the street and is taking him to Alice’s home. Quart asserts, “It [the fuck sequence] is an ecstatic affirmation of sex for its own sake” (Quart 1994: 247), and John Hill seems to agree: When Omar declares “ ‘much good can come from fucking,’ this is a view which the films [Sammy and Rosie and My Beautiful Laundrette] seem to share” (Hill 1999: 214). But making love while the Ghetto-Lites sing “My Girl” doesn’t clarify difficult questions for Sammy and Rosie, or for Rafi and Alice. Celebratory and unifying—we all make love, or want to—as the song may be, it nonetheless threatens to reduce lovemaking to a recreation, something that a man does with “my girl” that makes him feel “this way.” It diverts Sammy (and his parent, his wife, and their lovers) for the moment, but nobody’s problems are alleviated by the distraction. Like Anna, who is in love with him, Sammy is jealous—a greater sin than his adultery, according to Rosie’s doctrine. Nonetheless, it is a sin he cannot help but commit. Nor can Sammy evade mourning the decline of his marriage. He does indeed love someone, Rosie, but their freedom appears to be undermining their commitment, slowly and painfully. “Why do you think we don’t want to screw now?” Sammy asks Rosie as he’s doing her fingernails. The “repulsion” part of her answer clearly stings him, as does her refusal to stay home rather than going to her lover the night of Rafi’s arrival. As she’s leaving she adds, woundingly, “Sometimes I want a little passion.” Later he will hear from his wife that between sleeping with Danny/Victoria and him the choice is “easy”—in Danny/Victoria’s favor. That finishes him, and he goes off to prepare for their separation. As he’s dividing their books into “yours” and “mine,” one becomes a matter of mild dispute, the suggestively titled The Long Goodbye. Like the possible breakup of their marriage, the ownership of the book is ambiguous; Sammy recalls, “I bought it for you.” “Whose does that make it, officially?” Rosie asks. “Oh, you take it.” Then a sentimental memory, “We read it to each other in Brighton. We made love on the train.” Her words reveal that she too may suffer from the sin of jealousy, albeit perhaps less acutely than Sammy. She parries her husband’s “Let’s try and love each other a little,” with “How did you enjoy sleeping with Anna last night?” Her implicit refusal connects with her feelings about his current affair and, one guesses, with her feelings concerning the other “twelve or so” lovers he’s had in the past two years.8 Sammy attempts to defuse her question, “To be honest, I’d rather have stayed in and redecorated the kitchen,” but we know that he is lying, because we’ve seen him not only very much enjoying his lovemaking with Anna but also in intimate conversation with her. Rosie does not appear to be deceived, and does not respond in kind. Sammy continues, “You? (pause) You’re smiling inside at the thought of Danny. Did you like each other?” Rosie makes no attempt to spare her spouse’s feelings, “He excited me terribly.” At the same time, however, Rosie seems ambivalent about dissolving her marriage. When Sammy indicates that the decision to separate has been made, she disputes him, “What decision? What decision?” And after suggesting that they try living apart, she

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tells him “I won’t stop loving you.” Earlier, when Sammy says, “I do love you more than anyone else I’ve known,” Rosie replies, “Me too, stupid.” The disconnection that afflicts men and women disrupts the family—or potential family—made up of Sammy, Rafi, and Rosie and the family-­that-might-­have-been consisting of Rafi and Alice. In both cases, present affections and future hopes are blighted by the past, by political pressures and commitments, and by the chaos of contemporary conditions and mores and their conflict with traditional values. Indeed, the family practically defines tradition and is defined by it in turn: a family is a tradition. An interchange between Rafi and Anna suggests some of the tension that makes family-­forming in Sammy and Rosie so difficult: Rafi:  You young international people mystify me. For you the world and culture is a kind of departmental store. You go in and take something you like from each floor. But you’re attached to nothing. Anna:  I’m a free spirit, open to everything.

The tension between freedom and commitment, redefined in a cultural setting as openness and attachment, pulls against familial coherence. When Rosie asks Rafi what he’s doing in London, he replies, “I want to see you both, because I love you.” He mentions his “old friend Alice,” as well, but he does not mention, as he does to Danny/Victoria, that he “was terribly in love with her.” What follows this conversation with Rosie, however, renders implausible Rafi’s protestations of familial love; what he brings is not love but money and an attempt to arouse filial concern in his son. “I’m in great danger,” he tells Sammy, “I’m here in London partly because my life has been threatened there.” He doesn’t answer Sammy’s “Who from?” but concludes with, “Let’s just say that from now on I’m in your hands.” We might call this ploy, using Robert Frost’s famous words, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there / They have to take you in.” Rafi will try it again with Alice, when he asks if he might live with her: “I can’t live in that part of London anymore. Day after day those kids burn down their own streets. . . . Alice, take pity on me. I have too many personal problems.” He does not mention his flight from past political sins resurrected by Rani and Vivia and the gender hatreds between them, the immediate reason for his evacuating the flat of Sammy and Rosie. Instead, he lets Alice believe that the injury he suffered fleeing them occurred during the riot. He offers money, evidently a large sum, to Sammy, but with conditions: “You can have the money, provided you buy yourself a house in a part of London that is not twinned with Beirut. I would also like some grandchildren. Please. There is money for them too.” For a smaller bribe, a new car for Sammy after his was destroyed in the riot, a smaller expectation: “I got it for him,” he tells Anna. “And what does he have to do for you in return?” “Care for me a little bit.” (The perfect phrase, “care for” in both its senses of “have affection” and “take care of.” Frears began with—and collaborated on—an extraordinarily well written screenplay when he made this film.) Sammy responds ambivalently to his father, much as we have seen him do with Rosie and their marriage. A fundamentally humane person, Rosie says to her husband

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when Rafi arrives, “Don’t hurt him.” Sammy’s reply is not conciliatory, “He did abandon me years ago. He’s a stranger to me.” With Anna, Sammy says much the same, more bitterly, “He never wanted me. . . . I think I must have been the result of a premature ejaculation.” Yet he does not contradict Anna when she remarks, “You worship him, don’t you?” and he warmly returns his father’s greeting embrace. Sammy reacts ambivalently to his father’s attempts to make his son responsible for his happiness and safety. Unambiguous, however, is his desire to cash the large check Rafi has offered him. During an unusually amiable moment, when Sammy and Rosie are together making fun of Rafi’s habits, Sammy recalls the check and abruptly turns on his wife, “Stop badmouthing my father, you silly bitch! . . . It’s a lotta dough I’m on about here, so we’d better get respectful right now.” Nor does he forget his father’s desire for grandchildren: “Rosie, I think we should have a kid. . . . I’m well hot to trot in that respect.” Sammy’s proposal, like virtually all action in this complicated movie, could also have more than one motive, here his distress over his alienation from his wife, and the possibility that having a child together might restore their relationship. As to the house, Sammy remembers that, too. But his vision is hardly of home sweet home. The one he’s found “Would suit both of us bunny rabbits—so much room we could go for days without seeing each other. Or without seeing Pop. . . . He could have the basement, or dungeon, as we could call it.” Rafi’s past involvement with “stuff that was horrific and unforgivable” presents a barrier that Sammy can hardly imagine crossing—hence the reference to the “dungeon.” Rosie’s reaction to all this recalls her response to his suggestion that they have a child: she walks away. Sammy resents his father’s desertion when he was growing up; but he is not alone in looking back on a dismal childhood. Like Sammy, Alice was neglected by her parents, having been taken care of by “the ayah [nanny] that brought me up for the first eight years of my life.” After that, one supposes, she would have been old enough to be sent to a boarding school in India, where her family lived, or to one in England. Speaking with Alice of her children’s infrequent visits, Rafi observes, “The natural bonds are severed, though. And love is sought everywhere except at the home. What is wrong with the home?” Alice replies, “Usually the people who live there,” a judgment that applies to the past and present situations of most of the central figures of Sammy and Rosie. Rosie’s parents were worse than neglectful. Her father, the mayor of the town, brutalized her; and her mother was having an affair with her father’s official chauffeur. Rosie eventually “changed my name and became myself.” But scars remain: “My father would smash me across the room. Then he’d put on his mayor’s chain and open church bazaars. Since then I’ve had trouble coming to terms with men’s minds. Their bodies are alright.” Since Rosie has lost her taste for Sammy’s body, it’s hard to see on what basis their marriage is surviving. Family sorrows and ironies are strongly connected with eating together, or not managing to do so. For one of Frears’s influences, Alfred Hitchcock, the symbology of consuming food was emphatic across most of his films, with communal dining signifying love and concord and its lack or corruption the absence or opposite. Whether Frears and Kureishi adopted this motif from Hitchcock is hard to guess though, since

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communal dining is an almost universally recognized social symbol as well as a widely used cinematic one. Rafi almost always eats alone. The film introduces him, finishing a bag of some snack, seated in first class on the plane carrying him to London. Significantly, he has no companion in the adjacent seat. In Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat, Rosie gives him dinner but does not eat with him. Frears echoes the introductory shot later when Rafi eats sweets from a bag while Danny/Victoria struggles with the TV set; eventually, he tosses one to his inferior. The meal he shares in a fancy restaurant, turns into a debacle, with Rosie accusing him of suppression of the press and involvement in torture. Their argument becomes a shouting match that drives away an offended patron (a drag queen whom Rosie calls “a real star”) and ends with Rafi, Rosie, and Sammy obliged to leave. It is during this contentious dinner that a breadstick appears to turn into a finger in Rafi’s mouth. Later, after his night of lovemaking with Alice, Rafi can hardly wait to escape the breakfast he is sharing with her. Like his father, Sammy chooses as well as suffers his isolation, social and familial. Sitting alone on his couch, deafened to the world around him by headphones playing opera, perusing a girlie magazine on his lap, and with his pants around his ankles, he eats a solitary dinner of fast food take-­out after Rosie has gone off, half-­dressed, to meet Walter, her current lover. We recall Sammy telling Anna that Rosie “doesn’t need getting the dinner on.” As for Rosie, she claims to know “more about carrots” than sex— referring to a scene in which some of her friends are rolling a condom onto that vegetable, evidently for a birth control demonstration. During one of the few congenial moments between Rosie and Sammy, they share a can of beer; but that congeniality quickly ends when, as mentioned, Sammy recalls Rafi’s bribe and upbraids his wife. Sammy sprays Danny/Victoria with the next can of drink in his hands, using it as a sort of passive, accidental weapon after Rosie’s kissing demonstration. The one time we see Sammy sharing food in an undisturbed setting, he is serving Anna breakfast the morning after the “fuck sequence.” His preparation of food for his lover contrasts ironically with Rosie’s attitude toward cooking; but even in this sequence, he does not join Anna in eating what he gives her. Food is connected, also, with social disruption. Early in the film, the police mount an intense military operation against a building in which they hope to arrest a young jazz trumpeter. As they attack, they pass a barking dog that ignores them to chase its own tail—an apt emblem for the futility of their assault and the frenzy of self-­ destruction that follows in the rioting. A pan of frying chips (French fries, in the U.S.), thrown impulsively on an intruding policeman, leads the policeman’s partner, equally impulsively, to shoot the woman who throws it and precipitates the chaos. That riot embodies the class and cultural conflicts that pervade Sammy and Rosie, starting with the pre-­credit shot of what may be the smoking ruins of the settlement bulldozed in the penultimate sequence. The “big job to do in some of those inner cities” that Margaret Thatcher assigns her followers consists, in Sammy and Rosie, of destroying a peaceful community settlement to benefit the Property Developer. He tells a government official, “It might surprise you, but there’s a lot of money to be made out of this [the riot].” The official is compliant: “If you invest here,” he tells the Developer, “You

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can do whatever you like.” But his assurance is not sufficient. The Property Developer adds, “I’ve got to have that open space under the motorway, then we can talk.” To Alice, he offers a different story during the demolition, “I’m proud to say—making London a cleaner and safer place.” During the razing of the settlement, we hear Margaret Thatcher’s speechifying once more, this time backed by stirring music whose words are hard to discern, but whose patriotic import is clear.9 Set against the obliteration of a peaceful, coherent community, her noble (if hackneyed) words ring hollow, and the sequence as a whole reads as gloomily ironic: “Where there’s discord, may we bring harmony; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; where there’s despair, may we bring hope.” The repeated “may we bring” sounds like the “domestic colonialism” that Danny/Victoria described to Rafi, the “White Man’s burden” in twentieth century London. The sound track behind the eviction sequence was evidently a late addition, informed by what Kureishi called the “anger and despair following the [recent national] Election,” which Thatcher’s Conservatives swept. It does not change the basic political tenor of the film. The self-­justifications Rafi offers the Ghost the night before the demolition fit comfortably within Tory social schemes: “The country needed a sense of direction, of identity. People like you, organizing into unions, discouraged and disrupted all progress.” In Sammy and Rosie’s London, as during Rafi’s rule when he “shot rioters dead in the street,” national identity does not include dissent. Cockfosters, the uncrowded residential neighborhood in which Alice lives, though without the violence where Rosie and Sammy live, is not portrayed as an attractive alternative. Alice says that she enjoys neighbors “rarely” speaking to her, and “I’ve been living there for thirty years; nobody’s interfered with me once.” Her words describe estrangement, genteel perhaps, but estrangement nonetheless. Like other sites of disconnection, Alice’s place of residence keeps her away both from other people and from the rest of London. Though her children live in the city, she sees them, she tells Rafi, only once or twice a year. Her neighborhood has not evolved during recent decades. When Danny/Victoria guides a riot-­shaken Rafi to her street, they find themselves back in a time of racial separation and suspicion. As they walk, Rafi asks, “Why are they looking at us like that?” Danny/Victoria explains, “They think we’re going to rob their houses.” “God,” Rafi says, “things have changed little here.” Rafi, however, has changed. He’s become one of those who don’t want to be seen in the company of blacks. When they arrive at Alice’s house, Rafi thanks Danny/Victoria and dismisses him, casually shooing him away. But Danny/Victoria declines to be discharged. After Alice opens the door and Rafi enters, Danny/Victoria climbs over a long stone wall—symbolic perhaps—that backs the rear gardens. He passes two gardeners, who take no notice of him. A black man in a Cockfosters back yard is evidently invisible. Thus ignored, Danny/Victoria finds and puts on an elegantly decorated and very feminine sun bonnet. Seeing him outside of Alice’s window, as Rafi says later, “nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.” Eventually, Danny/Victoria’s persistence prevails, and Rafi introduces him to Alice as “someone I think you should meet . . . my map-­reader and guide,

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Victoria. We owe this visit to his ingenuity and kindness.” Amused by his sunbonnet, which may be hers, Alice greets him warmly. Her cordiality contrasts strikingly with Rafi’s condescension.

Hope amidst the ruins A film that begins with a shot of smoking urban wreckage and ends with a suicide and a grieving son can hardly be upbeat. Nor do its portraits of a disintegrating marriage, riots, failing or absent families, political and gender conflict, sexual jealousy, and domestic colonialism lighten the mood. Nonetheless, Sammy and Rosie is not entirely bleak. After the production team viewed an early cut, they discussed softening the ending: “We talk about there being another scene at the very end of the film, a scene between Sammy and Rosie under a tree, maybe at Hammersmith, by the river” (Kureishi 1988: 120). If the scene was shot, Frears decided against including it. Even had it been included, it could not have erased the frustration and grief that the body of the film portrays; but it would have suggested—unconvincingly, in my opinion—that the problems between Rosie and Sammy were somehow resolved by Rafi’s suicide. As Spivak writes about the ending, “The rest of the film has prepared us to see this fragility [of “alliances”] and we should pay attention to the rest of the film” (Spivak 1993: 253). The ending as it stands, with Rosie holding a weeping Sammy and crying in sympathy, and with the bereaved couple ardently kissing each other (for the only time), suggests the possibility that the centrality of their love for each other may be made evident to both of them by this tragedy and might begin to lead them back together. Or maybe not. As Lindroth writes, “Like ‘The Waste Land,’ Sammy and Rosie holds out the fragile hope of redemption won at much cost” (Lindroth 1989: 98).10 A better word than “redemption,” might be “melioration,” and one might better locate it not in the relationship of Rosie and Sammy but in the character and actions of Danny/Victoria. Like all the central characters in Sammy and Rosie, Danny/Victoria is complex; but he contrasts with them as being especially attractive—culturally, intellectually, and physically.11 Moreover, in an otherwise realistic, grim screenplay, he is the one character, as Kureishi told Gift, who is “unreal enough and idealized” (Kureishi 1988: 90). Handsome, affectionate and instinctively helpful, articulate and calm, Danny/Victoria is a romantic hero in an ironic world. In a film one of the main themes of which is the disintegration of the family, he has a child, whom he consistently includes in his life—in contrast to what we know of Rafi’s abandonment first of Sammy and then of the uncherished daughters he left behind. Only Danny/Victoria could plausibly invite Rosie to “Follow me up the Yellow Brick Road.” Where Rosie can at best manage not to hate Rafi (a level of toleration Rani denounces as “liberalism gone mad”), Danny/Victoria actually likes him, despite his treatment of him as a sort of coolie, and social inferior. For Rafi, Danny/Victoria is a guide, a role related to his status as a native to Rafi’s colonialist. As “map-­reader” and master of the tube system, Danny gets him to Alice’s, after rescuing him from the violence of the neighborhood uprising. His home is the last

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refuge for Rafi after Rosie and Sammy, who “have no human feeling for me,” and Alice turn away from him. In Danny/Victoria’s caravan he receives a welcome, a cup of tea, and a bed for the night, where he suffers his terrifying dream. The next morning, he rejoins “the proletariat,” albeit in delirium. For Danny/Victoria, Rafi presents an opportunity to express his political insights and his puzzlement as to what, if anything, to do. At Rafi’s urging, Danny/Victoria tells him “what’s wrong.” His speech comes closer than anything else in Sammy and Rosie to summarizing its central political dilemma: For a long time, right, I’ve been for non-­violence. Never gone for burning things down. I can see the attraction but not the achievement. After all, you guys ended colonialism non-­violently. You’d sit down all over the place, right? We have a kind of domestic colonialism to deal with here, because they don’t allow us to run our own communities. But if full-­scale war breaks out we can only lose. And what’s going to happen to all that beauty?12

After this speech, Danny/Victoria asks, “How should we fight?” Rafi doesn’t answer, nor does the film. But through Danny/Victoria, Sammy and Rosie does suggest answers to equally important questions of how to feel, act, and be. Smiling with apparent approval as he walks through the riot, Danny/Victoria sympathizes with what he is witnessing. When he sees a policeman and a rioter grappling, however, he throws himself upon the pair. To aid the policeman? The rioter? More likely, from what we have seen of him, he’s attempting to break up the fight. He assists Rafi after a rioter has knocked him to the sidewalk. He corrects Rafi’s “riot” to “revolt,” again expressing some degree of approval. But he involves himself as a peacemaker and helper of those who need help: “Where do you live? I’ll take you home.” Danny/Victoria’s ambiguous relation to the riot emphasizes its mixed portrayal. Carried out by a destructive crowd, from his perspective it might be also be considered constructive. As Canetti notes, for the crowd itself, the noises of its rampage “are the robust sounds of new life. . . . Everything shouts together; the din is the applause of objects” (Canetti [1962]1973: 19). Fire, an especially potent symbol of an unrestrained crowd, serves “refusal crowds” like the one that rebels at the beginning of the film as an ally and friend as well as symbol. A rampaging crowd revolts to wipe out “established and universal visible and valid distances” (Canetti [1962]1973: 19). In a movie that persistently shows the dismal effects of alienation and isolation, even a destructive crowd, in its egalitarian unity, can appear sympathetic. As Sammy tells Rafi, Rosie says such events “are an affirmation of the human spirit.” At the end of the film, a second annihilating crowd, this time representing the government, money, and conventional values, attacks the settlers. From the point of view that the film appears to endorse, the devastation of the settlement seems to be fundamentally harmful. Again, however, from the viewpoint of the destroyers, their destruction is making for a cleaner, safer London. Though that claim comes from a

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character whom we know to be more interested in a financial windfall than in sanitation or civic security, his crowd also has a more sympathetic advocate in Alice. She greets him warmly and has earlier expressed her dismay at the “ignorant anger and lack of respect for this great land” of rioters and counterculture dropouts. Moreover, the crowd of settlers, routed for the moment, is still coherent and is moving on to another battle with the powers that be. Their retreat has a tone of defiance, even triumph, in their continuing existence as a crowd. For the moment at least, “all that beauty” endures. Like those of Sammy and Rosie, Danny/Victoria’s childhood circumstances were not wholly fortunate. But unlike them, his story had a happy continuation: he was brought up by a loving woman named Paulette. It was she, however, whom we saw killed at the beginning of the film. Danny/Victoria explains to Rosie, “Paulette, the police just went into her house and shot her up. That was the start of the rebellion. Nobody knows the shit black people have to go through in this country.” Nonetheless, despite his deep connection to the victim of the police and his adopting of the not entirely accurate version of her killing, Danny/Victoria does not join the violence. He says to Rafi, “A fine woman I loved got shot up by police. Friends were dragging whites from cars, and beating them up, for revenge. I didn’t know if I should be doing it.” As we see from his conversations with Rafi and elsewhere, Danny/Victoria has a sophistication that understands social complexity better than any of the other

“Nobody knows.” Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears, 1987) © Lorimar Home Video.

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characters, whatever their pretensions. The killing of Paulette is not the simple matter the popular rendition makes of it. In their assault on Paulette’s building the police, to be sure, appear to be absurdly over-­equipped and excessively numerous; but (the operative word for talking about most of Sammy and Rosie) they clearly thought their target dangerous, and he instantly fled them. However impulsively, Paulette did throw proverbially boiling oil on the first policeman who entered her kitchen, causing him to scream and fall in the sight of his partner, whose shooting of her seems to have been hardly less impetuous than her throwing the hot oil. Danny/Victoria could not know these details, but he knows that things are always more complicated than they seem. Even the conversation he overhears involving the unsympathetic Property Developer who wants the site under the motorway describes something more complex than a simple land grab; it sets forth a condition upon which a more constructive deal pivots. The government official is looking to help the neighborhood: “You’re a wealthy, intelligent businessman. You’ve got to invest in this area—for your sake and ours.” Danny/Victoria’s relations with Rosie are also complex. He watches her intently as she walks through the riot on the way to meet her lover. The next day he discovers that the flat to which he has followed Rafi is hers, and there she demonstrates her unconnubial kiss upon him. It is, as we have seen, an especially complicated act. Her expanding relationship with Danny/Victoria continues the complexity. During their mutual seduction, they lightly chew each other’s fingers, a courtship gesture that resonates ironically with the breadstick-­turned-finger Rafi finds in his mouth. At the party, he calls her flat “this lonely place,” aptly enough, and suggests that they “go to a lonelier one,” which is lonelier only in that it is more private. The alienation Rosie experiences with her husband, her father-­in-law, and her friends, she does not experience with Danny/Victoria. During the “fuck sequence,” the intercourse of the “downwardly mobile” Rosie with Danny/Victoria is especially sensual, and they are at the center of the triply-­split screen at the end. Unlike Rafi and his son, Danny/Victoria does not seem to need absolution or forgiveness from his partner. Of greater importance than their sensual enjoyment of each other and whatever “social and political” meaning it may have are the continuing consequences of Rosie’s and Danny/Victoria’s night together. For Rosie, it appears to bring a sexual reawakening. At the same time, Danny/Victoria as lover forces the gradually decaying marriage of Rosie and Sammy to crisis—for Sammy, a point of decision. The painful clarity Danny/ Victoria brings about between them makes it possible, paradoxically, to imagine at the end of the film that they may yet reconcile; they have gone to the bottom of their relationship, and everything wrong with it lies open and acknowledged. Generally, Danny/Victoria acts as a catalyst, bridge, or connection with everyone he encounters. In multiple ways, he encompasses sexes and gender roles, classes, nations, and races. Immediately following the opening credits, he appears seated in a tube carriage [car, U.S.] that is about to leave the station, absorbed in work that causes him to nearly miss his stop. Bolting out of the closing doors, he holds them open for an old lady (anticipating his helpfulness throughout the movie), then exchanges a cordial greeting with a security officer. He seems to know almost everyone in his neighborhood.

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Later, in an Underground station, he greets and is embraced by the rag-­tag band of musicians who emanate from the settlement. His association with the underground transportation system corresponds to his role, for the tube is the circulatory system that connects all parts of London’s body. He knows and is known by its strangest denizens, grotesques encountered during the ride to Alice’s home. “Sometimes,” he tells Rafi, “I ride the tube all day.” The second time we see him, he is arriving at the scene of the police invasion, where a warning tape holds back the gathering crowd. Danny/Victoria produces a small pair of scissors, cuts the tape, and the crowd surges forward. His action symbolizes his role as one who frees people and allows them to come together in shared purposes. It anticipates, as well, his function as a catalyst, someone who is only briefly involved, but whose presence and actions lead others to transformations. Danny/Victoria’s compound name underlines his status as a joiner of genders. It derives from his inhabiting of the Underground: “Danny my name is. But people who like me call me Victoria. . . . It’s my office, the Victoria Line. It’s where I do my paperwork.” Danny/Victoria’s appropriation of two sexes extends beyond his name; we recall his putting on the feathered garden bonnet, and he often carries with him a small child, acting as mother and father at once. So who is Danny/Victoria? For Rafi, he is rescuer, native informant, “filthy street-­ rat,” and host of last resort. For Sammy, he is an interloper and formidable rival. For Rosie, a mannequin on which to make sociological and political points and an aphrodisiac and erotic companion. To Alice, an amusing acquaintance of Rafi’s; to her neighbors, a black who might rob their houses. He works, but we don’t know at what, and his office is the subway. He has a mother, but he was brought up by Paulette. He lives among squatters, but he is well dressed and he owns a caravan and an expensive motorcycle. He is literate, and has decorated his home with lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He is articulate and witty. He knows many people and much about whatever is going on. In a time of disconnection, he is connected and connects. Eithne O’Neill calls Danny/Victoria “the guide to the city” (O’Neill 1994: 26). She emphasizes his mythic quality and asserts that when he cuts the crime tape around the house in which Paulette was killed, “opening the gate to Hell, Danny is a grand traveler in the face of the Eternal” (O’Neill 1994: 26). The bisexuality of his name, Danny/ Victoria, and his maternal quality with the child he carries “echoes the androgyny of Tiresias, the ancient figure with ‘shrunken breasts’ ” (O’Neill 1994: 27). Living with the settlers under the motorway, Danny/Victoria, like them, has “no given place in this society” (O’Neill 1994: 27). When he takes Rosie to the settlement, he introduces into Sammy and Rosie a pastoral idyll in the midst of a ruinous “central city.” Emerging from his caravan in the morning, Rosie encounters a sort of urban rustic village, filled with people gardening, washing, cultivating and watering plants, cranking out fliers on an ancient duplicating machine, sewing up each other’s clothing, cooking, and eating together harmoniously. Like the pastoral retreats of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, this paradoxical bucolic setting eventually brings together all the main characters and it shows, with a clarity uncluttered by the distractions of the quotidian, fundamental truths about them and their society.

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Outside and above, however, the Property Developer with a pair of colleagues look down on the settlement through binoculars. Rosie notices them, “What’s going on?” “They’re chucking us off this site,” answers Danny/Victoria, “either today or the next day or the day after that.” Sammy and Rosie cannot turn suddenly into a romantic comedy, even with the help of Rosie’s new lover. For Rafi, the settlement provides an understanding of his past so devastating that he cannot go on living. During and after the destruction of this urban arcadia, most of the main characters come together—Sammy, Rosie, Alice, Anna with her camera, the Property Developer, and Danny/Victoria—and they are joined by the police, the settlers, and, on the sound track, the citizenry and the government. Over the roar of destruction, we hear the patriotic hymn and Thatcher’s rhetoric, its soaring, balanced phrases at once profoundly ironic and at the same time turning into a song of defiance as the settlers move on—so we later hear—to Westminster. The women, of different ages, gender identities, nationalities, and romantic or marital connections, return to the flat of Rosie and Sammy, where they lunch together and discuss what they have seen. As the movie ends, Rafi and Sammy return separately, the former to commit suicide, the latter to grieve for his father and to be comforted by his wife. Danny/Victoria has departed. He has done, expedited, provoked, and been what he could. As his caravan joins the departing settlers, he tells Rosie, “Looks like I’m on my way out.” He jumps onto the caravan and climbs to its roof, on which he stands— triumphantly somehow. In the grand scheme of things, in London and English politics, in British society, not much has changed. But a little, for a few people, has.13 Danny/ Victoria leaves behind a hint of how this bitter world might be a trace better.

4

“Multi-­whatever-it-­is”: Dirty Pretty Things

That’s what the film’s about, really, this multi-­culturalism, multi-­ whatever-it-­is.

Stephen Frears1

The world in London International airports are the world’s mixing bowls. In one of London’s, Dirty Pretty Things begins and ends. Frears’s 2002 film is peopled by characters from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and, by allusion, North America. Its London, as Brunsdon argues, “is a global city” (Brunsdon 2007: 117). Much of its action occurs in the Baltic Hotel, a place of tourists and other transients, with a Russian night doorman, maids who appear to be from most of the rest of the world, and a bi-­racial prostitute named Juliette (Sophie Okonedo). There the Spanish manager, Señor Juan, better known as “Sneaky” (Sergi Lopez), traffics in kidneys removed from desperate donors in exchange for counterfeit passports that “can make you whatever you want.”2 While Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) searches Chinatown for a frantic Senay (Audrey Tautou), she agrees to yield her Turkish kidney to Sneaky in exchange for a new Italian identity. That trade—if she survives it—will allow her to move to New York, the city of her dreams. Unexpectedly, Sneaky insists on a down payment: Senay’s virginity. When she reveals to Juliette what has happened, the film raises other sorts of “multi-­whatever”: “Jesus!” exclaims Juliette. “Mohammed!” responds Senay. Juliette again: “What a pair we are, the virgin and the whore.” The title of the film describes yet another kind of “multi”: “Dirty” and “Pretty.” Those qualities are not always separate; indeed they often describe the same “Things,” depending on point-­of-view. Preparing lunch, Okwe turns on the hot water to clean glasses; it then stops running in the bathroom, where Senay is washing. “Everything here,” she informs him, “is connected to everything else.” Her sentence largely sums up the “multi-­whatever” of Dirty Pretty Things; its London is everywhere and contains everything. When Senay asks Okwe where he has been—he has detoured to help a Somali man infected by an unclosed surgical wound—he simply replies, “Africa.” He has answered truthfully, though he has not left England.

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Multi-­genre Dirty Pretty Things Like most of Frears’s movies, Dirty Pretty Things mixes generic elements: It is a love story and a “problem film,” that is, a movie exploring social or cultural dilemmas.3 It balances ironic realism with the romantic artificiality of what Frears calls “a glossy film.” It is a romance in both the popular meaning of that word and the broader one: a story of striking adventures in a world where considerations of plausibility are slightly loosened. As Ian Sinclair observes, accurately if disapprovingly, “It’s a fairy story, a grimy fable” (Sinclair 2002: 34). Along with those generic elements, it compounds a strong dose of mystery-­thriller. Frears remarks, “The film is all the things at once . . . funny, a thriller, and all those things.” Generically, Dirty Pretty Things itself counts as “multi-­whatever.”

Comedy and mystery The “funny” in Frears’s comment might seem a little off target; but Dirty Pretty Things, finally and therefore predominantly, is a comedy. (It is also sometimes funny.) It has tragic elements and romantic and ironic ones, but it adds to the suspense of a thriller the pleasing anxieties of a story of love achieved, the resolution of traditional comic plots. The “closing embrace” that Northrop Frye notes as signifying the desired uniting of the central couple is only slightly diminished when replaced by a barely audible “I love you” between Senay and Okwe as they separate in the airport (Frye [1957]1967: 164). Their ability to freely leave England suggests a possible reunion, a future life for the lovers beyond mere survival. Though Dirty Pretty Things becomes emphatically comic only in its concluding minutes—beginning when Sneaky succumbs to the anesthetic in a doped bottle of beer—the obstacles to its happy ending are familiar. The main barrier to the happiness of the protagonists consists of what Frye called “some absurd, cruel, or irrational law” (Frye [1957]1967: 166). Immigration rules allow Senay to live in England but forbid her the means to do so, and force Okwe, a political refugee and a physician, to live pseudonymously as a taxi driver and night desk clerk. When he overcomes the many impediments his situation puts in front of him, saves the woman with whom he rightly belongs, and manages to return to his native country, Okwe’s story also resembles a domesticated, miniature version of what Frye calls “the epic of return . . . a romance of a hero escaping safely from incredible perils and arriving in the nick of time to claim his bride and baffle the villains” (Frye [1957]1967: 319). An appreciation of the comic elements of Dirty Pretty Things helps us to make sense of what might otherwise appear to be gratuitous sexual sensationalism, Sneaky’s coercive rape of Senay and the sexual blackmail inflicted on her by the Sweatshop Foreman (Barber Ali). In the episodes of sexual assault, the eccentric comedy and the problem film elements of Dirty Pretty Things mingle. The comic aspect of Frears’s film accounts for the coarseness of Senay’s sweatshop humiliation, ending with a “bite,” which is surprisingly played for laughs; it makes understandable why her misery after

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her violation by Sneaky is so quickly allowed to dissipate. Humor also includes such moments as Okwe’s assessment of his boss’s and co-­workers’ venereal disease, contracted from “a very popular lady”; camera placement during the doctor’s ministrations incongruously brings to mind acts of oral sex. Mystery-­thriller suspense begins early in Frears’s film with a series of shots that perhaps derive from similar shots in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). As Okwe looks into an overflowing toilet, bloody water streams up, to be followed by a human heart. Here the mystery enters the film and simultaneously finds its hero. When Okwe inquires of Ivan (Zlatko Burić) about guests who may have gone into the hotel but failed to emerge, the night doorman admonishes him to mind his own business: “If you want to stay, don’t concern yourself with who comes and who goes.” Okwe gets similar advice from his friend Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), who tells him to “stick with helping people who can be helped.” But Okwe cannot let the mystery drop, rather like Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) in The Third Man (Reed, 1949)—a film by which, Frears says, “I was more influenced than I realized.” In attempting to discover what is behind the mystery of the flushed heart, Okwe must ignore two threats: first, that of provoking the criminals, possibly murderers, who left the heart; second, his vulnerability as an illegal alien, which prevents his going to the police—a handicap to which both Ivan and Guo allude and of which Sneaky takes advantage. As a result of the second, he must become the sort of comic hero who does not change the dismal conditions of his society but simply leaves it behind. About his handling of the protagonists of Dirty Pretty Things, Frears comments, “I always like that quality . . . that they were like people in a film as well as being real people.” As Robert Bresson wrote, this doubling of realistic mimesis and what Frears calls glamour is a basic condition of many films: “The CINEMA falls between two stools. It cannot sublimate either the technique (photography) or the actors (whom it

Okwe discovers the heart. Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2002) © Miramax.

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imitates as they are). Not absolutely realistic, because it is theatrical and conventional. Not absolutely theatrical and conventional, because it is realistic” (Bresson 1977: 34). At the other end of the spectrum of reality-­versus-film-­glamour, we find the two immigration officers who harass Senay. Rough, disrespectful, hirsute, and generally villainous looking, they are distinct cinema stereotypes—a fact that Frears was uncomfortable with from a realistic perspective when he reviewed his film for the commentary. But they, no less than his beautiful hero and heroine, are “like people in a film.” Or like ogres in fairy tales. Comic narratives, like jokes, depend on timing. As Ivan tells Okwe, “Early is as bad as late.” Additionally, comedies often invest thematically in time itself, in part because they usually involve some level of suspense. Throughout Dirty Pretty Things time exerts continuous pressure. Watching the time and having to act before a deadline involve being watched and being held to temporal rules. Thus time is strongly associated with surveillance. The six months during which Senay’s visa proscribes her earning any money puts her under the scrutiny of the immigration officers. Close-­ups of clock faces, usually in the Baltic Hotel, are frequent; and they are commonly associated with Senay’s image on the TV monitors behind the front desk. There is a clock on the wall of the hospital mortuary when Okwe moves into Guo’s “hotel”; in the next scene, a dozing Okwe is awakened by a digital alarm back in the Baltic. When he has to depart from Senay, leaving her with Guo, he consults his watch. His schedule compels him to leave, but their forced separation also moves them for the first time toward acknowledging their love. Time, timing, and surveillance organize the sequence described below, in which Okwe’s efforts barely manage to save Senay from discovery by the two officers who have come hoping to catch her reporting to a forbidden job. It contains multiple shots of clock faces next to images from observation cameras. The last-­second rescue of Senay caps a sequence obsessively focused on time and reminds us that time in film, along with everything else, is in the director’s hands. Frears boils down to roughly a hundred seconds the first twelve of the fourteen minutes allotted to Okwe for saving Senay; in the remaining two minutes or so, film time and existential time nearly correspond. (Such extended correspondence of experiential and fictional time is somewhat uncommon—outside of dialogue—in narrative films which ordinarily condense time in order to tell their stories. At this point in Dirty Pretty Things, the slowing of passing time intensifies the suspense.) Comedy promises that things will turn out all right and that therefore (and apparently paradoxically) the audience can abandon itself to experience whatever anxieties, threats, frissons, or setbacks the work contains without fear of being left melancholy. What Aristotle said about comic action, that it has to do with “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive,” applies equally to the experience of the audience (Butcher n.d.: Section V). Like children on the Tilt-A-Whirl, the audience of a comedy may freely feel all available anxiety, what Hitchcock called “enjoyment of fear,” without being really afraid. The conclusion of Dirty Pretty Things reemphasizes time and timing. It begins with an unsuspecting Sneaky glancing at his watch while he drinks drugged beer and urges

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Okwe, “You better start.” The removal of his kidney must be precisely timed; so must the transfer of the organ and the subsequent escape of Okwe and Senay. Okwe twice instructs Ivan when to call an ambulance, “One hour, Okay?” The whole sequence resembles elaborately coordinated capers in crime movies—comic and otherwise. The final sentence of Dirty Pretty Things reiterates its emphasis on time triumphantly: Okwe, “At last, I’m coming home.” He is returning, moreover, with the address in New York of the cousin whom Senay will be joining; a fact that extends the present of mixed emotions to a possible future of love and the reconstruction of a family.

Dirty Pretty Things and Alfred Hitchcock Generically, Frears notes, Dirty Pretty Things straddles a shifting “borderline between the interesting elements of both its reality and, you know, the genre elements, the thriller and romance; so I suppose you’re trying to find a style that will do both.” If one were looking for a precedent style that combines elements of thriller, romance, some social commentary, and a bit of comedy, where would one turn? Frears supplies the answer, “There’s a lot of Hitchcock in this film.” Sneaky’s allegation that Okwe “murdered his own wife” recalls a central tension in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), a tension that is raised late in Frears’s film and resolved still later. The surgical impaling of the antagonist with his own knife and the rescue of the heroine reminds Frears of the conclusion of Notorious (1946). There, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman manage to escape at the last possible instant after Grant has finally acknowledged his love—to himself as well as his opposite. Frears’s movie echoes that admission and that timing. Dirty Pretty Things also shares with Notorious significant imagery of food and drink along with a Hitchcockian expansion of ingestion to incorporation, the collocation of eating and drinking with sexual taking in—in both films a coercive sexual imposition of male on female. In Notorious, Bergman is more or less forced to marry Claude Rains by Grant’s failure to stand up for her and by a reputation, indicated by the title of the film, that she wishes to controvert. The coercion is more direct in Dirty Pretty Things, but it also involves a woman whose situation renders her vulnerable to sexual blackmail, a blackmail behind which, directly or indirectly, looms the power of a government. Food and drink, when associated with Okwe and Senay, carries an ambivalent emotional load. Linked to Sneaky or the sweatshop supervisor, the connection is unambiguously negative. Food is also associated with suspicious goings-­on in the hotel when Ivan and Okwe, at Ivan’s insistence, prepare an early morning snack for a favored guest long after the kitchen is closed, and Ivan instructs Okwe to accept only cash for their extra-­curricular service. Senay dreams of going to New York, where her cousin works in a café. She and Okwe frequently meet in fruit markets or the delicatessen where Okwe gets his “leaves,” an ambiguous substance that keeps him awake and helps him to avoid depressing memories, but that also has the potential to “blow your brains out.” To slip into Senay’s flat where he “rents the couch,” Okwe goes through the back door of a grocery. The

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most unequivocally constructive episode involving food occurs when Okwe prepares lunch for Senay, a meal that begins their romance. An alcoholic, Sneaky usually has in his hand some sort of drink. When he arrives at the hotel in the morning, he consumes a small bottle of whiskey. He effectively announces his demand that Senay provide sex as part of “the deal” by opening a bottle of champagne. His dipsomania makes it likely that he will consume the drugged beer Okwe gives him when the manager arrives to assist at Senay’s supposed operation. The courier who comes to deliver money and take away the kidney immediately accepts Okwe’s explanation for Sneaky’s absence: “He’s drunk.” The coarsest association of food with sex comes when the sweatshop boss licks his lips in anticipation of another blow job from Senay and bellows, “Lunch!” He then leads her off to perform for him. But even this episode eventually reads as partly comic because Senay “bit”—a verb that ironically further enforces the association of ingestion with sex while reversing the roles of prey and predator. Many of Frears’s other techniques of telling his story (and his comments on them) recall his famous countryman. When he talks about “the more interesting bits of life than the bits you normally see,” one remembers Hitchcock’s description of drama as “life with the dull bits left out.” Watching the sequence in which Senay’s sweatshop boss coerces her into performing oral sex, Frears describes an approach that Hitchcock frequently used, “You have to find some way in which you can hide what it is you’re saying,” Frears explains, “At the same time you’re saying you’re trying to conceal it, so you make it more using people’s imagination rather than being explicit.” Hitchcock similarly spoke of using his audience to fill in the implications of his stories with dreadful imaginings. “You should do the minimum on screen to get the maximum audience effect. The audience should work” (Gottlieb 2014: 146). Like Hitchcock, Frears has a horror of using explanations to rationalize the development of the plot. Instead, he leaps over such verbiage with mild jump cuts that make whatever might have been explained either self-­evident or irrelevant. Or he simply compresses the scene to keep the movie going. “Hitchcock used to do it; he’d put his fingers an inch apart and say ‘you can have that much time to talk about it.’ ” Frears makes this comment when Okwe comes to Senay after Sneaky has violated her. “No ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’ All that stuff.” Instead Okwe enters, crosses the room to Senay, who asks him to get her a morning-­after pill, and leaves. Cut to Sneaky in the parking garage. The importance of whether Okwe will find out what accounts for the heart in the toilet and whether, having found out, he will be able to avoid involvement in the criminal enterprise, diminishes slightly as Dirty Pretty Things proceeds. The question of whether he and Senay will be able to achieve what Okwe calls a “stupid dream” moves to share the center of the film. Hitchcock constructed the majority of his plots in this way. The mystery-­thriller aspect of Hitchcock’s films usually recedes slightly in importance as the love story comes to the fore. Indeed, Hitchcock invented a term for the driver of such plots, the “MacGuffin,” a mystery or conflict inaugurating an action that is ultimately relegated to secondary importance. In Notorious, to take an obvious example, the MacGuffin of uranium mining has been somewhat vague throughout;

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when it is solved, concern with it is largely discarded and the love story carries the film to its climax. The illegal organ trade in Frears’s plot has sufficient detail and continuing weight to prevent its demotion to the status of MacGuffin, but the increasing importance of the burgeoning love of Senay and Okwe, and the fact that it ends the action, recall Hitchcock’s practice. The tensest moments of Dirty Pretty Things, in which the immigration officers attempt to catch Senay, proceed, as Frears remarks, along especially Hitchcockian lines. Its fifty-­one shots take just over three-­and-a-­half minutes. The shots vary in length; none is held for long, but during panning, they are somewhat extended. All are joined by cuts. The sequence begins with the light-­hearted action of Ivan and Juliette meeting for their usual “date” on Ivan’s payday. As the pair leave for “half-­an-hour” (Ivan) or “five minutes, max,” (Juliette), the camera remains on the back of Okwe’s head. A pan and refocus puts him in the center of the frame and slightly elevates the emotional temperature. The reason is immediately forthcoming: we hear a voice announcing “Immigration Enforcement Directive.” In the next four shots, camera angles emphasize the threatening appearance of the two immigration officers, whom we have already seen searching Senay’s flat. They ask Okwe what time the maids clock in. After he answers “five o’clock,” we see a clock face showing fourteen minutes before that hour. The sequence continues with a close-­up of an anxious Okwe looking at the officers. Officer One is the scarier of the two—dark hair, thick brows, large black mustache, three days growth of beard. This is the first of many shots of Okwe watching apprehensively, usually followed by an eyeline cut. With these shots, Frears joins the audience to Okwe’s spectator position, a technique that Hitchcock used repeatedly with his protagonists.

Apprehensive Okwe. Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2003) © Miramax.

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When one of the officers puts a cigarette in his mouth, Okwe says, “Sir, this is a non-­ smoking area.” In a medium low shot Officer One looks sarcastically amused at Okwe’s cheekiness. The angle reminds us of the power the officer has, not only over Senay but, potentially, over Okwe as well, who is risking offending him but must act as a plausible desk clerk. Moreover, as Frears says, “Actually he’s moving them aside, ’cause he’s started working out that he has to ring the Porter, who’s doing God knows what to the girl.” The twentieth shot of the sequence is a close-­up on Officer Two, apparently suspicious, watching Okwe. It is followed by a medium-­long shot of Okwe (perhaps from the perspective of the officer) behind a large, out-­of-focus lampshade in the foreground. This shot is saturated with red, here a conventional signal of danger. Hitchcock, like a great many of the filmmakers directly and indirectly influenced by him, consistently used red with alarming connotations in his color films from Rope (1948) through Family Plot (1976). Cut to the “date.” In a medium-­close two-­shot Juliette stands, supporting herself with her left arm while Ivan is passionately thrusting below right. A telephone rings and Juliette reaches for it. Beginning with a close-­up of Juliette’s hand grasping the telephone, the camera dollies back and pans as she picks it up, Ivan continuing to toss her about, then dollies in as she puts the phone to her ear and answers. She hands it to Ivan, “It’s for you.” Ivan gasps, “Okwe, Okwe, I’m almost there!” (One can only guess how difficult this complicated shot was to rehearse and film.) Frears’s interrupting the tension here with this return to comedy reminds one of how Hitchcock sometimes did the same sort of thing when he wanted a caesura in developing tension. The wildly shooting cop and the rustic handyman who mops himself with an enormous hankie under the careening merry-­go-round in the closing minutes of Stranger on a Train (1950) come to mind.

Date interrupted. Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2003) © Miramax.

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Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2003) © Miramax.

Breaking off the comedy, the camera returns to a close-­up of Okwe, “Senay will be here in two minutes. You must stop her.” Cut to Senay walking to work. Yet another close-­up on a clock shows one minute before five. Movie time is moving very slowly through the next several shots, which end with the maids entering and going past the officers. [At this point, Frears remarks, “I guess it’s just years of watching Hitchcock’s films, and it slowly dawning on me what he was doing.”] The next few shots alternate between close-­ups of the intent faces of Officer Two and the increasingly anxious Okwe. Resolving this tension, Ivan rushes into the lobby, pulling up his pants. Angrily: “I have medical condition.” As Senay arrives, Ivan takes her away from the door. The suspenseful heat-­wave that broke with Ivan’s entrance continues to cool as Frears pulls the camera back to medium close-­ups of the officers and Okwe. Vexed, Officer Two remarks, “This is an interesting place.” Okwe contributes to the concluding humor, “Would you like to see a rate card?” Officer One grins cynically, understanding that he’s been outmaneuvered. A final close-­up of Okwe, looking calm and helpful, celebrates his success. What about this sequence leads Frears to talk about realizing what Hitchcock “was doing”? For a start, it exemplifies the Hitchcockian preference for suspense over surprise. From the beginning, we know the danger and the amount of time the characters have to evade it. The rapid cutting and multitude of close-­ups— more than half the shots in the sequence—maintain a high emotional temperature. Technically, the sequence shares those aspects with Hitchcock, but also with numberless other filmmakers. What looks particularly Hitchcockian is not so much the technique of suspense achieved by montage but its quality. Notably, while it is suspenseful, it is not grim.

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The sequence begins with a comically risqué action and the threat is defeated in an equally comic conclusion. Bracketed by comic actions, it pivots upon another, the phone call Okwe makes to summon Ivan, in the midst of a ludicrous sex scene. Hitchcock repeatedly offered his audiences this sort of comic suspense. A well-­ known example, though not usually analyzed for comedy, is the crop duster sequence in North by Northwest (1959). Near the beginning, the hero (Cary Grant) is covered with dust by the blast of a passing truck (which anticipates his dusting later by the release of pesticide from an attacking airplane). He is temporarily joined by a farmer dressed in a cheap brown suit, a laconic opposite to the “well-­tailored,” smooth-­talking Grant. In its penultimate action, Grant, chased by a hapless bumpkin in straw hat and clumsy boots, drives off in the rustic’s pickup truck with an old refrigerator in its bed. The last shot is also comic: the abandoned truck parked on a downtown Chicago street, still carrying its incongruous fridge, being regarded quizzically by a puzzled cop. About the outcomes of comedies, Frye observed, “Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable” (Frye [1957]1967: 170). When things turn out happily, viewers may feel that they had some role in bringing about the desired conclusion. The audience identification with Okwe encourages the feeling that we’ve outmaneuvered the immigration officers. (In North by Northwest, Hitchcock fosters a similar feeling with similar close-­up insertions of Grant’s face.) We easily imagine ourselves as a little bit within the fiction, or at least able to affect it slightly with our wishes. Being manipulated like this is fun; the outrageousness of the timing and the apparently superfluous slapstick all but make explicit that Dirty Pretty Things is taking us for a ride, one for which we willingly pay the price of climbing aboard. That, too, is Hitchcockian. Further promoting this illogical, satisfying feeling, Dirty Pretty Things in this sequence is especially self-­reflexive, with its repeated shots of the images of surveillance cameras on the TV screens behind the front desk: images of images. If such self-­ reflexivity mirrors the unreality of the picture that contains them, it also reflects the status of the audience: people watching images of people watching images. No one did this better or more often than Alfred Hitchcock. We see likenesses of ourselves in the audience watching the “Cock Robin” cartoon in Sabotage (1936); we also see there a character’s visualization of a bomb going off, framed in an aquarium window that becomes, for a moment, another movie screen. Like Joe (Henry Travers) and his friend Herb (Hume Cronyn), aficionados of fictional crime in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the audience of the film is being entertained by a murder mystery. Such forms of self-­reflexivity, in Dirty Pretty Things and in Hitchcock’s movies, break down the barrier between reality and its cinematic imitation. Life is a movie.

Dirty Pretty Things as a problem film: social commentary The most obvious aspect of the social commentary offered by Dirty Pretty Things— implicit, but no less emphatic for that—consists of its presentation of entirely sympathetic central figures, unjustly persecuted. Okwe and Senay are attractive, well-­ meaning, responsible people who are victimized by unreasonable laws, corrupt

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governments, and villains who exploit their vulnerability. A sensible, kind society would protect and cherish such people. The society in which Okwe and Senay struggle to survive, however, refuses them membership, or even an identity. The complications of immigration law and policy, and the complex issues of immigration in general do not inform the argument presented by Dirty Pretty Things. Frears’s film embodies its thought in the stylized and simplified portrayal of its characters and in its ingenious and, from a realistic perspective, rather implausible action. Only the patently irrational law that allows Senay to reside in London but forbids her earning the means to do so comes in for specific criticism. Such a law, one supposes, represents an attempt to accommodate refugees and at the same time to protect local workers from competition. Dirty Pretty Things makes clear that it achieves neither. Legal lacunae turn people like Senay and Okwe into targets both of the enforcers of laws and of criminals who take advantage of immigrants’ inability to appeal to civil society for protection. The exploitation of Okwe’s medical training by his gonorrhea-­ ridden supervisor and fellow taxi drivers is relatively benign. Sneaky’s attempt to take advantage of the same expertise is sinister. Both of Senay’s employers exploit her economically and sexually; and she is prey, albeit a legal one, to the immigration officers, whose ransacking of her flat is treated like another violation. Rhetorically, if not logically, the violent, authoritarian immigration officers seem almost as reprehensible as the criminal exploiters of Senay’s vulnerability. Their livelihood derives from enforcing the statute she transgresses. Given her persecution by the brutish officers, her dream of a New York where some of the police ride white horses makes touching sense. We don’t know why Okwe has no official legal status, but like Senay he faces deportation. In Okwe’s case, return to his native country means imprisonment or death; in Nigeria he is “a wanted man.” To return to an earlier topic, the situation of Senay and Okwe, struggling with persecutors and exploiters while simultaneously dodging misguided legal authorities, mirrors that of a legion of Hitchcock protagonists, who pursue their persecutors while evading the misconceived pursuit of the police. From The Lodger (1926) through movies like The Thirty-­nine Steps (1934), Spellbound (1945), To Catch a Thief (1954), and Hitchcock’s penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), his heroes and heroines find themselves in this—or a closely related—pickle. Because he lives outside the law, Okwe has no identity; indeed, socially he has no existence. Guo tells him, “You don’t have a position here. You have nothing. You are nothing.” As Ted Hovet observes, the immigrants’ lack of a state-­recognized identity “results not in mere anonymity, but an obliteration of these people’s existence” (Hovet 2006). The prostitute Juliette declares, “I don’t exist, do I?” Which is true, at least insofar as she is part of the economy. Senay has an existence, outside of, but recognized by, English society; even that marginal status, however, is conditioned on rules that make its continuation problematic. The theme of non-­existence, and a related one of invisibility, culminates in the brilliantly choreographed sequence in which money and Sneaky’s kidney are exchanged in the hotel’s parking garage. Handing over the cash, the Courier asks, “How come I’ve

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Frears’s joke. Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2003) © Miramax. never seen you people before?” Okwe answers for himself, Senay, and Juliette. “Because we are the people you don’t see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks.” (Juliette raises a reproving forefinger at the last.) Frears indicates the importance to him of this theme when he remarks in the commentary, “That was mine, that was my joke. I’m very, very proud of it.” The idea of social invisibility and official non-­existence connects with the most universal aspect of such a theme, the prospect of disappearing in death. The principal emissary of death in Dirty Pretty Things is Guo, who burns waste and prepares bodies for burial or cremation in the mortuary of a hospital. Since we never see him anywhere else, he seems practically to dwell there. Guo tells the doorman Ivan, “You are Pylades, the postman who ferried the souls to the land of the dead.” Given that he is at that moment bribing Ivan to allow a car to wait in front of the hotel, his description is pointed: “If you didn’t put a coin under the tongue of your dead relative, Pylades wouldn’t take them to Hades.”4 His description on this occasion is ironic as well as immediately pertinent, for the car that awaits Senay and Okwe will bring them out of the land of the dead back to the land of the living, where they will be “nothing” no longer. Guo himself is a benevolent guide to the underworld.5 We encounter him first doing a possible favor for the corpse of a Chinese man: “I’m cutting off his buttons so his spirit can escape. I’m sewing up his pockets so he can’t take his bad luck with him to the spirit world. . . . If he’s a Buddhist, I’m giving him eternal happiness for the price of a piece of thread.” Reversing Guo, Sneaky offers the opposite service to Senay, a new identity and a return to the land of the living, but at a heavy price. When he begins to open her bathrobe to take her sexually, she tells him to “Go to Hell!” “This,” he replies, “is Hell. I’m helping you to go away.” Amidst his corpses, Guo too lives in Hell, and he understands why people sell their kidneys: “If I had the courage, I’d sell my kidney, just to get out of here.”

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Religion, a common human antidote to the fearful prospect of death, is on the surface reduced in Dirty Pretty Things to irrelevance, offhand exclamations, or jokes. Okwe teases the Muslim Senay during lunch first by offering her wine, which she accepts, though she is obviously an inexperienced drinker. He then tells her, “In Nigeria, they do many interesting things with pork (pause, Senay looks alarmed and perhaps disgusted) but of course I used lamb.” As we’ve seen, Senay corrects Juliette’s “Jesus!” to “Mohammed!,” and Juliette calls Okwe “an angel,” innocently echoing Ivan’s lewd description of Senay as “a Muslim . . . angel.” Threatening to faint as Okwe makes the incision into Sneaky’s flank, she murmurs, “Oh, Jeez. . . .” Sneaky exclaims, “Well, holy shit!” when Okwe announces that he’ll operate on Senay, and he babbles, “Jesus, was I speaking English then?” as he begins to lose consciousness before losing his kidney. His relation to the mild undercurrent of religious expression in Dirty Pretty Things is well described by Ivan’s response when Sneaky first appears, “Speak of the fucking devil!” In a grimmer register, Okwe tells Senay that he has no religion. When Senay dances frenetically after having been forced to perform oral sex, Okwe asks her, “What would your God say?” Her answer summarizes her despair, and indicates that the religious undercurrent in Dirty Pretty Things functions more substantially than is apparent: “My God doesn’t speak to me anymore.”

Design London fascinates Frears. At least eight of his movies are set mostly in London. In making Dirty Pretty Things, Frears seems to have asked himself two very Hitchcockian questions: “What will this place contribute to the story?” and “How can we do it differently?” The second question is answered by finding some parts of London that haven’t already been seen in scores of movies. The solution to the first question, as Hovet notes, comes through “The complicated web of (at best) quasi-­legal social relationships [which] in this film mirrors the crowded, labyrinthine neighborhoods in which it is set. Other than the hotel . . . nearly every location in the film must be entered through a maze of tunnels or back ways” (Hovet 2006). Additionally, the locations emphasize the international make-­up of the city and its inhabitants: Okwe goes to Chinatown; the street markets seen in the film look, as Frears remarks, like Middle Eastern bazaars. Okwe and Senay find relative safety among the crowded, crooked streets of multi-London. Isolated in more private spaces, they are in danger. As is usual for Frears’s films, Dirty Pretty Things is carefully designed.6 The graphic motif of parallel lines and grids (“//##”), familiar from other Frears movies, appears in the enclosed incinerator and elsewhere in the hospital, and beside a wrought iron fenced graveyard, where Okwe tells Senay that he comes to think about his wife— neglecting to tell her that she is dead. There he breaks off their relationship in despair. Those instances and others associate the motif with death and constriction. In an assertive, complicated aspect of its design, Dirty Pretty Things conspicuously deploys emphatic, even garish, red, blue, and green. As in other Frears films, color and value support the abstract formal rhythms of the movie, while at the same time they are

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associated with characters and events and underline particular themes. In Dirty Pretty Things, the three dominant hues are sometimes strongly separated; however, their symbolic associations remain clear even when they appear together. Discussing painting, Frye wrote,“It is easy to see both structural and representational elements. A picture is normally a picture ‘of ’ something. . . . At the same time, what a picture represents is organized into structural patterns and conventions” (Frye [1957]1967: 131). From one point of view, movies might be considered paintings in motion, or flip-­books of many paintings. (Sound films, of course, meld visual and acoustic aspects. Those elements can be separated for analysis, as I am doing here; but we should keep in mind that the total form of the film is the sum of all its parts, including its words and music.) Discussing Frears’s plotting of colors in Dirty Pretty Things, I pay attention mostly to its denotative or “representational” aspect. But we should also be aware of its structural patterns. The film begins and ends with dominant blue, for example, and blue and green generally harmonize, while red contrasts or clashes with both. Red in Dirty Pretty Things usually signals danger and is associated with distasteful or menacing situations. Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) it is often redolent of Hell. In color films generally, these are conventional uses of red; in Dirty Pretty Things, Frears gives those associations unusual emphasis. Red first appears emphatically in the light that saturates the small back room in which Okwe diagnoses his supervisor’s gonorrhea. The Baltic Hotel, consistently the scene of threats and of crimes great and petty, is strongly associated with red throughout the film. The central mystery of Dirty Pretty Things emerges with red blood in a clogged toilet, and the explicit association of red with blood occurs in the mortuary and on Senay’s robe after Sneaky has inflicted himself on her. Frears saturates the screen with red during two of the most harrowing sequences in Dirty Pretty Things, the stakeout of the immigration officers described above, and the cross-­cut episode in which Sneaky takes sexual advantage of Senay and Okwe, caught in a monumental traffic jam, is prevented from rescuing her. Blood red soaks the latter scene, with the hero stuck in a red car next to another red car, his face bathed in red light. When red is associated with Okwe and Senay, it does not label them as dangerous, but in danger. Okwe is obliged to put on his red uniform when on duty in the Baltic Hotel. Senay wears a red sweater through most of the film, for she is virtually always in danger, always vulnerable. When she is on the run, she carries a red suitcase. Outside of the Baltic, Okwe is usually dressed in green and is frequently seen in a green light. Often the green appears in complex scenes with red, where threats and dangers are neither fully ascendant nor wholly obviated. Green light conspicuously illuminates the storefront window of the taxi office; but a driver in a red jacket complicates the palette the first time we see the office, and red signage on the window does the same then and later. Similar touches of red punctuate the predominantly green and blue of Guo’s domain. There Okwe finds some refuge and relaxation in chess games with his friend; but, as we have seen, this location also evokes Hell. When Senay emerges from the shower in the “Chichester Suite” to which Sneaky has taken her for preoperative preliminaries, we glimpse a print of a green and red bird

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on the wall behind her. The chromatically dissonant print anticipates the strife that follows. Sneaky, in his red hotel uniform, moves to open Senay’s robe. She responds by threatening him with a green champagne bottle. Through the open door of the room, the wallpaper is green as Sneaky tears in half the sheet of information for the passport and threatens to walk away. The sequence ends with the red-­on-white of Senay’s hymeneal blood. Green is associated with Okwe in his roles as healer or rescuer. In the opening sequence at the airport, he wears a green sweater and predominantly green jacket, which we see again when he is outside the hotel and, most notably, when he arrives to rescue Senay from Sneaky—in green light but apparently too late. It turns out that he is not too late, actually; the scene in which he drugs and operates on Sneaky is as saturated with green as the traffic jam was with red. The chromatic symbolism appears to be momentarily disrupted when Sneaky, whistling jauntily after deflowering Senay, walks to his car in the harsh green illumination of the parking garage. Again, however, first appearances deceive. As he turns a corner in his vehicle, he is confronted by a menacing Okwe. Sneaky stops and grabs a wrench; but the threat Okwe poses is concealed and more dangerous: “I won’t allow you to butcher her. . . . I will operate on her myself. . . . In return, I want a passport, a new identity.” The lurid green produced by fluorescent light, in addition, can have a more complicated, sometimes negative set of associations. Sneaky is frequently photographed in such light. Through a hall flooded with blue-­green light, Okwe twice goes into the back room of the taxi office to diagnose those infected by the “popular lady” they all patronize. The culmination of this association of green with healing comes in the penultimate sequence of the movie, when the car carrying Okwe and Senay to the airport enters a long green tunnel, strongly suggestive of a birth canal. On one side, the old life of constant running away, non-­existence, and suffering; on the other, new life, and an identity. Saturated in blues that repeat the colors of the opening credit sequence, Senay and Okwe arrive at the airport. Blue harmonizes with healing green; it is generally connected in Dirty Pretty Things with transport and transition, and with the multiplicity of the world. The blue light of the surveillance monitors shows people in motion, usually the arriving maids. Adjacent to those screens are clock faces, somewhat threatening, but with glowing blue frames. Time, as we have seen, has a crucial role in Dirty Pretty Things; its characters move and their status changes through time as well as through space. In the final shot of the film, against a solid blue background, Okwe telephones his daughter to tell her that he is finally returning.

Multi-Okwe In Sammy and Rosie, Danny/Victoria plays an increasingly important role as the plot advances. Almost exclusively, he provides some positive balance to the cynicism of the other characters, all of whom are angry, bewildered, alienated, and more or less adrift.

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But even late in the film, he remains to the side of the main action. In some respects, Dirty Pretty Things renamed Danny/Victoria and moved him front and center, with the entire cast of the film—in the senses both of its characters and its tone—reconfigured to adjust to his prominence. Okwe is a complex figure in dramatic function and characterization. We have already seen that, with some variation, he fits the role of a comic male lead, rescuing his feminine counterpart and acknowledging his love for her at the last moment. Related to his place as leading man in a comedy, he also unravels the mystery that puts the plot of the film in motion. In that role there remains a trace of the comic about him, a degree of naiveté, which both Ivan and Guo remark on. (Among Hitchcock’s male protagonists, the conjunction of solver of mysteries and comic plotting and characterization frequently appear together. Recall the comic overtones of the beleaguered Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) in Saboteur and the same actor in Dial M for Murder, and of Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest. Although the film is an ironic tragedy, Vertigo’s Scotty (James Stewart) nonetheless is partly characterized with comic touches. As with Okwe, they mostly have to do with an emotional naiveté underlying his otherwise sophisticated character. Holly Martins, the writer of mysteries who ultimately solves a real one in The Third Man, is a mildly comic figure in a distinctly uncomic movie.) Considered from the realistic perspective that is part of the multi-­generic Dirty Pretty Things, Okwe is not so much comic hero as victim, condemned to hide from two governments, one of which, having killed his wife, is attempting to frame him for her murder. The other will deport him if he’s caught, and send him back to Nigeria to face certain conviction. Characteristic actions or personality traits contribute both to Okwe’s realistic status, because they individualize him, and to his status as comic protagonist, because they are amusingly repeated. Anything approaching obsessive repetition reliably serves as one of the bases of comic characterization. Etymology confirms this Bergsonian insight in our use of the word “humorous” to mean “funny”—suggesting someone whose character is disproportionately dominated by one of the four “humors.” A physician, Okwe is tidy and devoted to cleanliness. Frears emphasizes his sterilizing of surgical instruments and sheets—“wash these again, please. Boil, boil.”—in preparation for operating on Sneaky, and the sterile environment into which he turns the hotel room. This scrupulousness entirely fits its occasion. Frears also gives emphasis to less compelling occasions for Okwe’s inclination for tidiness and sanitation: his brushing of his uniform at the hotel, ironing of his clothes, and washing things—for example, his insistence on “very hot water” for cleaning the glasses in Senay’s apartment. Explaining the hospitality business to him, Sneaky tells Okwe that guests “come to hotels in the night to do dirty things. And in the morning, it’s our job to make things look pretty again.” His hotel job, then, fits with his personal and professional penchants. There is a further ironic side to this aspect of his characterization. Knowing little about him other than his skin color, people assume that he works in some menial capacity. When he tells Senay that he was in a hospital in New York, she guesses—

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before he reveals that he was studying there—that he was employed as a cleaner. In order to get into the pharmacy of the hospital where Guo works, Okwe pretends to be a new orderly reporting for duty. However irregular his unannounced appearance may be, a black man presenting himself as a janitor attracts no suspicion. He circulates freely through the hospital with mop and bucket. Okwe’s silences provide another individualizing detail. He is unable to speak to the police when Sneaky hands him the telephone, a confirmation of the helplessness his extra-­legal status forces on him. His stillness when playing chess however, signals the opposite; Guo says, “When you go silent, it means you’ve won already.” Okwe receives a telephone call from Sneaky, who has sent him a photo of his next client, a young girl named “Rima . . . If she doesn’t get the new kidney in the next few weeks, she’s going to die.” Okwe hangs up without speaking. Here his quiet reflects a dilemma that appears insoluble, “The kind of thing,” Sneaky says, “that keep [sic] you awake at night.” Senay comments on Okwe’s verbally evasive ways, “You never answer yes or no.” Later, when they briefly caress each other, she puts her ear against his chest: “So it is in there. I can hear it. Your heart.” A multitude of emotions crosses Okwe’s face, but he turns and leaves without speaking. In her 2003 interview of Frears for Cinéaste, Lucia asks, “What about the character of Okwe, as played by Chiwetel Ejiofor? In some ways he seems too good” (Lucia 2003: 11). Frears’s answer is a tautology—“The writer was interested in writing about a good man . . .,” but the question directs us to yet another aspect of Okwe’s character, one perhaps contributed to by his “strong, silent type” characterization—to appeal to a dated cliché. He is also the hero of a romantic narrative, that is, an adventure —here, as is usually the case, with a love interest. Strictly speaking, the prodigious actions of a hero of a romance should be literally marvelous; but the powerful sense of presence and photographic realism of most narrative films, excluding animated ones, generally demand plausible sublimations of preternaturally heroic capacities. Nonetheless, Okwe carries strong traces of archetypal heroism in his characterization and his actions. What Allison notes about Frears’s films in general applies with particular clarity to Okwe’s role in Dirty Pretty Things: “the integration of stylization and realism is a feature readily absorbed into Frears’s customary narrational technique. The mythic quality of the characters and narrative trajectory . . . can be found in equal portion from The Hit to The Hi-Lo Country” (Allison 2007: 46). Okwe’s ability to function without sleep approaches the superhuman. It gets a degree of naturalistic explanation in his stimulant leaves—assumed by most commentators to be khat, but never named. As a feature of romantic tales, such things hearken back in Western narratives at least as far as the “Moly” that aids Odysseus in the Tenth Book of The Odyssey. Okwe brings with him an aura of authority and incorruptibility, of stoicism, selflessness, and steadfastness. He can “rescue those that have been let down by the system,” as he says during the opening credit sequence. He drops what he is doing and disguises himself in order to steal drugs to treat a stranger suffering from an infected surgical wound. To use Lucia’s phrase descriptively rather than judgmentally, he does indeed appear “too good.”

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Narratives involve conflict; in romance, the contrast between virtuous and wicked characters is especially clear. The antagonist may be awarded some sympathy and the hero may have flaws and make mistakes, but the story will not confuse them. Unlike the shades of gray that predominate in realistic or ironic works, the separation between the bad guys and the good remains pretty much black and white. Sneaky brings a whiff of Hell into the movie; Okwe is, as Juliette says, “an angel” (like Senay). Sneaky observes, “I’m an evil man, right? But I’m trying to save her [Rima’s] life. That’s weird, huh?” At that point, he introduces an intriguing complication into Dirty Pretty Things; but we will not find ourselves thinking that, after all, he is an okay fellow. Romantic heroes typically descend into an underworld or a place suggestive of it, struggle with antagonists there, and often undergo something approaching death. They eventually come back to the surface of the earth, achieving what feels like rebirth. Okwe descends into the underworld of the Baltic Hotel where he puts on one of its fiery red garments and prevails over the threats and bribes of its ruler, whom O’Neill labels “un Méphistophélès espagnol” (O’Neill 2003: 43). With the morning-­after pill, he symbolically removes a stigma from the heroine. That medicine erases, to a degree, Sneaky’s violation of her. “There,” says Juliette, “it never happened.” By anesthetizing Sneaky and removing his kidney, Okwe slays the dragon, then carries the heroine back to the living world above. With justice—if not the law—on his side, he does what Sneaky proposed to do illegitimately: he elevates Senay from the Cinderella station of one “who cleaned up their shit for so long” to a place where she need do so no longer. In her turn, Senay, like the peasant girl who lifts a curse from her prince, saves her rescuer. To the desolate Okwe, she brings a love that thaws his frozen heart.

Conclusion Though Dirty Pretty Things outspokenly and sympathetically presents the dilemmas faced by undocumented immigrants in London (and, by implication, elsewhere), it remains, in sum, a comedy and a romance. This is a fact that most reviewers and academic commentators of the film either ignore or hold against it. Exceptionally, Chakravorty and Neti incorporate the relationship of the protagonists into their largely economic analysis of the film: “What Senay and Okwe offer is the singular possibility of an ethical ideal of love” (Chakravorty and Nety 2009: 213). The love story of Dirty Pretty Things, for all the unorthodoxy of its details, stands as one of the most straightforward and conventional of Frears’s career to date. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy regains girl. And vice-­versa. As romances do, it revolves from the depths of despair to end with a strong suggestion of gratified desire. At the nadir of his passage through the Hell of non-­existence, Okwe rages, “Love? For you and I there is only survival. It’s time you woke up from your stupid dreams!” As he speaks, the graveyard behind him adds an image of the land of the dead. But not much later, the closing exchange of “I love you,” as noted above, stands in for the ratifying embrace of a traditional comedy.

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However—even in Frears’s most conventional cinematic thinking about love there must be a “however”—the closing sequence contains a hint of ambiguity. In the midst of its romantically satisfying conclusion, Senay says, responding to Okwe’s calling her by her new name, “Isabella,” “Always, we must hide.” We are reminded that only counterfeit passports confer legal existence upon them. Have they, despite their struggles, gone from one situation in which they must hide to another with the same compulsion? The predominant sense of the ending leans toward “no.” Are they entirely safe now? Will they be rewarded with secure love and a permanent presence in the world? Maybe.

Part Three

Love, Power, and Pleasure: Dangerous Liaisons and Chéri1 The protagonists of Dangerous Liaisons and Chéri trade in sexual passion, albeit that those of the latter more openly practice their craft. Paradoxically, both movies figure forth meditations on love by dramatizing what happens when it is avoided, perverted, or willfully misunderstood. Set in the distant past, they invite audiences to experience the anguish of their protagonists from what seems to be a safe distance. But that appearance of safety is an illusion, just as the emotional imperviousness that their characters imagine themselves to possess deceives them. Everyone, of whatever era, can bring on themselves such failures of love. In Dangerous Liaisons, Merteuil and Valmont use sexual pleasure to achieve social power and prestige. When Valmont is finally confronted with true love, he comprehends too late that he actually reciprocates it. He discovers—to turn to Denis de Rougemont— that “passion means suffering” (de Rougemont 1940: 15). His story confirms “the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death” (de Rougemont 1940: 21). For Merteuil, though she uses amorous weapons even more ruthlessly than Valmont, the same dynamics ultimately apply. Chéri has less to do with battles for social status than with avoidance and denial of real emotion. Lea’s career as a courtesan—throughout which “her good sense had enabled her to avoid the most dangerous hazard facing those of her profession, namely, falling in love”—gives her a confidence about her invulnerability that she has not earned and that ultimately betrays her. The youthful Chéri’s unfamiliarity with any sort of love, maternal or sexual, renders him equally oblivious to what befalls him. Neither understands that they have achieved and lost “the love that comes along only once.” As it does for Valmont, Chéri’s belated realization of his true passion leads him to embrace death in order to put an end to his suffering. Both films are exquisitely realized. In settings and costumes, they share a formal voluptuousness appropriate to the voluptuaries that inhabit them. As is characteristic of Frears’s films, colors are carefully and sometimes spectacularly deployed, both in the precision of their associations with plots and characters and as they contribute to

structural rhythms. The performances of the casts are superb. There is arguably no better director of actors than Stephen Frears. The screenplays are excellent, their dialogue rings true and their plots—largely following those of the novels from which they are adapted—have a clarity and propulsion that is, again, characteristic of their director.

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Dangerous Liaisons: Pride, Passion, and True Love

In Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, love and passion dominate religion until the end. Concluding his epistolary novel, however, Laclos sends Cécile de Volanges back to the convent to become a nun and visits upon the Marquise de Merteuil smallpox that leaves her “fearfully disfigured” and costs her an eye—an outcome that looks very much like God’s retributive wrath. Beyond their roles as purveyors of passion and scandal, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil are blasphemers. Anticipating his seduction of the pious Présidente de Tourvel, Valmont boasts, “I shall truly be the God whom she has preferred” (de Laclos 1940: 13). Similarly, the Marquise: “Behold me, like the Divinity, receiving the diverse petitions of blind mortals, and altering nothing in my immutable decrees” (de Laclos 1940: 117). But at the end of the novel, Père Anselm and social and religious rectitude emerge victorious. Frears’s movie retains only traces of the conflict between piety and passion that animates Laclos’s novel, mainly in the character of Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is introduced wearing a gold cross on a bosom more hinted at than displayed. When religion does enter the action, it is twisted into a tool for passion. Père Anselm functions less as a priest than as an unwitting Pander, supplying for Valmont (John Malkovich) the access to Madame de Tourvel that allows him to complete his conquest.1 In pursuit of the happily married Tourvel, Valmont performs an act—in both senses of the word—of charity to endear himself to the object of his desire. In addition, religion provides a few occasions for jokes, as when Valmont, moving on from his deflowering of Cécile to her carnal education, says to her, “We might begin with one or two Latin terms”; Frears instantly cuts to a priest at communion, intoning a very different Latin vocabulary. Valmont then arrives to trap Madame de Tourvel by sitting beside her in her pew. The struggle between earthly and heavenly love, amor and caritas, that runs through the novel, explicitly and as subtext, changes in Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons to a conflict between what could be called innocent love—that is, love without ambitions for ego gratification or social advancement—and self-­aggrandizing passion. The latter finds its energy in vanity, in sensual pleasure for its own sake, and in striving for conquests and power. These motives are present in the novel as well, but there they are finally defeated by caritas. The main opponent of passion in the movie, secular true love, like caritas in the novel, also often works as a subtext or is explicitly suppressed until it, again like Christian love in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, asserts itself tragically at the end of the film.

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Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video.

The quietly spectacular opening credit sequence of Dangerous Liaisons announces central themes of pride and privilege. It begins with white-­on-black star credits and a close-­up of feminine hands unsealing a paper to reveal the movie’s title. This is accompanied by a music track that invokes Alfred Hitchcock (more about that later). The Hitchcockian music gives way to period instruments and melody, and the credits continue as the camera produces a lingering mirror-­shot of the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) inspecting herself. In the frame, in shadow, we see also the back of her head. Since close-­ups including two figures will be used systematically to indicate intimacy, this image may be taken to indicate the one to whom she is closest, herself. Alternating in the cross-­cutting that accompanies the rest of the credits are shots of the elaborate morning costuming, by multiple servants, of the Marquise and Valmont. The sequence ends with the latter, now a work of sartorial and cosmetic art, arriving at the Parisian mansion of Merteuil. As Frears’s credit appears, Valmont is observed from a window by Cécile de Volanges (Uma Thurman), who will become one of his amorous victims and who perhaps serves here as a wry emblem for the director— looking on wide-­eyed, wondering what the future with these people may bring. The morning rituals of the Marquise and Valmont illuminate close connections among vanity, social standing, and wealth. The editing shows at once the distance from each other of the two central figures and their likeness. There is an obvious gap in status and power between Merteuil and Valmont on the one hand, and on the other, their attending servants, sleek little pilot fish to the ruling sharks. Elias Canetti argued that power seeks or creates isolation, and Northrop Frye observed that separation from society is a defining theme of tragedy (Canetti [1962]1973: 227 ff., Frye [1957]1967: 35 ff, 206 ff). Add to those ideas Denis de Rougemont’s “the passion

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of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover’s self-­magnification,” and we have a compound lens well configured to reveal much of the significance of Frears’s film (de Rougemont 1940: 260). Chez Merteuil, Valmont meets Cécile and frivolously uses her to offend her mother, the self-­righteous Madame de Volanges (Swoosie Kurtz), by patting her daughter’s behind and staring openly at her breasts. (Madame de Volanges has just described him, when he was announced but before he appeared, as a charming but thoroughly destructive and disreputable personage, who is nonetheless received by “everyone,” including herself.) The mother responds to Valmont’s arrival by shepherding her daughter out of the presence of this ruiner of women, as she will later describe him in a letter to Madame de Tourvel. Left to themselves, Merteuil and Valmont are amused by her retreat, and they continue conversing like the long-­time co-­conspirators (and, more problematically, lovers) they are. “No,” Merteuil corrects Valmont, “deceit” is not her favorite word; rather it’s “cruelty.” Her governing rule for living is simple, “Win or die,” a motto that is equally applicable to her companion. To win, to achieve the repute that he seeks by seducing the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, Valmont begins, traditionally, by seeming to relinquish his power. As he says in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, “that illusive authority, which we have the appearance of allowing women to seize, is one of the snares which they find it most difficult to elude” (de Laclos 1940: 73). His siege begins when he declares to Tourvel that his weakness has caused him to reveal his love for her, a love that harbors no illicit ambitions. He later takes on the role of a defeated, reproachful lover reduced to depression; and he finally breaches her defenses with abject declarations of suffering and threats of suicide. The outcome appears to be vanity victorious. Madame de Tourvel promises, “No more refusals, no more regrets,” and sinks back on her bed in Valmont’s arms. Frears then cuts to the conqueror bounding up Merteuil’s stairs: “Success! Success!” He is there to claim his payment for a wager: if he succeeds in seducing Tourvel, Merteuil will accept him back in her bed. That reward, however, she withholds, on the technicality that she requires written evidence. In truth, she refuses because she guesses (with some dismay) that Valmont genuinely loves his victim, an understanding of himself that he does not yet share. Rather, he continues to exult in his power, deliberately allowing Madame de Tourvel to find him with the courtesan Emilie (Laura Benson). He then amuses himself by convincing his lover of his visitor’s virtue and even manages to provoke an apology. Intensifying the pleasure of this exercise of dominion is the fact that Valmont had earlier penned a letter to Tourvel while frolicking with this same woman, using her naked backside as “a most talented desk.” But Valmont would have done well to keep in mind the vulnerability that power itself can bring. In Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he remarks, “to command is to commit one’s self ” (de Laclos 1940: 73). His exercise of power recoils on him. Once again in Tourvel’s embrace, he murmurs, “I didn’t think it was possible to love you more, but your jealousy. . . .” To Merteuil, who in her distress pretends boredom, he admits, “I love her, I hate her; my life is a misery.” His hatred, one supposes, derives from the blow dealt

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to his vanity and sense of self-­control by his genuine love which, as indicated above, he has yet to fully comprehend. Since Valmont is not yet entirely aware of the depth of his love, his vanity remains ascendant, and Merteuil uses it to prevail in her struggle for dominance over him. Madame de Tourvel falls as a collateral casualty. Merteuil implies that Valmont has or will become an object of derision because of his attachment to the straitlaced Tourvel, and she provides him a script with which to extricate himself from his involvement: To all of Madame de Tourvel’s questions, pleas, and outrage, he should simply repeat his own earlier sentence (one that was profoundly threatening to Merteuil), “It’s beyond my control.” Catastrophically, he does her bidding. Uncharacteristically disheveled, he returns again to report his success in breaking with his lover, only to have Merteuil correct him: My victory wasn’t over her . . . It was over you. You loved that woman, Vicomte. What’s more you still do, quite desperately. (A confirming close-­up of Valmont shows his mouth trembling and tears squeezing from his eyes.) If you hadn’t been ashamed of it, how could you have treated her so viciously? You couldn’t bear even the vague possibility of being laughed at.

In this terrible defeat, Valmont still has shot left in his gun, and he hits precisely the target Merteuil hit in him, her vanity. Controlling his distress, he archly informs her that the Chevalier Danceny (Keanu Reeves), whom she expects, “isn’t coming tonight. . . . I’ve arranged for him to spend the night with Cécile. Come to think of it, he mentioned he was expected here. But when I put it to him that he would really have to make a choice, I must say he didn’t hesitate.” Merteuil’s vulnerability is the same as Valmont’s. Her vanity is wounded to some degree by the inattention of Danceny, but more grievously by Valmont’s love of Tourvel. Stung, she chooses to declare war; but her declaration follows rather than precedes the beginning of hostilities, as this scene and an earlier one, also involving Danceny, make clear. Merteuil’s passion for Valmont, like his for Madame de Tourvel, inspires simultaneous love and hate. When she declares “our arrangement [the wager] null and void,” she does so because “I can see quite plainly that you’re in love with this woman.” Glenn Close’s delivery of her next lines, Frears’s direction of her, and the editing of the scene imply, also “quite plainly,” her sorrow and jealousy: “We loved each other once—I think it was love—and you made me very happy.” Earlier, she confessed to Valmont that her feeling for him had been “the only time I’ve ever been controlled by my desire.” For a woman who “has always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own,” self-­abnegating love cannot be unequivocally welcome. Moreover, Valmont’s love for her has been exceeded by his love for Tourvel. After telling her that he wants “to come home [to Merteuil],” Valmont qualifies his declaration, “As for this present infatuation, it won’t last; but for the moment, it’s beyond my control”—a phrase that Merteuil receives like a kidney punch and that she will turn devastatingly against him and Madame de Tourvel, as we have seen.

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From this point until she learns of Valmont’s death, Merteuil’s vanity and her love of cruelty are in control. When she later strings Valmont along by blandly telling him, “I still love you, you see, in spite of all your faults and your complaints,” her avowal is more tactical than heartfelt; it is in the service of her double attack on him and Tourvel. Against Merteuil’s real love for Valmont and his for her, vanity triumphs, in a rout. Merteuil informs Danceny of Valmont’s seduction of his beloved Cécile, a revelation that leads to Valmont’s death. Then, even as Valmont suffers a mortal wound, he turns over his letters from Merteuil with the advice to the Chevalier that “when you have read them, you may decide to circulate them.”2 So he does, ruining her as decisively as she destroyed Valmont. It is an irony typical of Dangerous Liaisons that Danceny, Valmont’s instrument, is the same that Merteuil enlisted against him. “In this affair,” the dying Valmont tells Danceny, “we are both her creatures.” Merteuil, indeed, functions in some respects as what Jung called a “terrible mother” to her young lover (as well as to Cécile). But it is equally true that in this affair, Danceny is also the creature of the other main combatant, Valmont. Much of the action in Merteuil’s home takes place in front of a many-­paned wall of mirrors. Behind this multitude of reflections, and through a door concealed among them, Merteuil meets her lovers. By the middle of the film, they include Danceny and one other, not Valmont, though he is obviously familiar of old with the hidden room. Penetrating the wall at an early stage of his as-­yet-undeclared war with Merteuil, he finds her in bed with Danceny, whom he skillfully leads to humiliate her by telling him of Cécile’s illness and her desire to see “her beloved Chevalier.” “How can I have been away at such a time! How can I ever forgive myself?” As he says this, Danceny glances only briefly at Merteuil, who listens unenthusiastically to his mortifying words, the more mortifying for their innocence of any malign intention. As Valmont executes his verbal machinations, he and Danceny stand before a mirror, in which the image of Merteuil, now alone in her bed, goes progressively out of focus—a bit of cinematographic virtuosity that reflects her diminishing importance in Danceny’s consciousness. In this scene as elsewhere, the action is enforced or commented upon by Frears’s use of mirrors. In general, mirrors are associated with self-­satisfaction, with deception, and also with self-­deception. The artfully manufactured image that looks back from their mirrors at the characters of Dangerous Liaisons constitutes at once what they show the world and what they see of themselves.3 Madame de Tourvel, on the other hand, is rarely shown in or before a mirror. “A ‘natural’ woman,’ she is generally filmed in the park or in rooms that open onto gardens” (Bardet and Caron 2008: 158). Both of the culminating incidents of Valmont’s affair with Madame de Tourvel begin with him gathering himself before his mirror image. In a mirror-­shot of Valmont’s face and the back of his head, the Vicomte composes himself for his final, successful assault on Tourvel’s virtue. Climaxing his performance by forswearing any hope “that I may end my days in some peace of mind,” he stands facing her before a large mirror, which reflects, in anticipation of his success, both his figure and hers. When he breaks with her, the episode begins with Valmont entering Madame de Tourvel’s room in a mirror shot. As he announces that he has become terribly bored— “After all, it’s been four months”—he gathers himself again, facing not his lover but his

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Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video.

Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video. own image in her mirror. He has barely strength enough to complete his act, as we understand when he staggers into the hall outside her room. “Vanity and happiness,” Merteuil tells a miserable Valmont after he has recounted his breakup with Tourvel, “are incompatible.” Though she seems to think herself exempt, she too proves what Valmont calls “the truth of these philosophical speculations.” When she learns of Valmont’s death, she smashes her store of cosmetics and, significantly, the large mirror in her dressing room. If we can take her frenzy as in part a repudiation of her self-­absorption, it comes too late. Additionally, it appears to

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be temporary; she arrives at the opera, in the penultimate scene of the film, fully turned-­out once again. The opening shot of Merteuil as she prepares to face—literally—her day is balanced by her tearful removal of makeup in front of her mirror at the film’s end. Crucially, however, that image of her is direct, not reflected; and even the back of the mirror disappears when the camera dollies gradually in. As she removes powder and a cosmetic beauty mark, tears begin to trickle from her eyes and the image slowly fades to black, echoing in a melancholy key the quick fade-­in to her face that opens the film. We see Merteuil unprepared and unguarded, departing the scene of her vanity as finally as her beloved and therefore hated Valmont did, but without the death that set him free. It is an indication of how badly true love fares in Dangerous Liaisons that its main and almost only marker is jealousy. (This is also the case in Chéri.) In every case but Tourvel’s, moreover, the jealous lover is also sexually busy elsewhere. Merteuil is sporting with an unnamed companion along with young Danceny. Danceny, in turn, is bitterly jealous of Valmont, woundingly described to him by Merteuil as Cécile’s “more regular lover.” Valmont, who loves both Merteuil and Tourvel, is amusing himself at the same time with Emilie and, as revenge against her mother, Cécile. Nonetheless, he reveals himself to be violently jealous of Danceny, demanding, in what Merteuil calls “a marital tone,” that she break with “that colorless”—an epithet cut off by his losing self-­ control and slapping her. His jealousy is the more understandable because he earlier urged her to take in addition to her current one “a second lover . . . me, for instance.” Like mirrors, the settings (visual and aural) of Dangerous Liaisons, and its cinematography, underscore the perfusive vanity of its protagonists. As I noted earlier, the music that begins the opening credits conspicuously imitates that which Bernard Herrmann created for Alfred Hitchcock’s American films, especially Psycho and Vertigo. This acoustic foreshadowing of deception, loss, and sorrow continues only briefly. After a few seconds of silence, it is succeeded by what sounds like an eighteenth century operatic overture (actually from a Vivaldi concerto); the music will frequently return to that register, suitable to the period of the action. The music performed within the story is naturally also of the period, though not necessarily familiar: arias from Glück and an obscure one (at the time of the film’s release) from Handel. On the sound track, but without obvious sources, we hear instrumental excerpts from Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel.4 On one occasion, as O’Neill and Bardet and Caron point out, period music is used with particular significance: The melody of the aria that the castrato is singing in the music room sequence is heard again on the sound track—with intense irony—“at the moment when the Marquise dictates to the Vicomte the text for his rupture with his lover” (O’Neill 1994: 54; Bardet and Caron 2008: 170). At the opera, a repeated setting for Dangerous Liaisons, Danceny is introduced to Cécile and recommended by Merteuil as “the best music teacher in Paris,” an apparently idle bit of matchmaking that will become more consequential than she might have imagined. There too, in a later scene, she gives Cécile permission to answer Danceny’s love letters. And there, finally, she suffers her banishment from society because of Danceny’s circulation of the correspondence between her and Valmont.

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The opera house, with its surrounding tiered seats and boxes, “emphasizes less an exclusive caste than a universe closed on itself ” (O’Neill 1994: 50). When the assembly at the opera turns on Merteuil, her exclusion from its hermetic universe must be especially terrible, because for her there is hardly any other. “Monsieur Danceny,” she tells Cécile when she introduces them in her box, “is one of those rare eccentrics who come here to listen to the music.” For Merteuil and for most other members of aristocratic society, the arias that are performed for them serve less as a source of aesthetic pleasure than as their own background music, accompaniment for the dramas of the social lives they so artfully create. An especially vivid example of a musical setting for their intrigues comes when Merteuil, Valmont, Tourvel, and others attend a soirée that includes a performance of Handel’s “Ombra Mai Fu.” Madame de Tourvel enters the scene via a forty-­second tracking shot in which our view of her is obscured by a black wall for ten seconds (a stylistic touch of which Frears is fond). We then see the countertenor beginning his aria before the camera picks up Tourvel again. Without interrupting the flow of the scene, this shot achieves, in effect, two cuts; it also heightens the impression that the aria serves primarily as dramatic complement to the uninterrupted action. It is worth following the rest of the sequence in detail, a sequence without dialogue that is as visually rhythmic as the music and as packed with significance as several pages of novelistic description: In two-­shot, an attentive Cécile listens in center frame, Merteuil out of focus behind her, screen right. The focus shifts to Merteuil and the camera pans slightly, bringing into the frame Valmont; they smile at each other, mutually gratified by his recent seduction of the young woman. Cut to a close-­up of Madame de Rosemont, in whose country home the seduction occurred; then pan to an agitated Madame de Volanges, Cécile’s mother, under whose ineffectual watch her daughter’s violation took place. Cut to a medium close-­up of the singer continuing. Cut to Tourvel moving toward the back of the room, tracked by the camera. She stops for a moment, visually framed by Merteuil and Valmont, at whom she slightly smiles. Valmont looks sullen. She continues out of the frame as the camera stays on Merteuil and Valmont, who, continuing to look resentful, watches her go. Cut to a close-­up of Tourvel’s shadowed profile. Cut to an extreme close-­up of Valmont looking at her, still unhappy. Cut to a similar close-­up of Merteuil, her smile fading, then replaced by a look of dawning understanding and concern. Cut to a three-­ shot: Tourvel in shadowed profile, Merteuil and Valmont out of focus behind her. The camera moves only slightly, but the focus shifts to Valmont and Merteuil. Tourvel turns her head toward them. Merteuil averts her gaze, while Valmont, continuing to look aggrieved, returns Tourvel’s glance. In close-­up Madame de Tourvel proffers another friendly smile, which fades as she turns back to the music. Close-­up of Valmont, bowing his head. Three-­shot: Tourvel out of focus in right foreground; in focus, Valmont takes Merteuil’s hand and raises it to his lips; Merteuil smiles affectionately, and turns back to the music as Valmont briefly strokes the back of her neck. [Valmont’s performance is apparently designed to inspire some jealousy in Tourvel, but her gaze remains directed toward the singer. At the same

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Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video. time, we infer some sincere affection between Valmont and Merteuil.] Extreme close-­ up of Madame de Tourvel’s face as she turns her head to look at Valmont. Cut to extreme close-­up of Valmont, now grave and perhaps slightly questioning, who returns her look. Dissolve out to the next scene as the singer concludes his aria. The camera is now looking down on Valmont and Cécile in a passageway below. With its subtle acting and elegant editing, blocking, and camera work, the images of this sequence supersede the music which, after the opening shot of the tenor, becomes background. The main plot of the film, the evolution of the complicated triangle among Madame de Tourvel, Valmont, and Merteuil, advances without a word or anything that we would usually call action. Merteuil, whose conspiratorial camaraderie with Valmont prefaced the sequence, begins to suspect the intensity of her companion’s attraction to Tourvel, a suspicion that disturbs her and that leads us toward understanding the depth of her own attachment to Valmont. Valmont’s campaign to possess Madame de Tourvel moves into a new phase as he assumes the persona of a disheartened, morose suitor. Tourvel, attempting to show Valmont the uncompromised “friendship” that she promised him, begins to respond, however slightly, to his portrayal of an unrequited lover’s suffering. Ironically (as usual), the concluding dissolve of the sequence takes us away from its subtle drama to one of Valmont’s concurrent sexual adventures, his continuing bedroom education of Cécile—whose image, we may recall, was the first we encountered after the tracking shot that brought Madame de Tourvel into the music room. Like most classical operas in general and the operatic settings and arias of Frears’s film in particular, Dangerous Liaisons is plentifully stocked with intense emotional climaxes. Because of the importance of the face in expressing human feeling, close-­ups and extreme close-­ups of actors’ faces raise the affective temperature of almost any sequence. Dangerous Liaisons uses such shots frequently and aggressively. Ten of the

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fourteen shots in the sequence just described begin with or include close-­ups; counting the images added by tracking shots and focus shifts, it contains at least twenty or so facial close-­ups and extreme close-­ups, mostly of Merteuil, Valmont, and Madame de Tourvel. At moments of extreme emotion or turning points in the plot (which usually coincide), Frears moves his camera in tight. Close-­up two shots of Valmont and Cécile emphasize the physical intimacy he has achieved with her. A momentary extreme close-­up of Danceny’s face, teeth bared, precedes the fatal moment when Valmont rushes unarmed onto the young man’s sword. An emotionally intense close-­up two-­ shot shows Tourvel and Valmont embracing after he has provoked and then dispelled her jealousy. During his duel with Danceny, we are in Valmont’s mind for similar shots of his memorial flashbacks to his time with Madame de Tourvel. Facial close-­ups portray the final moments of each member of the central trio, which they experience apart: Valmont’s words to Danceny as he lies dying, Madame de Tourvel’s “Draw the curtain” just before she dies, and Merteuil’s tearful removing of her makeup.5 The death of Tourvel and the last shot of Merteuil repeat a metaphor of theatrical presentation that has played through the film, beginning with the opening shots of the protagonists making up for the day’s performance. Heavy use of such close-­ups underlines Dangerous Liaisons’ melodramatic quality. At the same time, such shots often remain ambiguous in emotional content. Does Merteuil weep for herself or for Valmont? Or for both? When Tourvel murmurs to Danceny, “Enough. Draw the curtain,” does her “Enough” signify that she has understood the message of love he brought from Valmont, or that she is wearied of life, or that she can bear to hear no more, or that Danceny’s words have consoled her, or that she wishes no further reminders of her fall from virtue—or perhaps all that? As at the end of their stories, the frequent photographing of the central characters in close-­ups emphasizes their solitude, the degree to which they experience their most painful moments emotionally alone, without fellowship or support. From its divided opening sequence, Dangerous Liaisons unfolds like the latter stages of traditional tragedies: Increasingly isolated characters lose touch with whatever human connections they may retain and slip away toward solitary death or ostracism. For Merteuil and Valmont, separation from other people—including casual lovers and even each other— results from their relentless pursuit of power. Two-­shot close-­ups signify pretty much the opposite, intimacy; but they are relatively infrequent and are sometimes ironic— for example, in the case of Cécile and Valmont in bed. In Mary Reilly, a visual motif of bars and grids—what I have labeled “//##”— underscores the social restraints and sexual repression that confine the central characters. In Dangerous Liaisons, similar imagery is used with straightforward irony: Protective obstructions fail to protect, restraining ones don’t restrain; rather, they are repeatedly breached. As Merteuil proposes the seduction of Cécile—whom her husband-­to-be believes to have “guaranteed virtue”—Frears inserts a quick flashback of her mother visiting her in a convent, first being vetted through a barred window at the entrance, then talking with her daughter through a formidable lattice of iron. But Cécile is already out in the dangerous world and Valmont has already encountered her.

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Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video.

When the assault on her virginity begins, Valmont spies upon her mother from behind a multi-­paned room divider, a barrier that protects only the spy. Merteuil’s mirrored wall and concealed door presumably render secure the room in which she conducts her assignations. It has the opposite aim of the grids behind which Cécile was guarded. In front of that wall, Merteuil refuses Valmont; and it is also in front of it that she begins to dictate the script that he will use to break with Tourvel. But her gridded wall is ultimately ineffective. Penetrating it even in darkness, Valmont confronts her and Danceny; and there, as we have seen, begins the battle that will destroy both of them. Valmont pursues Tourvel through equally ineffectual barriers. He opens the gates of Madame de Rosemont’s estate when he returns to Tourvel after setting the trap of his charitable “impulse.” He follows his quarry into the sanctuary of the church through equally unresisting gates. This motif of breached gates and insecure grids climaxes with a remarkable shot: After Valmont delivers his final ultimatum to Madame de Tourvel, “I must have you or die,” she rises and rushes from the chair where he has put his head in her lap. A predator sizing up his prey, he watches her flight through the dark wickerwork back of the chair, then pounces to deliver the verbal blows that at last bring her down. Evidence of Hitchcock’s influence on the mis-­en-scène of Dangerous Liaisons may be found in its staging of significant moments on stairways. Christopher Hampton, who was on set during the shooting of the movie, recalls, “He was going home to his hotel and looking at Notorious [Hitchcock, 1945] every night. As a result, there’s a lot of stuff on staircases” (Lindsey 1988: 52). In his more ironic films, Hitchcock tended to show characters descending stairs or, when they ascended them, finding reversals of their hopes at the top. Arbogast’s ascent in Psycho to his encounter with Norman/

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Mother and his immediate descent of the same stairs after he is stabbed constitutes an especially vivid example of Hitchcock’s ironic use of stairs.6 Similarly Frears, in the ironic Dangerous Liaisons, uses stairs mostly either in descents or in ascents with equivocal or unhappy outcomes. The latter occurs when an apparently triumphant Valmont bounds up Merteuil’s stairs to claim his reward. As we have seen, he gets only a startling rebuff and the unexpected assertion from Merteuil that he has fallen in love with his victim. Merteuil’s most vicious triumph, her instructions to Valmont of why and how he should break with Tourvel, takes place in a minute-­long tracking shot as she leads her former lover down a twisting staircase. Other visual motifs, like those of grids and bars, staircases, and mirrors subtly add their ironies to this deeply ironic film. Among relatively inconspicuous visual motifs in Dangerous Liaisons are hearth fires, one instance of which appears in the scene of Tourvel’s capitulation to Valmont. In their contexts, such fires suggest infernal flames more than cozy autumn comfort: before one, Merteuil listens with growing distress to Valmont’s ecstatic recitation of his lovemaking with Tourvel; before another, she declares her triumph over Valmont and assures him that he can never win back the lover from whom he has broken, “because when one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.” Related to this motif of flames may be the emphasis given to the lighting of a multitude of candles on the enormous chandelier that is prominent during the first after-­credit scene in Merteuil’s parlor. Another subtle strand of imagery, yonic spaces, appears first in the long archway at the convent, again in the small arch in a hedge before which Valmont strolls with Tourvel, and several times in the arch leading to Merteuil’s Parisian mansion. Most notable is the shot looking down at the arched tunnel in which the duel between

Dangerous Liaisons (Frears, 1988) © Warner Home Video.

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Valmont and Danceny is beginning. The phallic swords of the combatants clash in a space suggestive of a vagina both have known, and that one, Danceny, regards as his exclusive domain. Pervasively among its visual motifs, Dangerous Liaisons carefully orchestrates its colors, especially red, white, and black. It uses its palette both expressively and what we might call abstractly, to reinforce the rhythms of its plot. Put another way, the colors of Dangerous Liaisons function semantically and as part of its visual grammar, supporting both the content and the structure of its meanings. A few notable examples illustrate the chromatic design of the film. When we first encounter Cécile, she is dressed in white, conventionally associated here with innocence. In the same sequence, outside the convent, the secular world arrives with black horses and red drapery, colors that will often be connected, again conventionally, with death and with passion and/or danger, respectively. During a soprano’s intensely emotional aria at the opera, the stage is saturated with red, while in Merteuil’s box, Danceny meets for the first time Cécile, both of them dressed in calm black and white.7 In a later scene at the opera, Cupid and his accompanying harpist are on stage in pure white, which perhaps suggests something the film is ultimately clear about: the innocence of love, especially compared to the carnal egotism and vengefulness of the central pair. In an ironic variant on color associations, Valmont wears white garments when he wishes to appear to be idling sociably, as when he slips a letter to Cécile. Similarly, his white clothing early in his courtship of Madame de Tourvel may subtly and misleadingly suggest the purity of his intentions. When Merteuil appears in innocent white in the closing scene at the opera, she fools no one, having been exposed by the packet of letters, reddened with blood, that the dying Valmont turned over to Danceny. The red connected to Tourvel is not directly associated with passion but with her blood during the harrowing treatment she receives at the convent. Her medical tortures, however, do address an illness that has its origins in love. The crimson rose she picks when first she appears, in white, at Madame de Rosemont’s country estate, ironically joins the red of the early scene with late ones. That flower may also delicately suggest that she is not immune from the romantic love with which roses are traditionally linked. When Danceny draws the curtain and comes between Tourvel and the camera, black fills the screen, much as it did when the camera followed her into the music room earlier. But following the later shot, we next see her eyes being closed in death. Like culminating variations on a theme, the red, white, and black that flash through Dangerous Liaisons attain their crescendo with the high shot that ends the dueling sequence. Supported by his manservant and Danceny, Valmont dies and Frears cuts to look down on the scene from directly overhead. The scarlet of Valmont’s blood streaks the white of the snow; it leads to the somber dark clothing in which his valet, Danceny, and he are dressed—thus concluding his story with a tonic chord of the colors that have accompanied it.8 The last shot of the film, the close-­up on Merteuil’s face, echoes in a quieter, slightly dissonant coda the colors of Valmont’s death: pale skin, red lips,

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and a gradual fade to black as the outcome of the vanities of intrigue, of wealth and station, and of passion disappear into oblivion. Frye writes, “Tragedy usually makes love and the social structure irreconcilable and contending forces, a conflict which reduces love to passion and social activity to a forbidding and imperative duty” (Frye [1957]1967: 218). One could hardly ask for a more precise description of Dangerous Liaisons. From the elaborate labors involved in turning out Valmont and Merteuil, efforts that have obvious parallels to the armoring and equipping of knights for ritual combat, through endless, intricately plotted social maneuvers, to the ostracizing of Merteuil, social life appears as a battle for position. In this regard it resembles chess, a game whose pieces reflect its chivalric analog. The social struggle in Dangerous Liaisons is strenuous, hazardous, and obligatory. Paradoxically, it also isolates the combatants. Merteuil pushes the action forward more than any of the other characters. She proposes the seduction of Cécile, puts Danceny in a difficult position between her and Cécile, and informs him of Valmont’s intrigue with her. She adds to Valmont’s apparently whimsical scheme to seduce Madame de Tourvel a reward, her own bed, that intensifies her former lover’s desire to succeed. Like many tragic protagonists, her fault is not weakness—one might argue that Valmont’s is—but overreaching. She has excessive confidence in the power of her cruelty and her determination to “win or die,” the latter term which she does not seem to regard as a serious possibility. It is no insignificant detail that Frears begins and ends his film with close-­ups of her face.

6

Chéri

Chéri does not continue the story of any of the characters of Dangerous Liaisons, which is set a century or so earlier, but it does resume its costume drama mode and its focus upon wealthy people busy with the occupations of those who have nothing they must do. Its opening recalls the sartorial and cosmetic preparations undertaken by Glenn Close and John Malkovich as they prepare for the social combats of the day. Similarly, during the opening credits of Chéri, a voice-­over (performed by the director) tells us, “Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) found it necessary to rise early and prepare herself, as if for gladiatorial combat.” The director’s credit in both films appears over the image of a woman gazing out from the balcony of a luxurious dwelling. More profoundly, Chéri, like Dangerous Liaisons, tells “the love story of two determinedly superficial people, people who don’t want love . . . who even fear it as a mortal threat to the integrity of their elegant and meticulously constructed surfaces” (Rafferty 2009: 15). For reviewers, the visual opulence of Chéri recalled that of Dangerous Liaisons; but most of them, as James Bernardinelli wrote, found it to be little more than “a respectable and satisfying historical romantic melodrama . . . solid enough not to cause embarrassment” (Bernardinelli 2009). Reviews included the usual broad spectrum of raves and dismissals, but the general consensus seemed to be in the neighborhood of three stars out of five, with few reviewers finding much of interest beneath surface pleasures or shortcomings. At first viewing, indeed, Chéri appears to be one of Frears’s most straightforward and sentimental love stories: a tale of doomed lovers “unjustly punished,” as the film-­ ending voice-­over puts it, by misunderstanding and by the passing of a time that is fleeting, relentless, and out-­of-joint. As with all of Frears’s work, however, initial impressions serve as introductions to deeper, usually ironic, layers of meaning. What Frears said to Ciment serves as a useful guide to apprehending this subtle film: “It is one of the more difficult films, if not the most difficult, that I have ever directed, because everything resides in the details, as in Colette. . . . [It is] based essentially on refinement and elegance” (Ciment 2009: 30). Rewatching Chéri reveals a rich complexity characteristic of its director’s other films; it also continues his intense interest in the twisting paths and unanticipated byways of love. Chéri re-­enlists Christopher Hampton as screenwriter; he was on its set during the filming, as he was for Dangerous Liaisons, and he gets producer credits for both. His screenplay follows quite faithfully the Colette novel on which it is based.1

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Michelle Pfeiffer returns in a leading role. Almost none of the rest of the company that created Dangerous Liaisons, however, reappears in the credits for Chéri. Given that twenty-­one years separate the films, the replacement of cinematographer, art director, music composer, and so on hardly surprises. What is remarkable, however, is the matching tone and look of the two movies, a correspondence attributable to Hampton’s screenplay and to the consistency of Stephen Frears’s direction. Those who dismiss (or admire) Frears as a reliable (or even gifted) metteur en scène rather than an auteur might reconsider in view of the aesthetic alignment of Dangerous Liaisons and Chéri. The principal subject of Chéri is love and what becomes of love in time. The voice-­ over, which does most of the preliminary exposition, announces the central motivating issue: “Today Charlotte (Kathy Bates) was preoccupied with a particular problem of her own.” Cut to a medium close-­up of her son, a recumbent, sighing Chéri (Rupert Friend). Like Lea, whom we see arriving at Charlotte’s magnificent chateau, Chéri appears in white, a shade that will clothe troubled relationships throughout the film. The first sequence introduces the main themes of Chéri, along with its design and predominant symbols. At table with Lea, Charlotte sentimentally gushes about Chéri’s childhood beauty. Lea drily responds, “I expect I remember better than you,” a remark that signals her sympathy for “the rich but neglected son of another celebrated courtesan.” More broadly developed as Chéri progresses, the idea of abandonment is repeated in this sequence by Chéri himself. When he hears Charlotte’s voice as he is greeting Lea, he exclaims, “My God, who’s that?! Ah, yes, you’re my mother, aren’t you? I vaguely remember meeting you a few times when I was little.” Hoping that Lea might “have a word” with her son, Charlotte tells her, “He’s always thought of you as a kind of godmother.” Chéri’s decorous greeting of his mother’s colleague and Lea’s maternal concerns about Chéri’s behavior, health, and consumption of liquor confirm Charlotte’s assertion. But when Lea reveals that she is about to go to her country estate and invites Chéri to join her, surprising overtones arise. Chéri asks, “Where is this place?” A tentative musical cue begins; and Charlotte, sensing that something may be developing, slips away from the garden patio into the house, leaving Lea and her son to each other. Chéri settles on a divan close to his “godmother.” She at first continues her maternal mode, removing his brandy from his hand and repeating, “I said, you don’t look at all well.” Her attentions, however, become ambiguous, even flirtatious, as she languorously asks, “Has anyone ever explained to you why your eyes are so beautiful?” Tracing one of them with a delicate forefinger, she continues, “It’s because they’re shaped like a sole. Like a sole, the fish.” (Hampton punning: the eyes are proverbially the windows to the soul.) Chéri snuggles against Lea and asks, like a godson, “Why did I start calling you ‘Nounoune’?”—an infantile distortion of “Nounou,” French for a child’s nursemaid. “Is that when,” he goes on, “you christened me ‘Chéri?’ ” Chéri’s tone soon changes. “Kiss me,” he demands. Then again, “Kiss me.” Lea starts to offer a motherly touch of lips on forehead, but Chéri intercepts her and pulls her down for a lover’s kiss, which she reciprocates. At once startled and aroused, she moves away: “I’m not sure that was very intelligent.” By the end of the sequence, however, she

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“So beautiful.” Chéri (Frears, 2009) © Miramax. has alluded, ambivalently, to the possibility of “even if we were to . . .” and has come, unambivalently, into Chéri’s arms for another lingering kiss. As the second kiss ends, Lea discovers that Chéri is weeping. She smoothes away his tears and kisses him on the cheek, then quietly on his mouth. A major action of Chéri has been initiated, what we might call its oedipal tragedy. In her novel, Colette articulates the oedipal strain of Lea’s feelings for Chéri, which Hampton and Frears largely avoid making explicit. Colette writes, “She [Lea] was proud of a liaison— sometimes, in her weakness for the truth, referring to it as ‘an adoption’—that had lasted six years” (Colette [1920]1995: 7). Later she writes, from Lea’s point of view, of “that ‘naughty little boy’ never born to her,” and has her say to her lover as she sends him away, “her misery [Chéri’s wife’s] will come from passion and not from perverted mother love” (Colette [1920]1995: 125, 137). The opening sequence takes place on the furnished terrace of Charlotte’s garden. Its verdure, and its mix of colors, set much of the design of the film. The white garb of Chéri and Lea have already been noticed; the other dominant hues will be reiterated throughout the film. Green is often associated with youth and hope, a connection that sometimes turns sour. The dialogue suggests such a potential when Lea tells Chéri, “You’re a bad color, distinctly green about the gills.” The color is sometimes associated, conventionally, with jealousy, notably through an emerald with “a flaw,” which briefly convinces Chéri that another lover has succeeded him. Red is associated, again conventionally, with danger. Scattered through the green whenever the action takes place on Charlotte’s terrace, it is also referred to in the dialogue by Lea’s notice of “the rose acacia.” Less conventionally, it is associated with the depredations of time. Chéri’s dressing gown, an off-­purple, introduces a family of colors that suggests unpleasant complications to whatever action it accompanies. Lea calls puce “that awful color” when it is worn by Marie-Laure (Iben Hjejle), another courtesan for whom she has a special distaste.2 Through a marriage arranged by Charlotte, Marie-Laure’s daughter Edmée (Felicity Jones) will deprive Lea of Chéri.

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Most original in the color design of Chéri, neutral colors—usually somewhere in the vicinity of blue-­gray—might be called the hues of reality, a color-­family that accompanies moments when the facts of the matter, whatever they might be, appear plain. Such colors are largely missing from the first sequence, in which the participants express resentment and sorrow, along with youthful boldness and hope, middle-­aged temptation and passion. Neither Lea nor Chéri show much inclination to take into account the underlying realities of their circumstances. Ending the opening sequence, Frears cuts to Lea and Chéri in her auto, off to Normandy. Lea beams with gratified desire; “even if we were to” has come to pass. Beside her, Chéri looks put upon, perhaps trapped. His brief time of command has ended. Lea has regained the upper hand in their relationship, now claiming Chéri as both a youth to be guided and a lover to be possessed. Like Chéri, Lea suffers loneliness and perhaps some feeling that she has been abandoned; her latest liaison has “gone back to Russia.” Both are weary of emotionally empty dissipation. Lea, the voice-­over reveals, “aware that she was not far away from being a certain age, was beginning to entertain the idea of retiring.” At nineteen, “after several years of conscientious debauchery,” Chéri was “starting himself to think longingly of the notion of retirement.” The colors of the images accompanying these words are predominantly blue-­gray, those of reality. Chéri’s life, the voice-­over again informs us, had been “solitary,” a surprising adjective, given that we see him at this moment in bed with two naked women. Emotionally, however, “solitary” makes sense. Lea, “ostracized from polite society” because of her profession, finds “herself confined to an extremely narrow circle of friends.” Both, though neither realizes it, need love. Lea extols the delights of “a bed to oneself,” and Chéri finds the promise of “no women” at Lea’s retreat “irresistible”; but each finds the other’s embrace still more irresistible. In Normandy, like a mother doting on a clumsy, inexperienced child, Lea smilingly watches her trainer-­masseur Patron (Toby Kebbell) give the hapless Chéri a boxing lesson. A little later, she assures him (and herself) that she’ll hang on to Chéri for “a few weeks, Patron, just a few weeks, then I’ll send him on his way.” After an unexpected six years together, Chéri and Lea have slid into “the comfortable bickering of an old married couple.” They have not, however, outgrown the godmother– godson relation they had before their amorous entanglement. Lea maintains the motherly dominance that she lost only briefly when Chéri put himself forward as her lover. As the film takes up their story, Chéri, childishly teasing, is asking Lea for her necklace of pearls, which he noticed as “heavy” in the first sequence. Maternally, she refuses him. When he wiggles his nose while chuckling, she tells him, “Don’t scrunch up your nose like that when you laugh. You’ll give yourself wrinkles.” Chéri rebels by alluding to her age, and she responds firmly, if defensively: “You know, you can be really ugly sometimes.” Giving Chéri prenuptial advice, Lea’s words could come from either a lover or a mother: “You’re to be kind to her, do you hear me? Don’t make her suffer. It’s her turn now; mine is over.” Chéri responds, “That’s not what I want.” Lea answers, in effect, that he’s got to grow up, that the time has come for him to assume adult responsibilities:

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“I’m afraid from now on what you want has very little to do with anything.” Neutral colors accompany her words. She also instructs him on his wedding attire. Chéri wants a pink pearl for his wedding gift from her. Not pink, she tells him, “something a little more masculine . . . a regular white pearl.” Cut to a close-­up of a white pearl on Chéri’s tie pin. The camera backs off to show him wearing it at his wedding. Along with the officiating priest and the ring bearer, Edmée is dressed in white, the color of troubled relationships. Chéri, looking grim, is in light blue-­gray, facing the unhappy reality of his new status. When Lea and a pair of aging courtesans gather with Charlotte on her terrace, the topic of wedding night advice for the bride arises. It’s unnecessary, they conclude, because young people know all about sex these days. Moreover, Chéri’s mother complacently alludes to Lea’s training of her son in matters of the bedroom. Lea lowers her eyes without any comment. As we have seen, her tutelage has as much to do with how mothers instruct children as with what experienced lovers show less experienced ones. (Who Chéri’s father might have been, no one knows.) Back from his honeymoon with his young wife in his uncherished and uncherishing mother’s home—“that hideous mausoleum,” as Lea calls it—Chéri begins going again to Maxim’s, his refuge “at times of insecurity.” There he encounters a pair of former colleagues of Lea’s, whose equivocal sympathy underscores his misery and his immaturity. One of them says, “Go off home, back to your mummy.” “Poor boy,” murmurs the other. Stung, Chéri leaves, not to return to his mother’s home, which contains both his “mummy” and wife—each of whom, as Chéri’s friend Desmond (Tom Burke) observes, are called “Madame Peloux”—but to take a room in a hotel. When Chéri returns briefly to Lea at the end of the film, she reestablishes her dominance before allowing him to resume his role as her lover. He can stay with her, she insists, only if he says that he is sorry. For what remains ambiguous. So he apologizes. As he sobs against her, Lea solicitously asks, “What’s happened?” “Nothing’s happened. I’ve come back, that’s all.” After they have made love, the next morning, Lea resumes her maternal solicitude: “You just go back to sleep, and leave it all to me.” “All” refers to the arrangements that will be needed to accommodate Chéri’s return to her: a letter to his wife announcing what he’s done, sending for his clothes, travel plans for him and Lea, and so on. Lea must also confront a problem less easily solved than Chéri’s immediate requirements, that of time. When Chéri arises, Lea, serving him breakfast and chattering of “practical matters,” tells her prodigal godson-­lover, “We need to talk.” But talking has never been something Chéri and Lea have done well; and at this critical moment, they do no better. “Don’t you have anything to contribute to this discussion?” Lea says irritably. Early in their amorous relationship, she remarks to Patron, “He never says a word.” When she asks Chéri, “Tell me something about yourself,” he can only reply, “Nothing to tell.” He then puts an end to any possibility of continuing conversation by playfully menacing his companion with a langoustine, an action that leads to love making. Lea behaves in much the same way when Chéri asks her, referring to his coming marriage and their approaching separation, “What are you going to do?” She doesn’t answer, obviating any possibility of conversation by initiating sex. (These episodes recall several

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in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, when characters turn to sex rather than confronting acute problems in their lives.) Later, when Chéri pleads, “Nounoune, say something,” she puts him off by suggesting that they go shopping. With Edmée, Chéri seems content that his wife should be as quiet as he. “She admires me,” he tells Lea. “She doesn’t say much.” On one occasion, however, a few words between them bring him to tears. Thinking about the neglect they suffered as children, Chéri concludes, “I suppose we’re both orphans, really.” He begins to sob. Over his shoulder on the wall behind him, a portrait of a young Charlotte reinforces his tearful memories. Alarmed, Edmée asks, “Chéri, what’s the matter?” It’s the one time she calls him by that pet name, given to him by the woman who stepped in to ameliorate his mother’s virtual abandonment of him. When Chéri does manage to “contribute to this discussion” the morning after he returns to Lea, they have a painful talk, and it seems that they are finally considering the reality of their situation. Blue-­gray and tans back up the speakers. Lea and Chéri at last face the truth, or part of it. The final shot of Chéri follows this sequence. It strongly resembles that of Dangerous Liaisons, in which a desolate Glenn Close looks at herself in the mirror, while a tear runs down her cheek. As Chéri ends, Lea sits unhappily looking at her dressing room mirror, running her fingers over what she takes to be her ruinously aging face. Behind her blue-­grays again. Like this one, mirror shots generally reflect painful moments. As the opening voice-­ over speaks of Chéri’s disregarded childhood, the image is of him, between two “available women,” sitting forlornly under a mirror amidst the gaiety at Maxim’s. In another mirror shot, Lea receives Charlotte’s devastating news that Chéri is “back home with his lovely wife. . . . The young couple are happier than ever, so all is well with the world.” Two carefully set up mirror shots include both a direct view of Chéri and his reflected image, vertically split down the middle. In the first, he stands below an open window of Lea’s Paris home, trying to get information regarding her whereabouts from

Chéri (Frears, 2009) © Miramax.

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her butler. In the second, he hesitates at the entrance to Maxim’s. Both images suggest a person divided. Through the voice-­over, the latter of these shots articulates the theme of time, as do most of the other such shots. Three mirror shots in succession, of Chéri admiring himself in Lea’s pearls, bring the story up to the present after it skips over the six years since they began as lovers. Later, Chéri and Edmée, on their honeymoon (dressed in white), are partly fragmented by their reflections as Chéri ponders Edmée’s youthfulness, which he finds “obscene” and “shocking.” When Lea emerges from her bath just before Chéri’s brief return, she admires her arms and hands at the end of an extended mirror shot, “Beautiful handles, don’t you think, for such an old vase?” she says to her maid Rose (Frances Tomelty). Her remark sounds a note that anticipates the climactic sequence of the film. That sequence includes Lea’s telling Chéri that he is her “love that comes along only once”—which, as he realizes many years later, equally describes his love for her. The failure to recognize their love, or recognizing it “too late,” presents the chief obstacle to the happiness of Chéri’s principals. It is not, as they think, time, but their failure to understand that love transcends time’s depredations, that leads Chéri to end with a suicide rather than with “happily ever after.” To recognize the power of love to erase time, Lea and Chéri must first recognize love itself. Their histories make doing so all but impossible, or possible only after fatal delays. During the credit sequence, the voice-­over remarks that Lea’s “good sense had enabled her to avoid the most dangerous hazard facing those of her profession, namely, falling in love.” But all strengths imply their weaknesses, and Lea’s insulation of herself from love—other than sex—renders her, paradoxically, as emotionally immature and susceptible as Chéri. As he weeps in her lap during their last scene together, she says, “If I’d been a truly good person, I’d have made a man of you, instead of thinking of nothing but your pleasure and my happiness.” When she continues, “But thirty years of easy living does make you very vulnerable,” she is talking about herself, but what she says could apply to both of them.3 Growing up as a courtesan’s ignored son, Chéri has little experience of love beyond sexual dissipation. He is not shown to have suffered anything terribly traumatic, but neither has he had enough contact with real love to recognize it when he experiences it with Lea. In The End of Chéri, the narrator remarks, “[In] his childhood . . . Chéri had learned that love is a question of money, infidelity, betrayals, and cowardly resignation” (Colette [1926]1995: 230). During his only extended interchange with Edmée, Chéri “just can’t understand why you’re so aggrieved.” He doesn’t go out evenings or sleep in a separate bedroom, nor is he having an affair. When he asks, “Don’t you like the way I make love to you?” his wife turns angrily toward him, “You call that love?” On the last word, Frears cuts to a subjective shot of Chéri remembering passionate lovemaking with Lea and crying out, “Oh, my God! O, God! O, God!” His memory, however, produces not clear understanding, but “insecurity,” to which he responds by returning to Maxim’s “like a homing pigeon.” Love is not easily achieved, recognized, or preserved in Frears’s Chéri. Chéri’s casual description of Edmée before they are married signifies more than may appear: “Loves

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me, as far as I can tell.” Chéri cannot tell very far, when it comes to love. Hence his bewilderment at Edmée’s grievances. Chéri brutally takes sexual possession of his new wife on their wedding night. His action expresses only anger and a desire to inflict pain. As he is assaulting Edmée, however, Chéri recalls gentle lovemaking with Lea. An immediate cross-­cut to Lea alone in bed suggests that his memory is hers also. After sex becomes ordinary in their marriage, Chéri always turns his back on Edmée immediately afterward, a habit she notices unhappily. Only once does she seem to fully understand the reason for her husband’s distance: “I hate you! . . . All you ever think about is that old woman!” On their honeymoon, Edmée tells her new husband that he has beautiful eyes. In a matter-­of-fact voice, he agrees, then asks her, “Do you know why?” “Is it because I love them?” Entirely unresponsive to his bride’s endearment, he corrects her with the peculiar explanation Lea offered him long ago: “No. It’s because my eye is shaped like a sole.” He then turns coldly away to look at the frozen white landscape outside the train window. The only affection he ever offers Edmée results from his joy at Lea’s return from Biarritz. Deflecting his still not fully understood love for Lea onto the person of his wife, he returns to Edmée with a car full of gifts, a promise that he’s “back for good,” and the only tender lovemaking the film ever shows him offering her. Since the love he gives Edmée is really Lea’s, however, “for good” soon turns to confusion and pain. Earlier, in an opium den, one of Lea’s former colleagues sees what Chéri cannot, “I know what the trouble is. You have everything you could possibly want, and none of it means a thing.” He lacks love. Chéri responds with an apparent non sequitur, but one that is entirely relevant: “The thing is, I don’t know where she [Lea] is, or who she’s with.” He then moves to examine the woman’s pearl necklace, an emblem of Lea, but she tells him, “They’re fake.” They are as inauthentic as his marriage and as untrue as his possessing “all the luck,” which he hears from another aging courtesan. When he returns to Lea, he tells her, “Now I know what it means to suffer for a woman.” His suffering and the torment he feels at the prospect that Lea has replaced him with another lover lead him to recognize what he has long felt without understanding: that he truly loves her. At last, he can consciously feel his love and answer “Yes,” when Lea asks, “So then, do you love me?” Lea’s recognition of her feelings comes almost as slowly as Chéri’s. At the beginning of their sexual relationship, she tells Patron, “There’s something about him, something mysterious, something I can’t explain.” Anguished at her lover’s marriage and departure, she does not mention love, but says only “My mistake was keeping Chéri for six years,” as if he were a pet or possession to which she’s allowed herself to become accustomed. Poignantly, she asks Rose, “Do you think he’ll ever come back?” “I couldn’t say, Madame. Do you want him to?” Lea is not ready to face that: “No. I saved him once; I couldn’t do it all over again.” After having been confronted with an exaggerated version of an aging courtesan and her adolescent lover-­toy, Lea wonders with horror if her affair with Chéri appeared similarly grotesque. But that disturbing thought is immediately replaced by the memory of Chéri walking out of her field of vision just after she learned of his coming marriage. Unwilling or unable to confront the reason she responds to this memory by

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crying “Chéri!” she sets off to Biarritz to find “a consolation,” a muscular young man, a new amusement to replace what she imagines to have been the previous one. In Chéri’s absence, she begins to understand that her feelings for him were not what she might have felt for a gigolo. She recognizes that she has lost a “really honorable thing.” But an “honorable thing” is not yet quite love. Only when Chéri has come back, evidently to stay, and answers her question as to whether he loves her with three passionate affirmatives, can Lea fully confront her feelings: “I love you.” At the end of Chéri, however, time forces the plot back onto a tragic path. The morning following Chéri’s return, Lea, realizing that he is experiencing regret because he has “found an old woman” and that “now [he’s] had a taste of youth,” tells him that he must leave. “Carry your own burdens. A young wife, perhaps even a child. . . . You must go. I love you, but it’s too late.” (Her last two words perhaps echo James Stewart’s anguished cry at the conclusion of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.) Chéri reluctantly accepts her verdict and leaves. Though time becomes irresistible only at the conclusion of Chéri, it has exerted pressure on its plot and characters from the beginning. Some instances seem trivial and others have obvious importance. All together, they give Chéri a sense of proceeding under a deadline. In a detail repeated from Colette’s novel, Lea escapes from the group with whom she is socializing when they begin to allude to Chéri’s departure and honeymoon. She finds herself strolling in Charlotte’s garden. When she touches a rose bloom, it sheds its petals in her hand. On another occasion, finding her mistress up unwontedly early, Lea’s—significantly named—maid Rose asks, “Are you alright?” “Not really.” What’s the matter?” “You know,” Lea answers, “age.” Roses in Chéri sometimes serve as signs of passion, but more often as emblems of loss, regret, and decay. In an earlier scene, Chéri complains about Lea’s wearing a veil—presumably because it is appropriate for an older woman—when she joins him at his mother’s home. Charlotte tells her son, “A woman always has her reasons.” After Marie-Laure and her daughter depart, Lea raises the veil. The implication seems to be that she did not want

Chéri (Frears, 2009) © Miramax.

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her face easily compared to that of Edmée, now Chéri’s fiancée. Since it will be Chéri’s observation of her wrinkled eyelids and cheeks that later leads him to recognize how much she has aged, Lea’s reasons on this occasion seem tactically well judged. During the same visit, Chéri’s mother rhapsodizes about her son’s approaching marriage, “What a wonderful life they’re going to have: youth, beauty, money!”—with an emphasis on the first. Lea counters, “It doesn’t mean that little girl is going to be able to handle him.” Charlotte parries in turn, “Young women have their methods.” And Lea, defiantly, “I can’t say I remember.” A final thrust from Charlotte, “Don’t you find, now the skin’s a little less firm, it holds perfume so much better?”4 In the final sequence, Chéri complains when Lea disparages Edmée, “You sound just like my mother.” At that moment, we see a portrait of a young Lea, done in the style of the portrait of young Charlotte that we saw earlier. Eating breakfast alone the morning of Chéri’s wedding, in dark blue-­gray surroundings, Lea looks at her wristwatch and then begins to cry, imagining the ceremony from which she must be absent. As she does, the film returns to the wedding scene, with Edmée and Chéri reaching for their rings. Back to Lea, now showing her maid an emerald ring that she has purchased for herself. “A beautiful color,” but the maid notices that it has “a little flaw,” an indication of the tenuous prospects for Lea’s attempt to renew the joy in her life without Chéri. Back to the wedding, where the ceremony is over and the united couple and their party are being photographed. Time again enters the scene; Edmée’s mother Marie-Laure explains that she must “rush off ” (to join a new client) and runs down the red carpet laid out for the departure of the bride and groom. This sequence begins a long stretch of parallel-­cutting, as Frears alternates between Lea and Chéri. The cross-­cutting, per force, continues the emphasis on time as it synchronizes the actions of the separated lovers. Subjective memorial flashbacks to their happier days also emphasize the effects of time on Chéri’s protagonists. The next-­to-last sequence, Chéri’s brief return to Lea, is saturated with myriad difficulties caused by time. It begins when Chéri arrives at her home after midnight and has to bully his way past Rose to confront Lea in her bedroom. After their reconciliation, they awake in the dark, with Chéri immediately asking, “What time is it?” Lea replies, “What difference does it make?” (It makes, in a larger sense, all the difference in the world, though it should not.) To which Chéri replies, “I don’t know yet.” He goes on to worry about “tomorrow.” As we have seen, Lea offers him maternal reassurances and tells him to go back to sleep. When he awakens, Lea is on the telephone, trying to make arrangements for their “discrete” departure “back down South for a few months.” Revealingly, the train company can provide no convenient time: “No, that’s too late. Isn’t there something earlier? . . . No, that’s too early.” As she talks, Chéri watches through the open bedroom door. Nude, he looks beautiful and youthful. From his point of view, we see Lea, dark circles around her eyes, eyelids lined, face drawn, nervously fingering the skin on her neck—looking, in short, old. By the time she is giving him breakfast she is made up, but that does not undo his feeling about what he saw earlier. She declares her love again—“Why didn’t I realize you were the one? The only one. The love that comes along only once.” But Chéri can

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manage only a small, grim smile. While Lea chatters about “the arrangements,” Chéri nervously picks at his toe, which she tells him to stop doing: “That’s the way to get an ingrown toenail.” As he sits tense and silent, she continues her mild reproaches: “You’re like a twelve-­year-old.” And with that, he explodes. “With you, Nounoune, I’m likely to stay that way for the rest of my life.” At first, Lea does not understand the seriousness of Chéri’s remark. She attempts to deflect it with “Most people would be pleased to have the secret to eternal youth. It’s part of your charm, stupid. I don’t know why you’re complaining to me about it.” A revealing past tense alerts her to the urgency of what Chéri is saying: “For me you were always. . . .” Lea: “I was always? You sound as if you’re reading the eulogy at my funeral.” When Lea begins to speak nastily of Edmée, Chéri’s response—including another alarming past tense—suggests that he may have decided that he cannot remain with her. “Stop it, Nounoune! I can’t allow you to ruin my idea of you! . . . Nounoune, that’s why I’ve always loved you.” Lea understands what he is saying. Chéri begins, “Last night, I came back here and . . .” He pauses. Lea completes his sentence: “You came back here and you found an old woman. . . . So no, I never did talk to you about the future. Forgive me. I loved you as if we were going to die the same day. . . . I love you, but it’s too late.” As he leaves, shutting the door behind him with a terrible crunch, the voice-­over resumes. “Chéri felt capsized, as if he’d been present at some irreversible catastrophe.” As he departs, he hesitates; and Lea, watching, murmurs, “He’s going to come back.” But he shrugs, puts on his hat, and walks up the street. She turns away from her window. Both have accepted their conclusive separation. The voice-­over continues, “He was unable to suppress a sense that he’d escaped from something, that he was a free man—a feeling he eventually came to realize was entirely misguided. . . . It was many years before he understood that both of them had been quite unjustly punished.” (The injustice is not so clear.) He also realizes, eventually, “that Lea was the only woman he would ever be able to love.” When he does grasp this fact, he kills himself—dying, if not on the same day as Lea, then perhaps not long before or after. As the voice-­over tells of Chéri’s future, he continues in the present up a shadowed blue-­gray street surrounded by gray buildings. That shot colors what is apparently the final truth conveyed by the film. Deceptively, the music, montage of period photos, and upbeat voice-­over of the opening credit sequence promised a light comedy, as does the opening encounter of Lea and Charlotte. We hear a cheery sort of Gaîté Parisienne music while images of contemporary newspapers and photographs slide across the screen.5 The voice-­over describes the French Belle Époque at the end of the nineteenth century:6 “A select group of courtesans became, for a short period, the most celebrated and powerful women in the long history of prostitution.” He goes on to describe three of the most famous (with accompanying photographs), Émilienne D’Alençon, Liane de Pougy, and La Belle Otero—to whom he adds a fictional fourth, Lea. But the unemphasized “for a short period” anticipates the canker in the rose: passing time. Having been a neglectful mother in the prime of her career, Charlotte in retirement feels time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near and desires grandchildren. Playing

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cards on Charlotte’s terrace, two of her retired colleagues also show the ravages of age. Baronne (Bette Bourne) has become gray haired, with a square mannish face and a masculine baritone to go with it. Aldonza (Nichola McAuliffe) ecstatically recalls dancing “Sylvia at the Turkish gala in the ’89 exhibition,” laments her disappeared tresses—“enough hair to carpet the stairway to heaven,” and the arthritis afflicting her formerly “most beautiful hands.” Chéri begins with the voice-­over celebrating an enthralling historical era, but it concludes with the same voice announcing that “The Belle Époque itself was swept away utterly by a war.” Even the closing credits allude to the passing of a more gracious age. All appear against framed backgrounds of what mostly look like late Victorian wallpapers, except two. Jarringly, they are inscribed on what seem to be flat-­screen televisions (albeit with small filigrees at the top and bottom center). As is often the case with Frears’s films of ruinous love and social dysfunction, however, the downbeat ending contains a gentle hint that things could be, or might have been, better. In the case of the miscarried love of Chéri and Lea, that might-­havebeen is suggested by the belated recognition of Chéri, at the end of his life, and Lea, at the end of the film’s plot, of the permanence and depth of the love between them. A meditation on love and time (among other things), Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle provides language illuminating where Lea and Chéri went astray. Like the speaker of The Sonnets, Chéri experiences deep distress when he sees, “Time that gave doth now his gift confound / . . . And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow” (Sonnet 60). In Lea’s strained, worn face the morning after he “come[s] back,” he sees her “by Time’s fell hand defaced,” and concludes that “Time will come and take my love away” (Sonnet 64). In Lea’s aging he perhaps anticipates her death, or sees the prospect of his own; whichever the case, he thinks he sees the ruin of their love. But his response, he later realizes, is “entirely misguided.” Equally misguided, Lea believes that their love is lost when her “glass shows how beauties wear” (Sonnet 77). Both conclude that “death my days should expiate” (Sonnet 22), Lea because she has forgotten that she and Chéri will not “die the same day,” and Chéri, when he shoots himself many years later. Neither fully realizes what the movie implies: “love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds . . . Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come; / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom” (Sonnet 116). Finally, Frears’s movie preserves the love of Lea and Chéri and their era. As in Shakespeare’s lines, “they shall live,” and be “in them still green” (Sonnet 63). Frears’s Chéri brings back to life a bygone era and immortalizes it, even as it acknowledges its having been swept away by World War I. It creates, kills, and simultaneously preserves the abortive love it traces. In its world, the youthful beauty of Rupert Friend will never fade and Michelle Pfeiffer’s will diminish no further.

Part Four

Two Families: The Snapper and Liam “Frears is a master,” Graham Fuller (n.d.) observed, “at probing the fissures and gorges in real and unofficial families, as in My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, The Snapper, Liam, and The Queen.” To his list, one could add Gumshoe, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Hi-Lo Country, The Van, and Philomena—to say nothing of a number of television movies. Throughout his career, Frears has shown an attraction to scripts that emphasize families, usually discordant ones. Despite titles that suggest a focus on central characters, the two movies with which this section is concerned, The Snapper and Liam, have families at their centers. Liam is indeed an important character in the film named for him, but not the only one. His older sister and his father have extensive roles, and his mother, older brother, and neighbors also have considerable importance. The Snapper and Liam differ sharply in the shape and tone of their plots. The former qualifies as an eccentric romantic comedy, as close as Frears has ever come to a “feel good movie.” But though it is in a genre and has an emotional tone unusual for Frears, The Snapper has the density, the irony, and the attention to visual and aural design characteristic of all his movies. Like most of his films, it includes an unconventional portrayal of love. Liam is an ironic tragedy. In Frears’s oeuvre it falls into a category of films of unhappy families that includes The Grifters, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and The Hi-Lo Country, all of which have tragic outcomes. The Snapper, on the other hand, with its trajectory toward inclusion and acceptance, fits comfortably with the other comedy Frears made from Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, The Van.

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The Snapper

Sharon and Dessie The fetus for whom The Snapper is titled makes only brief appearances, once as an inscrutable ultrasound image and a few times at the end as a newborn. The role of lead in The Snapper goes to the unmarried mother, Sharon (Tina Kellegher), with her father Dessie (Colm Meaney) getting enough attention to be called the male protagonist. The relationship between the two, between them and the rest of the family, and their interactions with their community are the principal subjects of the film. Its mostly genial satire is spread across a wide swath of characters, with particular focus on attitudes toward sex and marriage. One of the standard ingredients of comedies involves the rivalry between an older, usually wealthy suitor, and a younger, usually poor one, for the hand of the female protagonist. Youth can be counted upon to win out, often with the financial aid of a surprise benefactor or the convenient death of a distant relative without other heirs. In The Snapper, this aspect of the plot is turned in a surprising direction and modernized. The choice is between an older, manifestly unsuitable partner, “Georgie” Burgess (Pat Laffan) and Sharon Curley’s desire for relative independence while remaining with her family (a somewhat paradoxical combination). Burgess’s rival for Sharon, ultimately, is Sharon herself. Her case is set forth partly by her father “I wouldn’t want Sharon gettin’ married that young.” Equally, the fact that Burgess is married, his age, his fondness for adolescent romantic clichés, and the dubious circumstances of his sexual connection with Sharon overwhelmingly disqualify him. If the importance of its characters is conceived as concentric circles, the bull’s-­eye is the pregnant, unmarried Sharon Curley. Slightly beyond the center comes the father of the Curley family, Dessie, then the rest of the family, consisting of the mother, Kay (Ruth McCabe), four younger siblings, two girls and two boys, and an older brother who returns from military service midway through the film. Further out are Sharon’s three closest friends and a similar group of Dessie’s pals, with whom they socialize in the neighborhood pub. Surrounding them are other friends and neighbors. As befits a comedy, the characters are “like us.” As Aristotle put it in the Poetics, “Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive” (Butcher n.d.:

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Section V). A fraught scene in which Dessie begs Sharon not to leave home could become sentimental; but Frears ramps it up to the point of parody: Dessie:  I haven’t cried since I was a kid. Sharon:  You cried during the World Cup. Dessie:  Sober, Sharon, sober. Drunk doesn’t count. We all do stupid things when we’re drunk, don’t we?

When Sharon wryly responds, “I know,” Dessie realizes the tactlessness of his last remark, “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” About this sequence, Frears remarks, “It has to be on the edge of laughter, it has to be almost funny. ’Cause that’s where their humanity is” (DVD “Commentary”).1 For The Snapper’s off-­beat story, whatever traces remain of a conventional lover are displaced more onto Dessie than the hapless Burgess. Such a transfer could suggest incest; but Frears and Doyle, the author of the screenplay as well as the antecedent novel, hardly allow a shadow of a doubt in that direction. Sharon seems unaware of the possible ambiguity of her father’s responses to her pregnancy, and Dessie himself is unconscious of the complexities of his feelings. The interactions of father and daughter, almost always comical and never lastingly “painful or destructive,” give the film much of its interest and coherence. Following brief opening credits, the first shot of the film pans down the door of the bedroom Sharon shares with her two sisters, Lisa (Joanne Gerrard), fifteen, and Kimberley (Ciara Duffy), considerably younger. An attached sign, decorated with a bouquet that also resembles a fierce face, announces, “Sharon’s Room,” associating her with spring and fertility, and at the same time anticipating her strength. When the door

The Snapper (Frears, 1993) ©Touchstone Home Video.

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opens—apparently by itself, a common Frears touch—we see her before a full length mirror, looking at her profile. Images of animals and flowers on the top of the mirror frame her hair and face, repeating the messages of the sign. She pulls in her stomach, perhaps in hopes of seeing that her pregnancy is not yet obvious. The camera tracks out as Lisa enters the frame, screaming at the older of the two boys at home, Sonny (Peter Rowen). It holds there as she closes the door and Sonny enters the frame to push it open. Sharon challenges him: “I dare ya! I bleedin’ dare ya!” She emerges and the camera pans to follow her down the hall past the bathroom, in which Kimberley, dressed in a majorette costume, is inexplicably putting shaving cream on her face. After almost thirty seconds, the film cuts back to Sonny entering the girls’ room and telling Lisa, “You’re dead!” This inconspicuously elaborate opening introduces the main problem of the film, Sharon’s pregnancy, and many of its themes and motifs: the quarreling and uproar in the crowded Curley household, the hyperbolical but inconsequential threats issued regularly by family members, the strongly differentiated characters of the children, the almost constant noise that fills the sound track, and the red and blue color scheme that visually dominates the film. All of these aspects are exaggerated; hyperbole moves the film into a space of defects and vulgarity that will ultimately cause little enduring damage. Only Sharon’s condition escapes comic exaggeration. The unintended pregnancy of an unmarried twenty-­year-old living at home needs no overstatement to pump up its dilemmas, and any magnification of them would more likely push The Snapper in the direction of pathos than of comedy. The Snapper opens and closes on Sharon with her parents and siblings. She is doubly in the family way. Her dilemmas in managing her place at home, and her changing relations with friends and the wider community after everyone learns of the likely father of her baby, energize the plot. The Snapper anticipates Frears’s recent turn toward screenplays that focus on female protagonists; seven of his last nine films—Philomena, Lay the Favorite, Tamara Drewe, Chéri, The Queen, and Mrs. Henderson Presents, and (to judge by available pre-­release summaries) Florence Foster Jenkins—have strong women in lead roles. Fundamentally, Sharon is self-­assured and sensible. Informing her group of friends of her pregnancy, she refuses to name the father, despite their pressure. She also stands up to that character, the middle aged father of one of her pals, Yvonne (Karen Woodley). When she confronts him in his home about having bragged that she’s “a great little ride,” he greets her with “What the hell do you think you’re up to, you little bitch?” Unintimidated, she returns, “What do you think you’re up to, you little bastard?” She goes on to threaten to expose his infidelity to his wife if he ever mentions her “to the lads” again. He crumbles in the face of her counterattack, and the confrontation ends with him repeatedly saying he’s sorry and promising to keep quiet. Later, regressing to romantic fantasies after leaving his wife and family, he tracks her to a shopping mall where he tells her he loves her and “I think I want to take care of you, Sharon. . . . Come to London with me.” Again, Sharon takes control of the conversation, “Shut up before ya make an even bigger sap o’ yourself. Go home.”

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Burgess’s wife Doris (Virginia Cole) deduces that her husband impregnated Sharon and publicly announces to Kay that her daughter has “been messin’ around with my George.” This revelation electrifies the community, which is vastly amused. As Sharon tells Burgess, she becomes “the laughingstock of Barrytown,” and she “can’t go out without being jeered at.” As she grows bigger, she has to run gauntlets of eyes; but she endures the community’s scorn with head up. In contrast with her strength and somewhat precocious maturity, Sharon can be impulsive and youthfully willful, especially when “pissed.” She stumbles into the brief encounter that produces her pregnancy. When her father urges her to take it easy in view of her condition, Frears immediately cuts to her dancing wildly, obviously drunk, in a crowded nightclub. Finally, she impulsively—and to her own amused surprise— decides to name her newborn daughter “Georgina.” Her incongruous decision at once confirms her baby’s paternity and suggests that she may have been a little moved— touched as well as scornful—by Burgess’s protestations at the mall. Comparing the portrayal of Sharon’s fateful encounter with Burgess in the novel and in the film, it’s apparent that Frears shows her to be a stronger character than he found in Doyle’s narrative. In the novel, she is all but unconscious from drink: She couldn’t move really. Then there was a hand on her shoulder. –Alrigh’, Sharon? he’d said. Then it was blank and then they were kissing rough—she wasn’t really: her mouth was just open—and then blank again. . . . She knew they’d done it—or just he’d done it—standing up because that was the way she was in the next bit she remembered. . . . It was like waking up. She didn’t know if it had happened . . . .   She’d wondered a few times if what had happened could be called rape. She didn’t know. Doyle [1992]1995: 185

This looks like rape indeed, with the semi-­conscious Sharon the victim. To translate it unchanged to the screen would be infelicitous for a comedy and would make Frears’s protagonist a weaker character. In the film, Sharon initiates the sex. Drunk, she staggers out of the hotel where a party is taking place, lurching into a passionately necking couple as she emerges. Burgess appears, “Are you alright, Sharon?” To which Sharon exclaims, “A man!” She staggers forward and ardently embraces him, dropping her bottle of beer. Their intercourse is hardly romantic. Or, for Sharon, even erotic. After he comes, Burgess declares, “That was A-one” and walks off. Sharon looks into the darkness after him, “Who was tha?” The flashback portraying this encounter arises from Sharon’s painful memory as she overhears her parents discussing the accusation Burgess’s wife has made. On the music track, a singer wails, “Can you forgive me?” It’s not clear who may be assumed to ask this question or to whom it is addressed: her parents? Burgess? Sharon herself? As usual for such ambiguities in Frears’s movies, the most plausible answer is “Maybe all of them.” Strong as Sharon often is, her memories of that night show her vulnerability. After Doris’s accusation and George’s desertion of his family, her friend Yvonne becomes her

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enemy. When a very pregnant Sharon passes the Burgess’s house, Yvonne emerges, glaring—as the cliché goes—daggers at her. Sharon panics. She runs to her front door, pounding frantically as Yvonne stalks by. At the nightclub where she has gone in defiance of her father’s advice, Sharon gets so pissed that she vomits in her purse. She and her friend Jackie find this expedient hilarious, but Sharon suddenly begins to sniffle, “I’m goin’ home.” “Jesus, is it startin’?” Jackie asks. “Yeah. No. I just think, I wanna go home.” This sequence reminds us that Sharon, for all her courage and usual strength, has not yet left her childhood far behind her. Her astonishment at some of the details in a volume about pregnancy underscores her naiveté. Shots of the room she shares with her two younger sisters emphasize the fact that she is only a few years older than one and still dwelling in their world, at least some of the time. The downward tilt that begins the film shows a bedroom door covered with the signs and photos that any young girl’s door is likely to carry. Her room is as much a teenager’s as a young adult’s. Besides her youth, hormonal changes attendant upon her pregnancy partly account for the volatility of Sharon’s moods. Recently educated by the library copy of Everywoman he has checked out (“for the wife”), Dessie tells his daughter, “You’re gettin’ snotty now because of your hormones. . . . Imbalance is the term I’d use.” In sum, Sharon is mature, childish, steady, impulsive, strong, vulnerable, self-­confident, and insecure. To quote Aristotle again, “though the subject of the imitation . . . be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent” (Butcher n.d.: Section XV). Like his eldest daughter, Dessie can be described as consistently inconsistent. At home, he behaves timidly and often indecisively, particularly with his wife. Outside, he is decisive and aggressive, especially when he feels that he, Sharon, or his family is being ridiculed. In general, he serves the comedy of the film as the vehicle for many of its jokes, the originator of some of them, and the butt of others. Clownishly, he tries to play the responsible adult when Sharon tells her parents of her pregnancy: “You should have come to us earlier, before, you know, you said you were goin’ to get pregnant. Then we could have done something about it.” Kay listens to this foolishness incredulously. Newly authoritative on matters female, thanks to Everywoman, he prompts an amused Sharon to call him “Professor Curley.” Coming home with a nose bloodied in a drunken fight over what may have been imagined insults, he is reproached for his behavior by Sharon and Kay, who declares herself shocked to discover after twenty-­five years of marriage that her “husband’s a prick.” Left standing alone in the kitchen, he grouses, “Wha’? You’d be a long time waitin’ before you get a bit o’ gratitude in this house.” Dessie makes jokes as well as suffers them. Departing for the pub after Sharon’s announcement—“A man needs a pint after all that”—he says to Kay, “Cheerio, (slight pause for emphasis) Granny.” He orchestrates the “messin’ ” with Darren on his birthday, telling his son that the air pump he’s been given is the first installment on a bicycle that will be delivered in parts over many years, then pretending that the actual gift is an old clunker, and finally producing the real gift, a beautiful new Raleigh racer. Exuberant after Sharon’s apology for disgracing the family, he returns to the pub to deliver an obscene riddle to his howling friends: “What’s hard and hairy on the outside, wet and

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soft on the inside? It begins with a ‘C,’ ends with a ‘T,’ and has a ‘U’ and an ‘N’ in it. A ca, ca, ca, coconut!” In the hospital where he takes Sharon, he serves as “comic relief ” for a sequence that threatens to fall into sentimentality. (Lacking such leavening, the delivery sequence in Philomena is intensely moving—appropriate for that film.) While he waits with anxious young fathers, he asks one if it’s his first child. “No, me turd.” The grandfather-­ to-be and father of six picks up a booklet entitled “Family Planning,” and asks rhetorically, “Have you read this?” Frears cuts from Dessie smacking a recalcitrant candy vending machine, (“You come out!”), to Sharon in labor, pushing to deliver her baby. Continuing the parallels, the film goes from Sharon’s father draining a pint of Guinness back to the hospital where the baby is nursing. Dessie’s neighbor at the bar inquires if “seven pounds twelve ounces” is “a torkey or a baby?” Informed that it’s the latter, he remarks, “That’s a good sized baby. . . . Small torkey, though.” Back to the hospital, where a nurse is showing Sharon how to burp her daughter; then to the pub again, where her father—“the bigger baby,” as Frears calls him—puts down his empty glass and happily burps. Dessie’s reactions to his daughter’s pregnancy are complicated, and reflect the tension between his role as her father and his feelings toward a young woman whom he loves and who is pregnant by a man comparable to him in age and station. In his first appearance, he shares with Kay the role of parents hearing from their unwed daughter the news of her pregnancy. In rapid succession, he is startled, distressed, supportive, and accepting. He continues in his parental role when he asks if she “wants to keep it.” Kay has to explain this question to Sharon,“He wants to know, do you want an abortion.” The euphemism explained, he denies having asked the question. Again like a typical father, he at first reacts squeamishly toward his daughter’s womanly physiological symptoms. When Sharon casually observes, “Me uterus is pressing into me bladder,” he tells her, “I don’t want to hear that sort of thing.” He continues in a paternal mode when he passes on to Sharon the information he received from his pal Lester (Brendan Gleeson) about Burgess’s having called her “a great little ride.” Confronting his fifteen-­year-old daughter, about to go out in a scanty dress and attention-­capturing tights, he declares, “You’re not goin’ out like that!” And then, tactlessly, “We already got one . . . .” This insulting remark requires a reconciliation between father and daughter after Sharon threatens to leave home. Whether her threat is entirely serious remains ambiguous; when she goes upstairs to pack, Sharon hesitates attentively on the stairs to gauge the effect of her announcement. As Dessie pleads with her, she shows a hint of satisfaction, having gotten her father back in line. Whatever the degree of Sharon’s sincerity, Dessie takes her words at face value. Their exchange in her bedroom could just as well take place between quarreling lovers or spouses. Indeed, The Snapper suggests that Dessie’s response to Sharon’s plight—and especially to the revelation of Burgess’s paternity—unconsciously confuses his role as her parent and an underlying emotional energy composed of more than paternal protectiveness. His feelings approach identification with the middle aged man who impregnated her.

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Verbal echoes between what George says to Sharon in the parking lot and what her father says to her subtly suggest Dessie’s bifurcated feelings. Burgess’s “Are you alright, Sharon” is anticipated early in the film when her father calls through the bathroom door, “You alright in there, Sharon?” As Burgess leaves Sharon on the boot (trunk, U.S.) of the car where they’ve had sex, he says, “Good girl.” Again, that phrase is anticipated when her father persuades her to come with him for a pint. “Good girl,” he says as she gets up to join him. Driving her to the hospital when she goes into labor, he uses the phrase again, “Good girl. It’s only the old cervix dilatin’ ”—drawing on his recent book learning—then adds incongruously, “It could happen to a bishop.” (A little later, the obstetrician, encouraging Sharon to give one last, decisive push, uses the same phrase, recalling the beginning of her journey to motherhood.) Telling Sharon of Burgess’s boast (to which his daughter feigns indifference), Dessie declares, “I don’t want some fat little fucker insulting any of my family.” Looking amused, Sharon calls him “me knight in shinin’ armor.” When her father comes home with a bloody nose, Kay tells her, “Your Da’s after been defending your honor.” Continuing to play roles that could as plausibly be taken by a lover or spouse as by a father, Dessie offers to occupy what he explicitly identifies as a husband’s role “nowadays. . . . I wouldn’t mind, stayin’ with you when you’re havin’ ’im.” As he bounds out of the hospital with an ecstatic “Olé!” his elation is plausible for a grandfather, but more suggestive of a new father. (His high spirits on this occasion recall his joy after Sharon tells him that she’s sorry for what she’s put him and the family through. “She’s apologized!” he exclaims to himself, “Pub!” Sulking at home, he’s been ostentatiously depriving himself of his accustomed pleasures there.) After Sharon has capitulated to her father’s pleas that she continue living at home, Frears cuts to the family at the kitchen table, with Dessie leading them in singing

“Because I love you in my own peculiar way.” The Snapper (Frears, 1993) © Touchstone Home Video.

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“Because I love you, in my own peculiar way,” a line that he calls on them to repeat. He sits between Sharon, with whom he exchanges affectionate looks, and his wife, to whom he turns as the line is sung again. Between his roles as father and as husband, there is an overlap. That overlap is handled delicately. Dessie’s interactions with Sharon are always appropriate to a daughter and her father; the film does not show him, as Burgess histrionically writes to his wife, “torn between two lovers.” At the same time, much of what he says could, in a different context, be equally appropriate from a betrayed but forgiving lover or husband. “I love you, Sharon. And the baby, it’ll be yours, so I’ll love it the same,” Dessie promises. He adds, “On the Bible,” a phrase that Burgess used earlier with Sharon. Eventually, Dessie at least partly untangles his unconscious conflation of the roles of parent and suitor. When his daughter admits that the putative father she has invented, the “Spanish Sailor,” looks “a little bit” like Burgess, he only sighs and murmurs, “Oh, well.” Earlier, he reacted with a mix of incredulity and identification,“That bastard’s older than I am!” But if Dessie is resigned to his neighbor’s paternity, he remains hostile to Burgess himself. As he is trimming bushes in his yard, Burgess passes. Dessie calls to him and raises the clippers, “You know what I’d like to do with these? . . . Snip, snip!” Sharon does not share the emotional ambiguities of her father’s response to her pregnancy. Those issues are Dessie’s alone. His daughter does not confuse, unconsciously or otherwise, her father for a lover. She reminds him that “All girls are daughters.” She tells her father to “shut up” on the way to the hospital, as she told Burgess to shut up when he was urging her to come away with him; and she’s angry with him for fighting on her behalf. She sums up her relation to her father in a karaoke performance of a Madonna song: “Papa, don’t preach / . . . I’ve made up my mind / I’m keepin’ my baby.”

Design As usual with Frears’s movies, visual and aural elements contribute important overtones and thematic implications to the representation of characters and to the plot. They also unify and give richness to the film on a more abstract level, on the level of its formal harmonies and rhythms. They are important to the sensual shape of the film as well as to its meanings. In The Snapper, song lyrics comment on the action—as we’ve seen in Sharon’s performance of “Papa Don’t Preach” and the family’s singing after Dessie and Sharon reconcile. The uproar of the Curley family, in its happy chaos and continuous trivial conflicts, serves as an unmusical acoustic leitmotif. Colors are deployed with considerable complexity; they serve perhaps more as unifying formal elements than as semantic cues, though there is a degree of association of certain meanings with particular colors, notably red. Other design elements include images of water and mirror shots, both of which are attached to Sharon’s pregnancy. Grids and parallel

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configurations, a recurrent visual motif in Frears’s films, appear in a modified form in The Snapper. They are generally associated with images of patterned curtains and other twisting lines, a combination that visually represents the tangled complexity of Sharon’s situation. The opening credit sequence is accompanied by “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” covered by a briefly popular group, Lick the Tins, and featuring a penny whistle in an Irish sounding version: “Wise men say / Only fools rush in / But I can’t help / Falling in love with you.” Who the “I” might be, and who the “you” are unclear; but the latter can apply equally well to the “Snapper,” Sharon, Dessie, the Curley family, and even, with heavy irony, to “Georgie” Burgess. As to the “I,” most of the above apply, with the addition of the filmmaker and the audience. The same song plays over the last shots of the film, the Curley family visiting Sharon and her infant in the hospital. After a brief freeze-­frame, it continues into the closing credits. (It is typical of Frears, if he uses a cliché like a closing freeze-­frame, to vary or, in this case, reverse its usual connotation. Freeze-­frames generally signify the end of hope or some other dead end; in The Snapper it signifies the end of anxiety and strife, and perhaps a moment of stillness before the Curleys resume their noisily chaotic ways.) Other songs also comment on the action. Kimberley practices twirling her baton to “My Irish Molly.” It proclaims, “I’m fairly off my trolley,” a description that fits the majorette with a face full of shaving cream, and that will fit virtually every member of the family at various times. When Craig (Eanna MacLiam) comes home from the military, the family greets him with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” the currently popular anthem for returning soldiers. Dessie fulminates about the laughter that he hears coming from Sharon’s room, where she is making up her lie about the Spanish Sailor. (Her invention apparently gets its inspiration from Chris Bernard’s 1985 Letter to Brezhnev.) The rock group the family is listening to on TV contradicts her father’s indignation: “You can live any way you want.” Later, he sulkily watches another group when Sharon enters to tell him she’s decided to move out. Their lyric is more in tune with his feelings: “I, I am crazed . . . It’s runnin’ through my pain. Pain . . . .” The night a drunken Craig throws a garbage can through the window of Burgess’s home, an observing neighbor turns to go into his house, sarcastically singing for Dessie’s benefit, “Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding daa-­ay.” During a sequence depicting the public humiliations Sharon must endure, three young men behind a meat counter, one holding a handful of none-­too-subtle sausages, adapt a verse from a Jewel Akins song, “Hey, baby, it’s a Georgie Porgie. / Let me tell you where I’ve been.” The second line of their version changes “I’ve” to “you’ve.” Dessie, too, turns to song for mockery, directing at Sharon the “Popeye” tune, with its lyric revised to “I’m Pedro the sailor man.” We hear the postman singing Presley’s “Return to Sender,” as he delivers George’s melodramatic letter to his wife. Sharon and her friends stagger through the night singing a football chant with the words “Olé, Olé, Olé!” As Sharon, drunk again, lurches out of the hotel en route to her abrupt sex with Burgess, a group of young men comes onto the scene singing/shouting the same riff and holding up a trophy—which anticipates the trophy that Burgess will

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carry off in the form of Sharon’s “knickers.” Just before that encounter, as Allison notes, “we hear the Jim Diamond song, ‘I Should Have Known Better’ emanating from the stereo indoors” (Allison 2007: 49). Driving Sharon to the hospital, an excited Dessie produces the theme song from TV’s “Rawhide.” “Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’, keep them doggies rollin’.” Sharon shuts him up, but he’s soon singing again as they approach the hospital, “Is this the way to Amarillo / I’ve been weepin’ like a willow.” After the baby’s birth, the rest of the family, in a conga line, jubilantly sings her birth weight. While Sharon informs her parents of her condition, there’s an accompanying uproar, mostly musical: Kimberley passes carrying a boom box playing “Molly,” a neighbor in the adjacent unit begins loudly singing opera, caged birds twitter, and the dog barks at the door. “The music gettin’ to you, is it,” says Dessie as he lets the dog in. Finally, there’s an obscene “musical” touch, when Dessie comments that Sharon’s unknown partner was equally responsible for her condition, “I mean, it was his flute that . . . .” In addition to the commenting songs, a steady racket accompanies the action of The Snapper. Mostly, it consists of the familial uproar in the Curley home and the clamor in the pubs. At Kimberley’s school, a din fills the room as she clamps a headlock on a classmate who has evidently said something insulting about Sharon. During their sexual encounter Sharon asks her partner,“Is that you squeakin’?”An uncharacteristically quiet moment in the Curley household still involves sound, as Lisa and Kimberley put their ears to Sharon’s belly, listening to the movement of the fetus. Water adds a relatively unemphasized motif: TV coverage of a yacht race, rain, the kitchen sink, and Kay’s joke about damaging the newly covered sofa if Sharon’s water should break while she’s sitting there. On the DVD commentary, Roddy Doyle relates that Frears wanted rain for the scene when Jackie is attempting to hail a cab for Sharon. Elsewhere, Frears has remarked that adding rain to a scene intensifies its emotions—a technique he used so broadly in High Fidelity that it approached self-­parody. A few mirror shots emphasize Sharon’s pregnancy: her looking at her abdomen in the opening scene; then later, as she examines her swollen profile in the same mirror; and when she’s reflected in the mirror of a discotheque. While her father pleads with her not to leave, she is again in front of the bedroom mirror. We see one side of her face directly and the other reflected, suggesting her ambivalence. According to Frears, that shot was suggested by the cinematographer, Oliver Stapleton; but it might also be a modest authorial autograph, recalling split screens or similar effects in My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Grifters, Mrs. Henderson Presents, and Tamara Drewe among others. Another subtle maker’s mark may come as Dessie and Sharon, en route to the hospital, pass a sign, “Laundrette.” A more emphatic Frearsian motif arises from the clusters of parallel lines and grids that in The Snapper, as elsewhere in his films, simultaneously suggest protection and constraint. At once safe from harm and imprisoned, the caged canaries in the Curley’s kitchen exemplify Frears’s use of such imagery. When Sharon goes to Burgess’s home, the grid imagery appears with special density. The entry hall is surrounded with paned glass doors, sometimes seen through the parallel lines of stair railings. Unusually,

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The Snapper (Frears, 1993) © Touchstone Home Video.

Frears draws attention to this on the DVD,“I love that glass.” Then he quickly downplays his part in it, “A designer would have put that glass in the door and you just play around with it, I guess.” However those panes of glass got into the movie, their grids dominate the mis-­en-scène during the tense meeting. In the next sequence, Dessie confronts Burgess in a washroom. As Sharon did, he angrily reproaches him about his “ride” comment, threatening to punch him, then telling him that he’d better not ever again speak about Sharon. The set is dominated by another grid pattern, the tiles of the washroom. In both sequences, the apparently secure settings become, for Burgess, places where he is confined and confronted. When Sharon, having gone into labor, emerges from her flat, Frears uses a long shot with multiple door and window frames and slats on the walls of the dwellings. To those lines are added the parallels of slightly rusty metal fences and gates. Sharon is leaving a place that both protects and restrains her for a wider, more dangerous space. The multiple parallel lines of fences and stairs when we see Craig arriving at the train landing perhaps carry an ironically related signification of his emerging from the army into his home and community, places of complications and conflicts, not unlike his assignment in the Middle East, from which he has just returned. The grid imagery in The Snapper simultaneously expresses the complexities of Sharon’s situation by superimposing patterns of wavy lines. They appear in the etched glass doors of the Burgess house and in patterned lace curtains there and elsewhere. When Burgess throws pebbles against the window of the room in which Sharon and her sisters are sleeping, frightening the younger girls, Sharon goes to a lace curtained window that is the only bright thing in an otherwise dark frame. From that sequence, Frears dissolves to a close-­up of the Burgess’s glass front door, with its tangle of curves, beyond which the postman is delivering the letter from Doris’s absconded husband.

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The Snapper (Frears, 1993) © Touchstone Home Video. During that dissolve, Sharon’s profile is briefly overlain by the glassy squiggles, making all but explicit the complication of her circumstances. Unlike some of Frears’s other movies, in which different colors or values are often separated and individually connected to particular actions, feelings, or themes, The Snapper favors mixtures. Its mosaic of colors parallels its acoustic collage of songs and sounds. Red, a protean symbol in Western culture, can be associated with danger, love, pain, sexual passion, rage, warmth, and the command, “Stop.” In The Snapper, it signifies all of those in one place or another. “Cool” blue, can also have multiple significances: calm, sadness, frigidity, and so on. In color film, it is frequently set against “hot” red. In The Snapper, however, those two colors more often appear together, for practically all of its events and people invite consideration from two perspectives or more. The film’s tone is supported by a chromatic chord, red and blue, with less emphatic yellows and greens providing contrasting notes. They are occasionally seen by themselves—blue in Sharon’s clothing, for example, which might possibly hint at a subdued ironic association of her with the Virgin Mary, usually represented in blue clothing. (The father of Sharon’s baby, like that of the Virgin Mary’s, is a mystery at the beginning of the story.) The association of red with danger and pain has an obvious source in the color of blood, which we see coming from Dessie’s nose and from Doris’s, after Kay, in a fuchsia sweater, slaps her. Indirectly, blood reveals embarrassment; “I was so embarrassed I was scarlet,” says Jackie, a redhead. “You’re scarlet,” Yvonne tells a blushing Sharon. The singers of “Georgie Porgie” wear red striped aprons, and they humiliate Sharon to weeping. But red and blood can also carry a positive message: during labor, Sharon turns bright red on her last “Push!” and is rewarded by the emergence of the baby, bloodied but vigorous.

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After the opening credits—white lettering on red background—the door of the girls’ bedroom has an explicit message: “Danger,” again in white letters on a red ground. We see the same sign when Dessie comes to persuade Sharon (in a red dress) not to leave the family. Burgess first appears wearing a ruby scarf, anticipating the revelations that follow. The disco is drenched in red. When Kimberley tells Dessie that Sharon has gone into labor, he shouts “Red Alert! Red Alert!” Red signifies danger and passion together when Sharon enlists Burgess as “a man.” Ripping drunk, wearing a red dress, Sharon stands holding a bottle of beer in front of “The Shieling Hotel,” which announces itself in huge red neon letters. A triumphant team of young men in crimson and green sweaters comes onto the scene. Red decorative lights are scattered about. Sharon will soon be pregnant. We should note the green in this sequence as well, on the jumpers of the young men; and more significantly, on a sign across from the necking couple that Sharon passes: “Celebrate League Win” in red letters on a green background. The beer bottle she carries is green, as is a broad stripe on Burgess’s tie. The color appears behind an ardent couple as Sharon exits the disco. In each case, it suggests one of its traditional messages, “Go.” That implication carries over to the green van in which Dessie rushes Sharon to the hospital. A less prominent yellow accompanies settings and objects that often have positive connotations. The Curley’s kitchen, brightly lit and congenial, has yellow walls. A yellow ribbon, the object as well as the song, welcomes Craig home; and Darren’s ardently desired new bike is lemon yellow. This color too, however, appears in complicating contexts. A yellow clad yacht crew tumbles into the ocean on television; and in her book about pregnancy, Sharon reads, “Then the discharge becomes yellow and offensive.” At the center of the Curley household, witnessing all its crises and zaniness, is Kay. The jersey in which we frequently see her embodies the complex harmonies of color design in The Snapper. “Jive” is written in yellow against a blue-­green background, with red stripes above and below. In a red sweater and blue pants—danger and relief in prospect—Sharon leaves for the hospital to deliver her baby. The shots of the Curley family emphatically mix red and blue when they are gathered at the kitchen table; a similar mix characterizes Kimberley’s majorette costume and Dessie’s “Barrytown Wheelers” outfit, the latter with an appropriate bit of green. In the concluding shot, the Curley family visits Sharon and the new baby in a rainbow of colors, dominated by red and blue. The baby is dressed in pink, appropriate for a girl. And human life is always a little hazardous.

Sex and Barrytown “Can’t Help Falling in Love” announces the pervasiveness of sexual love, its biological imperative, its dangers, and the question of its morality: “Shall I stay / Would it be a sin . . .?” The theme of sex in The Snapper extends from popular culture to such relatively scholarly books as Pregnancy and Everywoman. It thrives in the local watering hole, in the hotel, and in the discotheque. It is strongly associated with alcohol. In the

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lounge, Sharon and her friends talk mostly about men and sex, and they tease the young waiter who takes their orders, calling him “handsome,” commenting on his “nice little bum,” ruffling his hair, and asking him provocatively, “Do you have any nuts?” Beneath the words “Be Hot” on the poster in the sisters’ room, a cartoon cat lifts what looks like a glass of beer. When Mary inquires, “Any news, Sharon?” she replies, “No, not really.” Getting “up the pole,” is excluded from their raunchy, high spirited sex talk. Sharon does finally announce her condition to her friends, and they respond ambivalently. Jackie tells her, “Well, done, Sharon,” then glares at Mary, forcing her to add her congratulations. Yvonne also says “Well done.” Then she adds, “Ya thick bitch, ya.” At which all burst into laughter. But Jackie tells her that she must “start hangin’ around with someone else” when she begins to show, for “No fellas’ll come near us if one of us is pregnant”—as if pregnancy were an STD. When the conversation becomes awkward over Sharon’s refusal to identify “who you havin’ it for,” Jackie steps in as peacemaker, “Let’s get pissed.” Of course, getting pissed was largely responsible for Sharon’s present state. Popular culture aimed at girls and young women approaches the openly sexual. In the bedroom of Sharon, Lisa, and Kimberley, a photo of the backsides of shirtless, heavily muscled young men in tight shorts decorates the wall, as does the already mentioned “Be Hot,” which we see a second time just after a kettle comes to a boil in the kitchen. Two pandas in a print in Burgess’s house look amorous. Lisa seems unaware of the sexual suggestiveness of the short skirt she’s wearing when Dessie forbids her to go out “dressed like that!” For her it’s simply a matter of fashion; but Dessie thinks otherwise: “Every bousie in Barrytown will be sniffin’ after ya.” Kimberley’s majorette uniform emphasizes where her cleavage would be, if she had any. In the Curley’s crowded home, a degree of candor about sex seems inevitable. Among the children, especially Sonny and Lisa, there’s some budding sexual energy, perhaps paralleling that aspect of Dessie’s feelings toward his oldest daughter. Lisa takes derisory interest in Sonny’s masturbation, and provokes him to physical wrestling matches, ostensibly hostile but distinctly suggestive. Darren persuades Kimberley to put a phallic nail into a yonic electrical plug, “again.” When Dessie asks her why she did it, she answers, “Because it fit”—a reply that we might take as summing up the inevitability of sexual relations among people generally.2 Dessie and Kay treat sex with the relaxed interest of a still fairly young husband and wife of twenty-­five years. As Kay sits knitting and Dessie fruitlessly clicks from channel to channel on the television, he concludes, “There’s absolutely nothin’ on tonight, is there?” Then, looking speculatively at his wife, after a long pause and a sigh, “I spose a ride is out of the question?” Kay smiles, “Hang on till I get this line done.” “You serious? . . . Fuckin’ great! You’re not messin’ now?” “No. Just let me finish the next line.” “I’ll go up and brush me teeth.” “That’ll be nice.” Having moved in Everywoman from chapters about pregnancy to others about “doin’ the business,” Dessie puts what he has read to use in bed with Kay. His wife is responsive, until a disturbing question occurs to her. Dragging him up by his ears from under the covers, she demands, “Where did you learn to do that?”

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But Sharon’s parents, at ease as they may be about their own sex life, are unsure how to react to their daughter’s. After Sharon delivers her news, Dessie asks his wife, “What do you think?” “I don’t know,” she answers. “Is that the best you can do?” “Well, what do you think?” says Kay, repeating his question. “I don’t know.” A little later, Kay wonders if they should tell the younger girls “It’s better to be married if you’re pregnant.” Again, Dessie doesn’t know, “Whatever you think, Kay. I’m only the dad; they’d only laugh at me. Times have changed.” Times have indeed changed. The shame attached to an unmarried woman getting pregnant lingers, as does the attitude that pregnancy is per se comic. But acceptance without judging has also become part of the response to single motherhood. The feeling of disgrace that drove Philomena’s father to put her into captivity in an Abbey has been diluted by contemporary semi-­acceptance. Kay admits to being worried about “the neighbors,” but some of them have already gone down the same road. More would if they could, Dessie asserts, “The O’Neill young ones are after having kids, the pair of them. And the Bells would be the same, except they don’t have any daughters.” Sharon cushions the absurdity of this last by adding, “Tara O’Neill had her baby for Paddy Bell.” “So fuck the neighbors,” concludes Dessie. Sharon’s young siblings respond with a mixture of admiration and indifference to their sister’s news. “That’s massive, Sharon!” exclaims Lisa. Darren asks, “Is that all?” and Kimberley hurries over to inspect Sharon’s not yet evident bump. But attitudes change when the possibility arises that Burgess’s was the responsible “flute.” A bloody nose follows for Dessie, and self-­banishment from the bar to avoid further embarrassment. Craig returns home and declares himself a traditionalist by asking Sharon, “Who was it? Do you want me to sort him out for ya?” A visit to the police station chastens him after he has broken the Burgess’s window, and we next see him celebrating the birth of the new Curley. The other members of the family come in their own ways to accept Sharon’s condition and even the possibility of Burgess’s paternity. Sharon’s apology mollifies Dessie, as we have seen. Kimberley is calmed by Sharon’s assurance that the baby “won’t look like Mr. Burgess.” Kay responds practically to that mortifying possibility. Seated in the family van with her husband, overlooking the ocean (a setting for a mock-­romantic epiphany), she says, “I’d be delighted if the father was a Spanish sailor and not Georgie Burgess.” She goes on to suggest that Dessie “Leave her alone. If she says he’s a Spanish sailor, let her say it.” “What?” asks an astonished Dessie, “Believe her?” “Yeah.” Sharon appears, most of the time, to be “ready for” motherhood, as a jersey she wears puts it. “I don’t mind being pregnant,” she tells Burgess, “but I do mind people knowin’ who made me pregnant.” Burgess, on the other hand, casts himself in clichéd romantic roles: “I’ve been living a lie for fifteen years.” “I’ll always remember you, Sharon.” Generally speaking, the sympathy of people to Sharon’s “trouble deep” varies inversely with their distance from her or her family. Her closest friends, as we have seen, react ambivalently. Jackie, her best friend, sticks tenaciously to her; but Yvonne understandably turns against her. Hesitant about how to react to Sharon’s plight, Mary joins Yvonne. The audience for Sharon’s karaoke accompany her singing enthusiastically,

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grinning with approval. Her supporters there include Mary and Yvonne, her father’s role not yet known. Dessie’s pub pals support him (and through him, Sharon). Their first reaction mirrors Dessie’s family’s; they’re interested in details but not censorious. Bertie (Stuart Dunne) offers to sell Dessie baby clothes, at a suspiciously reduced rate: “Mucho goodo stuff, Benetton. Very competitive price.” They later try, with comic zeal, to reassure Dessie about Sharon’s Spanish Sailor. Tight close-­ups on Lester’s face show a hint of longing as he expatiates on Sharon’s story: “Good lookin’ lad, you know. Different as well, like. Dark, ’n’ tall.” Bertie adds, “Exotic.” Lester, fully engaged with the fantasy, says, “Exactly,” and grins happily. Paddy (Ronan Wilmot) caps it with, “And a hefty langer on ’im.” A well-­stewed Sharon returns after telling her friends her news and lies in bed imagining the community’s reaction: “Sharon Curley’s pregnant, did ya hear?” “Sharon Curley’s up the pole.” . . . “Who’s she havin’ it for?” . . . “She doesn’t know! (screams of nasty laughter) She can’t remember!” “That’s shocking!” And so on, including “Dirty bitch!” But the last imagined commenter says, “Poor Sharon.” Then a masculine voice in Sharon’s head asks twice, “Are you alright, Sharon?” That gesture of concern, as we will learn, initiates the interaction with Burgess that puts her up the pole. When she asks Jackie “do they believe me,” her friend cannot be very reassuring: “They do. Yeah, I think they do. But it’s a better gas, thinkin’ of Mr. Burgess doin’ it with ya, instead of the other fella. That’s what you’re fightin’ against, Sharon, Barrytown’s sense o’ humor.” And also against its malicious taste for condemnation. In the grocery store, when the news spreads, Sharon experiences both. The checkout clerks seize eagerly on the news and a pair of shoplifting children—their activity underlining the general hypocrisy—turn on her: “Hey, Slut, How’s Mr. Burgess?” says the boy. The younger girl, as they run away with their booty, hurls back, “Slut!” When Sharon walks home, four younger boys and girls say loudly, “Here’s the tart again. . . . Stupid old Curley. . . . Up the spout again.” Yvonne publicly calls her a prostitute. The community’s reactions are on the whole less vicious than Sharon feared, but they are hurtful enough. They comprise the most painful moments of the film. Their depiction is limited to a few minutes, however, and most of the time a more comic, or at least neutral, tone prevails. Her family, once Dessie has come to terms with his feelings, champions her; and most of her friends and contemporaries are accepting.

Brief conclusion After Sharon retreats to her bedroom, having just escaped the threatening glare of Yvonne, she passes the “Be Hot” poster and a drawing of a clown with an equivocal expression. Once more she stands in front of the telltale mirror, looking mournfully at her bulging profile. We might take this as an implicit comment about the wages of drunken sex, but the film as a whole does not favor such moralizing. Sharon sometimes feels sad and afraid during her pregnancy, but she also feels pleased by it, even

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exuberant, as in her performance of “Papa Don’t Preach.” She never considers an abortion. With remarkable compression, The Snapper details the entirety of Sharon’s pregnancy, its accidental beginning, her complicated feelings as it proceeds, her conflicted father’s struggle to accept her condition, the rest of her family’s unjudgmental response, the friend who remains entirely loyal, contemporaries who surround and (mostly) support her, the combination of hilarity and righteous indignation—equally hypocritical—from the rest of the community, and the joyful fact of the baby at the end. Some possible problems remain; this is, after all, a movie by Stephen Frears. We get no hint as to how people outside the family will react to “Georgina,” how George Burgess’s relationships at home have evolved, and what will become of Sharon and her child. Nor, however, are these questions raised by the ending, the rhetoric of which strongly leans toward encouraging us to feel that the problems and tensions of Sharon’s pregnancy have been resolved. It may be that it’s better to be married if you’re pregnant. Transcending Kay’s mild admonition, however, is the overwhelming fact, as Dessie’s friend says, that “Havin’ a baby’s the most natural thing in the world.” That Lester, who is probably gay whether he knows it or not, makes this undeniable observation, constitutes a mildly ironic touch. But that’s about as ironic as The Snapper finally gets. The world that the screenplay offered him and that he tried to reproduce, Frears told Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, is “funny, human, tolerant, complicated” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 39).

8

Liam

Dense and deft, Liam achieves its concentration of meaning across multiple themes and characters. Consequently, Frears cut it more swiftly than usual. As Cynthia Lucia wrote, “Frears tends to favor the longer take over more rapid cutting, with shot composition inviting viewers to contemplate the characters in the context of their environment” (Lucia 2003: 8). The context in Liam remains, but the editing is accelerated. Actors’ performances are superb, as is always the case in a movie of Stephen Frears. In Liam his direction of children, in particular, elicits remarkable work. (Megan Burns, as Teresa, won the Marcello Mastroianni Award to recognize an emerging actor or actress at the 2000 Venice International Film Festival.) The Burning, Bloody Kids, The Snapper, and Philomena also include superb performances from juvenile actors. The design of Liam includes familiar settings and stylistic markers: doors, stairways, and windows, often accompanied by images of parallel lines and grids (“//##”). Colors and lighting are carefully and systematically deployed. Music functions as dramatic underscoring and as thematic amplification, often ironically. Frears’s agile camera sets forth its pictures variously. It often operates as a relatively quiet, objective observer; at other times, it represents characters’ points of view, including subjective shots, notably Liam’s. Sometimes it actively follows, anticipates, or implicitly comments on the action with an independence approaching that of another character. Unusually for Frears, the cinematography of Liam includes multiple tilted frames, a touch that adds to the sense of apprehension that pervades the film. Individuals intertwine with social settings. Liam (Anthony Borrows) and his community exist a little way outside conventional, middle-­class British society—again, as is often the case for protagonists in a Frears movie. The Irish of 1930s Liverpool form two groups, congenial in good times, in competition and antagonistic in times of economic trouble. One group comprises those who are established in England, albeit that they are still culturally somewhat insular; the other group is made up of more recent arrivals from Ireland. The antipathy between Protestant Orangemen and the Catholic IRA persists in England. Added to this unstable mix are the Jewish landlords, factory, and pawnshop owners; and the contesting Depression-­era politics of Socialists/ Communists versus Fascists, the latter virulently anti-Semitic and eager to blame Irish immigration for a depressed labor market. Structurally, Liam has the shape of a tragedy. The father (Ian Hart) of Liam embodies the role of a tragic hero who moves from a position of centrality in his society—here

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primarily his family but also to some degree his neighborhood—to one of isolation and exclusion. The tragedy of Liam extends to all the family, though it is especially profound for the father. The final credits identify him only as “Dad”; he has neither first nor last name, nor do we ever hear either in the action of the film. His wife is credited only as “Mam” (Claire Hackett). The three children, Liam, his older sister Teresa, and their considerably older brother Con (David Hart) lack surnames in the credits. (We know from the movie that it’s Sullivan.) The absence in the credits of last names for any of the central characters implies a degree of universality; this family represents many similar ones. Liam is constructed from a set of interlocking narratives, the most prominent of which are those of the title character, Liam’s father, and Teresa, in that order. The stories of Con and Mam have importance, but they receive less emphasis. Liam gets the first close-­up after Dad’s, smiling happily at his father. For the next several minutes the film’s attention is distributed among family members and their neighbors. Unlike the almost unvarying downward trajectory of Dad’s narrative, those of Liam and Teresa swing between small successes and painful injuries. As the movie ends, the stories of the two children, strongly linked from the beginning, break off lamentably but not hopelessly. They are together, as is the rest of the family, excepting the unpardonable Dad.

Liam and his family The first action of Liam, inserted into the opening credits, shows Dad clipping off his mustache and raising his eyebrows waggishly. As he turns back to the mirror and resumes snipping, Frears cuts to Teresa and Liam watching him, a shot that suggests either a point-­of-view from Dad’s perspective or that accounts for the framing of the previous shot as coming from the viewpoint of the children—or, with an ambiguous expressiveness typical of Frears, both. In any case, it introduces the close companionship between Liam and his sister, and their admiration of Dad. After more credits, a shot-­ reverse-shot goes from Dad to a close-­up of Liam smiling in response to his father’s clowning. We wait a couple minutes for the next semi-­close-­up of Liam, this time from the perspective of a bullying policeman, who gratuitously reprimands the children watching their partying parents through the window of the local pub. Between are establishing shots of the family at home, framings of Con and Mam, mirror shots of Dad, scenes of the children watching the adults, and a brief squabble between Dad and his older son. Though the title promises that Liam will be the most prominent character, the division of attention during the first few minutes signals that he will not be the sole important one. It is only partly accurate to say, with Amy Taubman (2001), “The film’s governing point of view is that of seven-­year-old Liam.” Among its main characters, Liam most frequently invokes its title character’s perspective, but it also turns regularly to others’ or, through its sometimes inquisitive camera, inserts a viewpoint independent of any character. Liam’s perception of his world does not sum up that of the whole movie.1

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Frears’s lively, sometimes autonomous camera reflects the complexity of Liam’s place as a central figure. Roughly speaking, images of Liam fall into four categories, not always easy to separate: first, “objective” shots of him from no character’s perspective— these are the most common; second, track-­in shots that generally end on a medium-­ close-­up of Liam’s face and suggest his concentration on (and frequent alarm at) what is transpiring in front of him; third, point-­of-view shots, signaled by close-­ups and/or eyeline cuts; fourth, subjective shots that represent exactly what Liam is seeing and hearing, whether with his eyes and ears or in his imagination. Tracking in to Liam’s intent face, for example, combines with eyeline shots while his teacher explains to the class how “filthy” their souls have become and how confession will wash them clean. (A mischievous cut at this point goes to a close-­up of a plate from which Teresa is scraping leftovers into the garbage at the home of the Samuels, a Jewish family with whom she has found work.) Frears uses similar tracking-­in shots when Liam first views the painting of a nude Venus, which he comes to associate with the Priest’s explanation of “what sin does.” Subjective shots that take us directly into the mind of a character occur only with Liam. The first comes when he opens the bathroom door and accidently sees his naked mother. A rapid dolly-­in to Liam’s face registers his distress. Next a subjective shot from Liam’s point-­of-view, then a semi-­close-­up on the stuttering child, followed by another subjective shot, after which Liam slams the door and runs, obeying his mother’s angry command to “Go away!” This episode leads Liam to believe that “something is wrong” with his mother because of the pubic hair he sees, a detail missing from the nudes in the art book at school. It suggests the somewhat strained relation between Liam and his mother, who is convinced that “He knew I was in here.” It is one of a series of incidents for which Liam is blamed, over which he has no control. Another such event also involves his mother; he is strapped for coming late to school, because Mam’s excessive scrubbing him results in his tardiness. Disturbed by what he saw, Liam asks his teacher, “How do you know if a sin is a sin?” A point-­of-view shot shows the Teacher (Anne Reid), who repeats Liam’s question, and Father Ryan (Russell Dixon) looming. “A sin is a sin,” the Priest intones, “if it’s on your conscience, if it troubles you.” He thereby confirms Liam’s intuition about the wickedness of having seen his mother without clothes. Failing to confess anything that troubles you is a sacrilege and, the Priest continues, “if you die with a sacrilege on your soul, God will send you hurtling down to Hell.” On the last word, Frears dissolves through a close-­up of flames to a subjective shot of what Liam sees as he watches a blaze in a grate. The camera then films him through the fire for an emphatic ten seconds, next cutting to an overhead shot of him standing on the dirty street as a steam roller passes. The workmen tending the fire follow the machine, and Liam is left alone between two burning grates—an eloquent image of what he imagines his fate to be if he fails to confess what he has seen. A pair of later sequences show how effectively the religious threats of the Teacher and Priest have terrified the small boy. In the first, we hear the Teacher’s voice, “You know how much it hurts when you burn your finger? . . . The fires of Hell are a million times

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Liam (Frears, 2000) © Lions Gate Films.

hotter than any fire on earth, and you’ll be in there. . . . burning forever in the fires of Hell. Forever.” After the Priest amplifies “forever,” Frears cuts to Liam walking past a farrier sizing a horseshoe that he is forging. A subjective close-­up shows smoke wreathing from the hoof, accompanied by hissing. Then we see, still through Liam’s eyes, childish hands submerging in a basin of hot water, as he apparently tries to judge just how painful his eternity will be. A striking shot from behind the bowl tracks slowly in to Liam, looking down at the steaming water. We hear Mam’s voice, “First confession today.” The next sequence takes place in the church, where Liam awaits his turn to confess. An eyeline cut pans through blackness to a ceramic Christ’s face, first purple and then, evidently in Liam’s imagination, turning red. It continues down to an extreme close-­up of the statue’s finger on his heart, the camera then panning through a black screen to Liam’s anxious face. A second eyeline shot zooms into another statue of Christ, this time on the cross. A zoom is a rare shot for Frears. Here it indicates Liam’s enormous anxiety.2 Three more fast zooms into Christ’s nailed hands follow, along with the sound of a hammer striking, as Liam remembers the Priest’s explanation that every sin “drives the nails deeper.” Liam enters the confessional. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession, and I have (struggles to speak, as the camera that followed him comes closer, ending on an extreme close-­up of his lips). With difficulty, he goes on, “disobeyed m m my Mom, sworn, taken. . . .” Because he has been so long, the Teacher asks the boys waiting in the pews, “Is Liam still in there?” Back to the extreme close-up on Liam’s mouth as he laboriously continues, “. . . the Lord’s . . . name . . . in . . . v v v (extreme ­close-up on Liam’s eyes, squeezed shut with concentration) vain.” We see, on the other side of the confessional, the Priest in semi-­darkness, behind him candles and a small statue of Christ crucified: “Anything else?” Cut back to Liam’s face;

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he flashes back to the sight of his mother, nude in the bathroom. The Priest continues, “Is there something else bothering you, my child?” Again, Liam’s face in the darkness of the confessional, with one wide open eye and his lips in the light. Frears intercuts again, even faster, his memory of his naked mother. A series of shot-­reverse-shots follows between the Priest and the camera tracking in still closer to Liam’s face. The Priest tries to help Liam make a complete confession: “You can’t tell me because you can’t get the words out? Or you can’t tell me because you’re too embarrassed?” As he speaks, the silent Liam recalls, once more, the sight of his mother in the bathroom. The Priest brings the confession to a close: “There’s nothing else then?” Liam: “No, Father.” Since the Priest has explained that an incomplete confession followed by the taking of Holy Communion amounts to “the gravest sin of all,” Liam believes himself about to be condemned to eternal damnation. When his attempt to evade Communion fails and the Priest approaches to put a wafer on Liam’s tongue, Frears inserts another zoom shot from Liam’s point-­of-view, this of yet another statue of Christ on the Cross, ending on His wound and the drops of blood beneath it. As Liam struggles to chew and swallow, the Priest passes down the line of new communicants, repeating, “Jesu Christi custodiat animan tuam in vitam aeternam.” But in his mind Liam hears the sound of his sin driving the nails deeper into the Savior, and faces his aeternam in Hell. Liam’s extreme stutter at once causes some of his difficulties and symbolizes them. In general, it seizes him when he is stressed: trying to ask for something, for example, or needing to make himself understood. His inability to speak is frequently in evidence while he is receiving religious instruction. When his turn comes to say, as his classmates have, “Nine o’clock Mass and Holy Communion,” he cannot bring forth the words, and he fiercely strikes his chest trying to force them out. Later, after he has managed to tell the Priest about seeing his naked mother, he confidently speaks the same words, and smiles with satisfaction. Elsewhere, his stutter underscores his isolation and his struggles to comprehend the contradictory demands of the world. At the same time, it suggests the inability of his auditors to understand a bewildered child. Some of the attention he gets from his family and in school ameliorates his isolation, but often it makes matters worse, usually because it reflects adults’ inability to recognize what he needs. All young children, Liam suggests, come into the world to find themselves largely on their own, whatever their circumstances. Liam’s are difficult. “I’m watching you, Liam Sullivan,” says the Policeman who upbraids the children on New Year’s Eve. Trying to remember his mother’s instruction to ask “Auntie Aggie” (Julia Deakin) for a “Dickie Bow” by writing it down in class, he is caught and strapped for the second time that day; later he is slapped by Aggie when he talks back to her as she stands outside posing with her family for a much delayed photograph. The Catholic Church to a great extent shapes Liam’s world. Both the Priest and Liam’s Teacher try to relieve his troubled spirit by helping him to make a successful confession. But though they are intermittently sympathetic to the children in their care, and acting in good faith by their lights, the film portrays their words, and the practices of the Church, as mostly abusive. Like the bullying policeman, they convey threats. Though Mam doesn’t know exactly what has gone on in the confessional, her rhetorical

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question to Father Ryan sums up this aspect of the film, “What are you doin’ to my kids!” More sympathetic to him are Liam’s father and his sister Teresa. The first doesn’t have special understanding of his son, but he always acts toward him with love and gentleness. We have seen how happily they look at each other in the credit sequence, which sets the tone for their mutually affectionate, trusting interactions. When Mam asserts that Liam knew she was in the bathroom before he opened the door, Dad assures her, “He didn’t, Love.” After an angry Mam insults Dad and puts him out of the house following her row with Aunt Aggie, he nonetheless pats his son affectionately as he passes him in the yard. He does so again as he steps over his wife and Liam on the stoop when he returns. At that moment, Mam takes her husband’s wrist, soundlessly apologizes, and the two embrace passionately. Liam, who had been sitting with drooping head, watches their reconciliation and smiles. Predictably, he feels secure and content when his parents are happy. Walking home from school, Liam sees the locked gates of the closed shipyard where Dad works and realizes that his father has lost his job. Standing among the laid-­off men, Dad comes to him and speaks gently, “Go on, son. Go on”—in contrast to Mam’s screamed “Go away!” Our last view of Dad, stricken when he sees Teresa’s scarred face, for which he is responsible, comes from the point-­of-view of Liam, who gives no sign of anger toward his parent. But his father also introduces his son to the destructive codes of bigotry. Imitating what he heard on New Year’s Eve, Liam is happily singing,“Here I am a loyal Orangeman / Just come across the sea . . .” when his father instructs him to “never ever sing that song again. That’s the Proddie Dogs’, that.” With Teresa, Liam sees his father attending a meeting of the British Union of Fascists, and he hears the speaker’s diatribe, which concludes, “We are being overrun with Jews and Irish.” In church for his first Holy Communion, Liam witnesses his father’s tirade against both the Church and Jews: “Jesus Christ has got us all skint, Father. . . . Those who profit from all this Christianity are all bleedin’ Jews.” Overwhelmed by having committed what he supposes to be sacrilege and by the spectacle of his father’s enraged rebuke of the Priest, Liam strays down the central aisle of the packed church and collapses. The most supportive and the only purely constructive figure in Liam’s life is his older sister Teresa. They often play together, and Teresa sometimes acts as a third parent for her brother. In her unjudgmental presence, he rarely stutters. Near the end of the film, he walks happily with her—his anxiety about having made a bad confession relieved by the Priest’s contemptuous explanation, “You silly lad. All women have hair down there.” He prattles, “My name is Liam Sullivan. I live at 43 Westbourne Street, and I went to 9 o’clock Mass and Holy Communion.” With his sister, Liam celebrates at second hand the adults’ revelry on New Year’s Eve. They misunderstand the political rage between Nunny (Silvie Gatrill) and Lizzie (Bernadette Shortt) as no more than further adult high jinx. Given the drunken state of the combatants, they are not entirely wrong. (Frears reverses the sexes of the usual scene of wives intervening to separate brawling husbands.) Later, the two children walk in mutual puzzlement through the burned remains of the local pawnshop, where

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Teresa sees the half-­burned hand-­me-down dresses she got from the Samuels, which her mother pawned. In the foreground are the false teeth that an old man brought in the day that Mam took the dresses there. The word “JEW” in huge red letters on a surviving window means little to them. Still later, in a happy gang of children, they watch a Cowboys-­and-Indians movie—a scene that the film presents with pointed irony, but in which they take unalloyed delight. On the brink of adolescence, Teresa’s advancing maturity allows her to serve as a caretaker and protector for her young brother; but at the same time it begins to separate them. When Liam struggles to tell his name to the bullying policeman, Teresa steps in to finish for him. She has a sort of parental understanding of his half-­finished or aborted utterances; from his stuttering “ssss” she infers that Dad has been “sacked.” On his side, Liam relates to his sister, on occasion, as if she were a second mother. Touchingly, he combs her hair while she sits looking out the window at the end of the film. Earlier, when Mam was upset by Dad’s teatime absence, he combed her hair, attempting to calm his parent: “Ca . . ., soothe ya nerves?” After we see Liam furtively trying to glimpse Teresa undressing, Mam moves him from the bed he shares with her into Con’s. Neither brother is happy with the change. Mam attempts to reassure a whimpering Liam, “You’ve done nothing wrong. Teresa needs to be on her own, that’s all.”3 Con is less reassuring, “You pee the bed, and you’ve had it.” Sex bewilders Liam. As for many children, confusions and anxieties reflect puzzlement about sexuality, which he sees and tries to interpret; but he lacks details. He knows it’s important . . . and somehow connected with sin. Struggling to reconcile the nudes in the art book with what he saw of his naked mother, Liam sets out to determine if Teresa has pubic hair. With the torn-­out page showing Venus, he returns when Teresa is asleep. He carefully pulls back the sheet and blanket covering her, checks Venus once more, and is about to lift Teresa’s nightgown when she rolls over, thwarting his mission. Liam understands that sex has to do with touching. He has seen his parents embrace amidst the Saturnalia of New Year’s Eve and he understands that his parents’ going upstairs together confirms their closeness. Puzzling over the disjunction between his mother’s anatomy and Venus’s, he traces the painting with an exploring finger. All this might be played as simply endearing if it didn’t lead Liam to think his mother defective and suppose himself damned to Hell. The mode of Liam’s punishment in school, lashes across his palms, perhaps supports his intuition that touching is a form of badness. Beyond their relationships with Liam, Dad and Teresa have their own stories. Both are tragic. Though the trajectories of their plots diverge, they begin and end together. Teresa’s first words are to her father, “You look funny. . . . Nice.” So are her last, “I’m sorry.” Her father looks “funny” because he has just shaved off his mustache; when he visits his scarred child at the end of the film, his mustache is back. He doesn’t look funny. Teresa’s life within her family appears predictable and protected. She and Liam happily count down the seconds before a Wake-­up Man’s anticipated rap on their window, which summons the families with employed husbands. She has regularly assigned tasks: polishing the silver and cleaning the back kitchen. Like Liam, she’s

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happy when her parents are. When her mother averts what looks like a gathering storm by asking Dad if he’d like a cup of tea, she and Liam exchange smiles. Teresa has few clothes—in many scenes she’s wearing the same green sweater—but they are adequate. When she comes home with three dresses that belonged to Jane Samuels (Gema Loveday), Mam allows her to keep one and pawns the other two. In general, Teresa’s mother supervises and tries to protect her daughter. Before she leaves for work at the Samuels’, Mam declares, “You’re not cleanin’ the lavat’ry. No daughter of mine cleans another woman’s lavat’ry.” (A few shots later, we see Teresa brushing out her employer’s toilet bowl.) Mam is cognizant of her daughter’s approaching womanhood. When Teresa comes home with extra money that “I couldn’t keep,” her anxious mother starts to grill her: “Did he give it to you? . . . The man of the house. Did the man give you that money?” Teresa knows what her mother is driving at and she reacts angrily, “For God’s sake!” The money was thrust on her as a reward for her warning Mrs. Samuels (Jane Gurnett) that her husband (David Knopov) was listening to her telephone conversation with her lover. After Teresa reluctantly takes the coin and leaves the room, she sees the husband weeping quietly. He heard enough to come to an accurate conclusion—and his tears stir Teresa’s conscience. Sex then, for Teresa as for Liam, is a problem, albeit of a different sort. Bringing tea, she finds Mrs. Samuels and her lover David (Martin Hancock) passionately kissing. Later she carries a letter from David to Mrs. Samuels and, when the husband arrives, she is drawn into helping his wife conceal it from him. (This wins her Jane’s dresses.) Even after the Priest tells her, “You helped the woman to sin, you must stay away from that house,” she continues to protect her employer. She won’t tell her family why she can’t work for the Samuels any more. When she goes to resign, Jane, who obviously likes her, presses her about the Priest’s forbidding her to continue working in their home. With sidewise glances, perhaps at Mrs. Samuels, she evades the questions. (As she does so, Frears cuts to where Liam waits, covering his shoes in gravel from the driveway.) “Because we’re Jewish?” asks Jane. After hesitating, Teresa sees a way out, “Yeah.” During her confession, Teresa focuses on the Samuels’s home. She begins with, “I denied my faith, Father. I thought I wouldn’t get the job if I told them I was Catholic, so I said I wasn’t.” She confesses to taking home the chunk of roast that was to be thrown out, which she regards as “still stealin’ ” and tells the Priest about Mrs. Samuels’s affair and her own part in hiding it. Father Ryan’s proscription adds pressure to the straitened finances of Teresa’s family; and it exiles her from a place and people she admires, however ambivalently. Religion for Teresa, as for Liam, compounds her problems without offering any solutions. In his movies where religion has importance, Frears does not, on balance, portray it positively. It often turns aside from its spiritual mission or inverts it in the service of money or power—like the divorce of sex from love in other Frears movies. (The Abbey in Philomena is an especially clear example.) Frears sometimes portrays religious individuals with sympathy, sometimes with distaste, the latter usually for their hypocrisy; but he shows little respect for the institution.4 More broadly, passionate belief in any dogma does not accord with the comprehensive vision of humanity that

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infuses Frears’s films. Understanding all does not lead to pardoning all for Frears; but neither does it lead to judging, whether from religious, ideological, or political viewpoints. After telling the Priest of Mrs. Samuels’s adultery, Teresa goes on, “There’s worse, Father. She makes me ashamed of my own mother. She’s nice. She talks nice, she dresses nice, and my mom doesn’t. My mom shouts and she’s poor and she’s tight; and I want this other woman to be my mother.” The contrast between her home and the Samuels’s is vivid. (When her father attacks the Samuels, his justification recalls his daughter’s words: “I live in shit, and look at this place!”) Mrs. Samuels is affectionate with her daughter and she treats Teresa cordially and respectfully. She has no concern about whether her maid is Catholic or not, and she is straightforward about her family’s religion, “We’re Jewish. . . . Does that make any difference to you?” On her first day of work, Teresa is drawn by piano music to look into the living room where she sees the beautifully turned-­out Jane playing, her mother keeping time beside her. For Teresa, as for her father, the Samuels’s home has everything theirs does not. Even when Teresa arrives to quit, evidently after an absence, Mrs. Samuels greets her cordially and without reproach, “Oh! Hello, stranger. Come on in.” The affair Mrs. Samuels is conducting doesn’t lessen Teresa’s admiration of her employer or of the Samuels’s life. She knows that Mrs. Samuels’s behavior is wrong and hurtful to her husband; but she does not seem to understand—as the audience of the film will—that it threatens the happiness and tranquil life of the family. Teresa cannot share that life, as a moment during her first day at the Samuels’s makes clear. Arriving home, Mr. Samuels finds her peering through a cracked door into the living room and listening to Jane’s playing. “Who are you?” he asks, brusque but not threatening. “Teresa, Sir.” “Hello, Teresa,” he says, then goes past her into the living room, shutting the door behind him and cutting off the scene. His closing of the door does not seem rhetorical, which makes it the more telling; for him, Teresa isn’t there. Between two families, from one of which she grows increasingly alienated as its fortunes decline and its stability wobbles, and the other to which she can never belong, Teresa becomes increasingly isolated. Growing up, she grows away from her life as a child and from her family as she starts to venture into the world. What she brings home sows discord. The money from Mrs. Samuels that she feels she cannot keep she uses to pay a small debt to Aunt Aggie, hoping to settle the quarrel between her and her mother. But Mam is furious. “I wasn’t bein’ ’ard-­faced,” Teresa pleads, “I was tryin’ to do a bit of good, that’s all.” The world outside intrudes on her vulnerable life and that of her family, bringing economic woes that cause her father’s loss of his job, and the political turmoil that sucks him into a fascism that literally consumes her in flames. At the end of the film, evidently concealing her scarred, once youthfully pretty face from the neighborhood, she sits looking out her bedroom window, very much alone, despite Liam’s attempts at consoling her. Overwhelmed by everything that has befallen her and her family, she turns back to the window, from which she and her brother witnessed wishes for a “Happy New Year.” Frears dollies in to her disfigured cheek, then pans across black shadow to Liam behind her. The sound of his combing is exaggerated; it resembles the

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hissing of fire. As the movie and her story end, Frears cuts to a black screen. He does not fade; that might be too sentimental.5 Like Teresa’s, but more steeply, the trajectory of Dad’s story descends. From beginning a new year in a happy family, still employed as the depression begins, his authority as the head of the household unchallenged, and his relation with his wife solid, he falls into unemployment, decreasing stature at home and in the neighborhood, and eventual exile from his home and his family. The high point for happiness and a feeling of stability and belonging, for Dad and the entire family, comes at the beginning of the film when bells sound, fireworks explode, and the adults sing “Auld Lang Syne.” In a remarkable shot with double imagery—a shot that resembles similar ones in My Beautiful Laundrette and Philomena—the camera faces Liam and Teresa as they look out the window. An adjacent pane reflects the adults dancing in a ring. As the dancing ends, Dad and Mam embrace. Leading up to that moment, the action begins with Dad playfully mugging as he removes his mustache, a ritual apparently symbolizing a clean start for the new year. The sequence following the events of New Year’s Eve begins with Dad lighting the furnace and making tea and toast to carry up to his wife, “Here y’are, Love.” The portrayal of a sturdy family continues, with Liam joining his mother in bed to share her breakfast and Dad going back down to tend the fire. As he adds a sheet of newspaper, however, Frears shows the front page; its headline reads “DOLE QUEUES LENGTHENING.” One of the sub-­headlines further foreshadows what is to come in Dad’s life: “Propagandists Take to the Streets.” Ominously, flames consume the paper. A relaxed parent—Mam keeps the house in order—Dad unequivocally heads the family. Though his instructions are not always obeyed, his authority is essentially unchallenged. When he comes home with his wages, he replaces his older son in the

Liam (Frears, 2000) © Lions Gate Films.

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Liam (Frears, 2000) © Lions Gate Films.

single easy chair with a word, “Out,” then takes up the newspaper Con was reading. Against Dad’s wishes, Mam lets the Priest in; but her husband gets up and shows him out when he pressures Mam about being “a bit short this week.” Dad reads him a brief lecture in the entryway: “I earned my peace of mind years ago. I served me time. . . . Those fellas are on the dole now, Father, and I’m still workin’. ” The Priest opens his mouth to speak, but Dad preempts him, “Good night, Father.” As he leaves, Frears cuts back to a close-up of Mam, putting away a bill she was about to add to her “widow’s mite.” Fate, however, does not miss its chance at a nasty irony. The next time we see Dad, he learns that the yard where he is employed is “closin.’ ” Only once, early in the film, have we seen Dad at work, driving red hot rivets with a sledge. (The portrayal of his work joins motifs of flames and of sin driving nails deeper into Christ’s hands.) Standing with other laid-­off workers outside the locked factory gates, he watches a contingent of police open them for Mr. Samuels, whom we understand to be the owner. His chauffeured limousine stops for a moment and Samuels, doubly reflected in its windows and its rear view mirror, looks out at his former employees. This shot, a stylistic touch characteristic of Frears, shows Samuels at once separated from the workers and visually among them. After losing his job, Dad cannot find work. He stands among a crowd of men who have gathered hoping to be chosen for day labor, but the Gaffer (Bryan Reagan) leaves him unselected, though he notices him and gives him a quizzical look. Making eye contact, the Gaffer opens his hand and then closes it in Dad’s direction, evidently suggesting that a bribe is in order. The morale of the family plunges along with its finances. Cutting from the sequence in which the Gaffer does not select Dad, Frears shows them silent at the dinner table. When Dad finally speaks up, what he has to say to his wife is mortifying, “Will ya ask

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Aggie for a loan?” He plans to “buy the Gaffer a few pints . . . I buy him a couple pints, he gets me some work.” Already angry, Mam rubs in Dad’s humiliating request, “The man I married said he’d never do that.” After a pause and a sigh, Dad joins her, turning on himself, “He lied.” Dad buys the Gaffer a pint, watched by three disapproving patrons, at least one of whom we’ve seen in the line of unemployed men. He then leaves the pub to sit on the doorstep with Liam. Ashamed of what he’s done, he cannot bear his son’s smiling, affectionate gaze. He turns aside and weeps. But although the Gaffer accepts a drink, he apparently has something more substantial in mind, for the next time we see Dad in line, he is again passed by, the Gaffer chuckling derisively at him. Frears typically complicates the action. Cruel as the Gaffer’s mockery is, there may be some justice in his selecting more desperate men. In a warm overcoat and muffler, Dad looks more prosperous than those around him. He responds by spitting in the Gaffer’s face, which leads to a momentary, bitter-­ sweet recovery of his sense of pride and his family’s spirits. Sitting with his glum wife and children in the dark living room, he answers Mam’s “You should have spit in that Gaffer’s eye.” “I have done.” He giggles at the memory of his defiance; and as he and his family laugh, the scene brightens, literally and figuratively. Deprived of his role as breadwinner, Dad’s authority in his home shrinks. When Mam comes home enraged after quarreling with Aggie, she displaces her husband from his chair, a symbol of his status, “Go on, get out from under me feet!” She adds a wounding detail that Aggie used to shame her, “Go and see if you can find a few stumps in the gutter!” That outburst is followed, as we saw, by a reconciliation; but the conflict between Dad and his elder son is not easily resolved. Their contention explicitly revolves around politics and money, but it is ultimately an issue of power. As Mam is washing the bruises Con got when he tried to warn those at a leftist meeting that “the coppers are coming,” Dad enters. “What were you doin’ there anyway? They’re all bloody Communists.” With a response imported from a similar context in My Beautiful Laundrette, Con mildly corrects him, “Socialists.” (Con’s correction of his father’s characterization repeats an internal division among those in attendance. An orator (George Maudsley) shouts, “You’re singing a communist song and I object!” Behind him we see part of a banner with a hammer and sickle and “mmunist arty” visible; at the top of the banner, ironically, “Unite.”) For his part, Dad would “get this country back to work again. I’d get rid of the Irish, and then the bleedin’ Jews.” Pointedly, Frears cuts on the word “Jews” to Teresa arriving for work at the Samuels. The next time his father proclaims such ideas, Con is not so calm. Having already denounced the Church about the expense of dressing the children for first Communion, Dad continues his diatribe at home, speculating that Father Ryan is “probably gettin’ the back hand of the bleedin’ Jew boys. Nice little deal gone cozy with the Jew boys.” Con rises in anger, “Will you stop goin’ on about the ‘Jew boys’!” Dad responds to what he sees as a direct challenge, “Are you talkin’ to me?” When Con does not back down, Dad strides across the room and slaps him. As they continue to shout at each other, Dad arrives at the heart of the conflict, “I’m the man of this house!”

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Later he returns to the job line, not to seek employment, but to upbraid one of the men who is regularly selected, a friend whom we recognize from the New Year’s Eve celebration, “You work on the cheap, you Irish scab. Get out of my country!” His antiIrish feelings—the irony is obvious—are one part of the politics of hate to which he turns as his unemployment lengthens. The other elements, as we have seen, are his antiSemitism and his resentment of the Catholic Church, feelings he frequently combines. Mam urges him to accept help from the parish. With his diatribe during Liam’s first communion and his bragging to the Priest in mind, however, Dad regards that as humiliating, “I’m not going cap in hand to any bloody priest, watching Father Ryan gloat.” Nor will he pay the rent to the “Jewish bastard” who comes to collect it. What he does is to join the Fascists, whose scapegoating of Jews and Irish reinforces his prejudices. When he takes the uniform of the Blackshirts from its place of concealment, it has apparently never been worn. Where and why he got it is unclear, but his putting it on is not. He is publicly declaring his politics and his willingness to go to war. He strides along the street with a stern look of purpose. Passing the neighbor he rebuked in the employment line, he repeats his command, “Get out of my country.” Unaware that Teresa has gone to the Samuels’s home to quit her job and collect her wages, her father and fellow Blackshirts throw a fire bomb through a front window of the house. The flaming, gasoline-filled bottle shatters the window and breaks at Teresa’s feet, enveloping her in fire. Besides its horrifying immediacy, the flames recall those that have filled the movie, usually seen through Liam’s eyes, fires symbolizing the Hell that religion promises those it considers sinners. The command to “get out of my country” turns back on Dad. If he doesn’t replicate the self-­blinded Oedipus exiled from Thebes, the end of his story is not far different. When he enters his former home, some months later, he is grimy and unshaven. He is greeted with a mixture of sadness, fear, and anger from his wife, and with loathing from his older son. When he asks “Where is she,” Mam says only, “Upstairs.” Neither his older son nor Liam talk to him. Nor can he speak to Teresa. She says, “I’m sorry,” and turns away. Her apology is ambiguous; it might mean that she can’t bring herself to talk to him—that’s how he appears to understand it—but it seems more likely to indicate that she feels somehow to blame for what has befallen her and her family. The light in which Frears photographs Dad moves from bright to dark. The title of a short Wallace Stevens poem describes its progression aptly, “Domination of Black.” During the opening credits, five close-­ups of Dad shaving put him in a pool of light, a mirror reflecting the brightness of his image. The interior of his household grows darker as the film proceeds, and by the end of the film, as he departs, Dad has been reduced, literally, to a shadow.

Music, design, camera work Along with its dialogue and acting, meaning is carried in Liam by music, its rich, careful design, its cinematography, and its editing. Those elements work seamlessly together; but for purposes of analysis, it’s convenient to separate them. Doing so makes clear the

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concentration of meaning in Frears’s superb storytelling, in which every detail enforces central themes and propels the narrative. Given the complexity of the worlds Frears creates, density in design, visual and aural, is essential to supporting the multiple energies of his movies. Music conveys messages that sooner or later pull in opposite directions. The melody accompanying the opening credits is carried by an Irish harp and has a Hibernian feel, appropriate to the Irish subculture of Liverpool in the 1930s. But the cheerful, tranquil theme will be rendered incongruous by the bitter divide that opens between the recent and the more established immigrants, and between the Catholics and Protestants, a conflict embodied in contesting IRA and Orangeman anthems that are sung bellicosely at the end of the New Year’s celebration. When the opening melody returns to accompany the closing credits, it is carried by strings, and the harp has almost disappeared; as a result, its Irish quality diminishes. The story and its characters have been individualized; the Irishness has a reduced importance in comparison with the particularity of the characters and their misfortunes. At the same time, paradoxically, its import has been universalized. As Diane Arbus heard from her teacher Lisette Model, “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be” (Arbus 1972: 1). The line of singing dancers in the pub and the singing as the party moves to the home of Mam and Dad radiate happiness and communal unity, a feeling that climaxes in the circle of friends and neighbors joining in “Auld Lang Syne.” Suggestively though, the other songs the revelers sing have lyrics of abandonment and sorrow. In the first two: “You took my happy days / And left me lonely nights / . . . You taught me how to love you / Now teach me to forget” and “You’re going to miss me, Honey / One of these days.” Forgetting “old acquaintance” comes to pass all too soon. In the pub, Aggie sings (beautifully) “Someone to Watch over Me,” as Dad hands the Gaffer a pint of bitter. But his bribe, as we have seen, doesn’t avail, and Dad remains “lost in the wood.” In the church, the lyrics accompanying a closing processional are incongruous in light of the Church’s oppressive economic demands, “I shall not want.” The sound of Jane’s piano playing cues scenes in the Samuels’s home; and we see from Teresa’s point of view a Norman Rockwellish domestic tableau of a daughter learning music, instructed by an affectionate mother. But—always with Frears a “but”— such set-­pieces inspire guilty envy in the witness, as we have seen, and the perfect mother is pursuing an adulterous affair. With his young protagonist, Frears mutes the ironies of diegetic music. In the only comfortable sequence of Liam in school, he runs to retrieve the bell, which he rings at the Teacher’s instruction to signal the end of recess. But the sequence includes a hint of less happy times to come: in a tilted framing, we see the bell under a large ceramic statue of Christ crucified. During his second confession, Liam hits upon the expedient of singing what he cannot speak: “I saw my mother naked, and there’s something wrong with her.” His singing allows Liam to reveal his most shameful secret, and his tearful conviction that “I’ll go to Hell when I die.” There is no irony attached to the song he creates to liberate himself from his deepest terror; but there remains some in the scene, connected to the Priest who takes Liam’s confession. This scene and the other in the confessional proceed

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via shot-­reverse-shots. On the wall behind Father Ryan hangs a small statue of Christ on the Cross, all but nude—an appropriate touch, given Liam’s anxieties. Liam’s circumscribed world is saturated with religious art, which is predominantly associated with threats, guilt, and tenuous finances. Besides instances of iconic Christian images and figures already noted, others surround Liam. At home, a crucifix in the entry hall conspicuously punctuates the Priest’s dunning visit and another hangs beside the staircase. In his classroom, where Liam is learning of the everlasting fires of Hell, half-­a-dozen religious pictures hang on the walls, along with a crucifix and a statue of Mary holding the Christ Child. Another such statue appears in an especially poignant shot. In the foreground, just outside the classroom, stands a life-­size Mary holding her Divine Offspring, his right hand raised in blessing. Down the hall in the background, Liam, about the size and age of the statuary Christ, is receiving the last of three loud blows with a leather strap. As he approaches the classroom door, the ceramic figures gaze down benignantly. Unable to touch the doorknob with his stinging palms, Liam turns it with the heels of his hands. The popular art and media that appear in Liam lean toward unruly feelings suppressed by religion and by expectations of politeness and obedience. Several times we see Liam reading Dick Turpin, a romanticized outlaw. He and his sister convert the coin given him by passing nuns into enthusiastic attendance at a Cowboys and Indians picture. “C’mon,” Liam shouts at the movie, “Kill them! Kill them!” Visual motifs favored by Frears reappear in Liam: among them doors, mirror shots (mostly of Dad), tilts, and parallel lines and grids. As we have seen, doors figure importantly in scenes of Teresa with the Samuels. In addition, Frears twice shows her knocking on the Samuels’s front door, first when she “come[s] about the job” and is admitted by a supercilious Jane. Later, when she arrives to quit and collect her wages,

Liam (Frears, 2000) © Lions Gate Films.

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she reaches up to the knocker on the huge black door, the forbidding color of which foreshadows the catastrophe shortly to take place. The door to her family’s home is also emphasized, as we have seen, most significantly when Dad departs through it as a dark silhouette. When he arrives at the beginning of that sequence, we see that it is painted red, a color associated with danger and anger. Having gone up to see his daughter, he enters her room through another door, this one painted green, a calm color that opposes red in Liam and with which Teresa is associated. Unlike green, blue does not so much contrast with red as supplement it with traditional gloom, “the blues.” Blue lighting appears to be associated with comfort and security early, when Liam and Teresa smile at the wake-­up call they have been expecting. Retrospectively, Frears ironizes this scene after Dad has lost his job. Liam counts down silently as Teresa sleeps beside him. The sound of the Wake-­up Man’s shoes is audible, but his staff passes the window without stopping to tap. Frears then cuts, as before, to the street in early dawn, the man continuing; but he taps only on a single window, much farther down the row of houses. The music on the sound track repeats that of the first sequence, underlining the increasing poverty on Liam’s street. In Liam’s school, the four glass panes in the door to the classroom are divided by muntins that form a cross, a casual reinforcement of the religious imagery in the room. When Father Ryan enters to explain “what sin does,” the door-­cross is prominent; when he closes the door, it is visible again, its shape echoed by a crucifix on the wall behind the Teacher’s desk. Shot from Liam’s point-­of-view, the cruciform window and several like it appear again behind the Priest, when he returns to tell the class “how you know when a sin is a sin.” The effect is to immerse him in a background of crosses. Similar shots accompany his terrifying explanation of “forever.” The window-­crosses are related to a general graphic motif of grids and parallel lines. Characteristically, Frears gives that geometry immediate or eventual doubled significance: protection-­constraint, reassurance-­warning, welcoming-­exclusion, depending on context. The staircase and its banister spindles in Liam suggest at once security and restraint. Liam and Teresa peer through the spindles, and later watch through the grid of the window the celebrating adults; but they also uncomprehendingly observe the quarreling over the IRA and the Orangemen. Among other “//##” shots, Frears twice shows the chained and padlocked gates of the factory, excluding the workers after it closes. Similar gates at the base of the Samuels’s driveway twice open to Teresa, but their opening is injurious. The first time, as she’s about to go in, David gives her a letter to deliver to Mrs. Samuels, “on the quiet.” The second time occurs when she enters before the firebombing. Parallel lines and grids, when associated with Liam, are generally ominous. Going to the pawnshop, an errand he fears, he is shot through the red spokes of a wagon wheel. Frears surprises us, however, when his unhappy task has a lucky outcome. As the stuttering Liam tries to ask for the “seven and a tanner” that his mother told him to request, a neighbor woman bargains the pawnbroker up to nine and a tanner, at which point Liam manages to shout “Yes!” The door through which Liam must enter the dreaded confessional has a series of red-­lighted, vertical panels. There is no reversal of expectation there, as Liam fails to

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confess what most troubles him. On another occasion, late and hurrying to school, he runs past a red shop front, then behind a series of fences, with their vertical posts. With an irony that approaches cruelty, the sound track plays a light, cheerful air. When he starts to cross the schoolyard, Liam is caught and strapped. The Samuels’s home has a glassed in entry hall and a floor checked by black and white tiles. It produces a swarm of gridded lines and shadows. For Teresa, it opens on a place at once welcoming and excluding, as we have seen. It is where Mr. Samuels weeps, after his wife’s conversation confirms his suspicion of her infidelity. When Teresa conceals the bit of roast she has saved from the trash, she is confronted there by Mrs. Samuels. “Teresa!” Teresa turns apprehensively, “Yeah.” Mrs. Samuels, to Teresa’s relief, says only, “Thanks.” Mrs. Samuels did not reproach Teresa for spiriting the leftover roast out of the Samuels’s home, but she evidently told her lover David. When Teresa opens the front door and sees him for the first time, he enacts a scene from a police film, pretending to be a detective arresting her. With his suit and wide brimmed hat, he looks the part. “Teresa?” “Yes.” “Would you get your things please? . . . You’re under arrest for stealing meat from the kitchen.” This incident constitutes one of many that involve food, eating, and drinking. Sharing food can signify familial, amorous, or religious coming together. When it is held back, refused, or leads to conflict, that reverses or makes ironic the ideal that partaking together should embody. As one would expect, such reversals or ironic associations prevail in Liam, a narrative dominated by tragic and ironic energies. Happy occasions connected with food all involve Liam. He joins Mam in bed to share her toast. After his unexpectedly triumphant trip to the pawnshop, he is rewarded with a thick slice of buttered bread, though that pleasure is diminished when Mam declares that she’ll send him on the same errand again. Following his second, successful confession, Liam chews his Communion wafer without terror. Other occasions involving food and drink are immediately unhappy or lead quickly to ironic sequels. Mam refuses to accept the discarded roast Teresa brings home: “Well, your dad’s workin’. We don’t need charity.” She does not yet know, as Liam and Teresa do, that Dad has been laid off. Tea time proves especially hazardous. Father Ryan interrupts it when he comes to collect for the parish. During a gloomy tea, Dad asks Mam to borrow half a crown for the Gaffer’s pint, which eventually leads to a bitter quarrel with Aggie and produces no casual work for Dad. The landlord arrives to collect rent during tea. When Teresa first brings tea to Mrs. Samuels, she surprises her employer and David embracing; the next time we see her bringing the tea tray, she warns Mrs. Samuels that her husband is listening to her telephone call. The Teacher instructs the boys not to eat before Communion, “We don’t want the body of Christ sloshing around with bits of toast, do we?” she asks.“No, Mrs. Abernathy,” the class replies in chorus. Except for Liam. As his mother dresses him for First Communion, he does exactly what he’s been told not to do, hoping to evade sacrilege, but to no avail. “God wants you to make your first Holy Communion,” an angry Father Ryan tells him, “And by sweet Jesus, son, you’re going to make it!”

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Drink has uniformly dismal associations, ranging from Con’s vomiting after scorning his father’s advice to “go easy,” to the unproductive pint given to the Gaffer. When Dad comes late to tea, having fortified himself with a drink the day the shipyard closed, Mam is indignant, “Starting that game again, are we?” Con’s invitation to have a pint enrages Dad. Near the end of the film, in a dark corner of the alehouse, he drinks alone. John Huston once said about his camera work, “It’s what I do best, yet no critic has ever remarked on it. That’s exactly as it should be. If they noticed it, it wouldn’t have been any good” (T. Huston 1987: 16). Much the same could be said of Frears’s collaborations with his cinematographers. In Liam, the camera is often handled conventionally, effectively expediting the story with establishing shots, “objective” views of the action, ordinary pans, cranes, shot-­reverse-shots, and so on. Frequently, however, but without obviously drawing attention to itself, the camera acts independently; it goes beyond the requirements of storytelling and approaches becoming something like another character. Regarding it that way, it seems to me, makes more sense than calling it an extension of the director. It qualifies, after all, as a formal aspect of the film; the director does not. He may be responsible for those aspects, but he is not one of them. In the camera’s most conventional and usually inconspicuous functioning, it hardly matters what we call it; when it actively seems to comment upon the action or to shape the narrative, however, it can usefully be regarded as another member of the cast. Such is often the case in Liam. We can choose several examples among many. Early in the film, as Dad, Mam, and Con depart for the pub, Dad says to Teresa and Liam, “Don’t follow us,” and Teresa replies, “We won’t.” The next shot—camera and editing often cooperate—is from inside the pub, from no identifiable point-­of-view, looking at the laughing children peering in. The camera then pans onto a line of singing dancers, a continuation that could be seen as adopting the kids’ perspective, but that could also be seen as continuing the camera’s independence, and its implicit commentary. After the policeman orders the children down from the window and picks on Liam, the smallest among them, the camera once more comments upon what has happened. From a perspective no character could have, it looks sharply down on the entrance to the pub. Above it in large letters: “NOT LICENSED FOR SINGING OR DANCING.” The civic bully enters and reemerges, having said nothing to the adults inside. The singing stops only for a moment. Near the middle of the movie, a curious camera pans across Liam’s empty classroom, tilting down to discover him wrestling the large art book from the shelf. It then tracks in to his intent face. Frears cuts to a shot over his shoulder as he opens the book to the painting of Venus. As Liam awaits his turn to enter the confessional for the first time, the camera follows a series of subjective zooms from Liam’s point-­of-view with its own comment. In a shot which looks nothing like the preceding ones, it cranes down from an elevated position to a close-up on the back of Liam’s head. The little boy looks small and the image is dark. The camera’s position also comments, with clear irony, on Dad when he comes home briefly at the end of the film. As he stands alone in the living room, the camera

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photographs him from an extreme low angle. Shots in which a figure looms over the setting generally suggest power and position—Father Ryan is photographed towering above the congregation during his brimstone sermon, for example—but with this incongruous angle an ironic camera here underscores Dad’s entire loss of stature. Frears also uses slanted framing as commentary or forewarning. Such shots mimic the perspective of a skeptical cocked head looking at an unpersuasive or ominous scene. In one, Liam beams down through slanted banister railings at the struggling, enraged wives on New Year’s Eve. When Dad and Mam quarrel about Dad’s refusal to go “on the Parish,” all three offspring cluster at the top of the stairs in another tilted shot. A shot of the upstairs banister shows Dad about to descend after bringing his wife morning tea and toast, a congenial domestic scene. But that shot is tilted too, a foreshadowing of the alarming newspaper headlines; and we see this framing again when Dad hesitates at the top of the stairs, then descends, after having visited the scarred Teresa. When Teresa arrives with the discarded roast, Mam acidly asks, “They gave it you?” Teresa (without much conviction), “Yeah.” The frame is sharply tilted, and in the background, blue light of the night enters the room through the grid of a window. A strongly slanted close-up on the pay window of the shipyard immediately precedes the news of its closure. An editorializing camera sometimes joins with editing to underline a point or make a joke. The track-­in from Liam’s face observing his father at the meeting of the fascists is shortly followed by another track-­in on Liam’s face in church, where Father Ryan expounds his competing vision of horror: sinners shall be cast into a furnace “where there will be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” His threatening, parallel to the political declarations of the fascist speaker, is followed ironically by the choir singing a hymn that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd.”

Liam (Frears, 2000) © Lions Gate Films.

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To argue that such sequences embody Frears’s personal attitude is misleading. As we have seen, the perspectives of Liam are multiple, frequently overlapping and equivocal; but they are never simple or easily summarized. Nor do they elevate one point-­of-view to an authoritative position. If Frears has a summative attitude, it can only be the film itself, in its entirety.

Conclusion Though not without humor, Liam may be counted among the least hopeful of Frears’s movies. The direction of the narrative is largely unbroken in its downward path; and, unlike even such gloomy endings as those of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid or Mary Reilly, there is hardly any hint of a possibly less sad future at its end. Among Frears’s corpus of feature films, only Prick Up Your Ears ends more dismally. In the concluding sequence, Dad enters the living room to find Con seated in what was formerly his chair, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper, as his parent used to do. With a look of disgust, and conscious that his father no longer has any claim to that throne, Con leaves the house, refusing to be in his father’s presence. Dad simply sighs, as he did earlier when he said of himself, “He lied.” This sequence begins in the pub (apparently some months earlier), the scene of communal celebration at the start of the film. Now haggard, alone, and deliberately shouldered by a passing patron, Dad sighs and lights a match, which he holds under two fingers. We hear the crackling of burning skin. His action recalls Liam’s plunging his hands into hot water, and the sound echoes that of flames throughout the film. After entering Teresa’s bedroom and hearing her ambiguous “I’m sorry,” Dad does not speak. He turns, leaves the room, hesitates a moment, and then descends the staircase to the door. As he reaches the base of the staircase, the picture goes very dark. When he opens the door, light streams past his silhouetted legs, projecting their shadow on the floor. As he steps out, his full shadow stretches behind him. He has become a shadow of the man who joked with his family as he shaved and put on his suit for New Year’s celebrations. The door slowly swings shut behind him, plunging the screen into blackness. His story ends there. In a moment, Teresa’s and Liam’s will also end in the black of Frears’s final cut. Like the entire film, the final sequence is balanced among sorrow, a sense of fate, of waste, and of a family crushed by circumstances over which its members had scant control. Surprisingly, given Dad’s actions, the film lacks any concluding assignment of blame. It exemplifies the passionate objectivity Frears brings to all of his movies. Judgment or sentimentality would put the film, its maker, and its audience in a position of emotional or intellectual superiority, gazing down on the characters’ misfortunes. In Liam, what happens happens. The people are who they are. Darkness finally fills the tragic world of the film, as it will finally overwhelm all our worlds.

Part Five

Love, Media, and Memory: The Queen and Philomena The Queen and Philomena are both partly organized by narrative structures that recall low-­voltage, odd-­couple romances: in The Queen, between Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) and Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the prime minister; in Philomena, among the title character (Judi Dench), her dead son, and the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who joins her in pursuit of a “human interest story.” These generic similarities are limited—in particular, by the absence of any amorous details or even possibilities. Both films have strong central female protagonists, who are played brilliantly by distinguished actresses. They share, as well, a crucial memorial component: the recently perished Princess Diana in The Queen, and Philomena’s lost child. In both films, media, public and semi-­private, shape human consciousness as well as reflecting it. These qualities also characterize Mrs. Henderson Presents, released the year before The Queen. Judi Dench plays Mrs. Henderson, whose love with Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) is expressed mostly by incessant quarreling. Mrs. Henderson Presents also has an essential memorial component, the protagonist’s son, killed in World War I and buried in a graveyard in France, where Mrs. Henderson twice visits. As is characteristic of Frears’s carefully modulated ironies, the outcomes of the films analyzed in this section are happy, but limited in extent. (The same is true of Mrs. Henderson Presents. She and Van Damm cannot marry, because he is already married.) The alliance between Elizabeth II and Tony Blair must remain to a degree in constitutional tension; and Philomena, although she has in some ways found and even reunited with her lost son, cannot actually embrace him, nor can he ever recover her. But she and Sixsmith attain a nearly familial connection. In all three films, things turn out as well as they can in this not the best of all possible worlds, this always compromised human existence.

9

The Queen

As its title promises, the current Queen of England occupies the center of The Queen. She is the most fully developed character; her actions—or inaction—constitute most of the plot and the suspense that propels it. The main themes of the film develop almost entirely in relation to her character, behavior, and place in the governance and national psyche of England. The most important of those themes include the formation of crowds and their volatile dynamics; the place in modern life of media, especially television, but including newspapers and Frears’s film itself; and the complexities of British intra-­governmental order and distribution of powers.1 The plot seems simple enough: Will the Queen manage to comprehend the emotions of her countrymen, their grief at the death of Princess Diana and their growing anger at the Royals’ failure to respond publicly? If she does come to understand the national mood, will she do what is required? And will she do so before the institution of the monarchy is irredeemably injured? These tensions justify the epigram that opens the film, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” On one side are the popular media, especially the newspapers, the swelling and increasingly distempered crowds, and the recently elected prime minister, Tony Blair, egged on by his anti-­monarchist staff and wife. In various ways all put steadily increasing pressure on the Queen to break precedent and act. Resisting those pressures are those closest to her: her husband Prince Philip (James Cromwell), and her mother, another Elizabeth (Sylvia Syms). Her Private Secretary, Robin Janvrin (Roger Allam) maintains a steady inscrutability, intervening only once with a telephone call to the prime minister to explain how the personal history and feelings of the Queen might make her seem “unhelpful.” Her son Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), the divorced husband of Diana, feels himself to be a “modern man” and sides privately with the prime minister; but he is exhausted by his struggles with his late ex-­wife, more than uncertain of the regard in which his subjects hold him, and distracted by his own grief and the needs of his two sons, now motherless. Further, he is portrayed as weak and perhaps cowardly. The Queen and its production credits begin with what appears to be television coverage of the end of Blair’s campaign for prime minister; but a cut to a point-­of-view shot reveals that we are watching what someone else is watching. The credits continue as another cut reveals that watcher to be the Queen, regally attired in brilliant red, white, and black. When she speaks, we see that she is having her portrait painted.

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She asks the painter (Earl Cameron), “Have you voted yet, Mr. Crawford?” He answers that he has, and “not for Mr. Blair.” Amused, she asks, “You’re not a modernizer, then?” “Certainly not. We’re in danger of losing too much that is good about this country as it is.” The Queen goes on, “I envy you, being able to vote . . . . the sheer joy of being partial.” Mr. Crawford, a white-­haired black man, notes that, although the Queen is not entitled to vote, “It is your government.” As this conversation winds down, we see for the first time the full setting: the Queen in her royal garb, seated on a platform in a richly decorated room with portraits of her ancestors on the walls, the television, a little incongruous in this environment, on a stand facing her, and the portraitist off to the side with his paints and supplies. Back to a close-­up of the Queen, who smiles, “Yes, I suppose that is some consolation.” Cut to Helen Mirren’s credit, hers only, white letters in the lower left corner of an otherwise black screen. In the minute-­and-a-­half of this inconspicuously informative exposition, Frears has introduced most of the major characters, themes and motifs of his film: the dignity, relaxed confidence, and wry intelligence of the Queen—qualities that will soon be given a serious stress-­test; the tremendous importance of television, with its images of crowds and its commentators; crowds themselves, with contending passions of sorrow, rage, and love; Tony Blair and his family, especially his wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), which will parallel and contrast with the Queen’s family, particularly her husband, Prince Philip; the tension between the desire to modernize English culture and the wish to support its traditions; the complex issues of the monarch’s relation to the elected government; the Queen’s private lack of pretension or self-­importance—here speaking with a commoner with whom she has established a cordial, informal relationship; and, above all, her centrality.

The Queen (Frears, 2006) © Miramax.

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Elizabeth II and Tony Blair Accompanied by imperial chords on the sound track, a close-­up tilt begins at the Queen’s feet and records the gorgeous richness of her dress before stopping on her face. She turns her head to look at the camera as the title of the film appears, “THE QUEEN.” We cannot but be impressed at her wealth, her glory, and her calm, commanding gaze.2 Nor can the “actually rather nervous” Tony Blair, on his way to meet his sovereign for the first time as prime minister. Outside her overwhelming London home, Buckingham Palace, a bagpiper strides in front of massive columns, providing a wake-­ up serenade for the Queen. Inside, she learns of Blair’s landslide victory from newspapers and television, with images of the motorcade carrying him on his “first day of power.” She is unimpressed. When her private secretary informs her, “The prime minister’s on his way, Ma’am,” she corrects him, “To be, Robert. Prime minister to be. I haven’t asked him yet.” After he has been provided with lessons in protocol, Blair is greeted by the Queen with “Have we shown you how to start a nuclear war yet?”—a question well designed to take him aback. She continues by reminding him of her experience, and his inexperience by comparison: “You are my tenth prime minister, Mr. Blair. My first was Winston Churchill.” She further asserts her authority by reminding her petitioner of “our constitutional responsibility to advise, guide, and (leaning forward for emphasis) warn the government of the day”—the last phrase underscoring the impermanence of a prime minister’s power. Reinforcing her dominant position, she gestures the applicant to his knees and corrects him when he muffs his lines: “Mr. Blair, I ask the questions. The duty falls upon me, as your sovereign, to invite you to become prime minister and to form a government in my name.” Blair doesn’t know what to do next, so the Queen resumes her instruction, “And if you agree, the custom is to say ‘Yes.’ ” Which Tony Blair obediently does, kissing the Queen’s hand when she extends it to him. After Mrs. Blair is allowed “into the Presence,” the Queen, having been informed of some evidently more important business by Robin, abruptly dismisses her visitors, who bow and back their way awkwardly from the room. So much for “modernization,” and “call me Tony.” (But “constitutional responsibility,” as we shall see, cuts both ways.) Among the many meanings of “order,” two have special importance for The Queen: command, who gives orders to whom; and the absence or opposite of confusion or disarray. On behalf of the second, Tony Blair telephones the Queen shortly after the death of Princess Diana. Deferentially, he asks/suggests “that in view of her high profile, popularity, it might be an idea to pay tribute to her life and achievements? . . . The British people, you don’t think a private funeral might be denying them a chance to (the Queen interrupts, “a chance to what?”) share in the grief?” The Queen could hardly be less responsive, and she attempts to instruct the prime minister on a matter that he understands better than she, “This is a family funeral, Mr. Blair, not a fairground attraction.” Continuing to express her authority, she hangs up abruptly. Now the prime minister is unimpressed. “Her instinct,” an incredulous Blair tells his wife, “is to do nothing.”

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The second time he attempts to counsel the Queen on the advisability of making a public response to Diana’s death, he is less diffident; but she is no less dismissive. Nonetheless, she has already been forced to accept that the Princess’s funeral will be a public one. The prime minister asks if the Queen “has seen any of today’s papers,” at which point Frears cuts to the front page of The Sun on the Queen’s desk, featuring a stern image of her next to its enormous caption, “SHOW US THERE’S A HEART IN THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR.” Elizabeth responds that such headlines signify nothing more than “a few over-­eager editors . . . doing their best to sell newspapers.” She continues, with undisguised distaste, “So, what would you suggest, prime minister, some kind of a statement?” Blair does not back away this time, “I believe the moment for statements has passed. I would suggest flying the flag at half-­mast above Buckingham Palace and coming down to London at the earliest opportunity.” His recommendation is absolutely rejected. Once again, the Queen reads her prime minister a lesson in public relations, “I doubt that there is anyone who knows the British people more than I do . . . and it is my belief that they will at any moment reject this (pause as she looks for a euphemism and repeats his) this ‘mood,’ which is being stirred up by the press, in favor of a period of restrained grief and sober, private mourning.” Still imperious, she again abruptly hangs up. With the exception of her husband, who dismisses Blair as a “bloody fool,” and her mother, everyone around the Queen is beginning to see how untenable her defense of privacy has become. It is at this point that Robin makes his telephone call, appealing to the prime minister for understanding: “Try and see it from her perspective. . . . Unexpectedly becoming King as good as killed her father. I’m afraid she’s in a state of shock. This public reaction has completely thrown her.” Blair agrees to help, and he understands that the media must be mollified as a first step: “We’ve got to deal with these terrible headlines.” For all her unhelpfulness and apparent stubbornness in the situation that Diana’s death has called into being, however, the Queen does not lack a degree of media savvy or an awareness of the power of public perception on the institution she embodies. When Prince Charles, after the news that Diana has been injured but before the announcement of her death, tells his mother that he’s ordered “my people to start organizing a jet,” she resists out of concern for the Royal image: “Isn’t that precisely the sort of extravagance they always attack us for?” Later she wonders if “it’s wise for the boys to go stalking so soon? . . . If a photographer were to see them, it might send out the wrong signal.” The Queen’s mother has no qualms, “If there is a photographer out there, he could be the first kill of the day.” Frears indicates that Elizabeth II and her prime minister share an awareness of the importance of their images by giving them (and only them) rhyming mirror shots. In several, Blair adjusts his clothing before going out to address the media, to perform on television, or to meet his monarch. The most notable comes as a last title sets the stage, “TWO MONTHS LATER. . . .” Preparing to meet the Queen for the first time since the week following the Princess’s death, the prime minister stands adjusting his clothes in a shot that triples his image in facing bathroom mirrors. Toward the end of the sequence, the camera pans to a direct view, emphasizing that it began with a reflection.

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The Queen (Frears, 2006) ©Miramax.

The title “FRIDAY,” the fifth day of “that week,” introduces the Queen, dressing in front of a mirror for her television address. The camera dollies in, keeping her mirror image in focus as the direct shot of her goes soft—emphasizing, in effect, the primacy of her image. It then cuts to her face as she looks at her herself in the mirror and, at the same time, at the camera. The shot strongly recalls the one in the opening credits when she looked calmly ahead as the title of the film appeared. The later shot suggests that her mirror represents her audiences, which consist of intertwined entities: herself inspecting herself, waiting television producers and technicians, the worldwide viewers of her speech, and, finally, we who are viewing the movie. Belén Vidal, in a discussion of The Queen that argues for its status as “a key heritage film,” notes, “The monarchy biopic of the 1990s became increasingly self-­reflexive” (Vidal 2012: 36, 37). These mirror shots are among many supporting that characterization of The Queen. Blair makes his third telephone call after his attempt to calm the newspapers fails. A clear sign of an impending shift in order comes when Robin informs his employer that the prime minister is on the line and “rather insisting” to speak with her. Blair begins by justifying his intervention. He tells the Queen, “the situation has become quite critical. Ma’am, a poll that’s to be published in tomorrow’s papers suggests that seventy percent of people believe that your actions have damaged the monarchy and that one in four are now in favor of abolishing the monarchy altogether.” He goes on, “As your prime minister, I believe that it is my constitutional responsibility to advise the following: . . .” Here Frears remarkably cuts; and my discussion of the action should also pause. Tony Blair is no longer offering diffident suggestions, he is giving a command.

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The Queen (Frears, 2006) © Miramax.

Reluctantly but unmistakably, he has reversed the power relationship of Queen and prime minister. Robert Lacey, identified as “British Historian and Royal Expert” on the “Bonus Features” of the DVD, explains, “When the prime minister advises the Queen of something ‘constitutionally,’ and uses those very words, he is in fact giving her an order. She has no choice but to obey it.” As Elizabeth hears Blair invoke his “constitutional responsibility,” she shuts her eyes grimly. (We might recall Blair’s first call, “from his constituency,” which was a reminder, but no more, of the popular basis for his offering advice to the Queen.) As is often the case with Frears’s filmmaking, he handles this moment at once emphatically and subtly. Beyond his direction of Helen Mirren here (which may amount to leaving her alone), he has her speaking into a brown telephone in the kitchen of Balmoral Castle. Her earlier, self-­assured conversations with Blair took place in opulent, impressive settings; for the first, she used a green telephone—green being throughout The Queen associated with Her Royal Highness—and in both she refused his advice and hung up on him. In this scene, the phone, oddly, has a green cradle and brown handset, and the setting is far less magnificent. Frears jumps ahead a few minutes just after this conversation ends. A high shot looks down on an ordinary woman, small in an ordinary, if large, kitchen, sitting among leeks, cucumbers, cabbages, and other vegetables.3 She sighs. (Frears inserts an echoing high shot later, just after the Queen finishes her televised tribute to Diana’s memory. Again, the shot suggests the limitations of her power.) When Robin enters, she asks, “Is Queen Elizabeth up yet?” and Frears cuts to her knocking on her mother’s bedroom door, “Mummy.” As anyone might do in such a crisis, she goes to her mother. Only then do we learn what the prime minister’s “advice”

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The Queen (Frears, 2006) © Miramax.

consisted of: “One, fly the flag at half-­mast above Buckingham Palace and all other royal residencies. Two, leave Balmoral and fly down to London at the earliest opportunity. Three, pay respects, in person, at Diana’s coffin. And four, make a statement, via live television, to my people, and the world.” All these commands have either explicitly or implicitly been rejected by the Queen already. She concludes her recitation of Blair’s orders, “Swift prosecution of these matters might, just might, he felt, avert disaster.” Her anger is obvious; but other than precipitating a constitutional crisis, she has no choice. Though her mother seems to be suggesting that she do just that (“reassert your authority”), the Queen never seems to contemplate such an action. Later, she explicitly acknowledges the force of the prime minister’s command. When Robin asks her if she can bring herself to say “and as a grandmother,” words that Blair’s speechwriter has inserted into the Queen’s television address, she answers with a rhetorical question, “Do I have a choice?” She does consider abdication—“Maybe it is time to hand it over to the next generation”—but on that matter she attends to the reminder her mother offers: “Remember the vow you took?” The Queen does, “I declare that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” The ultimate order, the ultimate power, is neither the Queen’s nor the prime minister’s; it is the devotion required to the British people (and to God) in exchange for their conferring upon their rulers her sovereignty and his prime ministry. Paradoxes of power: rulers ruled by their own supremacy. If we view the plot of The Queen as constructed around a conflict between its title character and her prime minister, then it would appear to resolve in favor of the latter. But that perspective is only partial. Tony Blair admires the monarch and ultimately

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supports the monarchy. Moreover, structurally The Queen has mild undertones of a familiar love story in which a man and a woman are thrown together, grow alienated in the midst of conflicts more or less imposed on them by circumstances, and come back together in mutual understanding. The movement toward reconciliation between Queen and prime minister begins half way through the film, with Robin’s telephone call. The prime minister, as we have seen, responds sympathetically; he knows what it feels like to be in power suddenly, if not unexpectedly. Standing before a mirror, preparing to try to mollify the press, he defends siding with the Queen to his anti-­monarchist wife, “Allowing her to hang herself might not be in our best interests. Besides, I think there’s something ugly about the way everyone’s started to bully her.” In his reflection, one might infer, the prime minister sees not just himself, but a ruler, like the Queen; and his neck might not bear the cravat of power any more easily than her head bears the crown. Arguing with his wife about the status of the monarchy, Blair tells her that the “off with their heads thing” is “just daft.” Amused, Cherie shoots her husband a surprising question, “It’s not a mother thing, is it? . . . If she were alive now, your mother would be exactly the same age . . . old fashioned, uncomplaining, lived through the war. Now, come on, who does that sound like?” Her husband is incredulous, and turns away with a line that Americans may find astonishing from the elected ruler of a great country, “I’m going to do the washing up.” On the sofa, Cherie looks as if she has just scored the winning point. Here we might remember that the Queen, pressed, turns to her mother—not, as we might expect, to her husband. The movie further raises the theme of motherhood in a conversation between Charles and the Queen in which he praises Diana’s parenting; it raises that topic also through its cross-­cutting between the royal family and Tony Blair’s, and with emphasis on the Queen’s concern for “the Princes,” her grandchildren. By the end of the film, Cherie is referring to the Queen not as “a mother thing” for her husband but as “your girlfriend,” which hints at the sublimated structural underpinning of romance. Her sally suggests that Cherie, adding a personal reason to her anti-­royalist convictions, now experiences the Queen as a rival for her husband’s attention. An early, otherwise conspicuously irrelevant series of cuts between Blair and the Queen “inside” as she appoints him prime minister and Cherie waiting in the hall “outside” the closed door anticipates this suggestion. As the Queen flies down to London, she views the headline of The Times: “PALACE BENDS KNEE TO BLAIR.” Frears cuts to the prime minister’s offices where Blair sees the same headline, without any hint of pleasure. His most important aide, Alastair Campbell (Mark Bazeley), has received Robin’s draft speech for the Queen’s appearance on television. As Campbell goes on sarcastically about “scrap[ing] the frost off it” and “making it sound like it came from a human being,” Blair grows impatient. When his aide calls the Queen “the old bat,” he explodes. “When you get it wrong, you really get it wrong! That woman has given her whole life in service to her people. Fifty years doing a job she never wanted. A job she watched kill her father. [Here he echoes Robin’s words.] She’s executed it with honor, dignity, and as far as I can tell, without a single blemish, and now we’re all baying for her blood!” He stalks out.

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His admiration for his Ruler grows when he watches her live television address to “the nation and the world.” His wife again provides a foil: “She doesn’t mean a word of this.” “That’s not the point. What she’s doing is extraordinary. That’s how to survive.” Blair occupies his seat of power by virtue of an overwhelming electoral victory, the Queen by heredity; but both must survive, and the prime minister’s admiration is that of one survivor for another. The impulse to join crowds and the impulse to accrue power, as Canetti argued, are opposite responses to the deep sense of threat all humans share. Albeit that those who command are ultimately isolated (and usually desire such isolation), they nonetheless often derive their power from the manipulation of crowds or from their authorization, as in the cases of the Queen and the prime minister. But ultimately they remain alienated from the crowds that at once give them power and threaten them.4 Canetti calls those who seek power “überlebenden,” usually translated as “survivors” (Canetti [1962]1973: 227–80).5 The Queen and her prime minister, although both must deal with the enormous crowds that spring into existence after Diana’s death, are fundamentally isolated from them, and are truly close only to a few family members or advisors. When the Queen ventures to London to calm the crowds of Diana’s mourners, she must expose herself. We see how threatening that can be when she leaves her vehicle to walk, with apparent calm, between the masses of people and the masses of flowers, balloons, and messages that express their feelings. Among the floral tributes are farewells: “Diana we love you,” “I miss you” (in a child’s hand). As she walks, she encounters messages of a different tenor, explicitly hostile, even threatening: “You were too good for them,” “They don’t deserve you,” “They have your blood on their hands.” Just before she reads those messages, Frears inserts a telephoto “//##” shot from behind the flowers. We observe the Queen walking between four black bars in front of her and the bars of crash barriers behind. These barricades at once protect and confine her. She remains isolated from the crowd while simultaneously she exposes herself to it, for the first time since “the day that war in Europe ended,” as a television commentator observes. After she reads the last and most aggressive card, a reverse shot shows her shock. But then, astonishingly, she manages to turn to the crowd with a cordial smile. The faces, seen from her point-­of-view, offer a mixed reception: Some return her smile, some look away, a few appear openly hostile. A critical moment comes when she addresses a small girl holding a bunch of flowers. It begins crushingly. “Hello,” the Queen asks gently, “Would you like me to place those for you?” The unsmiling child answers, “No.” A reverse close-­up of the Queen registers her pain at this apparent rebuff, and she starts to turn away. But the child continues, “These are for you,” and offers her the flowers. Scarcely believing what she has heard, the Queen asks, “For me?” She looks truly happy. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” As she continues along the crowd of mourners, she is moved close to tears. Moreover, the tenor of the crowd—again seen from her point of view— warms. The faces are no longer hostile or evasive; they express friendliness, deference, even sympathy. Women (most of the mourners are women) smile, bow, and curtsey.

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The Queen (Frears, 2006) © Miramax.

As we, along with Blair and his associates, watch the television coverage of the Queen’s tour among her people, the commentators confirm the changed dynamic: “It’s really, isn’t it, as if the public and the Royal Family, the Monarchy, have had a bit of a quarrel this week and now it’s being healed in some measure.” Her co-­host adds, “Like a family spat.” One family spat remains to resolve, that between the Queen and the prime minister. The resolution of their quarrel comes in the last sequence of the film, a coda to the main actions, “TWO MONTHS LATER,” as an intertitle tells us. It begins with Blair adjusting his clothing as he prepares for his first meeting with the Queen after “that week.” At the start, it does not go well. The Queen extends her hand to Blair, but she withdraws it quickly the instant his makes contact, as if she had touched a scalding tea kettle. The prime minister radiates oleaginous grins; the Queen responds with boredom and irritation. But Blair forges ahead, offering “apologies . . . in case you felt manhandled or managed in any way” as insincere as the Queen’s response, “No. Not a-­tall.” Surprisingly, Elizabeth shifts from frosty distance to something approaching self-­ revelation, “I don’t think I shall ever understand what happened this summer.” Blair continues in an obsequious mode, “You showed great personal strength, courage, and humility.” Though his praise at this point is sincere, the Queen takes it as more pandering and responds, rather sharply, “You’re confusing humility with humiliation.” She points out that the prime minister “didn’t read the cards on the flowers outside the Palace that Friday.” As Blair continues to argue, the conversation becomes more honest, the speakers more vulnerable. “I actually think history will show it was a good week for you,” he asserts. With the amused, ironic shrewdness that we have seen little of since the opening

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sequences, confident now in her palace, seated in royal purple on an elegant green couch, the Queen replies without an instant’s hesitation, “And an even better one for you, Mr. Blair.” Nonetheless, the Queen is no longer instructing the prime minister in public relations, but asking for his opinion, “You don’t think that what affection people once had for (hesitates) for this institution [that is, for her] has been diminished?” He understands the question, “You’re more respected now than ever.” The Queen’s next remark, in its apparent challenge, reflects the growing candor between the two leaders and, in particular, her willingness to trust her companion sufficiently to raise the issue of the anti-­monarchists who surround him: “I gather some of your advisors were less fulsome in their support.” “One or two.” [What a “one or two,” his wife and his closest aide!] “But as a leader,” he continues, “I could never have added my voice to that chorus.” The prime minister has pulled in his modernizing horns somewhat; he’s become a bit more conservative, a point that comes out when he meets to consult with the speechwriters composing his maiden address to Parliament. The word “revolution” brings him up short: “Revolution? Where does this come from?” His aides point out that he has just been elected by an overwhelming margin on a platform of modernization; but finding himself actually at the head of his nation has moderated his understanding of the practicality and speed with which his agenda might proceed. With respect to the Queen and the Monarchy, he has become more conservative than his staff and his wife, with whom he argues about the Royals and whose bias toward abolition of the monarchy he dismisses, “It insults your intelligence.” Furthermore, the crucial phrase, “as a leader,” recognizes the joint position he shares with Elizabeth II as the heads not only of government and monarchy, but also of the national psyche. And their consequent shared vulnerability: “You saw those headlines,” the Queen remarks, “and you thought, ‘One day, that might happen to me.’ (pause) And it will, Mr. Blair. . . .” (Indeed, it had already been happening to the prime minister, if not “suddenly and without warning,” as the makers of the film in 2005–6 knew. In late June of 2007, roughly a year after The Queen appeared, Blair, under considerable pressure, stepped down as Labour leader and prime minister.) The Queen strongly signals her growing friendliness toward her prime minister when she smilingly proposes, “Shall we walk while it’s still light?” She is at her most thoughtful and comfortable out of doors, so her invitation to Blair to join her outside signifies a good deal. She typically goes outside when she confronts difficult decisions: stepping out of the Range Rover to walk after conversing with Prince Charles; picnicking with her family as the public storm mounts over the Royals’s failure to mourn Diana; setting off alone in her Range Rover and, after it breaks down, having a moment when she can express both her grief at her situation and her delight in the wild countryside and the stag that she witnesses there; walking with her mother in the garden outside Balmoral after receiving the prime minister’s “recommendations.” Her most intimate moments with Tony Blair occur as they traverse the halls of the palace en route to their walk. The Queen pauses to ask, “One in four, you said, wanted to get rid of me?”—not “this institution” now, though that formulation would be accurate. “For about half-­an-hour,” he replies. She goes on, confident enough in herself

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The Queen (Frears, 2006) © Miramax.

and in her companion to admit, “I’ve never been hated like that before.” And Blair has dropped his sycophancy, “That must have been very difficult.” “Yes. Very.” Behind them as they have this exchange is a statue in white marble of a woman, nude but for a bit of drapery over her midsection, a property that reminds us of the Queen’s vulnerability, and the public exposure that this instinctively private person must endure. As they continue walking the Queen muses about how people now want “glamour and tears, the grand performance,” how ill-­suited she is for such theatrics, and how she believed that her subjects wanted her “not to make a fuss, nor wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. . . . That’s how I was brought up.” Blair responds sympathetically, “You were so young, when you became Queen.” Elizabeth starts to brush this observation off, but she pauses thoughtfully, a bit nostalgically—Helen Mirren’s acting can be remarkably subtle and expressive—“Yes. Yes, a girl.” This conversation takes place in front of another, similar statue, a somewhat more modestly dressed but still partly exposed young woman, reiterating the visual point made a few seconds earlier, this time emphasizing the fact that the Queen was indeed a young woman at the time of her coronation. A little bit of the structure of a love story peeks out here as well, for a common feature of such narratives consists of recalling youthful memories as the principals come together to explore each other and their affection. Between the Queen and Blair a bit of jousting for position continues, but its tone is almost bantering. When Blair suggests that he might help her “modernize”—a tag on which he campaigned—she chuckles, “Don’t get ahead of yourself, prime minister. Remember, I’m the one supposed to be advising you.” Emphatically but delicately, Frears underscores the Queen’s increased esteem for Blair when she and he walk by Robin at the foot of the stairs. Her secretary points at his watch, but she ignores him, in

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marked contrast to the summoning away that she may have arranged when Blair came to her as the “prime-­minister-to-­be.” As they emerge into the garden, the Queen does indeed ask for something like advice from her prime minister, “So tell me, Mr. Blair, what might we expect from your first parliament?” Accompanied by a camera that rises and backs away, they continue through a garden that a Jungian critic describes as a “stately English mandala . . . this familiar symbol of wholeness” (Beebe 2007: 52). The current government and monarchy have achieved integration, both personal and political. However, as is typical for Frears in even the most positive endings to his films, nothing is settled forever. Blair will eventually resign as the prime minister and the constitutional tension between elected governments and the hereditary Monarchy remains a structural feature of British polity.

Diana After Tony Blair and his wife have been abruptly dismissed from their meeting with the Queen, the prime minister wonders, “What was that all about?” Cherie answers, “God knows. Diana. Whatever it is, it’ll be something to do with Diana.” Frears then inserts a rapid montage of twenty-­two shots of TV reports of the Princess’s doings, most accompanied by illustrative video clips and photographs: “Princess Diana embroiled in more controversy.” “Princess Diana moved today to patch up her relations with the former Royal Nanny.” “Princess Diana flew to Milan to attend a memorial service for . . . Versace.” We see her seated with Elton John as the announcer’s voice says, “Another royal controversy sparkles.” Then: “Embroiled in her second controversy this week.” Still more various shots and reports of Diana with Henry Kissinger, denying being a political figure, raising a drink at a function. The last thirteen photos, video clips, and comments show the Princess on yachts and private jets with Dodi Fayed: “Once again, her judgment’s under scrutiny.” This introduction to Diana tells us two things about the role that she will play: First, she is going to be a problem. Second, she will exist in Frears’s film as a media presence, and only as a media presence—with the small exception of the reenactment of her leaving the hotel the night of her fatal accident. Even that sequence, however, is intercut with video clips and photographs. Alive, Diana’s public identity was manufactured by media with whom she at least partly collaborated. In response to her son’s praise of Diana’s affection with her children, the Queen observes that she was especially demonstrative “whenever a photographer was in sight.” Her former husband, lamenting “being up against her popularity,” says to his secretary, “the two Dianas, the public’s and ours, bear no relation to each other a-­ tall.” The Queen does not pretend to have any knowledge of “ours,” the private relations between the Princess and the Royal Family, but it copiously represents “the public’s.” “She was,” Blair says in his eulogy, “the people’s princess.” In her notorious interview with Martin Bashir—a hugely watched media event that Diana evidently initiated and managed—she said that she wished to be “a queen of people’s hearts.” Paradoxically,

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this “people’s princess” was a media creation whom we see almost entirely associated with other rich and famous figures: politicians, singers, actors, and so on. We see her with or being memorialized by President Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Tracey Ullman, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Elton John, Tom Hanks, and Luciano Pavarotti. Diana is associated with ordinary people by the crowds of mourners who assemble after her death and the still greater crowds who watch the events of “that week” on television. The film presents the crowds sympathetically, and the audience of the film— to judge by my own experience—is likely to empathize with the televised mourners. Even the Royal Family, whatever their feelings, becomes part of the media-­assembled crowd, as they watch on television the military escort that carries Diana’s coffin when it arrives from France. The Queen never takes sides in the conflicts between the Royals and Diana. Frears’s movie extends sympathy to everyone: the mourners, the prime minister, Diana, the Queen and her family. It even presents Princes Charles and Philip with some understanding—though with qualifications that are more condescending than moralistic. The former is characterized as an attentive, affectionate father who retains considerable feeling for his former wife but also as indecisive and pusillanimous. The latter represents, in his rigid sense of prerogatives, the contrary of a “modern man.” Tony Blair, on the other hand, does take sides, though not the one we might expect. We hear him angrily describe Diana as “someone who threw everything she [the Queen] offered back in her face, and who for the last few years seemed committed 24/7 to destroying everything she holds most dear.” Given the prime minister’s personal view of the princess, his moving public eulogy has something in common with the sincerity or lack of it in the Queen’s belated memorial tribute. “Hypocrisy” seems too strong here. When Cherie remarks, watching the Queen’s address, “ ‘Heart,’ What heart?” her husband replies, with great admiration, “That’s not the point. What she’s doing is extraordinary.” The Queen herself, despite Blair’s characterization of her relationship with her former daughter-­in-law, does not lack sympathy for her presumptive adversary. As she watches a rerun of Diana’s television interview with Bashir, which must have brought her considerable pain, she murmurs to her husband, “Perhaps we were partly to blame.” Here we can look ahead to what she says about having been “a girl” when she became Queen and allow the possibility that she realizes, whether consciously or not, that Diana, too, was thrust into a demanding public role when just a girl. Philip adds his qualified agreement, “She was a nice girl, (pause) then.” The film presents Diana through numerous archived video clips and photographs as a beautiful, often charming, sometimes evasive and mysterious avatar of all that popular imagination could project onto her: a fairy princess whose romantic, magical story turns into an ironic tragedy. Like the emblematic stag, she is constantly harried by media hunters who finally bring her down. Our last view of her is a brief, enigmatic freeze-­frame at the end of the memorial service. She looks slightly askance, perhaps at the crowd, perhaps skeptical of what is being said about her. Like most concluding freeze-­frames (the brevity of this one prevents its looking like a cliché), it suggests that the future no longer exists for her.

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Crowds As in Frears’s Hero, the formation of crowds, their intense feelings, and their relation to the protagonists of the film constitute central subjects of The Queen. The first sound we hear during the opening credit sequence is a cheering crowd, and the first image we see shows a blurry television shot of a red tee shirt stenciled with “BRITAIN DESERVES BETTER.” The red suggests partisan passion, but the sound of the crowd proves to be the more significant introduction of the main actions and themes of Frears’s film, as does the fact that the image is not direct, but is taken from a television screen.6 At the beginning of High Fidelity, the protagonist Rob (John Cusack) asks, “Which came first, the music or the misery?” A similar question for The Queen might be, “Which came first, the media or the crowds?” The earlier film replies to Rob’s query in favor of “the misery,” but the answer to The Queen’s implicit question takes longer to infer, because both the Royals and the government focus their attention obsessively on television coverage and on newspaper headlines. As the days pass, however, the evidence mounts that the crowds lead the media, rather than vice-­versa. The great modern study of crowds, Canetti’s Crowds and Power, illuminates Frears’s portrayal of the mass mourning provoked by Princess Diana’s death. The sequence recreating the minutes before her fatal car wreck shows a pack of news people and paparazzi waiting for her to emerge from a building in Paris. They represent, in a sublimated form, what Canetti called a “Hetzmasse,” a hunting (or “baiting”) crowd bent on killing. Too soon, the sublimated version leads to real death, and Diana’s brother will accuse the news media that hounded his sister of having blood on their hands. From the beginning of her public existence, Diana precipitated crowds. Recapitulating her recent life, a television commentator remarks, “It was the love story that brought crowds onto the streets. . . . Most of all, [at her wedding] they came to see Diana.” Here file footage shows a crowd almost as large as those that come to lament her. It comes cheering and waving flags and banners; Canetti called such assemblies “Festmassen.” In such crowds, “the density of things and of people promises increase of life itself ” (Canetti [1962]1973: 63). The crowd that The Queen primarily concerns itself with has a different goal, lamentation, and it grows into something much larger than the pack of reporters, motorcyclists, and photographers who prey on Diana. It answers quite precisely to Canetti’s description: “The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. . . . As soon as it exists at all, it wants to consist of more people: the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd” (Canetti [1962]1973: 16). “SUNDAY” reads a title shortly after Diana’s death becomes known. A television image displays early morning in a large, mostly empty area in front of Kensington Palace, where a few grieving people are gathering, some with bouquets. The image that accompanies the title “MONDAY” shows the square beginning to fill. Mourners queue to leave flowers—the mass of which Canetti would call a “crowd symbol.” “TUESDAY” finds Blair and his Press Secretary worrying about the “two million people predicted to descend on London.” As the crowd swells, Frears inserts repeated

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shots of both the people and their flowers and cards. By the day of the funeral, the crowd has grown so large that even wide-­angle views from helicopters require long pans to encompass it. At the same time, the tone of the crowd is beginning to add puzzlement and anger at the Royals to its grief.7 The newspapers track this change; we see a headline on Monday that reads “THE SADDEST HOMECOMING,” but the next day indignant headlines are in harmony with the crowd’s gathering wrath. We need not, finally, separate the crowd from its media accompaniment, the newspapers and television coverage. As Canetti points out, “Today everyone takes part . . . through the newspapers” (Canetti [1962]1973: 52). If we include the media in our discussion of crowds in The Queen, six of the seven days the film encompasses begin with representations or discussions of its crowds. As they swell, they become more voracious and more threatening. What Tony Blair describes as “bullying” early in the week moves toward something more vicious as the crowd and its simulacra focus on their fury: “And now we’re all baying for her blood.” For what Canetti calls the fundamental, natural crowd, the “Open Crowd” with its insatiable desire to grow, the most egregious form of resistance is anyone’s refusal to join it. The Royals stand accused of this crime. (If the monarchy may be taken as represented, in part anyway, by the stag, its hunting down and beheading invokes both the French revolution and, going back to the English Commonwealth, the fate of Charles I.)8 Adrian Martin (2006) writes, “The sharpness of The Queen is in showing how rapidly and wildly a collective emotion can fluctuate.” Through a Canettian lens, we observe that its oscillating feelings are consistent with its desire to grow. When the Royals resist joining the crowd, it grows angry; when, through Elizabeth II’s walk among them and her television address, the Royals become members of the grieving crowd, the “family spat” begins to heal. The Queen resists joining the crowd because she “prefer[s] to keep my feelings to myself.” When Charles expresses doubts about not having taken his sons to Paris with him to retrieve Diana’s body, she objects, “No, they’re much better off here. It’s private. They’re protected.” Prince Philip desires the isolation that is one of the markers of those who cherish power. More deeply than his wife, he distrusts the crowd—a hostile mob, as far as he’s concerned: “It reminds me of one of those films, few of us in a fort, hordes of Zulus outside.” Among the Royals, Philip has the least understanding of popular dynamics. “You wait,” he tells his wife Tuesday evening, “In forty-­eight hours, this will all have calmed down.” Emphasizing his obtuseness, Frears cuts to the swelling crowd, television images of queues waiting to deliver flowers, and a poster hostile to the Royals. Tony Blair, on the other hand, immediately realizes, “This is going to be massive.” Prince Charles seems to sympathize with the crowd, but at the same time he fears it. He’s afraid someone might shoot him; and he wonders, “Why do they hate us so much?” (To which his mother replies, “Not us, dear”—emphasizing the “us” just slightly.) When a passing motorcycle backfires outside Balmoral, only Charles among the Royals flinches.

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By the end of the week, Diana’s lamenting crowd has expanded to include pretty much everyone. The last crowd sequences portray Diana’s funeral cortege and the service in the church. The only speaker there is Diana’s brother. When he concludes his tribute, those outside rise in applause. The applause of a crowd, writes Canetti, represents its assertion of itself as a crowd, and to refuse to join the clapping is tantamount to refusing to enroll. Frears makes the crowd’s continuing growth up to the end quite clear. As it applauds, the noise penetrates the church, in which are gathered invited rulers and celebrities. They have been elevated, for the moment, above the millions of ordinary citizens outside. But they too are swept up in the equality of all the mourners. The crowd rises in waves until all are standing; and the sound of their applause accompanies the camera into the church, where the distinguished mourners join the clapping sequentially from back to front, from those who are already standing to the seated mourners, the most august of the attendees. Only the Royals (and Cherie, steadfast anti-­monarchist) fail to join the clapping, though Charles looks as if he might like to. This moment of equality Canetti calls “The Discharge.” It marks the point at which a mass of people most fully give their individual identities to the crowd: “The discharge . . . is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal” (Canetti [1962]1973: 17). This sequence represents the last of a number of discharges, the point at which even the distinction that separated celebrities from the other mourners disappears. We might suppose that the refusal of the Royals to applaud along with everyone else in the church marks their stubborn rebuff of Diana’s mourning crowd, but this is not the case. With her televised address, the Queen, and through her the Royals, have already publicly joined. If they hold themselves apart from others within the church, they do so unobserved. As we have seen, Blair also harbors private reservations toward Diana. While Diana’s brother eulogizes his sister, Blair, alone among the attendees, looks not at the speaker, but at the Queen. Both he and the Queen lead crowds of which neither is ultimately a member. But their public obeisance suffices. Blair’s press aide tells him “you’re more popular than Churchill”; and during their walk together two months later, the prime minister assures the Queen, “You’re more popular than ever.”

Media Through archival television and newspaper reporting, and also through simulations of such coverage, The Queen presents its swelling crowds of lament and, occasionally, individual if not private moments of its characters. (Television footage of Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, for instance, exemplifies the latter.) Where news coverage requires shots of Tony Blair and his family or the Queen and hers, Frears simulates it. Obvious examples include the prime minister’s speech from a graveyard in his home constituency, and the Royals’s inspection of flowers and cards brought up to Balmoral from London. The authenticity of newspaper pages is difficult to judge; in any case, their headlines at once extend the look of historical validity and advance the narrative.

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In addition to serving as a vector for information, mass media constitute an important subject in Frears’s film. As Sandy Flitterman-Lewis writes, in The Queen “we are constantly reminded of the mediated nature of what we take for reality” (FlittermanLewis 2007: 51). Moreover, the film was itself a media event, first in its pre-­release publicity and then when it was distributed. The DVD of The Queen provides further self-­reflexivity with its nineteen-­minute “The Making of The Queen.” Media, then, are at once an important raw material from which Frears creates his own work, a subject of his film, and an important part of the aesthetic and cultural form of The Queen. Emphatic emblems of the media saturate Diana’s funeral in the images of “SATURDAY.” Archival helicopter video pans over the immense crowd—with thousands of its own cameras flashing—until it arrives at a scene where the crowd watches on a giant TV the Princess’s nearby coffin bearers carrying her flower covered casket. The crowd itself appears in the background on the television screen they are watching. The media’s presence here is pervasive: the primary television image includes images of other televisions, with Frears’s movie containing both. The Queen is built on parallel cutting, mostly between the Monarch’s sphere and Tony Blair’s. Often, that editing takes the audience from one scene to the next, not directly, but via a media intermediate—a newspaper’s front page or a television broadcast that is being watched in two or more places.9 Most frequently, the media intermediate involves archival (or simulated archival) video showing the deceased Princess. Her images provide many of the seams in the parallel editing that advances the action of what Frears called a “seamful” film. The Queen does not hide but emphasizes its transitions between people and places. When Blair delivers his eulogy of Diana, for example, the sequence begins with the news reader (Martyn Lewis in archival footage) announcing Tony Blair’s speech. This is followed with imitated TV footage of the prime minister, while Lewis’s voice continues. Cut to Blair’s staff watching on a bank of television monitors, then back to Blair speaking, intercut with another shot of his staff. Frears then shows Robin Janvrin watching and listening with a dozen staff at Balmoral as Blair’s voice continues. Then back to the simulated television close-­up of Blair finishing his speech: “She was (pause) the people’s princess.” The Balmoral group surround a small television set. “A bit over the top, don’t you think,” Janvrin remarks. Shots of the staff, some weeping and others trying to control their emotions, make clear their responsiveness to Blair’s words. Back to Lewis, sharing the television screen with a photograph of a young Diana and struggling to control his emotions as he summarizes what we have just seen and heard. This sequence carries us between various sites and viewers and, in a way typical of The Queen, entangles the authentic archived past, a simulated archival fragment, and an historical present-­past of actors in a movie. A sequence at the beginning of “THURSDAY” builds a similar structure, beginning with Blair awakening to TV commentators who are discussing “what the newspapers are saying this morning” as they hold up front pages critical of the Royal silence. It continues to the Queen sitting in bed surrounded by more fuming newspapers, then moves to Blair’s offices, where Alastair holds up further antagonistic headlines. This continuing flood of media criticism provokes the prime minister’s third call to the Queen. Here Frears’s cutting

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among news media and their audiences takes the film not just from one locale to another, but also advances the action several hours. Again, it melds actual bits of the archived past, simulations, and imaginative reconstructions in the present-­past of the movie. Frears’s use of these headlines to convey information and advance the action recalls older films in similar genres, especially film biographies, with their montages of newspaper front pages, a device that to a degree replicated the function of the intertitles of the silent cinema. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) provides especially famous examples. In clarity and density of detail, the images in the film correspond inversely to their “authenticity.” The richest are those of the Queen, her family, and her surroundings— almost all in various ways inauthentic—which were shot with 35 mm film. Next comes Blair and his family, staff, and surroundings, photographed with less fine grained 16 mm film; then the recreated television footage, and finally, lowest in resolution, archived television footage, that which was actually recorded from September 1, 1997, through the day of Diana’s burial. This informational hierarchy suggests that as the contemporary understanding of an event fades, its fictional recreations and retellings assume ascendancy.10 One thinks again of Hero and its exploration of what becomes of media versions of events versus the “true story.” In contrast to The Queen, which ultimately takes a generally respectful view of the media, Hero presents its media reports mostly as strata of semi-­inventions. The prize-­winning reporter Gayle Gayley (Geena Davis) worries that peeling back layers of stories may lead not to edifying truth but to a void. Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman), less politely, explains to his son that among all the stories “you choose your own level of bullshit.” But as with The Queen, if less emphatically, there is a truth at the center of Hero, one that Gayley eventually ascertains but that she can never tell, because “the legend”—as another movie, Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) puts it—has become more satisfying and enthusiastically accepted than grimy reality. And perhaps equally true, in a sense. “Only by lying,” Frears remarks, “can you tell the truth.” The lying of which he is speaking consists not of deceiving, but of plausible imagining, with no ultimate claims of reality outside its own boundaries. This remains the case however much a narrative may have been backed by research and “inspired by a true story.” As Sir Philip Sidney wrote several centuries ago, “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so . . . the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth” (Sidney 1595). In an interview, Frears concluded, “If you’re British, you know a lot about the royal family and you know nothing” (Gullen 2006).11 In another interview, he answered questions about the relationship of truth and fiction in biopics by noting, “I got it all wrong and I got it right. I don’t see how you could do better than that” (Durham n.d.). Images of crowds and media connect with those of the work on the portrait of Elizabeth II with which the film opens. Like the mass media that photograph, describe, and judge the Queen, the painter creates an image of her for the world. But his originates in private, and proceeds at a leisurely pace. Nonetheless, again as print and electronic

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media do, and as does Frears’s film, the portrait will eventually fix her as the sum of a collection of moments, however still she sits. For those who view it, it will create yet another royal identity. For purposes of the film, the painting is incomplete, as must be the media coverage of the Queen until, like Diana’s, her story ends. Or so it may seem. But as Diana’s death shows, stories and identities continue to develop post mortem. While we retell yet more tales of Elizabeth II, Diana, Tony Blair, and the other characters and events of “that week,” every aspect of the story will continue to grow, to increase in complication and decrease in certainty. With more versions and multiplying details, the sum of contending narratives favors the complexities of irony. So, quite self-­consciously, do Frears’s movies.

10

Philomena: Love and Evil, Truth and Forgiveness

Philomena has the shape of a romantic quest motivated by love: in this case, Philomena’s for her lost child. Familiar features of such narratives include adventurous journeys to exotic places with exotic people; descents into underworlds (literal or figurative) inhabited by unequivocally evil adversaries with powers often approaching or including the magical; escapes from such locales in possession of treasure, frequently information; improbable helpers; mystical talismans; and so on. In film versions of such romantic tales, the super- or preternatural aspects tend to be diminished, but they are not entirely absent. As one would expect from Stephen Frears, such aspects in Philomena are frequently ironized—made “more realistic”—by complications and reversals. Its mingling of romantic fulfillment and ironic setbacks gives Philomena a strong sense of melodrama. Ascents to truth and love, for example, a standard move in romantic narratives, are frustrated or reversed in ironic fictions—an equally standard move for them. Thus Philomena rushes up the Abbey stairs not to save her child Anthony but to witness him being carried away. Another reversal of romantic convention, in the opposite direction, takes the protagonists down, but to hope, not despair. Frears photographs Martin (Steve Coogan) and then Philomena descending in the hotel elevator after Martin’s failure to arrange an appointment with Pete Olsson (Peter Hermann), Anthony’s surviving lover. She announces to Martin, who has repaired to the bar, that she’s giving up the search for people who knew her son and that they must return to England. But the journalist has noticed in a photograph that the Celtic harp on the lapel of Michael Hess—the name of Philomena’s son after his adoption—matches the one on his glass of Guinness. “Why would someone who cared so little about where he came from,” Martin rhetorically asks, “wear something so Irish.” (One of Philomena’s motives for setting off on her quest was “I’d like to know if Anthony ever thought of me.”) In the next scene, Philomena and Martin are driving to Pete’s home, in hopes of talking with him there. Widely regarded as a director who likes to mix genres, Frears in Philomena combines tragic and comic elements. He remarked, “The form of putting a comedy on top of a tragedy, I found very, very appealing, very interesting. . . . [Philomena is] a film whose origins are entirely in American comedy” (Hernandez n.d.). The quest that makes up the narrative begins with the sort of happy coincidences typical of comic plots. At a cocktail party, Martin meets an editor (Michelle Fairley) who specializes in “human interest stories.” Philomena’s daughter, having just learned

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of her lost half-­brother, overhears Martin declare that he has been a journalist, and she approaches him with her mother’s history. Martin tells her that he doesn’t do that sort of writing. Nonetheless, those casual encounters eventually lead to his pursuing the search with Philomena, while working for the editor who told him that what she does is “not really your cup of tea.” Subtle, often equivocal handling of point-­of-view and of the relation between memory and imagination complicate the narrative of Philomena, giving it an ambiguity that pulls slightly against its origins in romantic comedies. It has an implied factual source, Martin Sixsmith, whose recounting, again by implication, informs the gradual unraveling of the story of Philomena and her stolen baby.1 Eyeline cuts at times assign images to Sixsmith’s gaze; but much of the time, the camera appears independent. Subjective shots of Philomena’s memories of her son and her imaginings of his life after he was adopted also shape the telling of her story. Her visualizations of her son’s life, moreover, frequently include details from home movies that come to light only late in the film. Are her visions, then, recollections of these films? But if so, how do they appear before she has seen them? Are they Martin’s rendering of what he imagines to be her suppositions, filled in with the images that they observe at the home of Pete Olsson? But there is no obvious indication of such an assignment of her point-­of-view. Moreover, the point-­of-view of the film as a whole is only intermittently linked to its characters; much of the time, it looks and feels like a movie with a “third-­person”—that is objective—camera/narrator. Nor does the camera, as in some other Frears films, behave with an assertiveness that might lead us to consider it another character, as in Mary Reilly and Gumshoe (with its even more assertive music track), for example. In practice, the equivocations of point-­of-view are easy to accept or ignore. The question of the sources of information never becomes noticeably problematic, with the exception of the home movie footage, and that mystery does not become a distraction. Frears’s handling of the narrative complexity is so smooth that an audience, if it notices at all, will predictably take what it sees as relevant, and true. As regards plot, Philomena has a more adventurous structure than we’re likely to immediately apprehend. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose female protagonist is famously murdered mid-­way through the film, Philomena kills the object of its quest just past its half-­way point. When Martin discovers that Anthony/Michael died of AIDS eight years earlier, the search that has formed the basis of the action seems abruptly to conclude. Indeed, Philomena and Martin take it so, and they prepare to return to England, the object of their journey lost forever. Initially, it appears that only Sixsmith’s editor’s insistence that he come up with something to justify her investment sustains the narrative: “Find the story. Keep her there. You signed a contract,” she tells him. “You serious?” he replies. “Yes. Call me when you’ve got something.” Her demand is followed by Philomena’s independent reconsidering of her decision to abandon her search. As is consistently the case in the Coogan/Pope/Frears screenplay, this crucial turning point in the plot is textured with sentiment and lightened with comedy.2 “I’ve been sitting here waiting for a sign,” she tells Martin, “and I haven’t had one. So I’ve made the decision myself. I’d like to stay a little longer.” She has evidently been influenced by an embracing young couple she witnesses on the way to the airport

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and by an echoing Evangelista advertisement of another ardent couple, which reminds her of her encounter with Anthony’s father. There is irony in the fact that the couples onto whom she projects her memories and/or imaginings of Anthony are heterosexual; she will soon discover that her son was gay. She continues, “I’d like to talk to someone who actually met him.” Ironically again, she is already doing exactly that, unbeknownst to them both. She will notice Martin, then a correspondent for the BBC, in a photograph of her son taken during his service for President Reagan in the White House. Airplanes, a persistent motif in Philomena, carry Martin first to Ireland (Philomena and her daughter drive) and then both of them to the U.S. on their search. They also serve as an image of Anthony’s removal by his American adopters. Anthony as a small child is repeatedly shown clutching a toy plane, an emblem of his abduction. With that toy in hand, he is also shown in a home movie and a photograph of his arrival in the U.S., going down the stairs of the airplane that carried him away from Ireland and his mother. Anthony/Michael descends from a long line of abducted youths that stretches back to the myth of Persephone, dragged down by the King of the Underworld into his realm and pursued by the dogged attempts of her mother Demeter to find and recover her. In Frears’s film, Philomena recalls Persephone’s mother. Frears’s treatment of the last shots of the film gives glimpses of its mythic substratum. (This is not to argue that Frears or his collaborators “had it in mind,” as we sometimes say.) In the Greek fable, when Persephone returns, the dormant earth leaps back to life. Her myth is seasonal, with her absence (she must return for six months to the underworld every year) bringing fall and winter and her reappearance corresponding to spring and summer. Philomena’s ultimate achievement of locating Anthony’s grave takes place in a wintery scene, with frost and light snow and a leafless oak dominating the foreground of the Abbey estate.3 Anthony, after all, is dead. Yet the white that covers this landscape serves at the same time as part of a pattern of images of white that is predominantly associated with revelation and love. Martin and Philomena have succeeded in uncovering the facts of her son’s life. Most importantly, Philomena has learned that her son did remember her. As the camera cranes upward and the protagonists depart the scene, the green of the grass underlying the snow becomes more visible, perhaps heralding the coming of spring. The close-­up of the small statuette of a welcoming Christ on Anthony/Michael’s headstone also includes green grass showing through the snow. The romantic quest of Philomena is partly expressed by its frequent shots of characters in motion in various ways: driving and riding in cars, flying in airplanes, running, walking, riding on a cart in an airport. Responding to the pervasiveness of these shots, some reviewers identified Philomena as an eccentric “road movie.” Since the basis of the plot, as with most romances, consists of a quest, more or less continuous excursions come with the genre. Cars are common. They include a Vauxhall Cavalier, BMWs, and Pete’s “little red Mazda.” In autos, Philomena experiences many of her most poignant memories and has some of her most revealing conversations with Martin. Driving home alone from

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Philomena (Frears, 2013) © Anchor Bay Entertainment.

church at the beginning of the film, she recalls the nuns interrogating her about her pregnancy and then, as she walks through the night, the agony of her breech delivery without anesthetic. Anthony is taken away in a “big car,” looking forlornly out the rear window as it departs. With Martin, Philomena drives several times through a beautiful fall landscape in rural Ireland and through the autumnal countryside of the U.S. Those scenes emphasize romantic aspects of her quest, as do the shots of famous Washington D.C. monuments, images of the idealistic side of the U.S. and evocations of the movies of directors like Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Philomena summarizes for Martin the plots of the pulp novels she’s devoted to. She tells him the first as they are driven to their flight in the airport, ending with “and he says, ‘I’m taking you to a place where no one can hurt you anymore.’ ” This might also apply to her goal in seeking her lost son, who she fears might be “homeless, and nobody loves him.” The last thing we hear from her, as she and Martin depart the Abbey and their story ends, is her recounting of the conclusion of another such novel, The Saddle and the Loom4: “In the morning she shows him the cloak, and she asks him, ‘What do you think, kind Sir?’ And he says, ‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my whole life.’ And guess what, he’s not even looking at the cloak, he’s looking at her! (chortles) I didn’t see that coming, Martin, not in a million years!” The film presents these retellings with apparent condescension—Martin dismisses such stories as toxic to the intelligence of those who read them. But the sentimental improbabilities of Philomena and its bittersweet happy ending ultimately match them. The irony attached to the idea of romantic fiction itself becomes ironic, and Philomena’s summaries revert to romance taken at face value. The amused irony that remains is self-­directed at Frears’s film.

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Martin’s jogging, a comically ironic inversion of the quest, begins with his doctor’s recommendation. Martin, having been fired from his position with the Secretary for Transport (an appropriate job for him to lose), feels mildly depressed, and so follows his physician’s advice. Shots of him running almost invariably show him being passed, panting to a stop, or being frustrated in whatever he’s attempting to do at the moment— being hung up on by Pete’s secretary, for example. There are two important exceptions: In a sequence that begins with a shot of his running legs, he telephones his editor. He reports his preliminary investigations and sells her the story of Philomena, which becomes, of course, Philomena. The second comes when he returns from a jog to the hotel where he and Philomena are staying in Washington. He is unable to rouse her by knocking on the door of her room, so he induces the hotel clerk to unlock the door by claiming to be her son—a suggestive falsehood that the movie emphasizes when he enters and calls, “Phil? Mom?” Martin does not become a surrogate for Anthony, but he is central in the search for him and for those who knew him. A chromatic motif inconspicuously intensifies our sense of their kinship: Anthony as a child and as an adult is frequently dressed in blue or otherwise associated with that color, as in a video taken at Roscrea with two nuns in uncharacteristic blue habits. Martin, too, is frequently associated with the color blue, especially when he runs, often in a blue sweatshirt. Philomena opens on a blank black screen. We hear a voice: “Blood glucose fine. Liver function, kidney function normal.” As the voice continues reciting the results of an ordinary physical examination, the image of an attentive Sixsmith fades in. The Doctor concludes, “There’s nothing wrong with you, Martin.” Searching for something to recommend for his healthy, apparently hypochondriac patient, he suggests losing “a centimeter or two off your waist. Try running.” Martin “has got the sack for saying something I didn’t say.” Cut to TV coverage, a split screen of Sixsmith on the left and the commentator on the right. “The Whitehall feud between the Transport Secretary Stephen Byers and his former Press Secretary continues to grow.” As we watch Martin jogging, another news-­reader continues the story: “After a week of trying to clear his [Sixsmith’s] name in private, he’s now gone public.” More news coverage, now filtered through Martin’s memory while he attends a church concert of a boys choir with his wife. We hear remarks he made to an interviewer: “I was amazed to hear that they had unilaterally ‘resigned’ me.” Then another voice: “I would like to make a statement regarding the circumstances of Mr. Martin Sixsmith’s resignation.” More TV commentary: “There’s no doubt this has been yet another embarrassment for the government.” (As in The Queen, here and elsewhere the story will be carried forward by a mix of actual contemporary recordings—in Philomena, TV video and 8 mm home movies—and simulations of such archival imagery.) Martin exits the recital. When it has ended, his wife rejoins him: “Father Turner just asked me where you disappeared to.” “Well,” he answers gloomily, “I don’t believe in God, and I think he can tell.” Or “He.” Father Turner or God? The ambiguity remains ambiguous. As they walk away, we see a religious statue someone has crowned with a traffic cone. “I did that,” says Martin, sarcastically extending the false blame that has

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cost him his job. When his wife encourages him to get back to his writing, he agrees with his physician’s implied assessment of his current project: “No one’s interested in Russian bloody history.” Almost four minutes have passed since the opening credits. Given this beginning, we might expect a story of Martin Sixsmith trying to clear his name, with flashbacks to the villainous circumstances of its besmirching, a steadfast wife and family by his side, and perhaps a religious crisis to accompany the personal and political one. We will get, instead, the less predictable story of Philomena—as the title of the movie promises. Besides introducing an unjustly injured potential narrator, this somewhat misleading opening also introduces, in a diminished form, several of the notes that will be key to the richer chords of Philomena’s central narrative. More painfully than the injustice Martin suffers, that suffered by the “shamed” Philomena leaves her spending much of a lifetime expiating and trying to recover from what the Catholic Church has convinced her are sins. She, like Martin, will eventually decide to “go public,” thereby posing a considerably more serious embarrassment than he to the government and the Church. Martin’s jogging, as we have noticed, anticipates the travels that she will undertake with him in quest of her son. We see him stop, panting against a signpost. His stopping contrasts with her unfailing doggedness. Once, however, their roles are reversed. Philomena, discouraged by Pete Olsson’s refusal to meet her and wavering in her religious faith, determines that they should return to England. But Martin, as noted, has discovered evidence to dispute her melancholy conclusion that Anthony never thought of his origins. As Philomena discovers who her son became and how he died, Martin undergoes his own education. He learns that the person he takes to be a simple, uneducated Irish woman is shrewder than he assumed, has marvelous tenacity, and possesses an innocence that she has earned, paradoxically, through terrible suffering. She retains an undiminished capacity to forgive. Her religious faith has been tested, not only by the pain inflicted on her in the Abbey, but later by the nuns’ deliberate, heartless lying to her and her son as part of the Abbey’s cover-­up. We have no indication that Martin’s wry atheism has ever been subjected to such tests. He does have a sort of religion, the journalist’s devotion to telling the truth. His education in Philomena comes about, ironically, by his pursuing a “human interest story,” a kind of reporting he snobbishly disdains as “about weak-­minded, vulnerable, ignorant people, to fill newspapers read by vulnerable, weak-­minded, ignorant people.” Eventually, it will be clear that if Martin does not himself fit that description, he is nonetheless at the beginning of the film parochial and prejudiced against Catholicism (from which he’s lapsed), the lower classes, and the Irish. Moreover, what appears to be his physically unnecessary visit to the doctor applies metaphorically to the state of health of his spirit, which does require attention. Martin needs to be cured of his prejudices and his sterile cynicism. Philomena serves as his physician, mainly by example, but also by some direct criticism of his sense of superiority, “just ’cause you went to Oxbridge and I didn’t.” (Martin, down his nose, informs her that he went to “Oxford, not ‘Oxbridge.’ ‘Oxbridge’ is a portmanteau, where two words are joined together.”)

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His return to a balance of optimism and skepticism takes the whole movie. After he denounces the Catholic Church and religious faith in general, his companion fires back with “And what do you believe in? Picking holes in everyone else and being a smart-­ alec?” He subsequently apologizes to her, agreeing that he’s been “a fickin’ idiot.” The culmination of his education comes just after the climactic scene during their return to the Abbey, at the end of which she says, “Look at you.” “I’m angry,” he replies. Philomena remarks, “It must be exhausting,” and moves on to the culmination of her search, “Sister Claire, will you take me to my son’s grave?” Following this interchange—which I discuss in more detail below—he comes to her in the graveyard, where she is contemplating the headstone of her son. There he presents her two gifts; the second is a small plastic statue of Jesus with His arms spread in welcome. Philomena thanks him and places it on her son’s grave marker. His first gift is equally significant, another gesture of deep respect for her, acknowledgment of her right to privacy, and acceptance of her judgment: “I’m not going to publish the story. It’s between you and him.” If Martin has been educated—and healed—by his quest with Philomena, so has she learned from a reporter whose commitment is to asking questions and getting the whole truth. Crossing herself, she says, “You know, I just decided; I did want you to tell my story after all. People should know what happened here.” Philomena educates its audience along with Martin. In part by the identification of the film with Martin’s visual and verbal point-­of-view, we are encouraged by our first encounters with Philomena to regard her as a simpleton. An especially egregious example is inserted during Sixsmith’s initial meeting with her. When she fails to get Martin’s playful allusion to The Wizard of Oz, her daughter Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin) explains to her that he’s joking. The journalist goes on to remark that his mother has “advanced osteoarthritis in both her knees,” but Philomena fails to notice the change of tone and laughs heartily, obviously (and implausibly, since she’s been a nurse for thirty years), ignorant of what the medical phrase means. Coogan has said that the script was designed to give “a simple, near-­caricature version of Philomena, then reveal her greater depth” (Hernandez n.d.). Other examples of this comic “near-­ caricature version,” inflected through Martin’s point-­of-view, include her attraction to Big Mama’s House—“It’s about a little black man pretending to be a fat black lady”— and her horror that Anthony might be “obese . . . . because of the size of the portions! [in the U.S.]” In an interview posted on YouTube, Philomena herself remarks, “I’m not really a simpleton,” which is obviously true. But she’s a good sport about the need for comedy, at her expense in the film, with which “I’m quite happy” (Poland n.d.). After the toney, crowded, comfortable church with its well-­tailored parents and boys choir, Philomena moves to its heroine. From the place of worship that Martin prematurely departs, the film shifts to a less thriving church where we see Philomena’s hands and a cluster of votive candles, then her face in close-­up. She intently lights a candle, her eyes brimming. For whom is she praying and why is she sad? A long shot follows of her in front of a statue of the Virgin and Christ Child illuminated by the candles. Though the Catholic Church does not in general receive sympathetic characterization—the nuns at Roscrea Abbey are the principal villains of

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the film—its potential as a welcoming haven for mothers and children, however badly fulfilled, is a recurrent motif. The shots introducing Philomena initiate another recurrent motif, that of the heroine seeking light on the fate of her son and of positive associations with brightness itself, set against the dark. In one of the few affirmative shots of the Abbey’s nuns, they are dressed in white in a well-­lit room, caring for babies in the nursery. The door to Pete Olsson’s home is conspicuously white; and its panels, suggestively, form a cross. (Doors, often symbolically closing, comprise another of the motifs of this carefully designed movie. Those at the Abbey are always dark.) When Philomena and Martin visit the Lincoln Memorial at night, it is bathed in light. I have already noted the white of the conclusion of the film. Between shots of Philomena in this church, Frears interjects subjective shots of her memories of meeting Anthony’s father at a fair. She laughs at her ridiculous reflections in a funhouse mirror. Contrary to what we might expect, those shots anticipate not some distortion of her personality, but its innocence and joyful pliability. At the end of that series of shots, the young man appears. In a present action parallel to her memory of the young man, a priest greets her. The juxtaposition of secular love and that offered by the Church will recur. When the Priest asks if she’s lighting a candle for “someone special,” she answers “Yes,” and returns to her memories of the young man, memories that end with a kiss and a candy apple dropping from her hand, with obvious symbolism. The allusion to The Fall here works to further emphasize her naiveté. (Eve and Adam were vulnerable to the snake partly because of their innocence.) To the nuns, the young Philomena (Sophie Kennedy Clark) reports, “At school the Sisters never taught us anything about babies.” Her happy memories of the fair give way, as she drives home in the darkness, to those of her interrogation by the largely black-­clad nuns into whose care her mortified father has given her. The nun’s questions are manifestly prurient: “Did you let him put his hands on you? Did you enjoy your sin? Did you take your knickers down?” They seem especially eager that she should answer the last question. The Mother Superior responds with belligerent defensiveness to Philomena’s mention of the Sisters’ failure to provide information about sex, and to the news that her mother died ten years ago, and hence could not have told her “about babies”: “Don’t dare blame the Sisters for this! You are the cause of this shame, you and your indecency!” The movie characterizes the nuns’ vindictive self-­righteousness as arising from repressed libido. “Unlived lives,” as Jung is reputed to have said, “revenge themselves.” While Philomena screams in the agony of a breech delivery, a young nun urges an older one to call a doctor. With some satisfaction, the latter refuses, “The pain is her penance.” At the end of the film, Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), a merciless persecutor of the young women in her care, justifies her behavior by citing her suppression of her own desires: “I have kept my vow of chastity my whole life. Self-­denial and mortification of the flesh, that’s what brings us closer to God. Those girls had nobody to blame but themselves, and their own carnal incontinence.” Further punishment for the sins of the disgraced mothers takes the form of years of indentured servitude at the Abbey—seven days a week of often hard labor. “You could

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only leave if you paid them one hundred pounds,” Philomena tells Martin. “Where would I get that kind of money? Where would I go?” In the book originally published as The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, Martin Sixsmith details the 1950s collaboration in Ireland between the Catholic Church and the civil authorities that led to the control of unmarried mothers and their children in Abbeys like that at Roscrea (Sixsmith [2009]2013: 22–47). As I am writing, a related story is breaking, coincidently, of the discovery of mass graves of infants and children in an abandoned septic tank on the site of a former such Abbey in Ireland.5 “Don’t let them put my baby in the ground,” Philomena begs the young nun, Annunciata (Amy McAllister), “It’s cold in there. It’s dark in there.” Annunciata saves the life of Anthony and his mother, and later gives her a photograph of her son, “all I have of him.” Unlike the nuns who interrogate the pregnant young woman, Annunciata candidly shows her vicarious interest in Philomena’s short affair: “I bet his [Anthony’s] father was handsome.” Philomena remembers the Abbey as predominantly a house of horrors. It provided no medical assistance to the young women who gave birth there, and it enslaved those who lived through their ordeal. “I was one of the lucky ones, Martin,” she says. “Some of the mothers and babies didn’t even survive childbirth.” The most apparently humane practice, the daily hour that mothers were allowed to spend with their infants, became another cruelty when the children were turned over to adoptive parents. As Sixsmith notes in his book and Frears makes clear, “This hour—the time they looked forward to most . . . established the bond that would haunt mother and child for the rest of their lives” (Sixsmith [2009]2013: 29). “I’ve thought of him every day,” Philomena tells Martin. The Abbey attempts to efface evidence of its brutal, exploitative past. Little remains from Philomena’s time: a few marked graves (“Mother and Child / Died in Childbirth” and “Aisling Devlin / Aged / 14 Years / RIP.”), the frail, still-­defiant Sister Hildegarde (whom the administrators of the Abbey attempt to conceal), and the contract Philomena signed giving up any rights to her child, including the right to seek him in the future. As Martin remarks, “All the pieces of paper designed to help you find him have been destroyed. . . . The one piece of paper designed to stop you finding him has been lovingly preserved.” That doesn’t have to do, as Martin sarcastically puts it, with “God in his infinite wisdom.” Rather, as he learns from a local barman, the nuns themselves burned the other records. “I suppose they were embarrassed about sellin’ all them babies to America.” Behind its whitewashed exterior and its feel-­good, public-­relations-savvy manner, the Abbey at Roscrea remains darkly horrible. “Some of the nuns were very nice,” Philomena tells Martin. “They’re very helpful. . . . They said they’d try and trace him for me.” The shots of Martin and Philomena arriving for their first visit to the Abbey foreshadows its futility. The car approaches through a lovely Irish countryside and the sky, reflected on the windscreen, is blue; but the Abbey is framed by dark hedges and trees and the driver and his passenger sit in shadows that will be undissipated by their visit. As they approach, Philomena hangs a Saint Christopher medal from the rearview mirror, “for good luck.” “I’ve always thought that Saint Christopher was a bit of a mickey

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mouse saint,” Martin remarks. On this occasion, he appears to be right. The brown door to the Abbey opens on shadow within, from which a bit of white cloth and a cross emerge. The Jamaican nun who admits them shows them through another dark door into a parlor to wait for Sister Claire, who will clarify nothing. The black nun offers and serves them tea—her role a hint, perhaps, of persisting racism in the Abbey. “Most of our records were destroyed in the big fire,” Sister Claire tells them, “So I’m afraid I have no news of Anthony.” But after the deceptions of the Abbey’s nuns have been revealed and Philomena returns with Martin, it will be Sister Claire who knows where to find her son’s grave marker. During their first visit, however, Philomena and Martin receive fruit bread and sympathy but no information. In fact, as we learn later, worse than none: lies. When Pete and a dying Anthony came to the Abbey, they also were lied to; they were told that Philomena abandoned her son. We see Philomena’s Saint Christopher medal twice more. In the car as Philomena and Martin near Pete Olsson’s home, Frears cuts in a brief shot of it. A bad sign, we assume, if we remember its earlier appearance. Indeed, Pete slams his door on Martin and threatens to call the police. But this time, the dark interior of the car has some light in it, the low autumn sun striking the side of Philomena’s face. The nuns’ claim that she forsook her son evidently led Pete to refuse to see her or Martin, until she goes to his door and blurts, “I just want to talk to you about my son. He was taken from me and I’ve been looking for him ever since.” Flabbergasted, Pete opens his white door. The dimness surrounding Anthony’s life brightens. The last time we see the medal, Martin and Philomena are again approaching the Abbey. The sun reflects brilliantly from it; and Philomena will be shown to her son’s grave at the end of the visit. When Sister Claire, during the first encounter, denies having any news of Anthony, Martin looks a bit skeptical, Philomena stricken. But she, too, senses that the Abbey may be protecting itself. “I still go to Mass. I don’t want to cause any fuss, or point the finger at anybody, or blame the Church in any way. I only want to know if he’s alright. I don’t even need to see him.” Her plea brings forth some of the film’s most chilling lines. Leaning forward and taking Philomena’s hands, Sister Claire, with what we will later realize is entirely false empathy, consoles the woman she refuses to help: “Philomena, we can’t take away your pain. But we can walk through this with you. Hand in hand.” As Philomena pleads, Martin sees, in an adjacent room, Sister Hildegarde. Sister Claire, however, refuses to allow the visitors to interview any of the older nuns and, when Martin persists in asking, she dismisses him, “I’d feel more comfortable if I could speak to Philomena in private.” When Philomena returns to the car where he is waiting she tells him that Sister Claire warned her that he is “a journalist. And that you were trying to manipulate me, and that I should be careful what I said to you.” In relating this to her companion, Philomena indicates her trust in him—and her budding distrust of the Abbey’s nuns. As they sit in the car, Philomena shows Martin the contract renouncing all claims to her son. “I signed it,” she reveals to him a little later, as they stand in a green field in late afternoon sun, “because I believed I committed a terrible sin and had to be punished. But what made it so much worse was (pause) that I enjoyed it. . . . The sex. It was wonderful, Martin, I felt I was floating on air.” Martin responds, “Fucking Catholics! . . .

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Why would God bestow upon us a sexual desire that he then wishes us to resist. . . . It baffles me. And I think I’m pretty clever.” Philomena answers simply, “Well, maybe you’re not.” As part of Martin’s education, he will learn the limits of his cleverness. Additionally, this exchange makes explicit one of the main themes of the film, guilt. Who is guilty and who is innocent? Can the Church forgive sin, in God’s name? Can anyone? Is belief in God required? Such ideas in Philomena are at once complicated and simple—a combination that is itself complex. Early in their acquaintance, Philomena asks Martin, “Do you believe in God?” He replies, somewhat evasively (we’ve already heard him say he doesn’t), “I’ve always felt that was a difficult question to give a simple answer to.” He then asks her, “Do you?” “Yes.” This exchange sets the pattern for many of their interactions: Martin acts hesitantly and holds somewhat equivocal views, while Philomena’s actions and beliefs are more straightforward. Contrasts between simple truths and complicated circumstances characterize the film’s deepest human and theological questions. Martin has no monopoly on complex understanding nor Philomena on simplicity. When Jane says, “What they did to you was evil,” Philomena contradicts her, “I don’t like that word.” Martin, taking notes, joins in, “No, no. Evil is good (pauses, as Philomena stares at him). Storywise, I mean.” Later, when Martin asks, “Why did you keep this a secret for fifty years?” She explains, “What I’d done was a sin, and I kept it all hidden away. But then I thought to myself, keeping it all hidden away was also a sin, ’cause I was lying to everybody.” Anthony/ Michael also had to keep something hidden away, his homosexuality. Working for Republican administrations eager to mollify their homophobic constituents, he required for public events a female companion, “his beard,” as the surprisingly sophisticated Philomena puts it. A fellow hidden sufferer, she commiserates with her son, “Must have been terrible, having to keep it a secret his whole life.” She comprehends both the injuries the nuns perpetrated on her and others and their place in the Church and in an Irish culture that led her father to entomb his pregnant daughter in the Abbey and publically declare her dead. It was a culture of shame that people had internalized. Ignorant of sex and “babies,” Philomena nonetheless understood immediately that what she had done couldn’t be right: “Now when the sex was over, I thought anything that feels so lovely must be wrong.” Of the present nuns she concludes, “It’s not their fault. They didn’t know Anthony had a different name.” But they did, after his visit. Martin cannot manage to achieve such a lenient view. (My guess is that many in the audience also find a nuanced understanding difficult; for in many respects, Philomena functions in the story as an uncomplicated heroine, the nuns and the Catholic Church mostly as unvarnished villains.) The forgiveness Philomena offers to the nuns and, in particular, to Sister Hildegarde, does not come easy for her, nor does maintaining her faith.6 After Martin excoriates the Catholic Church (it “should go to confession, not you”), mentions the recent catastrophic earthquake in Turkey, and quotes an Onion headline about Hurricane Katrina (“God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again”), Philomena, shaken by her companion’s diatribe, finds herself unable to speak in confession. “Speak up now, Dear,” says a

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reassuring Priest, “don’t be afraid.” But Philomena can only weep, and she leaves the confessional without a word. The Priest’s promise that “God will forgive you” and the paintings of the Stations of the Cross on the church walls do not at this moment carry conviction for her. Philomena has already expressed some reluctance about making public her story, having asked Martin if it could be published without using her real name. Now, lacking the Church’s forgiveness, she cannot bear the idea of exposing her guilt to the world: “I don’t want it published. I don’t want anyone to know about this, ever!” Without her faith, everything looks hopeless and unforgiving. Anthony “probably hated the thought of me. . . . I should never have let him out of my sight”—as if she had any power to do otherwise. During this sequence, Frears gives special emphasis to a visual motif, “//##,” that occurs in others of his films. As Philomena settles into the confessional, the camera shows her behind a gridded window that separates her from the Priest. In silhouette in the next shot, the gridding is especially prominent. Throughout the sequence, it remains conspicuous. As Martin enters the church, shadows of slatted blinds repeat the motif on the door. Outside, the lines of the church’s siding continue it, less noticeably. As in Mary Reilly, Dangerous Liaisons, and many other Frears films, “//##” patterns in Philomena are associated simultaneously with protection and confinement. At this moment, Philomena has temporarily both lost the protection of the Church and escaped its restraints. Abundant imagery of parallel lines and bars during the sequences when Anthony is carried off from the Abbey emphasizes the power of the Church to control and confine. From the moment that Philomena learns “they’re taking him away,” such images dominate the mis-­en-scène. Photographed through banister spindles, Philomena rushes up a flight of stairs with their parallel treads. A brief shot of the nursery follows, the barred railings of the cribs prominent. Even Philomena’s spread fingers on the nursery door repeat the motif. She continues up more stairs, by more railings, to peer through a multi-­paned window. Then back down the stairs and across the courtyard to scream “Anthony!” in close-­up through the locked door to the driveway. Its small opening is laced with iron prison bars. They continue to be conspicuous in shots of Philomena’s anguished face, her shaking hands gripping the bars, and in reverse shots of what she sees through them. The last shot returns to her, weeping as she sinks down behind the bars. From a window overlooking the courtyard, Sister Hildegarde, unmoved, watches her anguish. During her first visit to the Abbey with Martin, Philomena uses the excuse of going to the bathroom to retrace her steps of that terrible day. She goes up the same stairway, shot through the same spindles, to the same multi-­paned window, and then across the graveled courtyard to the iron bars of the door through which she witnessed her son’s departure. In her mind, the sounds of her youthful cries reverberate. As she takes this tour of the past-­in-the-­present, Martin, left alone, looks at photographs of nuns, including a “Portrait of Sister Hildegarde, 1957,” in a black habit with a large cross on her breast.7 Later, looking out one window and into another, he sees the nun herself. At the end of the film, when Martin denounces her and declares

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Philomena (Frears, 2013) © Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Philomena (Frears, 2013) © Anchor Bay Entertainment.

that he could not forgive her, the motif of vertical lines returns in the panes of the glass door behind which the old woman dwells, now protected and confined in her turn. The past has not passed. Those absent—whether stolen or deceased—have presence, and those who remain continue developing relationships with those who have gone. Whenever Philomena looks at her photo of Anthony, she says “a little prayer for Sister Annunciata,” long dead. Philomena’s first lover lives in her memory. “I remember that

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Philomena (Frears, 2013) © Anchor Bay Entertainment.

day at the fair. His [Anthony’s] father made me laugh by pretending to be an old man, and I made him laugh by pretending to be an old woman. Now I am one.” Philomena’s memories merge with her envisioning of Anthony’s life, and they in turn merge with the photographs, home movies, and videos that she sees as she searches for him, then seeks to know who he was through those who met and lived with him. As already noted, media traces of her son are not presented as wholly separate from her imagining of his life. We see many of those images through her consciousness before she encounters them in the memorial video Pete Olsson shows. Whether we take them as retrospective or not, they fuse with her first-­hand memories of her son and become part of her relationship with him, a relationship imagined during his life and enriched by her discoveries after his death. The fusing of Philomena’s memories with mediated images links Philomena to a number of other movies of Stephen Frears. Notable among the films in which media, mass and otherwise, play complicated roles, we may count Hero, High Fidelity, The Deal, Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Queen, Lay the Favorite, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight and The Program (2015). The connections between Philomena’s direct memories of Anthony and her internalization of still photos and moving images can be characterized as what Alison Landsberg and others have called “prosthetic memory.” Though that phrase has been used mostly to define the incorporation into personal memory of information gained through mass media, it usefully describes Philomena’s absorption of semi-­private images—photographs, home movies, and videos—into her composite understanding of her son’s life. As Landsberg describes them, prosthetic memories are “not the product of lived experience . . . but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation.” Nonetheless, they are “sensuous memories produced by an experience [emphasis in

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original] of mass-­mediated representations. . . . Prosthetic memories, like an artificial limb, often mark a trauma” (Landsberg 2004: 20). For Philomena, such prosthetic memories allow her to participate in her son’s birthday parties, baseball games, graduations, and professional success. They confirm her supposition that he might be gay and her feeling that he was intelligent: “I always kept him smart.” They create their life together from Anthony’s arrival in the U.S., through his youth and adulthood, to his final illness and death. Philomena’s discovery of his grave—“I found my son”—completes her life with him, no longer guessed at but lived, albeit memorially. Such memories, after all, are what remain to any parent of a deceased child. As she stands gazing at his headstone, her recollections of hugging and kissing her smiling son during their daily reunion in the Abbey and the adult Anthony/ Michael smiling in a home video run together. At the end of his life, Anthony resumes his relationship with his mother. Standing by his grave, Philomena says to Martin, “He knew I’d find him here.” An inspired shot at the end of Michael’s memorial video renders the creation/ recreation of Philomena’s life with her son as a resurrection. Pete has just told her, “It was your son’s dying wish. . . . He said he wanted to go home. He’s buried at Roscrea.” The video of Anthony/Michael’s life appears to be ending on a track-­in to an extreme close-­up of his face in death. Startlingly, he opens his eyes, looks at the camera, and smiles. At this point, Frears dissolves to a shot of the heavens above, a reflection of sky and trees on the windshield of the car in which Philomena and Martin are returning to the Abbey. The quest for Anthony ends back at the Abbey of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. “We’ve come full circle,” Philomena says. Martin quotes T. S. Eliot, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”8 The lines could hardly be more appropriate; but Frears, with his wonderful sense of timing, does not let the emotion of this visit come to a boil prematurely. “That’s lovely, Martin. Did you just think of that?” Philomena asks. “No, it’s T. S. Eliot.” “Ah well, never mind, it’s still very nice.” Coogan, known almost exclusively as a comedian before this role, responds with an understated double-­take. The confrontation with the aged Sister Hildegarde near the end of the film clearly sets forth the issues of guilt, blame, shame, and possibilities for forgiveness. Throughout the sequence, the shots are mostly close-­ups on the faces of the speakers; the affective temperature stays very high: Sister Hildegarde:  What’s done is done. What do you expect us to do about it now? Philomena:  Nothing. There’s nothing to be done. Or said. I found my son. That’s what I came here for. Martin (summoning him as she turns away). Martin:  I’ll tell you what you can do. Say sorry. How about that? Apologize. Stop trying to cover things up. Get out there and clear all the weeds and crap off the mothers and babies that died in childbirth. SH:  Their suffering was atonement for their sins. M:  One of the mothers was fourteen years old!

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P:  Martin, that’s enough! SH:  The Lord Jesus Christ will be my judge, not the likes of you! M:  I think that if Jesus was here now, he’d tip you out of that fucking wheelchair, and you wouldn’t get up and walk. P:  Stop! Stop! I’m sorry. I didn’t want to bring him in here like this to make a scene. M:  Why are you apologizing? Anthony was dying of AIDS and she wouldn’t tell him about you. P:  It happened to me, not you. It’s up to me what I do about it. It’s my choice. . . . Sister Hildegarde, I want you to know that I forgive you. M:  Just like that? P:  It’s not “just like that.” That’s hard, that’s hard for me. But I don’t want to hate people. I don’t want to be like you. M:  (To Sister Hildegarde, after Philomena exits) Well, I couldn’t forgive you.

This interchange wraps up all sides of the argument, giving each its say. All speak sincerely, from deeply held beliefs. Sister Hildegarde does not come off well, but how could she? Nonetheless, her point about being judged accords with her convictions, the beliefs that guided her atrocious actions, however much they may have been energized by sexual suppression and frustration. Martin gives voice to the desire to condemn those actions, the repugnant cover-­up, and the residual self-­righteousness in the Abbey. Philomena pretty much settles the dispute. Her painful forgiving of Sister Hildegarde reverses their power relationship; the nun doesn’t speak again after Philomena addresses her. She has a crucial point: it did happen to her, and the choice of how to respond must be hers. That response is generous; it reflects who she is and aspires to be. For all the opposition of the speakers, all speak truly and what they say is necessary for full understanding of the narrative. The story continues as the final credits run: “MARTIN SIXSMITH PUBLISHED / ‘THE LOST CHILD OF PHILOMENA LEE’ IN 2009. / THOUSANDS MORE ADOPTED CHILDREN AND THEIR / ‘SHAMED’ MOTHERS ARE STILL TRYING TO FIND EACH OTHER.” “PHILOMENA LEE LIVES IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND / WITH HER CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN. / SHE CONTINUES TO VISIT HER SON’S GRAVE AT ROSCREA.” “MARTIN SIXSMITH NOW WORKS AS AN AUTHOR AND BROADCASTER. / HE HAS PUBLISHED SEVERAL BOOKS ON RUSSIAN HISTORY.” Photos of both principals accompany the words. Following these intertitles, home movie images of Anthony occupy the screen again with more credits (Director, Screenplay, multiple Producers, and so on). They end with a symbolic sunset. As the last credits finish, the sound of children playing and the organ music of a fair—the site where the story of Philomena and Anthony began—return to the sound track. Among its other themes, Philomena makes an overriding point: guilt is evil, guilt itself is guilty. The guilt on which the doctrines of Christianity are based—recall the dropped candy apple during the kiss at the fair—and that are firmly institutionalized in the practices of the Catholic Church, the shame about sex that suffuses human societies

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like a virus, and the discomfiture that we often feel about our deepest feelings of love and pleasure extend to almost everyone. We are all guilty. But not to be blamed.9 The movie implies that all people, even including the nuns, retain some part of a fundamental innocence, a word that signifies lack of knowledge (in this case, mostly of ourselves) as well as exemption from culpability. Philomena has an especially comprehensive and truly sophisticated innocence, which she has achieved in the world of experience. She has suffered and witnessed human weakness, grotesque injustices, and profound disappointment; and she has chosen neither to judge nor to hate. Frears’s film suggests that we might follow its heroine’s lead.

Part Six

Acceptance, Forgiveness, and Love: Mary Reilly

11

Mary Reilly

When Mary Reilly appeared in early 1996, it was received with reviews that were generally unenthusiastic and often insultingly dismissive. Peter Stack’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle was not especially extreme: “The film is too mannered, too stuffy. Even Malkovich’s interesting performance won’t let it break free of a formal style and cloyingly creepy tone that becomes precious while trying to be merely claustrophobic.” Reviewers complained about Julia Roberts’s Irish accent, the dismal atmosphere of the film, the screenplay, and just about any other aspect that could be isolated for dispraise. Bad reviews did their bad work. A production estimated to have cost forty-­seven million dollars managed worldwide gross revenues of something just over twelve million (IMDB). Not surprisingly, discussions of Frears’s career usually hurry past Mary Reilly, sometimes pausing to suggest that it was one of several big budget efforts that confirmed Frears as a master of small productions who ought not venture into deep financial oceans. Never one to bite the public hands on whose morsels of good opinion the career of commercial filmmakers partly depends, Frears himself has rarely come to the defense of his slandered offspring. In interviews for English language publications, he seldom admits to any fondness for the movie.1 With Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, who interviewed him for the French journal Positif, however, he was more affirmative about Mary Reilly. “I now think that the last reel is superb” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 39). At the same time, he was forthcoming about the difficulties he experienced in making it. He had accepted the invitation to direct it, he tells them, after Tim Burton, to whom it had originally been assigned, withdrew—apparently to direct Ed Wood. Answering the question of why he agreed to take it on: The idea from which it began—this servant in the home of Dr. Jekyll—seemed great to me, and also because it was another opportunity to work with Christopher Hampton after Dangerous Liaisons. His screenplay was already written; afterwards, of course, we reworked it, but without introducing major changes. . . . What attracted me was the psychology. Ciment and Niogret 1996: 36, 37

When he arrived, Frears found corporate chaos: “No one [at Columbia] wanted the film to have the same genre.” Nonetheless,“I always knew what I was trying to do” (Ciment

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and Niogret 1996: 36). For what he “was trying to do,” Frears found little support from the executives watching the film being made: “Columbia would never stop saying that I could have made a better film than I did” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 38). Indeed, after the shooting and initial editing had been completed and Frears had moved on to The Snapper, there was an attempt by Columbia to re-­edit the film. Since Frears shoots his films with a total vision of them, however, this was not practicable. “When they gave up the idea of re-­editing the film, I had a very clear idea of the whole . . . . the rupture made things easier for us.” Final editing and the addition of a sound track from George Fenton went quickly and easily once Frears and his collaborators were “certain of our line” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 39). Fenton’s score delighted the director: “George Fenton can bring to the surface things that are deeply buried in the unconscious” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 38). Regarding executive doubts and the reviews, one is tempted to apply Robin Wood’s acerbic summing up of the hostility that greeted Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964): “The general critical reception . . . would appear quite staggeringly obtuse if one had not been well prepared for it by many precedents” (Wood 1989: 173). A less cranky phrasing may be borrowed from David Thomson, a friend of Frears and an admirer of Mary Reilly: “This is the best version of the Jekyll and Hyde story ever put on the screen—and it is a wonderful movie. . . . The neglect of the film by real critics is shocking” (Thomson [2008]2010: 529). I’m not sure whether I might qualify as a real critic, but I enthusiastically join Thomson’s estimation of the film. Mary Reilly begins with a superb screenplay; it is brilliantly acted and photographed, meticulous and expressive in design and costuming, and precisely edited. Frears’s imaginative direction, never more fertile or humane, knits the parts together. What results is a remarkable wealth of meaning and formal opulence, of unity in complex variety. Frears has packed virtually every frame with multiple, often paradoxical signification and intricate formal harmonies. Mary Reilly is all but overwhelming in its intensity, its density of imagery and thought, its gorgeous cinematography, and the rhythms of its editing. If it does not expose Stephen Frears’s complete identity as a human being, it puts him forth entirely as a filmmaker. It embodies the tenderness, violence, love and rage, electric imagination, determination, and total focus that he brings to his art. The great grandchild of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886, Mary Reilly’s cinematic forbears include scores of theatrical and film adaptations, the most famous of which are the Barrymore silent of 1920, the Rouben Mamoulian version with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins (1931), and the Victor Fleming rendering with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman (1941).2 Elaborations of Stevenson’s story have often increased its complication and resonance, an increase in complexity that Valerie Martin’s novel, Mary Reilly, 1990, also achieves. Hampton’s screenplay further complicates matters by realizing ideas and themes that exist in Martin’s novel only as hints or potential. The film by Frears, his actors, and his other collaborators adds a rich tapestry of imagery and a still richer, more vigorous, and more subtle understanding of the central characters. Generically, Frears’s movie has the multiplicity characteristic of most of his films. As he says on the DVD’s “Featurette” (a slightly expanded trailer), “It’s a proper, old-­ fashioned story-­film: romantic, psychological, suspense, horror—everything.”

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During his directorial career, Frears has consistently favored the complex over the simple, ironic ambiguity over romantic clarity. To judge not only by the version of Mary Reilly that was released but also by what little we are able to see of footage that did not make the final cut, his direction remains true to his vision of a human world of ambivalent emotions and multifaceted reality. Any discussion of Mary Reilly must honor its complexity, its refusal to achieve the closure of an unequivocal summing up of its central themes or characters. Frears’s preference for complication and ambiguity is confirmed by material in the “Special Features” section of the DVD. Evidently made in anticipation of the release of Mary Reilly, both the “Featurette” and a “Preview” contain material excluded from the final release: inferior takes of scenes that are included and moments that were removed from the final version. Most of what was replaced or cut was footage that tended to streamline complex actions or themes and simplifying dialogue that was shot but removed from the final version of the film. For example, “Dr. Jekyll: Most people are afraid of him [Mr. Hyde], but you’re not are you? Mary: No, sir, I’m not.” But she does, and should, fear him. She also loves him, trusts and distrusts him, desires him, wishes not to desire him, flees from and seeks him, believes and doubts his identity with the Doctor, and so on. “They lead each other,” as Frears says, “into a more and more complicated world.” The “Featurette” also includes a rather unattractive profile close-­up of Mary moving toward something or someone with eyes closed— another moment well-­removed. The opening sequence of Mary Reilly anticipates much of what will follow. Occurring between the first credits—title, director, two leading actors—and the secondary ones, it runs for about two minutes and contains seventeen shots, edited to compress the action by quicker cutting as tension increases and then to extend it as the intensity passes. Scored for strings, the inconspicuous background music establishes a dominant key without introducing much in the way of melody; and it briefly stops in favor of ambient sound, which is emphasized even when the music track is continued. Only when the sequence ends and the credits proceed, do the strings introduce the lyrical Hibernian cue that will recur throughout the film. The opening shot, through an iron fence with alternating spear points on shorter bars, fades quickly in and the camera immediately begins a steady approach toward the dark, foggy street behind the fence. In contrast to the dreariness, a maid in brighter clothes is scrubbing the steps of a residence under the front door of which a sliver of light shines. On both sides of her are short iron fences, again capped with spear points. Once the camera fully penetrates the fence, the scene brightens somewhat and the title of the film, “Mary Reilly,” fades in to the right of the scrubbing figure, while the camera continues to close on her. It stops on a medium close-­up of the woman we assume to be Mary (Julia Roberts), her face now visible. Cut to an extreme close-­up of her hands, pushing a wet cloth back and forth. The camera then tilts up her gray sweater to her face—pale skin, red lips, auburn hair. She is concentrating on her task. Cut to a dark shaft, later revealed as a cane, followed by very dark cloth that briefly intervenes between Mary and the camera. (Moments of darkness like this, caused

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Opening dolly-­in. Mary Reilly (Frears, 1996) © Columbia TriStar Home Video. either by something impeding the view of the camera or by the camera’s panning past a wall or other obstruction, constitute a visual motif in this partly Gothic picture.) Mary looks up at the sound of footsteps accompanying the shot, which like the preceding one, runs ten seconds. An eyeline cut follows her gaze to a close-­up of a muddy black shoe and black stocking as the shoe is scraped on a black iron scraper. Dr. Jekyll (John Malkovich) is generally seen in black with some white, costuming that reflects both his identities and his way of viewing the world. Mary, on the other hand, tends to appear in stripes and grays, values (in the sense of brightness) that indicate the complexity of her understanding of herself and other people. When she is dressed entirely in black or white, those values are used conventionally, in association with death or innocence, respectively. Close-­up of Mary watching, scars visible on her throat; on the sound track a man’s voice: “I’m not going to bite you.” Mary: “I’m sorry, sir. You gave me a fright.” As they continue to talk, the cane and cloak again pass in front of the camera, briefly filling the screen. The Doctor’s humorous promise not to bite Mary inadvertently invokes, as we discover later, a horrible episode from Mary’s past. It also proves to be a promise that Dr. Jekyll (John Malkovich), as his other self, Mr. Hyde, finds terribly difficult to honor; indeed, he is able to do so only at the cost of his—their—life. Close-­up of Dr. Jekyll in black top hat, black hair, black coat collar and dark gray cloak, but with a white shirt collar, glancing furtively up an adjacent street. Does he fear pursuers? He turns back to face the camera (and presumably Mary): “I used to be able to stay up all night and suffer no ill effects whatsoever (pause). Oh, well.” He moves out of the frame toward Mary. From this point, the cutting is fast and becomes faster; the next ten shots occupy twenty-­eight seconds of screen time, with the middle four consuming a total of only six seconds.

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Close-­up of Mary. Dr. Jekyll’s voice, “Those scars.” Mary’s hand and wrist are pulled into the frame by the silver grip of a cane, fashioned into the head of an animal. “Would you mind if I examined them?” Extreme close-­up on Mary’s wrist, covered with small scars. Dr. Jekyll continues, “It’s a purely professional curiosity.” Cut back to a medium close-­up of Mary, freeing her wrist, “I don’t really like to talk about them, sir, if it’s all the same to you.” Close-­up of Jekyll looking intently down, “There are some on your neck, as well.” As Mary looks away, his white-­gloved fingers touch her white cap, “They look almost like teeth marks.” Extreme close-­up of his gloved fingers touching the scars. “Yes, sir, that’s what they are.” We hear Mary’s words as the image cuts back to Jekyll’s face and he rises. Close-­up of Mary, agitated, looking at him, then down, then away. This small moment sums up, in anticipation, some of the complexity of her relation to her employer, and the spray of emotions she feels in his presence: attraction, shyness, her strong sense of the difference in their status, a desire to evade her feelings for him, and the confusion that follows their conflicting multiplicity. In a medium long-­shot, Mary continues her work as her employer walks off and enters the door while she carries the bucket to a box of cleaning supplies; she picks it up and takes it toward the house. The last shot of the sequence relaxes to about eighteen seconds. It begins with a close-­up on the cleaning equipment. Mary’s hands come down into the frame and take a rag and blue glass bottle; as she lifts them, the camera tilts to follow and goes on until it reaches a medium close-­up on her face and upper body, at which point it dollies in for a closer view as she apparently soaps the rag. At the end of the dolly, it pans to the left to reveal a brass plaque attached to the building: “Dr. Henry Jekyll / M.A., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S.” Mary’s hand enters the frame and begins to wash it. In addition to introducing the two central characters of the story and beginning to show some of the facets of their complicated relationship, this opening sequence contains a myriad of formal motifs and themes, which are inseparably fused in the opening and remain so throughout the film. We see restraint and guardedness in Mary and Dr. Jekyll and in their interactions. That restraint, which can often be accurately described as repression, will be associated with a recurring imagery of vertical lines and grids, here the fences. Images of hands are of great importance in Mary Reilly. Like the patterns of bars, of grids, and of other vertical lines, they carry strong thematic suggestions; and, like the evocation of Alfred Hitchcock in the shot of the plaque at the end of the sequence, they are part of the legacy of that director in Frears’s picture.3 Fog recurs throughout the film—almost all exterior shots are foggy—and contributes to an emphasis on the values of black (often, like the fog, obscuring), white, and intermediate grays. The design of the film associates fog with complexity, mystery, and conflicting forces. The crucial theme of wounds, visible and psychic, and of their healing, is manifest in Mary’s scars, which have an enigmatic importance to her employer. (His gratuitous “It’s a purely professional curiosity” alerts us to the opposite, as unsolicited explanations or denials usually do.) Animals, another complex of imagery important to the film, are represented by the silver head of Dr. Jekyll’s cane; they are also hinted at in her multitude of small scars, which “look almost like teeth marks.”

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The long, rapid zoom of the opening shot suggests the urgent interest in Mary that the title of the film promises. At the same time, it introduces a camera that will often be quite active, undertaking dollies, pans, tilts, intricate combinations of movements, and occupying unexpected vantage points.4 Such an energetic role gives the camera a status approaching that of another character. The last shot of the opening sequence exemplifies such cinematography; the camera tilts up, dollies in, and pans, without a cut. All of these movements serve the narrative, but they are more elaborate than necessary for that purpose; a simple medium shot of Mary taking the soap and rag from her carrier and wiping the plaque would do the same thing, as would a continuation of the previous medium shot. What Frears has chosen to do instead emphasizes choices involved in the camera’s viewing and gives it a sort of semi-­independence, the power to shape assertively what elements of action and setting the audience perceives and when and how it does so. “Here’s what I am looking at, and how” such maneuvers imply, or “Here’s what’s important.” Much of the time, Frears’s handling of the camera is less aggressive and it acts as a conventional filmic narrator, with establishing shots, inconspicuous movements, and representations of characters’ points of view via eye-­line cuts. Less frequently but sometimes emphatically, it seems almost to insert itself into the story, either to comment or to draw attention to details that do not advance the action. We may call it something like a narrator with its own point of view—in effect another character. (Martin’s novel is framed as Mary Reilly’s discovered diaries, so its action is told in her voice; it has no third-­person narrator, but it has a second narrator, commenting on Mary’s manuscript, in an Afterword.) Unlike Mary or Dr. Jekyll, Frears’s camera shows little reticence; it goes where its curiosity or its sense of what may be consequential take it. The opening sequence shows Mary and Dr. Jekyll at once protected and confined behind the bars of surrounding fences, and half-­concealed by the fog. The camera, on the other hand, can penetrate iron barriers and, like Mr. Hyde, follow the persons of its interest whither they may go. Further, it can penetrate what Mary in the novel calls a “cloud of lies” (Martin 1990: 162), the interpersonal evasions and interior psychological confusion that afflict the main characters. However we label it, the camera expresses intermittently something like participation in the movie. The audience, whose looking it controls, may feel in the camera’s energy its own participation. “Audience identification” then, will sometimes be with the camera/narrator as well as with the protagonists. The camera dotes on Mary and so, therefore, will most of the audience. In the novel, Mary reports Dr. Jekyll as saying, “I was thinking how dear your face is to me, Mary. . . . And how sad it would make me if I were never to see it more” (Martin 1990: 221). That line has gone missing from Frears’s treatment of the novel; whether he or Hampton discarded it hardly matters. In its place the camera, an “objective narrator” with little objectivity as regards the heroine, fastens almost obsessively on her face, usually in close-­up, effectively taking on itself the Doctor’s love of looking at Mary. What we see of Mary in this opening intertitle scene anticipates her social position, character, and role in the film that follows. Despite its brevity and the apparent absence of significant action, it gives us a remarkably inclusive glimpse of her. We immediately

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understand her social position from her posture and her task. She is a servant well down the domestic chain of command. Though she is on her hands and knees doing what looks to be a menial duty, she gives no sign of feeling resentful or oppressed. On the contrary, she seems engaged by her work and scrupulous in taking responsibility for it. When Dr. Jekyll remarks, “You’re up very early” (which implies that he’s up very late), she answers, “I’m generally up by five, sir; otherwise I get behind.” A later scene contrasts her with Annie, the fellow servant with whom she shares a bed. “I don’t mind hard work,” Mary says. “Well I do,” says Annie. “I’ve been in service since I was twelve,” Mary goes on, “and this is by far the best place I’ve had. He’s a kind man, the Doctor, anyone can see that.” “If he was that kind, he’d let me sleep until six,” Annie says, turning over and shutting her eyes. Before Mary extinguishes the bedside candle, she murmurs, to herself as much as to Annie, “I feel safe here, is all.” That remark reflects the relationship she already has with Dr. Jekyll (we learn that she is the most recently hired of the servants). It also confirms the sense of their relationship suggested in the opening sequence. Dr. Jekyll converses easily with her and shares a personal thought about his decreasing toleration for staying up all night as he ages. He is neither distant nor too familiar; he does not seem especially authoritarian, though he does imperiously pull her wrist toward him and continue to speak about her scars after she demurs. On her side, Mary is appropriately deferential to her employer. Apologies are her most frequent utterances, and “sorry” is the word she speaks most often throughout the film. But at the same time, she is hardly characterized as abject, albeit she sometimes appears so. When pressed, she has a will and a clear sense of herself: “I don’t really like to talk about them, sir.” After the Doctor has learned how she came by her scars and tries to insist that she must hate her father, she flatly contradicts him. Dr. Jekyll remarks, incredulously, “You refused to say you hated your father.” “I don’t.” “Why not?” Mary explains, “He put a dark place in me and I can’t forgive him for that. But it’s a part of me now and how can I regret what I am? (pause) Though it often makes me sad.” (Her explanation distills one of the central arguments of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life.) At her mother’s funeral, her father appears and Mary refuses to take his money or to see him later. When he asks that she not “bear a grudge,” she confirms her inability to forgive him. As she turns away from him, tears fill her eyes, recalling the sadness to which she did admit. What do we make of the concluding action of the opening sequence, Mary’s washing the plaque identifying the house as Dr. Jekyll’s home? Most suggestively, perhaps, it resonates with her last utterance, “You said you didn’t care what the world thought of you. Nor will I.” It anticipates her response to the dying Jekyll’s question, “Would you have ever forgiven me?” Mary’s laying her head on the Doctor’s chest emphatically answers him. To judge by her washing of Dr. Jekyll’s name in the opening scene, she already has a strong predilection for such a reply. The relative brightness of Mary against the foggy gloom of the street, the contrasting darkness of Jekyll’s clothing and hair, and the middle gray of Mary’s sweater introduce a pattern of light and dark values that will be consistently articulated. Those values are joined by the colors red and yellow-­tan. The main values and colors of Mary Reilly thus

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resemble those in Dangerous Liaisons, white, black, and red.5 But in Mary Reilly, Frears complicates the black and white contrast with gray. The associations of values (and colors) are considerably more complex than in the earlier film. Notably, the permutations of black, white, and gray are connected to the exploration in Mary Reilly of the dilemmas of being human among other humans, and of the terrible mystery of inevitable death. To start with its most conventional aspect, black opposes white as darkness opposes light, as gloom and pessimism oppose optimism and cheer, as guilt opposes innocence, as evil opposes virtue, as sickness and death oppose health and healing. But in Mary Reilly, and especially for its heroine, the associations of brightness and darkness and the values between them are rarely simple—even when they appear so. The bright of Mary against the gloom of her surroundings in the opening shots does contrast with the dark values associated with the Doctor; but her position is complicated by the labor in which she is engaged. It is cleansing, but it’s also somewhat demeaning. Her clothing appears bright indeed, but her dress is striped and covered from shoulders to waist by a tattered gray sweater. Mary is frequently associated with nurture, both as food and as sympathy. All in white, she enters Dr. Jekyll’s bedroom carrying his breakfast tray through a white door. This action is repeated, essentially without change, three times. Besides a remarkable moment discussed below, the only other times she appears in undiluted white take place when she goes to bed in her white nightgown. But that innocence in slumber is frequently interrupted, a few times when she hears Jekyll or Hyde moving about, and once by an erotic dream of Hyde tearing the white cloth from her body. She also appears entirely in black on several occasions, all but one of them associated with death: Twice she goes in black to Mrs. Farraday’s brothel. The second time, more horrible because it includes her seeing the bloody carnage that Mr. Hyde has wrought, she trudges through rain with a black umbrella, while the black stones and stairs that lead to the black door shine especially dark. At Dr. Jekyll’s request, she accompanies Mr. Hyde to an infernal open-­air abattoir. Black is especially emphatic in this sequence also, which begins with her and Hyde dressed in black in a black cab pulled by a dangerous-­ looking black stallion. She is dressed all in black with a black veil at her mother’s funeral, where her father accosts her. In a remarkable transition, she goes from that encounter to Dr. Jekyll’s house, where we see her in a snow white woolen robe, while her father’s last remarks at the funeral continue on the sound track: “We had some good times. You remember. Must remember.” The camera tilts up the white cloth from her clenched hands to her face, eyes overflowing. Her costume suggests that she has retained her innocence in the midst of her grief, even without suppressing the horrifying memories of her father’s violence and molestations. And, perhaps, that she retains some faint affection or sympathy for her parent. Most of the time, Mary appears in a mix of values, gray or black and white together, attire that Frears and his frequent costume designer, Consolata Boyle, must have plotted carefully. Neither Mary, nor the movie comprehend the world and its inhabitants, as the cliché has it, simply “in black and white.” Even as nurturer, consoler,

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and healer, her colors and her roles are generally mixed. When she helps Dr. Jekyll, who has sprained his ankle, probably as Mr. Hyde, she wears a long white apron over a gray dress, and she wears the same white apron on other occasions, sometimes over black, sometimes over gray. Both Mary and Mr. Hyde are in striped garments during an especially intense, revelatory sequence. “I feel differently with you. . . . You still the rage,” murmurs Hyde. But during the same sequence, Mary twice tries to run away “to raise the alarm.” “Last week you saved my life,” Mr. Hyde says, restraining her, “Now you want to send me to the gallows? Can you explain?” After a long pause, Mary answers, “No.” She sympathizes both with Hyde and with the Jekyll who contains him and whom he contains. She does not understand all and forgive all from a point of high virtue; she participates in the feelings of both men, who make up together the whole man. She is herself angry and restrained, sexually responsive and repressed, ready to kill and ready to save. Like all humans. When Mr. Hyde tells her of Dr. Jekyll’s “strange malady” of which the cure is “me,” he drags her back to the bedroom and kisses the scars on her wrist, bringing her to the edge of fainting. When she begs to go, he releases her, lounging seductively on the bed, “I’m sorry. I thought you were planning to stay a while. But perhaps my sense of smell deceives me.” (That line startles my not easily shocked students.) Having tried twice to escape, she evidently does stay a while. Do they make love? Probably, but we don’t see and, like pretty much everything in this film, it’s not certain. Only uncertainty is certain in Mary Reilly; the only simple truth it insists upon is ubiquitous complexity. If Mary is protective of the melancholy Dr. Jekyll and even, ambivalently, of his raging alter ego, she is at the same time protected. In the color design of the film, the safety Mary feels in Dr. Jekyll’s residence is supported by the warm yellows and tans of its décor, especially in and around the kitchen, with its fellowship of servants at work

Mary Reilly (Frears, 1996) © Columbia TriStar Home Video.

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and at table. Despite the intermittent efforts at a repressive social decorum from the always black-­clad Mr. Poole, almost everything is discussed there, including sex. Nonetheless, the protection and warmth Mary experiences in Dr. Jekyll’s home implies a degree of restraint or repression, just as fences and grids confine while they defend. The dangling chains and many horizontal and vertical structural members in the lab extend the doubled association of a secure space and a constraining one. The imagery there elaborates also the relation between Dr. Jekyll and his indwelling other, Mr. Hyde, whom he at once protects and restrains—or attempts to. The precise reverse applies to Mr. Hyde, who sets the doctor free and puts him at risk. Similarly for Mary, the relation between her and her employer (in both his incarnations) compounds protection and peril, liberating and repressing. Against constraint, however, Mary Reilly sets not so much freedom as violence, especially in the person of Mr. Hyde. Again, the color design brings complex support to this theme with red punctuation that underscores, on one side, rage, danger, and bloody devastation; and on the other, sexual passion. Mary Reilly embodies in blood the red associated with Mr. Hyde. The open-­air abattoir to which Hyde takes Mary streams with bloody water and steams with a fog rising from animal carcasses and butchered organs. When Mrs. Farraday (Glenn Close) comes to Dr. Jekyll’s home to confront him, Hyde butchers her too, and her blood drips from the severed head he holds like a trophy. His murder of Sir Danvers Carew (Ciarán Hinds)—an act toward which both Dr. Jekyll and the film extend a bit of sympathy, if not approval—is a predictably bloody affair, presented in flashback by Frears’s independent camera from the point of view of no other character. Yet even in association with Mr. Hyde, the red of blood has mixed signification. When he tries to apologize to Mary, he cuts his palm on a shard of the teacup he crushes in his nervousness. That profusely bleeding wound brings to an end his uncharacteristic attempt to speak ingratiatingly: “Look what you made me do,” he says, adopting a threatening tone and diction that recall the assaults of Mary’s father. The evocation of her parent implies that Mary’s father was wounded as well as wounding. This stigmata reappears, in an extremely complex sequence, after the murder of Carew, when Jekyll is questioning Mary about her having lied to the police to protect Mr. Hyde. He then tries to explain something of who Hyde is: “It is marvelous how much he loves his life.” “And his victims, sir,” Mary replies, “did they not love theirs?” Trying to justify Hyde, the Doctor staggers in pain and Mary advances to support him. Jekyll comes close to confessing his love: “I trust you as I trust no one, Mary. My life would be a sad thing, if . . . .”6 Here he breaks off, as his palm begins to stream blood from the wound Hyde inflicted on himself earlier. “He is impatient!” Dr. Jekyll exclaims, and rushes from the room, holding his coat in front of his face, an act at once realistically plausible and, at the same time, a stereotyped gesture that approaches the risible. Does Hyde’s impatience have to do with his eagerness to resume his existence outside of the “cave” of the Doctor in which he “shelters” (as he later says to Mary), or does it reflect his exasperation with a man who “is entirely incapable of asking for what he most wants in the world”? What are we to make of the religious overtones of his wound? Is Dr. Jekyll suffering for the sins of another like a redemptive Christ? (Among

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the grids that reappear throughout Mary Reilly, the muntins of windows frequently form crosses, usually associated with its heroine.) The crimson-­and-black violence of Hyde joins another recurrent motif, images and sounds of animals. In a bloody scene, Mary witnesses the horrific aftermath of one of Mr. Hyde’s outbursts in Mrs. Farraday’s “house.” Blood covers the linens and the walls, and extends even to the ceiling of a room in which Mary “felt sure someone had been done to death.” On the bed lies a blood-­soaked, partly eviscerated rat—a brutal expression of Hyde’s sympathetic rage about Mary’s childhood injuries. An indignant Mrs. Farraday calls Hyde a “mad dog,” an epithet that connects him to a series of canine images and growls associated with an often violent side of human biological identity that respectable society avoids, or attempts to repress.7 The first of many animal images comes in the opening credit sequence when Dr. Jekyll, in his one domineering action, pulls Mary’s scarred wrist toward him with his walking cane’s silver handle, shaped like the stylized head of a dog. We see it again, covered with blood, after Mr. Hyde uses it to murder Danvers Carew. During one of the flashbacks when Mary is telling the Doctor how she got her scars—“They were a punishment”—the camera pans away from the remembered scene of her beating to an alley with three scavenging dogs. We do not see the rat that her father puts in her closet prison with her, but we hear it squeak. Two more dogs forage in the street during Mary’s first errand to Mrs. Farraday. When Mary attempts “to raise the alarm” after Mr. Hyde appears in Dr. Jekyll’s bedroom subsequent to his murder of Carew, he seizes her and forces her against the wall; as he does so, he makes a sound like a dog’s bark. Later in the sequence, Hyde recalls that audible cue when he says, “Lately I found a way to slip his leash.” Worried that Hyde might reappear, Annie declares, “This place is goin’ to the dogs.” For his director’s credit, Frears gives himself a typically wry acknowledgment over shots of a different animal; Mary carries a flopping, very phallic eel through a long yonic passageway. “It’s alive!” she cries, aghast. “Warmth of your hands, that’ll be” says the cook, “revived ’im.” Later, as the relations between Mary and the Doctor grow more intense, she attempts to revive him with the warmth of her hands after he complains that his are “frozen through.” The comically erotic overtones of the early sequence disappear with the cook’s attempt to dispatch the wriggling fish: “Difficult buggers to kill, is eels.” Horrifyingly, she then drives hooks into the bloody head of the eel, hangs it up, pulls its skin off, and chops it into pieces as it continues to twitch. In the next shot, Mary hands a dinner tray to her fellow servant Bradshaw (Michael Sheen), who passes it to Mr. Poole, who checks under its silver cover and sets it in front of Dr. Jekyll. Mary, Bradshaw, and Mr. Poole are dressed in black, and the Doctor, alone at the table, is in formal dinner clothes. In the midst of all this decorous elegance, however, we are unlikely to forget the bloody, agonizing reality behind his dinner. Nor does Mary forget. She dreams that night of kitchen carnage: fowl hanging, bloody heads down, and the eel, stripped of its skin, raising its smashed face from the marble cutting slab to gape accusingly. Her nightmare—perhaps provoked by cries from the Doctor’s laboratory, where he screams as he undergoes transformation—continues

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Mary Reilly (Frears, 1996) © Columbia TriStar Home Video.

with a cluster of rats in a flowing sewer, another image of nasty nature underlying a civilized surface. (We do not yet know why rats are especially frightening to Mary.) Ironically, her terrifying dream comes just after she says to Annie, “I feel safe here.” Especially suggestive images of animals appear when Mary looks into an open book in the Doctor’s library. The volume is identifiable as Darwin’s The Descent of Man, a book that confronted Victorians with their kinship to animals. Published in 1871, it was bound with another, Selection in Relation to Sex; and the four drawings of reptile heads that Mary sees appear in the latter. The work that the Doctor has been reading addresses not only our relation to the animals from whom we descended, but also the place of sex in the perpetuation and diversification of species. Given Mary’s double attraction to Jekyll/Hyde and the conflict that arises in her—“He troubles me, sir”— Selection in Relation to Sex is especially pertinent. Its inclusion adds a nineteenth century controversy to the theme of biological realities and the attempts of Mary’s society to avoid them. Mary’s ambivalence personalizes a central debate of her era— and one that persists in ours. Mary has complicated connections to bloody nature and crude sexuality, along with a love that has the potential to redeem, or at least ameliorate, that natural heritage. Her red lips and reddish hair connect her to the multiple associations of red. The red blood and other red signifiers that recur in connection with her also mark her victimhood. When her father transfers his beastliness to a real beast, the rat that he puts in the closet where he’s locked his daughter, she is bitten into bloody unconsciousness. Mary is at once implicated in the passion and grief associated with red, threatened by those feelings, and the one character in Mary Reilly who can begin to integrate them into an understanding of human life as a whole. As she says, she does not hate her forebear but cannot forget the facts, past and present, of her existence. Nor can she regret them.

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Most of Mary’s other associations with the reds that signify victimization are expressed through surrogates. Hyde, whose walk duplicates that of Mary’s father, knocks down a child, approximately the age of Mary when her father locked her in the closet, and stomps on her stomach. Mary observes the girl screaming in her bloody smock while her parents are being bought off with “Blood Money,” as it is called on the £100 bank draft. At the end of that sequence, Mary is trapped under the operating table in Jekyll’s theater and confronted by blood on the tip of Hyde’s black shoe. Her first excursion to the exotic whorehouse of Mrs. Farraday is marked by red. In front of a strong red background, Dr. Jekyll asks Mary to undertake the errand; as she goes there, a passerby in brilliant red and blue crosses in front of the tracking camera. In this sequence and elsewhere, Mrs. Farraday wears garish red lipstick; and her establishment is papered in brilliant red throughout. From her arrival there to her departure, there is an implication that serving clients in such a place could have been Mary’s destiny. Mrs. Farraday at first assumes that she has come looking for a position. Then one of her regular clients, Danvers Carew, takes an interest in her, remarking “Pity” when Mrs. Farraday informs him that she is “not even an apprentice. Not yet.” He calls, “Mary!” and Mary Reilly looks up, startled; but another Mary answers and emerges. As he passes with his companion for the day, he says to Mary Reilly, “I look forward to meeting you in due course.” These easily made assumptions about the future of an impecunious, moderately attractive maid recall an earlier conversation among the servants at breakfast, after Mr. Poole has expressed his disquiet about the length of time Mary was in “the Master’s bedroom.” The cook tells of a maid who serviced her employer every morning until she “fell in the family way and was dismissed without a reference. I often wonder what become of her.” Bradshaw, giggling, offers his opinion, “Oh, I expect now she entertains gentlemen all hours of the day.” Annie finds this amusing and entirely plausible. Just before he is murdered, Carew emerges with the young prostitute we saw earlier. She is dressed in a red velvet gown and looks very much like a schoolgirl, with curled, beribboned hair and a cross hanging from a chain around her neck. Mr. Hyde, waiting in ambush, appears to be punishing Carew’s desire to degrade innocence, which we may infer Hyde associates with Mary. On her second errand to Mrs. Farraday’s, Mary is passed again by a flash of bright red, this time a garment in the hands of a panic stricken, half-­dressed woman fleeing the scene of the blood-­soaked room. When Mary returns, Dr. Jekyll is chromatically implicated with this slaughter, emerging from behind the red padded door of his laboratory wearing a red waistcoat and a burgundy scarf. But Mary needs no color cue to suppose that he’s somehow connected to the horror she has just left; she hands him a bloody handkerchief with his monogram and repeats Mrs. Farraday’s message: “She said, ‘this is such linen as even she cannot clean.’ ” She then questions him closely enough to annoy him and to force from him the excuse that Hyde was trying to repair the injuries done during an “amateur operation,” presumably an abortion. Mary has seen a blood-­stained, “HJ”-monogrammed handkerchief before, when she was changing the linens on Jekyll’s bed. Ratcheting up the mild implications of the plaque-­cleaning in the first sequence, Frears shows Mary taking the bloody article to

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the laundry, where she washes and irons it, now pure white. She does not get a chance to try cleaning the stained cloth she brings back from Mrs. Farraday’s, for the Doctor tosses it onto the coals in the stove, and it disappears in flames, an image of the hell from which it came. Mary’s developing relationship with Jekyll/Hyde puts her in a position to experience desire and the craving to liberate it. She dreams of Hyde attacking her in bed, licking her with a long red tongue. When she resists (in the dream), he apologizes, saying “Sorry. Must be some misunderstanding. I thought you invited me here.” She hesitates, struggles to speak; then, “I did.” Awakening, she startles and sits up in bed, apologizing to Annie, “Sorry. Bad dream.” But Annie, who has some sexual sophistication, heard sounds of pleasure: “Don’t sound too bad.” Earlier, Mr. Hyde encounters her in the library and, trying to apologize, breaks a cup and drives a fragment into his palm, as we have seen. He then presses his hand against her mouth, smearing his blood on her face and asking, “Don’t you know who I am?” He leaves Mary in tears—of shock, confusion, maybe desire. She accepts blame for the broken cup the next day, which requires her to make up a story for the inquisitive Poole. Her act expresses feelings as complex and ambivalent as her dream. Dr. Jekyll asks her why she did it, especially given the terrible punishment she suffered for a broken cup as a child, “After the story you told me about your father, I can’t understand how you could bring yourself to say you’d broken a cup. Especially when you didn’t do it.” She can only reply, “Yes sir, I can’t rightly understand it myself.” Part of the explanation comes when he suggests that she doesn’t “care for Mr. Hyde,” which she obliquely denies, “Who told you that, sir?” “Well you don’t, do you?” The cup in her hands shakes, as the cup in Mr. Hyde’s shook: “He troubles me, sir.” The desire he awakens in her must be dreadfully confusing, given his violence, his vulgarity, his resemblance to her father and at the same time to Dr. Jekyll—which she could hardly be expected to understand but which must contribute to her response. After the police visit to question the staff about Hyde and the murder of Carew, Annie, who senses some relationship between the murderer and Mary, asks, “Do you still feel safe here?” “I don’t know what I feel anymore,” she answers. Mary experiences mutual desire with Dr. Jekyll also, albeit of a tenderer, less aggressive sort. After he has sprained his ankle, he asks her for help. Poole and Bradshaw take over and carry him upstairs to his bedroom while Mary is rekindling the fire there. As he’s being disrobed, Mary looks at his naked torso and the Doctor returns her glance. We have seen that they clasp hands when the Doctor complains of cold, after he admits to feelings like hers: “Sadness, yes. That can’t be helped.” Following a brief clash over Mr. Hyde’s knowledge of Mary’s past, the Doctor asks her to accompany his assistant on a scientific errand. Mary advances toward him, extending her hand, which he takes in his as they again exchange glances. Later, they clasp hands and embrace when Jekyll appears about to collapse while he tries to explain why he protects Mr. Hyde. They seem to be on the brink of kissing, and a brief close-­up of their joined hands includes a thin gold ring on the Doctor’s pinky, next to his fourth finger and suggestive of a wedding band. But almost immediately, Mr. Hyde interjects himself into this moment, as the wound he suffered opens and Dr. Jekyll is forced to flee.8

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In addition to her own repression of her sexuality, others suppress it. A disapproving look from Poole turns Mary’s eyes away from the half-­naked Dr. Jekyll, and I have mentioned his reproaches about her time in the Master’s bedroom. On the stairs that lead there, Mary is often photographed through the bars of its railing rather than by camera angles that emphasize its feminine curvature. As in the opening sequence, such images are associated with constraint. Mary’s suppression, more generally, is connected to her social station. Annoyed by what he takes to be her excessive familiarity in speaking to her employer, Poole reminds her that servants should not be offering the Master their “entirely insignificant opinions,” and threatens her with dismissal: “You must be aware, there are a great many young women in straitened circumstances who could fill your position. And observe a few elementary regulations. Remember that.” Sequences frequently end with doors closing on Mary as she attempts to see what is going on around her: at the Doctor’s dinner service; when she watches him descend the steps into the forbidden building that houses his operating theater and laboratory; when he comes back and goes into his room; and so on. All these shots leave Mary on the outside, cut off. Others, like the shot of her being thrust into the tiny closet by her father, exclude her by shutting her in rather than shutting her out. Doors that remain open, increasingly as the story unwinds, are those leading to the Doctor’s bedroom and his laboratory (despite Poole’s proscription). In both places, she is as likely to encounter Mr. Hyde as her Master. Mary’s exclusion from watching is underscored when Hyde threatens her with a long phallic knife in the laboratory; he begins by pointing it at her eye, before moving it to her throat. She also represses herself. She has internalized the requirements for decorousness and the class distinctions of her society. When the Doctor discovers that Mary can read and invites her to borrow books from his library, she declines, “No, sir. I wouldn’t want the other servants to think I was gettin’ above myself.” She is unable to imagine that a man of Dr. Jekyll’s propriety might frequent “houses,” even if he has no “lady friends” visiting his home. When the Doctor asks her, “Haven’t you ever wished for a completely new life?” she replies, “No, sir, what good would that do?” In another place, Mrs. Farraday’s, Dr. Jekyll finds something like the other life he desires. “I always say yes,” the proprietor of that house of exotic pleasures tells Mary. Mr. Hyde affronts Mary at their first meeting in the library, where she has come upon his violent, obscene drawings. He argues against “control,” he wonders “how far it went between your father and yourself,” and whether she “looked forward sometimes” to his molestations. We see her in a dream remembering one such occasion, and crying out painfully as her father suggestively tells her to “come here.” Mr. Hyde repeats these words when Mary finds him in the Doctor’s bed later. In the library, he puts his hand on her breast and later pulls her onto his lap, inviting her to “come in town with me tonight.” She flees. To Dr. Jekyll, she admits that she fears herself. Describing her father to him, she says, “it was like he carried another person inside him and the drink brought him out.” “Or maybe set him free,” the Doctor murmurs. For all of her attraction to the Doctor and eventually to Hyde, Mary does not want to be set wholly free, and she fears the consequences.

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Yonic imagery pushes against the social repression of Mary’s sexuality, as well as that which originates in her diffidence and the psychic scars of her difficult past. Immediately after he pauses outside the Doctor’s bedroom door and hears Mary speaking within, Poole descends a yonic spiral staircase, with a large black pot at the bottom. Like the combination of hall and eel, the pot suggests both feminine and masculine sexuality. Later Mary ascends these spiral stairs en route to her encounter, at once terrifying and arousing, with a violent but seductive Hyde. Elsewhere, Mary is further associated with feminine spaces. Though she is never presented as libidinous, such imagery suggests, however delicately or subliminally, her sexuality. The corridor through which she carries the flopping eel is not an especially subtle image; it may seem so only because we have been more sensitized to masculine symbols than to feminine ones. The sewer in Mary’s nightmare may also qualify as yonic. If we take it that way, we can connect it and its rats to the erotic energies that her scars seem to contain for both her, however unhappily, and Jekyll/Hyde. Mr. Hyde advances his seduction of Mary—if there is a seduction—by kissing the scars on her wrist; and we have seen the Doctor’s intense interest in them. Near the end of the film, when Mary finally understands that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man, Frears inserts an emphatic yonic shot, downward looking through the twisting white staircase. In the hall at the bottom, the Doctor is leaning on Mary, a posture that suggests their increasing intimacy. (There are phallic shapes in the frame as well, but they are unemphasized; the sequence foregrounds, in the shot as well as the dialogue, Mary’s coming to accept the double reality of Jekyll/Hyde.) The dialogue between Mary and the Doctor is rendered as if the image were a close-­ up—as it is immediately preceding and following this shot—but they first appear as small figures at the bottom of a striking composition. The camera twists, turning the scene slowly clockwise for twenty seconds, before cutting to a close-­up two-­shot that matches the sound track. “I didn’t know if I could believe what he was saying, but it’s true, isn’t it?” says Mary. “I kept thinking you must know we were the same man,” the Doctor answers. “How could anyone know such a thing? How could anyone guess?” Mary replies. Such an understanding, that the Jekyll and the Hyde in us are equally ourselves, was the point of Stevenson’s story; and it would soon become a central point of the developing psychoanalytic movement. Mary’s discovery would be elaborated by psychologists, most famously Freud; it had already been the discovery, from a biological perspective, of Darwin and Wallace. At this moment of revelation, full understanding, and growing closeness between the protagonists, Frears invokes one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots, Scotty’s (James Stewart) vision through the spiral stairs of a bell tower in Vertigo (1958). The dénouement of Hitchcock’s film follows immediately with Madeline/Judy’s (Kim Novak) fatal plunge from the platform to which Scotty has dragged her. The death of Jekyll/Hyde is delayed ten minutes or so in Mary Reilly, but the outcome is the same, as are the central meanings. The double person of Madeline/Judy cannot be reconciled into a single whole, nor can that of Jekyll/Hyde. In both films, the surviving lover remains alone, bereft.

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The route to the laboratory goes through another yonic space, the operating theater marked by concentric circular tiers of seats.9 Mary has been there twice before the end of the film: once when she flees Mr. Hyde and tries to conceal herself under the table in its center, and again during her furtive pursuit of him after she spies him in the library. When Jekyll/Hyde dies in the last scene, Frears varies the shot of the theater slightly, but significantly: As Hyde prepares to inject himself with the antidote that will replace him with Dr. Jekyll, a long shot from above sets him in the operating theater to the right of a white table. The camera tracks in and pans slightly to put near the center of the screen a phallic white pitcher standing in a yonic white bowl. (This jug/bowl set is present in earlier shots, and it has prominence in a downward looking shot of Mrs. Farraday when she makes her visit.) Combinations of the yonic and the phallic, as we have seen, recur in Mary Reilly. Here the image accompanies the infant’s cry that Mary hears as the Doctor is delivered from the body of Mr. Hyde, whom he absorbs. (Earlier, Mr. Hyde called Jekyll his “cave,” a word that might evoke a womb, a place of birth as well as concealment.) The infant’s cry is multiply ironic: it carries a suggestion of the outcome of the combination of male and female in the generation of new life. It also seems to promise the capitulation of Mr. Hyde, the redemption of Dr. Jekyll, and the possibility of a fully achieved relation between the protagonists. None of those possibilities come to pass. On the contrary, Mary Reilly is dominated in its conclusion by Jekyll/Hyde’s death and by Mary’s departure from the place where once she felt safe. That ending is consonant with the entirety of the story. Death has rarely been long absent. It enters with the skinning and chopping of the eel and Mary’s subsequent nightmare that adds slaughtered chickens. The bloody room at Mrs. Farraday’s with its dead rat and the outdoor abattoir, as we have seen, add images of violent death, as does a brief glimpse we have of Mr. Hyde attending an autopsy in the hospital adjacent to the butchering of animals. Later, Hyde dangles Mrs. Farraday’s bloody head in the operating theater. The demise of Mary’s mother and her funeral, with its formulaic invocation of “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” continues the theme of death. There Mary’s father suddenly appears with the news that “The doctor tells me I’m not likely to live through the winter.” Carew’s murder and Dr. Jekyll’s admission that “there were others” is part of this theme. So is his description of his illness as having “left me with a taste for oblivion.” Even the Doctor’s statement that “It is marvelous how much he [Hyde] loves his life” leads to the idea of death with Mary’s “And his victims, Sir, did not they love theirs?” Dr. Jekyll’s reply recalls the imagery of the bloody eel and chickens waiting to be cooked: “Not so ravenously.” During the violent sequence that ends with the death of Dr. Jekyll, Hyde holds a dagger to Mary’s throat, “What stops me from killing you?” As she will when the expiring Doctor asks her if she could ever have forgiven him, Mary answers with a gesture of love and consolation, gently stroking the distraught Hyde’s cheek. Closing his eyes, he leans his face against her hand, then drops the knife and walks away. But if Mary’s love saves her life, it cannot do the same for Jekyll/Hyde. The “fracture in [Dr. Jekyll’s] soul” is beyond repair. “I always knew you would be the death of us!” Hyde says, stalking off to

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administer the antidote. An observation attributed to Jung seems germane here: “That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.”10 Though Dr. Jekyll has brought Mr. Hyde “to consciousness,” he fails in both his identities to realize his capacity for love sufficiently to save himself—or for Mary’s love to rescue him. The closest that Mr. Hyde can come to putting unalloyed love into action is pity. When Dr. Jekyll returns from Hyde, Mary tells him, “He took pity on me.”11 “Seems he took pity on me as well,” the Doctor says, “He mixed something with the antidote. A poison. . . . It was the only way he could devise to set you free.” Invoking destiny, like Mr. Hyde, the dying Doctor continues, “It was inevitable from the moment I found how to achieve what I’d always wanted, to be the knife as well as the wound.” Then, “Would you have ever forgiven me?” Mary answers this last question by placing her tearful face on the Doctor’s chest. But the Doctor’s words raise more questions than Mary’s gesture can answer: How does Mr. Hyde’s murder/suicide represent pity, even granting that his other half “wanted the night”? From what or whom does it set Mary free? From the danger that he represents to her? But he loves her and she “stills the rage” in him. From the Doctor? Again, that part of him loves Mary. Does he suppose that he is freeing her from both of them, and the impossibility of their coherence? Or from her increasingly equivocal situation in his household? But Mary was already leaving by herself before she inexplicably returned to the laboratory. She was setting herself free. Why did she return? To say farewell? To urge the Doctor or Mr. Hyde to come with her? Most likely, given her frequent disavowals of knowing her own motives and feelings, she couldn’t say. And for what does Jekyll/Hyde imagine he requires forgiveness? For assaulting her? But he pitied her, let her go on both occasions of violent aggression. Or, as Jekyll, for exposing her to Mr. Hyde? For making love with her, if he did, in that identity? For being unable to ask for what he most wanted in all the world, to touch her? Those who desire resolution will be frustrated by a movie that leaves all these questions, and others, unanswered. But Mary Reilly is a film of questions, not of answers. That is one of its many virtues. Another shot of the operating space, immediately after Jekyll/Hyde dies, compendiates many of Mary Reilly’s visual and thematic motifs. The camera looks down on the scene below. There Mary leans over the Doctor’s corpse, which lies on the white slab of the operating table, the bowl and jug still prominent. This time, however, the camera is shooting through a grid of window panes in the foreground, two of which form crosses. As Mary gets a blanket to drape over the Doctor’s body, the camera pulls back and tilts down slightly, reversing its movement in the opening sequence of the film. It continues to retreat as Mary joins Dr. Jekyll’s body on the operating table, her red dress visible under her dark coat. At this point, Frears inserts a lap-­dissolve—unique in the film—to a close-­ up of Mary’s face, the camera panning to superimpose it directly on the previous image. Does the juxtaposition of Mary’s face and the body of Dr. Jekyll promise that in his death the central figures achieve the oneness that escaped them in life, like Romeo and Juliet? Or does it imply, not the union of Mary and Jekyll/Hyde, but the addition of his death to the dark memories she carries, that will often make her sad, that have become part of her?

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Mary Reilly (Frears, 1996) © Columbia TriStar Home Video.

As the dissolve ends, we see Mary looking back from the stairs leading to the dense fog outside the laboratory. Her lips are red, her eyes wide, her auburn eyebrows and hair striking against the grays of the background. An eyeline cut reveals that Dr. Jekyll has been replaced in death by Mr. Hyde, his eyes open and his mouth a rictus. This shot seems to support Mr. Hyde’s assertion that he is “presumably . . . the stronger.” But he is dead, as is his “cave.” Frears cuts back to Mary, who turns and walks up the stairs into the fog, slowly disappearing as the last shot of the film fades to black, again reversing the opening. Unlike Juliet, Mary lives on; and that fact prevents Mary Reilly from approaching the romantic sense of tragedy of Shakespeare’s play and leaves it instead in the realm of irony. With Jekyll/Hyde’s death, it parodies any sense of rebirth or escape from the underworld—the more ironically because of the inclusion of a newborn’s cry as Hyde is metamorphosing back into Jekyll. In death, the Doctor gives up his identity again to the form of Hyde, an equivocal change.12 A mythic undercurrent connects Mary to Persephone, who was seized and pulled into the underworld while picking flowers, is at last rescued by her mother (in most versions), and returns to reawaken a world gone dormant in her absence. Mary descends several times into the building that holds the Doctor’s laboratory. On two occasions, when she returns from the lab, high shots emphasize her association with the flower beds she proposed and tends, a detail that subtly strengthens the mythic association. Revealingly, time in Mary Reilly is measured in part by the progress of the heroine’s plantings. We see her tending the bedding plants, then we see them growing, and next blooming. Finally, as (all in black) she descends the back stairs to say goodbye to the Doctor, the blooms have shriveled.

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Mary Reilly (Frears, 1996) © Columbia TriStar Home Video.

She makes another harrowing descent down the stairs of the boarding house in which her mother lived. In the cellar, she is shown her mother’s corpse, stuffed into a “cozy” closet that recalls the one in which her father confined her. Like Persephone, her visits to the underworld taint her, and she is obliged to go back periodically—a compulsion that adds a possible explanation to her returning to the laboratory after she has packed and is preparing to slip away from the Doctor’s home. She comes back from a lower world to the surface of the earth, but her return does not bring rebirth, either to Jekyll/Hyde or to the world above. It remains wrapped in fog. In Martin’s novel, Mary writes of “a cloud of lies”; similarly, the film suggests that her society exists within a fog of hypocrisy and repression, denying or attempting to conceal the fundamental biological status of human beings and their needs and desires. Besides Mary’s distant connection with Persephone, her story also resembles, more proximately, the folk motif of loving revelations that bring about characters’ transformations into—or back to—their proper forms. “Beauty and the Beast” may be the best known of such stories; “The Frog Prince” is a widely reproduced variant; and “Prince Lindworm,” less well known, is another resonant version.13 The conclusion of Mary Reilly parodies and frustrates the end of such stories, rendering ineffectual Dr. Jekyll’s revelations and Mary’s commitment to love the entirety of his joint identity. Indeed, not only does her love fail to reconcile his more brutal identity with his gentler one, but the beast in him is what remains after his death. Beneath Mary’s characterization there also runs a faint religious current, or a mythical one, of saviors who can be effective only from within, from experiencing as well as transcending the sins and agonies for which they atone. Christ is the best known to us of such saviors. Images of crosses often appear in the muntins of the windows through which Mary watches Dr. Jekyll descend the steps into his laboratory.

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Connecting her further to the crosses made by dividers between window panes, the windows themselves sometimes reflect the image of the gazing Mary. Unlike her mythic forbears, however, she returns to a world of fog, not sunshine; in effect, she remains below. She does not achieve in herself or the one she loves a rebirth or redemption, but rather leaves behind the lifeless body of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and disappears into the obscurity outside. This combination of her mythic/theological resonance and the frustration of constructive outcomes signals the deep irony, ultimately tragic, of Mary Reilly and its vision of human life. According to the pamphlet that comes with the DVD, “Although a total of three finales were eventually filmed—Mary stays with Jekyll, Mary stays with Hyde, Mary leaves them both—Mary Reilly concludes with the Director’s ending.” Frears is almost always an ironist. He is emphatically so in Mary Reilly. However, he is never a cynic. His ironies are flavored, if not quite sweetened, with empathy. Like the heroine of Mary Reilly, he does not judge from above or outside but portrays from within worlds into which his films have introduced him, with sympathy for the irresolvable dilemmas of being human and of having a redeeming potential for love—even if the circumstances of the world, or society, or the human psyche itself frustrate that potential. In his career to date, it is the capacity for love, in a multitude of different forms, that provides a central subject of the majority of his films.

Coda: actions without consequences At the end of Valerie Martin’s novel, the discoverer and editor of her diaries—whom the reader did not know to exist before—adds some curious thoughts to an Afterword: First, speculating upon “The question of what really happened to Mary’s employer . . . that Henry Jekyll did somehow come upon a way of transforming himself,” he admits that this possibility “strains credulity, but surely Jekyll would have found the transformation of dots of light into moving pictures, which we enjoy without astonishment, equally as incredible” (Martin 1990: 260–2). Second, concluding, “I neither endorse nor seek to discredit . . . the possibility that her sad and disturbing story unfolded for us in the pages of Mary’s diaries is now and always was intended to be nothing less serious than a work of fiction” (Martin 1990: 263). The film does not explicitly or energetically take up these suggestions of the fictionality—specifically cinematic—of Mary’s story, but they do exist in it as an undertone, which we can infer mostly from its relatively unemphasized self-­referentiality. (Self-­referentiality occurs frequently in Frears’s films, sometimes only subtly expressed, but often as an important theme. Among the most obvious examples of intense self-­ awareness in his work is the first theatrical feature he directed, Gumshoe (1971), an homage to and parody of film noir, especially of two of the masterpieces of that genre, The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946). The Queen, given its preoccupation with the media’s reaction to Princess Diana’s death and the response, or lack of it, of the Royal Family, is another clearly self-­referential movie, as in various ways are Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity, Mrs. Henderson Presents, and Philomena.)

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The activity and intermittent independence of the camera frequently draws attention to the visual teller of the story, and hence to its status as an illusion. At the end of the sequence in which Mary reveals to Dr. Jekyll the origin of her scars and then watches him cross the courtyard to the building that houses his operating theater and laboratory, the camera, without attribution to any character, leaves the library to pan across a shingle roof and past a row of chimneys—both of which are //## images—and then stops on a telephoto shot of fog-­draped pre-­dawn houses, illuminated by a bright full moon. Similarly, at the end of Mary’s dream of her father’s molestation, the camera leaves the subjective representation of the dream-­memory to look down upon the bed with the sleeping Annie and Mary. It then pans to the window of their room, and dollies slowly toward it, bringing into prominence the foggy scene of houses beyond, a scene similar to that described above. What we are to make of such shots is not clear. Can we infer that the story extends to the city beyond, suggesting that the particular narrative we are watching might be repeated in other houses? Do those shots suggest that the whole society lies under a fog of uncertainty?14 There are other possibilities, none of them signaled with clarity. What is clear, however, is that the camera has set out on its own, whatever it may be suggesting or “thinking.” Its independence at once expands the narrative and makes visible its status as a story with a teller. An audience watches a movie reflected from the screen in front of it. Reflections within the movie repeat the existential situation of movie and audience, with more or less rhetorical stress. In Mary Reilly, such moments generally receive little emphasis, but they come frequently enough to make another pattern underlying its more insistent motifs. Along with several mirror shots, reflections appear in windows, on which we can see the watcher, virtually always Mary, as well as whatever lies beyond. In an early example, Mary looks from the library window down on the courtyard as the doctor crosses. She is reflected in the rain-­streaked window. The Doctor seems to sense her observing him, and turns to look back, causing her to retreat. His consciousness of her at this point serves as an early indication of the rapport between the two of them, but it also carries a muted undertone of broader import: that the watched might in some way be aware of watchers. This shot repeats a little later; Mary is again reflected in the library window, immediately after she tells the Doctor the story of her childhood “punishment.” Such a shot, which functions as a sort of lap-­dissolve without the dissolve, superimposes the image of the watcher on the action beyond. The one actual lap-­ dissolve, noted above, Frears reserved for the climax of the film, when he conspicuously joined the image of Mary to the image of her embracing the dead Dr. Jekyll. Earlier, after Dr. Jekyll has for a second time touched her wrist and asked her if she’s “quite sure you don’t want to tell me how you got the scars,” then apologized and promised not to ask her again, a mirror shot (to which the dialogue directs attention) shows Master and Maid together, as in a framed photograph. Both are dressed entirely in white, appropriate to the inhibited innocence of their developing affection. The reflections of Mary, here with the Doctor, may also suggest that she, as he, carries within her another side.

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Mirror reflections are also prominent in the introduction of Sir Danvers Carew, parliamentarian, connoisseur of “exotic customs,” and evident pedophile; they enforce the portrayal of another, unrespectable side of this socially prominent figure. He also shares with Mr. Hyde, Mary’s father, and Mrs. Farraday the distinction of emerging from darkness “as if he was made of it.” Besides reflecting images, a movie screen frames what we see, sets it apart from the décor of the theater, the audience, the surroundings of “Exit” signs and aisles, and whatever may be in front and behind it. Framings within a film can mimic the framing of a film. The mirror shot does that to a degree. More commonly, shots framed by window panes pervade Mary Reilly; they almost always portray the heroine, whether originating from her point of view, or from that of the camera acting independently. These internal framings represent the most frequent indicators of self-­referentiality in Mary Reilly. Repeatedly, we watch framed views of the scenes within the larger frame of the movie screen. Dreams carry another sort of self-­referentiality for films, and there are several sequences in Mary Reilly that exemplify such turning inward. (Comparison of movies to dreams has long been a well-­worked area in film theory.) We have noted Mary’s nightmares of kitchen butchery, and of her father’s sexual interest in her as a young girl. The camera leaves the latter dream as Mary sleeps on after crying out. Panning across the bed in which she and Annie are slumbering, it leaves her, goes through the window, and tilts to the street below, where a girl in a white dress, of approximately the age of Mary in her dream, is running. She collides with Mr. Hyde, who strikes her down and then tramples her abdomen. The cries of the girl awaken Mary, and for a little while the sequence of shots leaves viewers uncertain as to whether what they have witnessed is a continuation of Mary’s dream or a real event. That uncertainty may also be considered self-­referential, since it confuses—as films are said to do—the vision of the dream with a reality beyond. This confusion, Allison argues, constitutes: A central tenet of the movie. . . . The boundary between objectivity and subjectivity, between the conscious and the unconscious, is often merely a narrational construct with little psychological significance. . . . It is impossible to strip the narrative back to a single objective dimension whilst retaining any facet of the psychological truths that lie at its core. Allison 2007: 44

In Mary’s dream of Mr. Hyde’s assault, her dreaming self eventually acquiesces. Within her dream, she can allow herself to accept his violent love-­making. If dream and movie are near kin, then movies allow us to do in the dark of the theater, imaginatively, what daylight and its internalized moral guides rule out. Pictured fictions escape ordinary repression. Mr. Hyde defaces with violent, obscene scrawls an anatomy book that Mary finds in Dr. Jekyll’s library: first, an enwombed fetus holding a superimposed cocktail glass, and under the drawing, “Pain begins in Understanding”; then, between anatomical sketches on the next page, a crude sketch of

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a nude, eviscerated woman, her throat slashed and her arms cut off and bleeding; finally, a ventral view of a skull, a cigar sketched into its mouth and “True beauty lies in Corruption” written on the page. The scribblings are adolescent and totally unrepressed, a mixture of sex, violence, and defiance. As Mary turns the pages, the camera alternates between what she sees and close-­ups of her face, expressing shock, sadness, disgust, and fascination. Behind her appears a radically unfocused face, which a focus shift reveals to be Mr. Hyde, the creator of the indecent graffiti. Abruptly embracing her, he asks what she thinks and remarks, comically, “I’ve always had an artistic temperament.” Turning to a mutilated, full-­figure anatomical drawing to which he has added an eye patch and an erect penis squirting semen, he adds, “Strange, the thoughts that come unbidden, don’t you find?” Implicitly, Mary acknowledges his observation, “If you mean we’re not always in control of our ideas. . . .” Mr. Hyde interrupts, “Why should we want to be, that’s the question.” That’s a question Stevenson’s novelette and Mary Reilly ask as well. And to which they offer a somewhat ambiguous answer. We should “want to be,” but we won’t like it. Hyde remarks, “I know I owe my existence to science,” but in fact he owes it to art. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” gives him existence. As does Mary Reilly, which allows a single actor to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: at once the rich, decorous, respected “F. R. S.” (Fellow of the Royal Society) and the lewd, murderous, uncontrollable personification of what we would call, after Freud, the Id. Frears’s movie brings him into existence and allows us to participate, albeit at second hand, in his double existence—with our empathetic neurons presumably firing along with both characters, rather as Mary responds to both sides of her beloved Master. In art—stories, drawings, motion pictures included—we can do, even be, what we desire, whether as author or audience. The wounded, repressed Dr. Jekyll asks Mary, “Suppose you were able to do whatever you wanted, with no consequences and no regrets; then what?” For about two hours, we are part of such a completely new life—several, indeed— and we have no reason to fear the consequences. We are also instructed as to the last part of the Doctor’s question, “Then what?” Mary, for all her responsiveness to both Jekyll and Hyde and for all her self-­understanding and her admission of thoughts that come unbidden, remains a reality principle in the fantasy of total freedom and gratification of impulses, whether sexual or vengeful. She cannot imagine an existence of such freedom: “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as actions without consequences.” Her reply suggests her self-­restraint, even repression. But the fate of Jekyll/Hyde demonstrates that she is correct. Horrified and fascinated, like Mary looking over Hyde’s defacing of the Doctor’s anatomy text, the audience enters a world in which a protagonist lets loose the dogs, not of war, but of unrestrained desires. We see, eventually, that actions must have consequences, and that we best experience some things in movies. Discontent as we may be, civilization requires that we keep our Mr. Hydes under wraps, at least most of the time, in the daylight world beyond dreams and movies.

Notes Chapter 1:  Introduction 1 For example, Cynthia Lucia remarks, “Stephen Frears is a director whose films resist easy classification. He has worked in both his native England and in Hollywood, and both within and outside of established genres. Indeed, to study Frears is to crash headlong into those auteurist limitations film theorists have debated for decades” (Lucia 2003: 8). 2 William Stafford, “Vocation,” in Stafford, Kim (ed.), Ask Me 100 Essential Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014. 3 Used VHS tapes are widely available, as is the occasional laser disk. It appears that Sammy and Rosie Get Laid has never been available on DVD. 4 Among many examples of this emphasis, the following are typical: Michael J. Shapiro 2006; R. Prime 2006; Mrinalini Chakravorty and Leila Neti 2009; Ibrahim Abraham 2008; Mireille Rosello 2009. 5 My biographical summary is extracted from the following sources (see the Bibliography for full references): BFI n.d.; Bardet and Caron 2008; Brown 2010; Cooper 2003; Curtis 2005; Frazer 2010; Friedman and Stewart 1994; Lindsey 1988; Lucia 2003; Mapes n.d.; and Pfefferman 2001. Mr. Frears graciously looked over the “Biographical Sketch” and made some corrections. I am responsible for the final form of this section, of course. 6 Mr. Frears wrote this in an email to Charles Barr, who kindly inquired on my behalf about his (Mr. Frears’s) looking at the short biography I was compiling. 7 Anthony Suter, writing about Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, also notes that Frears’s interaction with his writers extends beyond preproduction: “Just as Stephen Frears was ‘redeveloping’ elements of Hanif Kureishi’s script on the film set and in the cutting-­room, so the whole concept of the film is one of post-­modern redevelopment” (Suter 1995: 108). 8 In the “Introduction” to the eight screenplays collected in Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Bennett writes of Innes Lloyd’s support for A Day Out, and asserts that he “produced everything I wrote for the BBC over the next twenty years” (Bennett 2003: vii–viii). This appears to be inaccurate, given the producer’s credits Frears gets for The Old Crowd and Afternoon Off. 9 Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film. London: Andre Deutsch, 1994. Summarized by Hill (1996: 230). 10 But Oliver Stapleton, in the Blu-Ray edition of Laundrette, remarks on Frears’s efficiency: “We shot just about everything in under five takes.” 11 This diagram is taken from my The Hitchcock Romance, p. 71, as are some of the remarks on romance and irony that follow. 12 Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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13 The 1978 Alan Bennett scripted Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, produced and directed by Frears, in its brief ending “make[s] it plain that this has been a [homosexual] love story” (Bennett 2003: 125). “First transmitted by London Weekend Television on 2 December 1978” (Bennett 2003: 91).

Part 2  Unclassifiable Love 1 See, for example, Michael J. Shapiro 2006; R. Prime 2006; Mrinalini Chakravorty and Leila Neti 2009; Ibrahim Abraham 2008; Mireille Rosello 2009; and Vinay Swamy 2003. 2 My discussion looks somewhat more minutely at the film itself than Geraghty’s study does, but I leave illuminating details of production, distribution, and so forth to her work.

Chapter 2:  My Beautiful Laundrette 1 Neil Sinyard adds that, additionally, “the poetic image of the Laundrette . . . is an image of modern Britain itself, as it attempts to transform derelict drabness into money-­ making fun-­palace” (Sinyard 1989: 115). 2 As Geraghty points out, this sequence serves other purposes, as well: “Salim is clearly marked as the disruptive agent in the film; he is responsible for the eviction and for the violence that accompanies it. . . . The scene also introduces Johnny as a figure who can control things . . . although the two do not recognize each other later, the scene establishes Salim and Johnny as antagonists” (Geraghty 2005: 29). 3 These “gangster and thriller elements” were originally intended to be grander than they became. Kureishi describes his and Frears’s decision to downsize the projected scale of My Beautiful Laundrette: “I started to rewrite. Stephen and I had long talks, each of us pacing up and down the same piece of carpet, in different directions. . . . The film started off as an epic. It was to be like The Godfather, opening in the past with the arrival of an immigrant family in England and showing their progress to the present. . . . We soon decided it was impossible to make a film of such scale” (Kureishi 1996: 4–5). 4 Monica Calvo Pascual offers a slightly different interpretation of the repeated images of trains: “The recurrent appearance of trains, indeed, calls attention to the different points of inflection in the constitution of Omar’s ‘identity’ ” (Pascual 2002: 62). 5 This small action reveals how a scene may evolve from page to shooting. In the published screenplay, we read the following: EXT. BALCONY. NIGHT OMAR stands on the balcony, looking over the silent railway line. Then, suddenly, he shouts joyfully into the distance. And throws the empty bottle as far as he can. Kureishi 1996: 39

In the film as it was finally released, Omar’s joyful shout turns into his very different cry and an angry gesture. Frears kept the scene, but reversed its emotional tone and changed its implied meaning. 6 During his interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of Laundrette, Kureishi says, “We [he and Frears] were both really influenced by the mirror stuff [in Paris, Texas

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(Wim Wenders, 1984)]. Fuller calls Laundrette “a Borgesian hall of mirrors” (Fuller n.d.: 5). He also connects Frears’s use of mirrors to what he calls the film’s “revelatory metacinematic self-­consciousness” (Fuller n.d.: 5). 7 A directorial touch, according to Kureishi: “Frears told Danny, ‘Lick his ear’ ” (Kureishi interview in the Criterion Edition of Laundrette). 8 About this moment, Ruhal Gairola argues, “That a train goes by and she vanishes, I suggest, does less to erase her from the film’s plot then it does to allow her to escape the very scene in which heteronormative ideals are rehearsed and realigned by the two reigning diasporic patriarchs” (Gairola 2009: 50). 9 About this shot, Frears comments during the interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of Laundrette, “That was improvised. That’s really all to do with Ford, isn’t it? It’s the end shot in The Searchers [Ford, 1956]. When the door closes.” Liam also ends with a closing door, which Frears again identified as an allusion to Ford’s The Searchers. See note 4 to the chapter on Liam. (During his interview on that Edition, Kureishi reports that throughout the filming, “Stephen kept saying, ‘Do it like a Western. Do it like a Western.’ ”) 10 The music is assigned to “Ludus Tonalis,” the title of an important 1942 piece by Paul Hindemith and probably the nom de film of the composers Hans Zimmer and Stanley Meyers, who are jointly credited under “Music Produced By.” 11 About this sequence, Frears comments, “We had a lot of trouble with the ending. I said you have to have a happy ending because you become so involved with these boys. But of course, the film contains so much tragedy . . . it’s outrageous to have a happy ending. We found it in the last few seconds” (Interview on the Criterion BluRay Edition).

Chapter 3:  Sammy and Rosie Get Laid 1 Kureishi’s “Diary” makes clear that Frears collaborated to a considerable extent on revisions to the screenplay—as it appears that he does routinely on most or all of his films. 2 The published screenplay makes The Ghost somewhat more material, less ambiguous, than he appears in the film. As the settlement is dismantled in the morning, “In their caravans and trucks other kids are packing up. The GHOST in the brown suit leaves Danny’s caravan.” And a little later: “As ALICE goes through on to the site, ROSIE, VIVIA, EVA, RANI, etc., accompany her. The GHOST, walking away in the opposite direction, slips in the mud and, unnoticed by anyone but the kid whose mother was shot, goes under the wheels and is broken” (Kureishi 1988: 54, 55). 3 Kureishi describes the filming of this moment: “Claire . . . starts to reveal her power in this cellar scene. . . . She reveals such a combination of wild anger, vulnerability, and pain, that when the camera cut, there was complete silence. Even Shashi looked shaken” (Kureishi 1988: 111). 4 This detail may have been inspired by a darkly comic moment in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972). While the Police Inspector (Alec McCowen) is telling his wife (Vivien Merchant) that a murderer broke the fingers of his dead victim in order to retrieve incriminating evidence, she snaps a breadstick and crushes it in her mouth. “It would be so nice to get back to plain bread,” murmurs the Inspector.

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5 Sammy’s jealousy is clear in Sammy and Rosie as Frears filmed it. Kureishi made it explicit in his screenplay, but the lines proved unnecessary in the final cut of the movie: Rosie:  That’s my lover, Walter. I’m seeing him later. Rani:  What will Sammy say about that? Rosie:  Though a forest fire will have broken out in his heart, lungs and liver, his tongue will try to say: ‘What an interesting life you have, Rosie.’ Rani:  How damaging for him. 6 Leonard Quart argues, “if it [Sammy and Rosie] has a center, it’s Rafi” (Quart 1994: 246). Gayatri Spivak, however, suggests that the audience of the film “may not even know who the central character is” (Spivak 1993: 245). 7 Kureishi may have found this line in a 1958 interview Terry Southern conducted with Henry Green for The Paris Review. “I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.” “Henry Green, The Art of Fiction No. 22.” The Paris Review, Summer 1958, No. 19. (Thanks to Megan Parry for this information.) 8 Rebecca Fine Romanow offers a very different understanding of Rosie than I do here. Depending heavily on Deleuze, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, she writes, “Rosie is constructed as a site of disturbance to English patriarchal and heteronormative power systems . . . undermining the structures that are used to support the creation and maintenance of Oedipal constructs” (115). She valorizes Rosie, sees her moving toward “ethical maturity,” and leading others by her interventions and example: “It is only through Rosie that the other characters can begin to shed their subjectified selves” (119). It is perhaps worth noting that Romanow evidently depends mostly on the published screenplay, not on the released film. There are significant differences, additions, and omissions between them. 9 Kureishi reports, “Frears has taken . . . the patriotic hymn ‘I vow to Thee my Country’ . . . from the Tory broadcast, and played it over the eviction scene” (Kureishi 1988: 121). 10 Lindroth extracts many of the references to Eliot’s poem in her essay, “The wasteland revisited: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.” As does Suter in “Wastelands Redeveloped: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as a Post-Modernist Film.” He makes an amusing observation about a short sequence in which Rosie and Sammy attend a lecture: “Colin McCabe . . . the critic and director of The British Film Institute, which contributed to the film’s financing, himself appears—as himself! . . . He is the lecturer giving a seminar on Derrida and Deconstruction at the ICA, where Sammy and Rosie go. . . . This very scene has its own built in deconstruct device in the debunking question about ‘What is the connection between Deconstruction and a bag of crisps?’ by a woman in the audience” (Suter 1995: 105). 11 Remembering the casting of Roland Gift, Kureishi writes, “I ask the women in the office to get a look at him through the office window and let us know if they want to rip his clothes off with their teeth. As most of them seem to want this, Roland inches closer to the part of Danny/Victoria” (Kureishi 1988: 79). The actor who plays Sammy, Ayub Khan Din, is also strikingly handsome, as befits a man who has had “about twelve or so” lovers in the past two years.

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12 This speech carries a mild echo of Macbeth, the line that MacDuff utters when he learns of the slaughter of his children, “All my pretty ones?” IV. 3. 216. Another faint echo—of Macbeth’s famous “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”—may be heard in Danny/Victoria’s statement about the settlers being thrown off their site, “tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.” 13 About the conclusion, Elisabeth de Cacqueray writes, “The end of the film, in a typically postmodern way, offers no final solution to the problems posed, but it is open to hope, not closed on despair” (Cacqueray 1995: 118).

Chapter 4:  Dirty Pretty Things 1 Frears says this during the “Director’s Commentary” on the Miramax DVD of Dirty Pretty Things. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Frears are from this DVD. To quote dialogue, I have also used this DVD, with occasional help or confirmation from Drew’s Script-O-Rama www.script-­o-rama.com (retrieved August, 2013). 2 In a long discussion of “the legend of the black Spaniard,” Samuel Amago makes a provocative argument about the casting of Lopez: “final responsibility for the cruelty and inequality of this subterranean society rests not on the society that allows it to exist but upon Sneaky Juan and, to a lesser degree, the Punjabi sweatshop owner, who are also immigrants. . . . By making the bad guy a Spaniard we might overlook the culpability of late capitalism, English politico-­economic reality and the more sinister ills of globalization” (Amago 2005: 59). 3 Its problem film aspect has been the focus of virtually all published commentary on Dirty Pretty Things, using it, as Ortega writes, “as an exemplifying instance of a film that critically engages the social problematic of today’s Europe” (Ortega 2011: 23). See, for example, Michael J. Shapiro 2006; R. Prime 2006; S. Gibson 2006; Mrinalini Chakravorty and Leila Neti 2009; and Ashley Dawson 2009. 4 Earlier in the film, Guo recommends Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths to Okwe. 5 Shapiro argues, “The Deleuzian attendant function [as a referent for moral status] asserts itself in Dirty through the character of Guo Yi” (Shapiro 2006: 671). Somewhat similarly, Cynthia Lucia suggests, “It is between these two porters that the attitude of the film is poised, preferring the philosophical distance of Guo Yi—who wryly sews up the suit pockets of a corpse, speculating that this may, indeed, secure eternal rest as Buddhist tradition suggests—to the more cynical distance of Ivan who has made terms with the corruption surrounding him. Both men ferry others to subterranean worlds— the hotel is the last stop on the way to the morgue—either literally or figuratively—for those forced to venture there” (Lucia 2003: 12). 6 The collaborators most responsible for the look of Dirty Pretty Things, Production Designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski, Cinematographer Chris Menges, and Editor Mick Audsley, have all repeatedly worked with Frears. Two of them, Luczyc-Wyhowski and Audsley, filled the same roles on My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Luczyc-Wyhowski also did production design for Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005). Menges was cinematographer on Gumshoe and for three of Frears’s TV movies, Bloody Kids, Walter, and Walter and June. Audsley has worked with Frears on fifteen films, from Walter and such movies as Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and High Fidelity through the HBO production of Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (2013).

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Part 3  Love, Power, and Pleasure 1 This chapter is a revised version of an article first published by Film International as “True Love, Pride, and Passion: Re-­viewing Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988),” January 13, 2014, accessed on February 4, 2016 from http://filmint. nu/?p=10528.

Chapter 5:  Dangerous Liaisons 1 John Malkovich recently directed—July 9–14, 2013—a theatrical production of Christopher Hampton’s play, the source of the screenplay, also by Hampton, for Frears’s film. Malkovich’s production was in French with English supertitles. Reported in The New Yorker, July 8 and 15, 2013, p. 12.   It debuted a year earlier in Paris: “Les Liaisons Dangereuses, at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris, features an ensemble of young, ethnically diverse unknowns cast from acting schools around France. Instead of composing letters to each other in the style of the pre-­revolution era, the dissolute characters use their thumbs to send text messages and other forms of electronic missives.” Retrieved in August, 2013 from http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/02/john-­ malkovich-dangerous-­liaisons-paris.html. 2 According to O’Neill, Frears, having read the novel of Laclos, was “seduced” by its epistolary conventions, which Hampton had eliminated from his first version of the screenplay, and “decided to reintegrate them into his film” (O’Neill 1994: 48). 3 Bardet and Caron note the importance of what they call “signifying mirrors and deceitful doors,” which “illustrate the exercise of deception of the libertines [Valmont and Merteuil]” (Bardet and Caron 2008: 156). Similarly, Justine Kemlo writes, “The pervasiveness of mirrors and reflections in the film helps us construe the role of appearances and deception as pivotal” (Kemlo n.d.: paragraph 51). These mirrors and doors, as I argue, also suggest the self-­deceit of the protagonists.   Allison makes a similar point, “In Dangerous Liaisons, mirrors come to feature quite regularly in the latter stages of the film where they signal, as so often in cinema, the acknowledgement of self-­deception and role playing” (Allison 2007: 41). 4 It is perhaps an indication of how powerfully the recreation of Eighteenth Century visual settings influences one’s perception of the music on the sound track that Anahid Kassabian asserts, “Most of its score consists of Baroque period music” (Kassabian 2001: 70). In fact, most of its score consists of music composed for the film by George Fenton. O’Neill observes, “Two musical registers, each inspired by music of the 18th Century, were written by Fenton” (O’Neill 1994: 52). 5 According to Bardet and Caron, Glenn Close proposed this final scene to her director (Bardet and Caron 2008: 185). 6 As Bardet and Caron note, however, the emphatic use of stairs also has a long history in cinema, independent of Hitchcock, from Eisenstein’s famous stair sequences in The Battleship Potemkin and in expressionist cinema, through Welles and Hitchcock up to the present day (Bardet and Caron 2008: 156). 7 Discussing costuming and wigs in Dangerous Liaisons, Bardet and Caron argue that they subtly correspond with the depiction of the actions and reactions of

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the characters, “without excessive emphasis on their significance” (Bardet and Caron 2008: 161). 8 This brilliant moment may also have a Hitchcockian antecedent, the shot in Topaz (1969) in which the murdered Juanita (Karin Dor) slips from the arms of her lover and killer, Para (John Vernon). As she falls, Hitchcock uses a radical overhead shot to show her intense blue dressing gown flaring out around her on the marble floor.

Chapter 6:  Chéri 1 The novel, of course, is Colette’s Chéri, published in 1920. Hampton’s screenplay also draws, only slightly and less faithfully, on Colette’s sequel, La Fin de Chéri, 1926. 2 In one of two deleted scenes included in the “Bonus Features” of the Miramax DVD of Chéri, Lea calls the purple tie Chéri dons on the occasion when she will learn of his engagement “hideous. Suitable enough for Marie-Laure and your mother, I suppose.” 3 Hampton and Frears moved this line from its appearance midway through the novel to the end of the film, thus giving it an overtone of ambiguity it lacks in Colette’s version: “She [Lea] had just said goodbye to thirty years of easy living: years spent pleasantly, intent often on love, sometimes on money. This had left her, at almost fifty, still young and defenseless” (Colette [1920]1995: 56). 4 About this sequence, Frears remarked, “that allé of roses [through which Lea and Madame Peloux walk] was my idea. It wasn’t easy to do . . .” (Ciment 2009: 30). 5 Speaking of Minnelli’s Gigi (1958), an important influence on Chéri, and of the music for the film, Frears said, “It’s the same thing that happens in Gigi, which I had to watch again in the middle of shooting. . . . When the music plays its part, the whole film comes to life” (Ciment 2009: 30). The composer for Chéri was Alexandre Desplat, who had fulfilled the same role for The Queen and who would later be the composer for Tamara Drewe and Philomena. 6 Frears remarks, “That world wasn’t for me la Belle Époque but that of Lubitsch, for example. In my imagination, I saw it much more through Hollywood, even if I well understood that it was a question of fin du siècle Paris” (Ciment 2009: 30).

Chapter 7:  The Snapper 1 Unless otherwise noted, all Frears quotations in this discussion of The Snapper come from the “Director’s Commentary” on the Miramax DVD, g3225. 2 A more serious take on issues arising when siblings are crowded together arises in Frears’s early documentary of poverty in Nottingham, “gimme shelter: Report St. Ann’s.” In that film—whose influence recurs throughout its director’s career—a mother worries about her eleven-­year-old daughter sharing a bedroom with four brothers, the oldest ten. “Any day, nature could take its part and she’s going to be a terrible mess when she gets out of bed with the four boys in the same bedroom. She’s a well developed girl for eleven; she knows all about the facts of life and everything.” Frears raises the same issue in Liam, when Liam’s mother moves him out of the bedroom he shares with his older sister, who “needs to be on her own.”

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Chapter 8:  Liam 1 In an interview with James Wood, Frears remarked, “I think the title of the film is slightly misleading. It’s just as much the girl’s story, for example” (Wood n.d.: 67). 2 This shot may have been suggested by a series of zooms in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), also subjective shots conveying intense distress, when Marnie (Tippi Hedren) attempts to bring herself to take money from the safe in her husband’s office. 3 As I note in discussing The Snapper, the issue of maturing girls crowded into close proximity with brothers arises in that film, as it does in one of Frears’s first directorial efforts, the television documentary “gimme shelter: Report St. Ann’s.” 4 Frears remarked, “It is all a very complicated issue and I hope the film reflects an ambiguity about religion” (Wood n.d.: 67). 5 From the interview with Wood: JW:  Speaking of John Ford, how overt a reference to The Searchers (1956) was the final shot? SF:  It was very conscious. I would also hope that the viewing of Liam would not depend upon a knowledge of The Searchers. (Wood n.d.: 68)

Wood and Frears refer to the closing door that ends Ford’s film. Beyond that, echoes of Ford’s film do not seem marked in Liam. Frears also used a closing door to end My Beautiful Laundrette.

Chapter 9:  The Queen 1 Giselle Bastin writes, “It is the Sovereign’s relationship with her prime minister and her renegotiation of her role as titular head of State that forms the core of the film’s storyline” (Bastin n.d.). 2 Belén Vidal characterizes the Queen’s expression here quite differently, as Mirren’s “blank stare,” a description she insists upon twice more (Vidal 2012: 41, 42, 43). Given its context, “It is your government,” I find the shot to express much less prejudicial qualities of the Queen’s character. 3 It is possible that this shot, in this context, may derive from a pivotal moment in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1945) when Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) learns of her uncle’s terrible crimes and the camera pulls back and up to render her tiny form, crushed, among the shadows of the library reading room. This shot has been imitated in similar contexts in other films since Hitchcock’s use (which might not be entirely original, either), so to attribute its origin here in Shadow of a Doubt remains a speculation of very modest strength. 4 Allison makes a related point about Frears’s films generally: “The paradox arising from the conflicting instincts to connect with others and to keep them at bay is recognized by the characters in most of Frears’s films” (Allison 2007: 40). 5 Because of the positive, even valorizing, connotation of the word “survivor” in English, something like “outlivers” seems to me to better reflect Canetti’s attitude toward those he calls überlebenden.

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6 Most of the television images and sound in The Queen appear to be archival recordings of news footage and commentary contemporary with the events of the week following Diana’s death. Some are simulated—like Tony Blair’s eulogy—and for some, it remains unclear whether they are “genuine” or simulated. For purposes of my analysis of the film, all are treated equally in the unfolding of the story. 7 Shirley Law notes, “It is also possible to read the mourning crowd as assuaging their own guilt, for many of them were as voracious as the media and the paparazzi in their desire to know the details of Diana’s private life, a point made repeatedly in the film via archival footage” (Law 2009: 128). 8 On the DVD commentary, Peter Morgan remarks, “People talked endlessly about what the stag means.” Frears then says, “Go on, say what it means.” Morgan continues, “To me it just meant something that had survived . . . beyond what was expected. . . . And therefore it was something that was lucky to have escaped. . . . I’ve heard some extraordinary interpretations of the stag—being Diana and having wandered onto the neighboring estate . . . going to France.” Sandy Flitterman-Lewis belongs to the Stag-Diana school: “The parallels are obvious: Diana, the most hunted woman in the world, stalked as prey by image-­hungry photographers and finally killed” (FlittermanLewis 2007: 52).   Most reviewers who discuss the stag, however, identify it with the Queen or the Royals. Straightforwardly, Stella Hockenhill notes, “Much like the Queen, the animal is being pursued, and both their positions are threatened” (Hockenhill 2012: 175). Less straightforwardly, she adds, “The stag is represented as a graceful beast and its appearance is an obvious homage to artist Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), and his painting Monarch of the Glen executed in 1851” (Hockenhill 2012: 176).   A relatively elaborate example of the stag as Queen may be found in Norman’s gloss: “the metaphorical message: that The Queen herself, like the stag, is threatened by her own family, in that the misdemeanors of members of her family, including Prince Charles, Princess Diana and the Duchess of York, have brought the monarchy into disrepute” (Norman n.d.: 33). An interpretation that Morgan would probably add to his collection of extraordinary ones is John Beebe’s: “The stag, a medieval allegory of Christ, and also of Christian superbia (the pride one can take in ruling one’s human instincts, for instance), seems in the film to represent divine right, the archetype that is passing away in the age of easy access to the masses through the media that Diana and Blair (and Frears) understand so well” (Beebe 2007: 4). Vidal calls “The scene of the Queen with the stag . . . reductive iconography of nation” (Vidal 2012: 49).   The stag can also be related to other animal imagery in The Queen: the mounted antlered heads in the hall at Balmoral, the small figurines of a stag and of a dog on desks there, and the Queen’s corgis and black labradors. 9 Frears used this technique extensively in Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, the 2013 film he made for HBO. 10 Bastin (n.d.) writes, “From its promotional material through to its creative mise-­enscène, it [The Queen] offers . . . an analysis of the role of film in the perpetuation and construction of royal imaginings. . . . Frears . . . emphasizes the constructed nature of the image of royalty we are being presented, and which we, importantly, are helping to construct as desiring subjects (it is a fitting irony, too, that in this act of being gazed at, we in the audience of The Queen are situated as the Sovereign’s subjects).”

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11 In his discussion of The Queen, Norman has an illuminating survey of what he calls “an intense debate . . . conducted among academics regarding the mixture of fact and fiction (‘faction’) in the cinematic treatment of history.” He concludes that “The Queen should be understood as a development or evolution of the British Heritage genre. Among Frears’s more recent work is Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), a factual/fictional story of wartime London, strongly nostalgic in its appeal, to which The Queen is much more closely related than to My Beautiful Laundrette or Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (Norman n.d.).

Chapter 10:  Philomena 1 In fact, Philomena uses little of Sixsmith’s book, which is mostly a reconstruction of the life of Anthony Lee/Michael Hess. The title of the book was changed from The Lost Child of Philomena Lee to Philomena, and it was repackaged with a photograph of Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in their roles, presumably to take advantage of the popularity of the film. The statement that precedes the film, “Inspired by true events,” is more accurate than either “Based on the book by Martin Sixsmith” or “Based on a true Story” would be. 2 In interviews, Coogan makes clear Frears’s collaboration: The writing “changed after Frears got involved because he wanted the script tighter and more focused” (Gray 2013). “We did a few rewrites based on Stephen’s notes on the script” (Hernandez n.d.). Frears, too, is clear: “The whole time you’re rewriting” (Rose n.d.). 3 In the interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of My Beautiful Laundrette, Frears remarks about this scene, “When it froze, I said ‘Now I know how to end the film,’ because God or the weather or whatever had shifted and given you something to photograph.” 4 “ ‘I’m quite proud of that scene,’ admits Coogan. ‘I enjoyed writing the story of the novel, and imagining a whole series of them; The Saddle and the Loom, that sort of thing’ ” (Schneller 2013). 5 From The Washington Post, June 3, 2014, by Terrence McCoy: “In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-­foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of ‘fallen women’ and their ‘illegitimate’ children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.   Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-­of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.   More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed—where a housing development and children’s playground now stands—what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has perhaps now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins. (In PostEverything: “Philomena” author Martin Sixsmith writes, ‘Sadly, the mass grave at Tuam is probably not unique.’)” 6 In Poland’s YouTube interview, Ms. Lee reports that she did, in fact, lose her faith when Anthony was taken from her. 7 Martin also notices and asks about a publicity photograph of a buxom Jane Russell, inscribed “All my love, Jane.” Sister Claire evades his question, but the mother of a

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barkeep provides relevant information: “Jane Russell bought a baby from Derry in 1952.” When this adoption and its price became public, it precipitated a scandal that for a time looked as if it might damage or terminate Russell’s career as a movie star. 8 Eliot is also quoted in the writing on Danny/Victoria’s caravan in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. 9 Interviewed on the CBC show “Q,” December 23, 2013, Steve Coogan summed up his understanding of Philomena: “The film is about tolerance and understanding.” (Ghomeshi 2013).

Chapter 11:  Mary Reilly 1 Typical are the remarks he made to Bernard Weinraub (1998), “I have no capacity at all to make these big films; I admire people who do that. . . . Both of those films [Mary Reilly and Hero] were in a mess. . . . I’m not good at those kinds of things.” On at least one occasion, however, he expressed some satisfaction with his work: “A lot of my films have been slated. Mary Reilly, which I can’t pretend entirely worked, but it certainly had good things about it.” 2 Pierre Berthomiew adds the Hammer film, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (Fisher, 1996: 40) to the Mamoulian and Fleming versions as Mary Reilly’s great predecessors. For him, Frears’s film thus becomes one of “four great versions. . . . Insofar as it joins them, so far is it also set apart from them.” 3 Hitchcock was fond of setting the scene of his films, or of important locales within them, by showing identifying plaques of such places as Scotland Yard, as in Blackmail (1929) or Frenzy (1972). 4 During filming, Frears said, “I perfected very elaborate camera movements with my principal cameraman late at night, when everyone had gone home to sleep. I adored that” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 38). 5 “Stylistically,” O’Neill wrote, “this drama of separation [“déliaison”] of psychic forces is the fruit of Dangerous Liaisons” (O’Neill 1996: 33). 6 As I have noted, in the novel, Jekyll completes his utterance: “ ‘I was thinking how dear your face is to me, Mary,’ he said, ‘And how sad it would make me if I were never to see it more.’ ” The novel, in Mary’s voice from her diary, continues: “I could scarce believe my ears to hear Master speak so . . .” (Martin 1990: 221). Frears and/or Hampton perhaps felt that this confession was a bit too forward to fit with their characterization of Dr. Jekyll. 7 Speaking with Ciment and Niogret of both Prick Up Your Ears and Mary Reilly, Frears remarked, “They are both set in a society that is anti-­expressive. Even today . . . they are people who hide their emotions” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 39). 8 The shots of hands that mark the growth of intimacy between Mary and her employer are another mark of the influence of Hitchcock on Frears’s film. Hands, often in close-­up, are a pervasive and always significant image of relations between characters across Hitchcock’s career. “Hitchcock’s films are full of images of hands, in close-­up and otherwise, and repeatedly they are shown in a manner which is ‘expressive’, going beyond the naturalistic gestures considered appropriate for the cinema” (Walker 2006: 44). See my The Hitchcock Romance for extended discussions of this motif.

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9 In his review of Mary Reilly, Roger Ebert (1996) wrote of “his operating theater, a Victorian monstrosity with tiers of seats for observers, looking down into the circles of hell.” This interpretation connects with the motif of descent, usually on stairways. Those descents frequently suggest, I agree, journeys into the underworld, especially when they lead into Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory. 10 I am indebted to Professor James Palmer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, for this quotation. Though it is widely cited in psychoanalytic literature, neither he nor I have been able to ascertain its source. 11 These words repeat precisely those used by Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons, after Valmont has refrained from consummating his seduction of her when he first has the opportunity. 12 According to a Wikipedia article, a 1981 British TV film directed by Alastair Reid and starring David Hemmings “gives a twist to the usual ending when Jekyll’s body turns into Mr. Hyde upon his death.” Retrieved in March, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Adaptations_of_Strange_Case_of_Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde#Television’.   I haven’t managed to confirm this; but if it is the case, it may be the source for the similar postmortem transformation in Frears’s film. 13 “Prince Lindworm” can be found in a collection of Scandinavian folk tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, available as a Project Gutenberg ebook, retrieved in March, 2013 from www.gutenberg.org/files/30973/30973-h/30973-h.htm#PRINCE_ LINDWORM. 14 Speaking with Ciment and Niogret of his decision to use Edinburgh for the urban settings of Mary Reilly, Frears said, “One often discovers this doubling in the Scottish temperament, people of the day and people of the night. . . . It seemed evident that Stevenson was thinking of Edinburgh” (Ciment and Niogret 1996: 36).

Video/Filmography as of March, 2016 Florence Foster Jenkins (post-­production) The Program (2015) Philomena (2013) Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (HBO 2013) Lay the Favorite (2012) Tamara Drewe (2010) Chéri (2009) “Skip Tracer” (2008, TV pilot) The Queen (2006) “Sarah Brightman: Diva—The Video Collection” (video “Pie Jesu”) Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) The Deal (2003) Dirty Pretty Things (2002) Liam (2000) High Fidelity (2000) Fail Safe (2000, TV movie) The Hi-Lo Country (1998) The Van (1996) Mary Reilly (1996) “A Personal History of British Cinema by Stephen Frears” (1994, TV documentary) The Snapper (1993, TV movie with theatrical release) Hero (1992) The Grifters (1990) Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) Prick Up Your Ears (1987) December Flower (1987, TV movie) “Song of Experience” (1986, TV series, Screen Two) Loving Walter (1986, combines TV movies “Walter” and “Walter and June”) My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) The Hit (1984) Comic Strip Presents (1984–7): “Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door” (1987), “Consuela, or the New Mrs. Saunders” (1986, parody of Rebecca), “The Bullshitters: Roll Out the Gunbarrel” (1984, parody of hi-­tech spy show) Walter and June (1983, TV movie) Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983, TV movie, also theatrical release) The Last Company Car (1983, TV movie) Walter (1982, TV movie) “The Tractor Factor” (1982, 25 minutes, available only to the agricultural industry) Going Gently (1981, TV movie, BBC2 Playhouse) “The First Few Years” (1980, documentary about banks, “Intended for school leavers”)

238

Video/Filmography as of November, 2015

Bloody Kids (1980 TV movie, also theatrical release) One Fine Day (1979, TV movie) The Old Crowd (1979, TV movie) “Long Distance Information” (1979, Play For Today series) Doris and Doreen (1979, TV movie) Afternoon Off (1979, TV movie) Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978, TV movie) “Cold Harbor” (1978, ITV Playhouse) “A Visit from Miss Protheroe” (1978, BBC2 Play of the Week) “Able’s Will” (1977, BBC2 Play of the Week) Black Christmas (1977, TV movie) “18 Months to Balcomb Street” (1977, TV) “Last Summer” (1977, ITV Playhouse) “Play Things” (1976, BBC2 Playhouse) “Early Struggles” (1976, Play for Today) Daft As a Brush (1975, TV movie) “Sunset Across the Bay” (1975, Play for Today) Three Men in a Boat (1975, TV movie) Second City Firsts (1974, 1 episode, “Match of the Day” perhaps AKA “The Cricket Match”) Sporting Scenes (1973, 1 episode, “England, Their England”) “The Sisters” (1973, TV) A Day Out (1972, TV movie) Gumshoe (1971) Follyfoot (1971–3, 4 episodes, TV) Tom Grattan’s War (1970, 5 episodes, TV) Parkin’s Patch (1969, 2 episodes, Yorkshire TV) “gimme shelter: Report St. Ann’s” (1969, Thames TV, documentary) The Burning (1968, TV movie)

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Williamson, Judith. “Two Kinds of Otherness.” Black Film, British Cinema. ICA Documents. London: British Film Institute, 34–5, 1988. Wills, Jenny. “I’s Wide Shut: Examining the Depiction of Female Refugees’ Eyes and Hands in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things.” Refuge (Toronto. English edition) (0229-5113), 24 (2), 115.

Reviews and interviews Abeel, Erica. “The ‘High Fidelity’ director on stages of undress and Michelle Pfeiffer.” www.ifc.com/fix/2009/stephen-­frears (retrieved October, 2013). Barraclough, Leo. “British Film Institute to Fete Stephen Frears with Fellowship.” Variety online: http://variety.com/2014/film/news/british-­film-institute-­to-fete-­stephen-­frears-­ with-fellowship-1201323534/ (retrieved January, 2015). Bernardinelli, James. “Review of Chéri.” ReelViews, June 23, 2009. BFI “Screenonline” biography of Stephen Frears. www.screenonline.org.uk/people/ id/469201 (retrieved November, 2013). Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television. London: Continuum, 2001. Brown, Mick. “Stephen Frears on ‘Tamara Drewe’ and a life in film.” The Telegraph 27 August 2010. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7965385/Stephen-Frears-­on-TamaraDrewe-­and-a-­life-in-­film.html (retrieved November, 2013). Buckmaster, Luke. “Interview with Stephen Frears, director of Tamara Drewe, The Queen and High Fidelity”, February 7, 2011 http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2011/02/07/ interview-­with-stephen-­fears-director-­of-tamara-­drew-the-­queen-and-­high-fidelity/ (retrieved February, 2016). Ciment, Michel. “Entretien avec Stephen Frears.” Positif, 539 (January 2006), 17–21. Ciment, Michel. “Entretien avec Stephen Frears. Un équlibre entre la frivolité e la tragédie.” Positif, 578 (April 2009), 27–30. Ciment, Michel and Hubert Niogret. “Entretien avec Stephen Frears.” Positif, 423 (May 1996), 36–9. Cooper, Rand Richards. “Questions for Stephen Frears: Not Exactly Notting Hill.” New York Times Magazine, July 20, 2003. Criterion Blu-Ray Edition of My Beautiful Laundrette, 2015. Curtis, Nick. “I hope you find it vulgar.” London Evening Standard, November 10, 2005. Durham, Katie. n.d. Panel discussion host, “Are Biographies Fiction?” iai.tv/video/ the-­art-of-­life (retrieved July, 2014). Ebert, Roger. Review of Mary Reilly. Chicago Sun Times, February 23, 1996. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “The Queen.” Cineaste, 32 (2) (Spring 2007). Frazer, Nick. “Stephen Frears.” The Observer, Saturday, August 14, 2010. Friedman, Lester and Scott Stewart. “Keeping His Own Voice: An Interview with Stephen Frears.” In Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992. Albany: State University of New York Press, 221–40, 1994. Ghomeshi, Jian. “Interview with Steve Coogan, December 23, 2013.” www.cbc.ca/player/ Radio/Q/ID/2426400433/ (retrieved June, 2014). “GrandeMarguerite,” review of “The Burning,” March 28, 2010. www.imdb.com/title/ tt0290151/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt&licb=0.27390406909398735/ (retrieved October, 2013).

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Gray, Tim. Variety, September 8, 2013. Gritten, David. “Philomena: behind the scenes with Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.” The Telegraph, October 26, 2013. Gullen, Michael. The Evening Class. “Interview by Tim Sika. ‘The Queen’—Q&A with Stephen Frears.” December 1, 2006. http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2006/12/ queenqa-­with-director-­stephen-­frears.html (retrieved October, 2013). Heath, Duncan. “Interview with Stephen Frears.” Left Lion October 1, 2010. www.leftlion. co.uk/articles.cfm/title/stephen-frears-interview/id/3140 (retrieved February, 2014). Heller, Zöe. “A Bloke’s Life.” The Independent Sunday Magazine, April 25, 1993. Hernandez, Eugene. Interview with Steve Coogan and Stephen Frears at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cTot4EY5E8 (retrieved May, 2014). Huston, Tony. “Family Ties.” American Film, 12 (10) (September 1987). Jamal, Mahmood. “Dirty Linen.” In Black Film, British Cinema. ICA Documents. London: British Film Institute, 21–22, 1988. Judell, Brandon. “The Homecoming: Stephen Frears Returns to U.K. with Liam.” www. indiewire.com/article/interview_the_homecoming_stephen_frears_returns_to_u.k._ with_liam (retrieved September, 2014). Lucia, Cynthia. “The Complexities of Cultural Change: An Interview with Stephen Frears.” Cineaste, 28 (4) (Fall 2003), 8–15. Malik, Kenan. “Hanif Kureishi in Conversation with Kenan Malik.” youtube.com/ watch?v—DqJAICQONU (retrieved April, 2013). Mapes, Marty. Interview with Stephen Frears for Turner Classic Movies. www.tcm.com/ this-­month/movie-­news.html?id=114865&name=Stephen-Frears-Interview (retrieved October, 2013). Masson, Alain and Eithne O’Neill. “The Deal et Fail Safe/Pointe limite.” Positif, 539 (January 2006), 23–4. O’Neill, Eithne. “The Snapper le nom du père: on s’en fout!” Positif, 393 (November 1993), 36–7. O’Neill, Eithne. “Mary Reilly.” Positif, 423 (May 1996), 33–5. O’Neill, Eithne. “Dirty Pretty Things Sang et obole.” Positif, 511 (September 2003), 43–4. O’Neill, Eithne. “Madame Henderson présente Madame desire.” Positif, 539 (January 2006), 15–16. Pfefferman, Naomi. “Hidden Heritage Inspires Director.” JewishJournal.com, September 27, 2001 (retrieved October, 2013). Poland, David. n.d. “Interview with Philomena Lee and Her Daughter.” www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VkYzAEsUTEY (retrieved May, 2014). Rafferty, Terrence. “An Englishman Returns to the Gallic Boudoir.” The New York Times, June 21, 2009; Section AR, p. 15. Rolinson, David. “The ’Appening: Parkin’s Patch.” British Television Drama, December 31, 2012. www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=3250 (retrieved March, 2013). Rose, Charlie. “Interview with Stephen Frears.” www.bloomberg.com/video/-philomena-­ charlie-rose-01-08-SD31AvAETKOOnNnc3iugeA.html (retrieved May, 2014). Schneller, Johanna. “To get a career-­redefining part, Steve Coogan had to hire himself.” The Globe and Mail (London), November 29, 2013. Simon, Alex. “Stephen Frears Lifts the Veil on The Queen.” http://thehollywoodinterview. blogspot.com/2008/02/stephen-frears-hollywood-­interview.html (retrieved February, 2015).

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Sinclair, Ian. “Heartsnatch Hotel.” Sight and Sound, December, 2002. Stack, Peter. Review of Mary Reilly. San Francisco Chronicle, February 23,1996. Taubman, Amy. “Review of Liam.” The Village Voice, September 18, 2001. Thomson, David. moderator. Berlinale.topix.org/audio/btc8_storytelling_trojka.mp3 (retrieved October, 2013). Weinraub, Herman. “An Englishman Rides into Town.” The New York Times, December 25, 1998.

Miscellaneous Lacey, Robert. “Audio Commentary for The Queen” Miramax DVD, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Inc., Burbank, California, 2007. Time Out 1993 introduction to “Report St. Ann’s.” www.timeout.com/london/film/st-­anns (retrieved February, 2014). The Times (London), February 15, 1986, Saturday, “Gumshoe’s man tumbles back” (831) /SCT, Byline: Peter Waymark.

Index Stephen Frears is referred to as SF throughout, Alfred Hitchcock as AH. Illustrations are denoted by the use of italics and major discussion by the use of bold. Film characters are shown in single quotation marks, e.g. ‘Anna’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 54, 59, 61

A Day Out (1972, TV), 15–16, 17 Abraham, Ibrahim, 35 alcohol Chéri, 108 Dirty Pretty Things, 76 Liam, 145 My Beautiful Laundrette, 42–3, 48 The Snapper, 124, 134 ‘Alice’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 53, 57–8 alienation Liam, 147 The Queen, 168–9 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 33, 62, 66, 68 Allison, Deborah, 3, 22, 39, 87, 223 ‘Anna’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 54, 59, 61 ‘Annie’ (Mary Reilly), 207, 211, 214 ‘Annunciata’ (Philomena), 189 ‘Anthony/Michael’ (Philomena), 181, 182, 184 archival images Philomena, 183, 185, 194 The Queen, 174, 177–9, 233 n.6–7 ‘Asian in the Brown suit’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 52, 53, 54 audience and AH, 76, 77, 80 education of, 187 experience, 91, 191, 206, 222, 233 n.10 reactions, 58–9, 74, 147, 174, 228 n.6 “auteur theory,” 4, 20–3, 108 Barber, Frances, 67 Barrytown Trilogy (novel, Roddy Doyle), 29

Bening, Annette, 23, 29 Bennett, Alan, 14–15 Bergman, Ingrid, 75 ‘Big Boy Matson’ (The Hi-Lo Country), 29–30 ‘Bilquis’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 38, 44 blackmail, 34, 72, 75 Bloom, Claire, 227 n.3 Borrows, Anthony, 142, 148, 153 Boyle, Consolata, 17, 209 Buric, Zlatko, 78 Burns, Megan, 139, 148 camera work, 77–9, 100, 141–3, 165 See also individual terms Canetti, Elias, 55, 66, 169, 175–6, 177 Catholicism, 143, 146, 186, 187–9, 190–1 ‘Cécile de Volanges’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 93, 97, 100–3, 105 ‘Charles Spencer’ (The Queen), 175, 177 ‘Charlotte’ (Chéri), 108, 112, 115–16, 117–18 Chéri (2009), 31, 91, 107–18 ‘Chéri’ (Chéri), 108–9, 110–12, 116–17 ‘Cherie Blair’ (The Queen), 162, 168, 173 ‘Cherry’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 40, 44 ‘Chevalier Danceny’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 96, 97, 99 childbirth, 188, 189 chromatography. See color, use of cinematography. See camera work Clark, Sophie Kennedy, 193 class hatred, 47 classification difficulties, 4 n.1

248

Index

Close, Glenn Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 112 Oscar nomination, 19 working with SF, 18, 96, 230 n.5 close-ups Chéri, 111 Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 100, 101–2, 106 Dirty Pretty Things, 74, 77, 79 Liam, 141–2, 149 Mary Reilly, 203, 204–5, 206, 218, 224 The Queen, 162 See also point-of-view shots collaborators, SF and, 11, 17–18, 21, 229 n.6 colonialism, 55 colonialism, domestic, 51, 55, 64, 66 color, use of, 24 Chéri, 109–11, 112, 116, 117 Dangerous Liaisons, 105–6 Dirty Pretty Things, 78, 84–5 Liam, 154–5, 157 Mary Reilly, 204–5, 207–10, 212–13, 217, 218 My Beautiful Laundrette, 39–40, 43 Philomena, 183, 185, 188 The Queen, 162, 175 The Snapper, 128, 132–3 comedy, 24–6 My Beautiful Laundrette, 43 Philomena, 187 The Snapper, 121–2, 125–6, 136 comic elements Dirty Pretty Things, 72, 74, 78, 80, 86 Mary Reilly, 211, 224 Philomena, 181, 187, 195 community Liam, 139 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 63–4 The Snapper, 123–4, 136, 137 ‘Con’ (Liam), 150, 156 confession (religious), 141, 142–4, 146, 152–3, 191–2 conscious mind Chéri, 114 Dangerous Liaisons, 97 Liam, 158 Mary Reilly, 218, 222, 223

Philomena, 159, 194 The Queen, 159, 174 Coogan, Steve, 13, 32, 187, 234 n.4 Cooper, Dominic, 31 costume design, 17, 91, 123, 208, 209 costume dramas, 7, 91 See also Chéri (2009); Dangerous Liaisons (1988) ‘Craig Curley’ (The Snapper), 129, 131 crane shots, 39 cross-cutting scenes Chéri, 114, 116 Dangerous Liaisons, 94 My Beautiful Laundrette, 37, 38, 47–8, 49 Philomena, 178 The Queen, 164–5, 168 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 59–60, 68 The Snapper, 126 crowd scenes High Fidelity, 33 Liam, 152 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), 38 The Queen, 169, 174, 175–7 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 66–7 The Snapper, 233 n.7 Crowds and Power (Canetti), 55, 66, 169, 175, 176, 177 Crudup, Billy, 29–30 cultural change, 8 Cusack, John, 23, 29, 30, 33 ‘Dad’ (Liam), 139–40, 148–51, 152, 155, 156 Dangerous Liaisons (1988), 28, 31, 34, 91, 93–106 ‘Danny/Victoria’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 55, 64–70, 85–6 dark/light, 189–90, 203–4, 207, 208, 223 Davis, Geena, 29 Davis, Leo, 17 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 38 The Deal (2003), 30 death Dangerous Liaisons, 105 Dirty Pretty Things, 82, 83 Mary Reilly, 208, 210, 216, 217–18

Index The Queen, 31 See also murder; suicide Dench, Judi, 28, 30, 194 de Rougemont, Denis, 94–5 design Dirty Pretty Things, 83–5 Liam, 139 The Snapper, 128–33 ‘Dessie Curley’ (The Snapper, The Van), 29, 121–8 Dirty Pretty Things (2002), 14, 30, 34, 71, 71–89 doors Dangerous Liaisons, 230 n.3 Liam, 147, 153–4 Mary Reilly, 215 My Beautiful Laundrette, 48, 49, 227 n.9 Philomena, 192 The Snapper, 122–3, 130–31 doorways, 44, 149 double entendres, 41, 56 downward shots, 216 Doyle, Roddy, 29, 122, 124, 130 “Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde” theme, 29 dreams, 75, 88, 211–12, 214, 223 See also nightmares drugs, 38, 39, 44, 45, 114 editing Dangerous Liaisons, 94 Mary Reilly, 202 My Beautiful Laundrette, 49 The Queen, 178 The Snapper, 202 ‘Edmée’ (Chéri), 113–14 Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 73, 77, 82 endings, film Chéri, 118 Dirty Pretty Things, 89 Gumshoe, 27 Hero, 32 High Fidelity, 32 Mary Reilly, 217, 221 Mrs. Henderson Presents, 32 My Beautiful Laundrette, 227 n.11 Philomena, 184

249

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 65 The Snapper, 32 eyeline cuts, 182, 204, 219 fading in/out, 24, 218, 222 family Liam, 140–51, 158 My Beautiful Laundrette, 47–8, 62–3 The Queen, 162, 168, 171, 174, 233 n.8 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 61, 65 The Snapper, 121–8 See also siblings female protagonists Dangerous Liaisons, 91, 102, 106 Philomena, 181 The Queen, 159, 163 The Snapper, 123 Fenton, George, 17, 202 Field, Shirley Anne, 37, 46 fire Dangerous Liaisons, 104 Liam, 141–2, 148, 151, 158 Mary Reilly, 214 Philomena, 189, 190 flashbacks Chéri, 116 Dangerous Liaisons, 102 Mary Reilly, 210, 211 Philomena, 186 The Snapper, 124 food Dirty Pretty Things, 75–6 Liam, 155 Mary Reilly, 208 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 54, 62–4, 68, 227 n.4 Frears, Stephen and AH, 74–80 BBC work, 225 n.8 biography, 9–12 comments on own work, 72–4, 82, 181, 201–2, 235 n.1 on direction, 12–20, 22, 48 film/theater influences, 8, 31, 73 honors and awards, 4 portrayal of religion, 146–7

250 recurrent collaborations, 229 n.6 television directing, 10, 14–15, 22 freedom Mary Reilly, 224 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 57–8 freeze-frames, 129, 174 Friend, Rupert, 19, 31, 109, 112, 118 Frye, Northrop, 24–5, 72, 84, 94, 106 ‘fuck sequence,’ 59–60, 68 Fuller, Graham, 7, 23 ‘Gaffer’ (Liam), 149–50 gangster elements, 39 genres, 23, 72 ‘“Georgie” Burgess’ (The Snapper), 121, 123 Geraghty, Christine, 8, 35, 226 n.2 ‘Ghost’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 52–5 Gift, Roland, 67, 228 n.11 Grant, Cary, 75, 80 graphic motifs, 83, 102, 103, 103, 154 grids, 24 Dangerous Liaisons, 102, 103 Dirty Pretty Things, 83 Liam, 154, 157 Mary Reilly, 205, 210, 218, 220–1, 222 Philomena, 192–3, 194 The Queen, 169 The Snapper, 128–9, 130–1 The Grifters (1990), 23, 29, 34 guilt Philomena, 191, 192, 195–7 The Queen, 233 n.7 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52 Gumshoe (1971), 10, 27, 28 ‘Guo Yi’ (Dirty Pretty Things), 73, 81, 82 Hampton, Christopher collaboration with SF, 14, 19–20, 31, 201, 202 as producer, 103, 107 Harrelson, Woody, 29–30 Hart, Ian, 30 Hell Dirty Pretty Things, 82, 84 Liam, 141–3 Mary Reilly, 214, 219, 236 n.9

Index Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 69 See also underworlds Hero (1992), 29, 32, 179 heroes, 65, 87–8 High Fidelity (2000), 30, 32, 33, 34 Hill, John, 8 The Hi-Lo Country (1998), 29, 33 The Hit (1984), 27–8 Hitchcock, Alfred as influence, 8 and male protagonists, 86 settings, 235 n.3 and symbolism, 24, 74–80, 103–4, 235 n.8 Hjejle, Iben, 30, 33 homosexuality My Beautiful Laundrette, 28, 35, 38, 41, 46–7 Philomena, 32, 183, 191 Prick Up Your Ears, 28, 33 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52, 57 honors and awards, 4 Hoskins, Bob, 31 hostility, 42, 51, 55 Hovet, Ted, 81, 83 humor Dirty Pretty Things, 73, 79 etymology of, 86 Mary Reilly, 204 telling a story, 5 See also comedy; comic elements Huston, Anjelica, 23, 29 Huston, John, 32, 156 hybrid identities, 7, 8, 35, 55, 69 imagery airplanes, 183–4 animals, 205, 211–12, 217, 233 n.8 fog, 205, 219 food and drink, 75–6 religious, 153, 154 telephones, 166 trains, 42–3 TV shows, 56 See also color, use of; Shakespearian immigration Dirty Pretty Things, 72, 73, 74, 81

Index illegal, 30 My Beautiful Laundrette, 28 officers, 74, 77–81 target of abuse, 40 innocence Dangerous Liaisons, 105 Mary Reilly, 204, 208, 213 Philomena, 186, 188, 197 Irish culture, 30, 191 Irony, 24–6 irony, 5–6 Islam, 83 ‘Ivan’ (Dirty Pretty Things), 73, 77, 78 Jaffrey, Saeed, 37, 38 jealousy, sexual, 28, 56, 60, 99, 228 n.5 Jewish culture Liam, 144–5, 147, 150, 151 Mrs. Henderson Presents, 30 and SF, 12 ‘John Bubber’ (Hero), 26, 29 ‘Johnny’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 39–40, 41–3, 46, 48–9, 226 n.2 ‘Juliette’ (Dirty Pretty Things), 71, 77, 78 Kapoor, Shashi, 20, 51 ‘Kay Curley’ (The Snapper), 121, 133 Kellegher, Tina, 127, 131, 132 Khan Din, Ayub, 228 n.11 ‘Kimberley Curley’ (The Snapper), 122, 123 Kureishi, Hanif collaboration with SF, 13–14, 17, 20 My Beautiful Laundrette, 13, 39, 48, 226 n.3, 226 n.5–6 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 14, 51, 65 Lacey, Robert, 166 Landsberg, Alison, 194–5 lap-dissolve, 24, 218, 222 ‘Laura’ (High Fidelity), 30, 33 ‘Lea de Lonval’ (Chéri), 107–16 lesbians, 51, 52, 55, 57–8 Liam (2000), 30, 139–58 ‘Liam’ (Liam), 144–5 lighting, use of Dangerous Liaisons, 104 Dirty Pretty Things, 84, 85

251

Liam, 139, 151, 154, 157, 158 My Beautiful Laundrette, 39, 43 Lindroth, Colette, 228 n.10 Lindsey, Robert, 10 ‘Lisa Curley’ (The Snapper), 122, 123 Loach, Ken, 8, 10 loneliness Chéri, 110 Dangerous Liaisons, 102 Liam, 143, 158 The Queen, 172, 176 long shots Dirty Pretty Things, 78 Mary Reilly, 205, 217 The Queen, 187 The Snapper, 131 love Chéri, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 116 Dangerous Liaisons, 93, 95–9 Liam, 147 Mary Reilly, 218 My Beautiful Laundrette, 47, 48, 49 Philomena, 182, 188 plots, 27–34 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 58, 60 The Snapper, 126 Loving Walter (1986), 28 Lucia, Cynthia, 87, 139, 225 n.1, 229 n.5 McCabe, Ruth, 127 ‘MacGuffin’ (AH term), 76–7 ‘Madame de Tourvel’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 93, 95–7, 100–1, 103, 105 ‘Madame de Volanges’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 95, 103 Malkovich, John Dangerous Liaisons, 98, 104, 230 n.1 Mary Reilly, 201, 209 on SF, 19 ‘Marquise de Merteuil’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 93, 94–9, 100–3, 105–6 marriage Chéri, 111, 113–14, 116 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 28, 53, 56, 60 The Snapper, 134 The Van, 29 Martin, Adrian, 176

252

Index

‘Martin Sixsmith’ (Philomena), 38, 181, 182, 185–7 Martin, Valerie, 29, 202, 206, 221 ‘Mary’ (Mary Reilly) relationship with employer, 207, 209, 209, 214, 215–16, 224 relationship with father, 207, 215 relationship with mother, 207, 220 social position, 204, 206–7, 215 and symbolism, 212, 219, 220 Mary Reilly (1996), 14, 29, 102, 201–24, 235 n.4 mass media, 178, 194–5 Meaney, Colm, 127 media, 177–80 television, 170, 175, 185 use of, 23, 161, 194–5 use of newspapers, 117, 149, 164, 168, 176–7 Meek, Allen, 8 metteur en scéne, 21, 108 Mirren, Helen, 162, 166, 167, 170, 172 mirror shots Chéri, 112–13 Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 97–8, 103 Liam, 140 Mary Reilly, 222–3 My Beautiful Laundrette, 45–6 The Queen, 164–5, 166 The Snapper, 123, 130, 131, 136 mirrors, 24, 97–8, 103, 226 n.6, 230 n.3 money Chéri, 113, 116 Deborah Allison on, 23 The Grifters, 29 Liam, 146, 147, 150 Mary Reilly, 207, 213 My Beautiful Laundrette, 43–4 Philomena, 189 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 61, 66 montages, 117, 173, 179 Morgan, Peter, 14 ‘Mr Crawford’ (The Queen), 162 ‘Mrs Farraday’ (Mary Reilly), 210, 211, 213 Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), 6, 9, 30–1, 159, 234 n.11 ‘Mrs Samuels’ (Liam), 146, 147, 155

murder, 28, 210–11 music (film) Chéri, 117, 231 n.5 Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 99, 101, 230 n.7 Gumshoe, 10 Liam, 152, 154, 157 Mary Reilly, 17, 202, 203 My Beautiful Laundrette, 43, 49, 227 n.10 Philomena, 196 The Queen, 163 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 54, 59–60, 64 The Snapper, 128, 129–30, 133 Tamara Drewe, 31 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), 23, 35–49, 226 n.1 mystery-thriller suspense, 73, 76–7 mythology, use of, 82, 151, 183, 219–20 naiveté, 86, 125, 188, 197 narratives comic, 74, 181 complexities of, 26, 182 romantic, 87, 88, 159, 181 tragic, 140, 155 ‘Nasser’ (My Beautiful Laundrette) party scene, 42–4 and ‘Rachel,’ 37, 38, 46, 48, 49 relationship with brother, 48–9 newspapers (media), 117, 149, 164, 168, 176–7 nightmares Mary Reilly, 211–12, 214, 217, 222, 223 My Beautiful Laundrette, 40 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52–5 See also dreams North by Northwest (AH, 1959), 80 Notorious (AH, 1946), 75, 76–7 Okonedo, Sophie, 78, 82 ‘Okwe’ (Dirty Pretty Things), 30, 73–5, 77–8, 80–3, 84–8 ‘Omar’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 37, 38, 39–40, 41–6, 48–9 O’Neill, Eithne, 22, 69 operating theaters, 86, 213, 217–18, 236 n.9

Index Ortega, Vincente, 35 Oscar nominations, 19 overhead shots Dangerous Liaisons, 101, 104, 105 Liam, 141 Mary Reilly, 217, 218 The Queen, 166 overtones Chéri, 108, 231 n.3 Mary Reilly, 210, 211 The Snapper, 128 Palin, Michael, 11, 19 ‘Papa’ (Hussein) (My Beautiful Laundrette), 39, 40, 41, 42, 48 parallel lines, 24 Dangerous Liaisons, 102, 103 Dirty Pretty Things, 83 Liam, 154 Mary Reilly, 203, 205, 210, 218, 220–2 Philomena, 192–3, 194 The Queen, 169 The Snapper, 128–9, 130, 131 parallel-cutting scenes. See cross-cutting scenes Parkin’s Patch (1969, TV), 22 party scenes, 38, 42–4 ‘Patron’ (Chéri), 110, 114 ‘Paulette’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 67–8, 69 ‘Pete Calder’ (The Hi-Lo Country), 29–30 ‘Pete Olsson’ (Philomena), 181, 195 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 101, 108, 109, 115, 118 phallic symbols Chéri, 112 Dangerous Liaisons, 105 Mary Reilly, 211, 212, 215, 217 The Snapper, 130, 134, 135 Philomena (2013), 13, 32, 34, 181–97 ‘Philomena’ (Philomena), 38, 181, 194–5 plots, love, 27–34 point-of-view shots, 161, 169, 182 police Dirty Pretty Things, 73, 81, 87 Liam, 140, 143, 145, 156 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52, 53, 56, 63, 67–8

253

politics The Deal, 30 Liam, 139, 151 The Queen, 31 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52, 54, 56–7, 66 power Chéri, 110, 111 Dangerous Liaisons, 91, 94–6, 102, 106 Dirty Pretty Things, 78 Liam, 146, 150, 157 My Beautiful Laundrette, 28, 43–4 Philomena, 188, 192, 196 The Queen, 163–73 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 51–2, 55, 57–9 See also Crowds and Power (Canetti) pregnancy Philomena, 184, 234 n.5 The Snapper, 121, 123, 134, 135 Prick up Your Ears (1987), 28, 33 ‘Prince Charles’ (The Queen), 31, 161, 176 ‘Prince Philip’ (The Queen), 31, 176 ‘Princess Diana’ (The Queen), 173–4 ‘Property Developer’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 57, 58, 64, 68 prostitution Chéri, 113, 117 Dirty Pretty Things, 34, 71 Mary Reilly, 213 My Beautiful Laundrette, 45 proto-genres, 24–6 Psycho (AH, 1960), 103–4 The Queen (2006), 31, 161–80 ‘The Queen’ (The Queen), 163–73, 166, 167, 168 ‘Rachel’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 38, 39, 43–4, 46, 49 ‘Rafi Rahman’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 51–6, 61–2, 63 ‘Rani’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 56–7, 65, 228 n.5 rape, 33, 72 Reeves, Keanu, 98, 104

254

Index

reflection shots Chéri, 112–13 Dangerous Liaisons, 97–8 Liam, 148 Mary Reilly, 222–3 My Beautiful Laundrette, 38 The Queen, 164 Reisz, Karel, 8, 10 religion Dirty Pretty Things, 83, 229 n.5 Liam, 141–3, 146, 152, 155 Mary Reilly, 210–11, 220 Philomena, 186, 187–9, 190–1 See also Jewish culture religious art, 153, 154 reverse shots, 169 reviews Chéri, 107 Mary Reilly, 201 riots, 52, 63–4, 66 ‘Rob’ (High Fidelity), 30, 33 Roberts, Julia Irish accent, 201 Mary Reilly, 204, 209, 212, 219, 220 ‘Robin Janvrin’ (The Queen), 161, 163, 164, 178 Rollinson, David, 22 romance, 24–6, 31, 72, 87–8, 105, 159 ‘Rosie’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) childhood, 62 and ‘Danny/Victoria,’ 68 marriage, 54, 60–1, 62, 63, 65 sexual behavior, 56 Rothman, William, 24 Sabotage (AH, 1936), 80 Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983, TV), 28 ‘Salim’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 37, 38, 43, 45, 48–9 ‘Sally Mitchell’ (Philomena), 181–2 same-sex relationships. See homosexuality; lesbians ‘Sammy’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) isolated figure, 63 jealousy, 56

marriage, 54, 60–1, 65 relationship with father, 52, 61 treatment of women, 54, 59, 61 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), 28, 33, 51–70 self-imprisonment, 24 self-referentiality, 221, 223 self-reflexivity, 23, 31, 80, 178 ‘Senay’ (Dirty Pretty Things) character, 30, 75–6, 80–1 immigration officers, 74 religion, 83 and sex, 72–3, 76, 84–5 settings Edinburgh, 236 n.14 Liam, 139 London, 83 opera, 99, 99–100, 101 operating theater, 86, 213, 217–18, 236 n.9 The Queen, 162, 166 sex ‘fuck sequence,’ 59–60, 68 problematic, 33–4 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 57 as a sin, 34, 145, 188 The Snapper, 133–6 suggestive images, 76, 212 violent, 33, 72, 223 sexual boundaries, 33 sexual freedom, 56–7, 59–61 Shadow of a Doubt (AH, 1943), 80, 232 n.3 shadows Chéri, 117 Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 100 Liam, 147, 151, 155, 158 Philomena, 189, 190, 192 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 53 Shakespearian imagery, 54, 69, 161, 218, 219 quotes, 55, 229 n.12 Sonnets, 118 shame Liam, 147, 150, 152 Philomena, 188, 191 The Snapper, 135

Index ‘Sharon Curley’ (The Snapper), 29, 32, 121–8, 131–3, 135–6 Sheen, Michael, 30, 31, 165, 172 shot-reverse-shots, 153 siblings Liam, 140, 144–5 My Beautiful Laundrette, 39, 41, 44, 47–9 The Snapper, 122, 125, 135, 231 n.2–3 sin, 141–3, 146, 188, 191 Sinyard, Neil, 22, 51, 226 n.1 ‘Sir Danvers Carew’ (Mary Reilly), 210, 211, 213, 222 ‘Sister Hildegarde’ (Philomena), 188, 191, 192, 195–6 slanted framing, 157 The Snapper (1993, TV), 29, 34, 121–37 ‘Sneaky/Juan’ (Dirty Pretty Things) alcoholic, 76 comic elements, 72 exploiter, 30, 71 rapist, 72, 84–5, 88 social complexity, 67–8 social disruption, 63 solitude Chéri, 110 Dangerous Liaisons, 102 Liam, 143, 158 The Queen, 172, 176 soundtracks (film). See music (film) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 6, 65, 228 n.6 split-screen. See cross-cutting scenes Stack, Peter, 201 staircases, use of Dangerous Liaisons, 103–4, 230 n.6 Liam, 158 Mary Reilly, 215, 216, 219, 220 Philomena, 183, 192, 193 Stapleton, Oliver, 14, 17, 20, 39 storytelling, 4 Strangers on a Train (AH, 1950), 78 Sturges, Preston, 31 subjective shots, 182, 188 suicide Chéri, 117 Dangerous Liaisons, 29 My Beautiful Laundrette, 40

255

Prick up Your Ears, 28, 33 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 54, 58 superimposition, 131, 218, 219, 222, 223 suspense Dirty Pretty Things, 73, 74, 79–80 My Beautiful Laundrette, 37 Suspicion (AH, 1941), 75 symbolism, 24 airplanes, 183–4 color, use of, 105–6, 110 dark/light, 109 doorways, 44, 149 pearls, 110, 111, 113, 114 St Christopher medal, 189, 190 statues, 142, 143, 152–3, 172 time, 74, 85, 116, 117–18, 189 trains, 39–40, 48, 78, 226 n.4, 227 n.8 Tube network as connector, 59–60, 65, 69 urine as hostility, 42 use of hands, 205, 211, 214, 235 n.8 See also color, use of; doors; fire; food; phallic symbols; water, use of; yonic spaces sympathy Dirty Pretty Things, 88 Liam, 146 Mary Reilly, 208, 221 The Queen, 174 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 59 The Snapper, 135 Tamara Drewe (2010), 7, 31, 34 ‘Tania’ (My Beautiful Laundrette), 39, 41–2, 43–4 Taubman, Amy, 140 Tautou, Audrey, 30, 82 television (media), 170, 175, 185 ‘Teresa’ (Liam), 30, 144–6, 147, 151, 155 Thatcherism, 43, 51, 63, 64, 70 themes, 81–2 Thomson, David, 16–17, 202 three-shot, 100 thriller Dirty Pretty Things, 30, 72, 73, 75 My Beautiful Laundrette, 39, 226 n.3 Thurman, Uma, 103

256

Index

tilts, camera Liam, 139, 152, 156, 157 Mary Reilly, 203, 205–6, 208, 218, 223 My Beautiful Laundrette, 39 The Queen, 163 The Snapper, 125 tones Chéri, 108 Dangerous Liaisons, 108 Dirty Pretty Things, 86 Liam, 119 My Beautiful Laundrette, 226 n.5 Philomena, 187 The Queen, 172, 176 The Snapper, 119, 132 ‘Tony Blair’ (The Queen), 31, 163–73 Topaz (AH, 1969), 230 n.8 tragedy, 24–6 Chéri, 109, 119 Dangerous Liaisons, 94, 106 Liam, 139–40 Philomena, 181 trains, 40–1, 48, 116 See also symbolism Tube stations, 59–60, 65, 68–9 Tufano, Brian, 14 TV films, 28 unconscious mind Mary Reilly, 202, 223 The Snapper, 122, 126, 128 See also dreams; nightmares undertones Mary Reilly, 221, 222 My Beautiful Laundrette, 44 The Queen, 168 underworlds Dirty Pretty Things, 82, 88 Mary Reilly, 219–21, 236 n.9 Philomena, 181, 183 The Van (1996), 29 Vertigo (AH, 1958), 86, 115, 216 ‘Vicomte de Valmont’ (Dangerous Liaisons), 28–9, 93, 95–8, 99, 100–3

Vidal, Belén, 165, 232 n.2 violence Mary Reilly, 210–11, 217, 223–4 My Beautiful Laundrette, 48 visual motifs, 128–9, 153–4, 169, 192–3 See also parallel lines; symbolism ‘Vivia’ (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), 56–7 Warnecke, Gordon, 37, 38, 45 Wasteland (poem, T S Eliot), 58, 228 n.10, 235 n.8 water, use of Dirty Pretty Things, 73 Liam, 142 My Beautiful Laundrette, 41, 42, 49 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 54, 59 The Snapper, 130 Waymark, Peter, 22 window shots Dangerous Liaisons, 94 Liam, 145, 147, 148, 157 Mary Reilly, 211, 218, 222, 223 My Beautiful Laundrette, 48 Philomena, 192–3 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 52 The Snapper, 131–2 women place in relationships, 43–4, 54 relationship with daughters, 95, 100 relationship with fathers, 44, 58 relationship with men, 44–5, 57–8 relationship with mothers, 95, 100 relationship with sons, 108, 141 See also prostitution yonic spaces Dangerous Liaisons, 104–5 Dirty Pretty Things, 85 Mary Reilly, 211, 212, 216, 217 The Snapper, 134 ‘Yvonne Burgess’ (The Snapper), 124–5, 135–6 Zucchetti, Lucia, 17–18