Plot intro
Two middle-class sisters with unpronounceable names live in a mining town in the Midlands. Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson) is courageous, irreverent, defiant, and starts to fall for repressed, ruthless businessman Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed). Meanwhile, Ursula Branwen (Jennie Linden), is sensitive, empathetic and cautious, but falls in love with Gerald’s best friend, the effervescent and passionate Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates). Unfortunately for both of them, Rupert is married to stuck-up society-climber, Hermione (Eleanor Bron) and Gerald is a dick.
Doug says...
And we’re into the 1970’s! We start with an adaptation of a DH Lawrence novel which is very faithful to Lawrence’s overall style - and that style is…HORNY.
For anyone who has had to trudge through a Lawrence novel at university like me, you will know that Lawrence’s novels (Sons and Lovers etc) swing between wild horniness and very dull emotional interludes which are somehow still horny but also depressing.
This film really captures that. First of all, they cast Alan Bates who is incredibly fit. Then they make him run naked through fields of wheat, or seduce Jennie Linden’s Ursula with a camera shot focusing - focusing - on his bare arse. And then they’re like, no this isn’t horny enough. So they make him have a full-frontal nude wrestling scene with Oliver Reed where you’re 90% sure they’re about to start having sex halfway through. I’m still not entirely sure they didn’t.
All four of the leads get naked in this film which feels a bit like the soft-porn entry at the Oscars. There’s a lot of shuddering desire, sex in fields, people just taking their tops off at a second’s notice and then SO. MANY. MONOLOGUES. Poor Jennie Linden has to go from having a nice time at a picnic to standing in a muddy field yelling about how Alan Bates doesn’t truly love her - in about thirty seconds flat with no recognisable character arc or intention behind it.
Equally Glenda Jackson - who is the celebrated winner here - has no real intention behind what she does. Instead she’s just a sculptor who shags Oliver Reed after his dad dies and then dresses up as Cleopatra with a mad gay artist and then Reed tries to strangle her before trudging off into the snow and dying.
If it sounds like I’m utterly bewildered - I am. I have absolutely nothing useful to say about this film other than - what the fuck?!
It was directed by Ken Russell who is known for his ‘arty’ films and this clearly sits up there. There’s a sense of the experimentation that made Darling so thrilling - it’s clumsy but innovative. One scene where Oliver Reed is professing love to Glenda Jackson involves lots of weird fade outs and shots of Jackson writhing on the ground. Another bit where Alan Bates goes in for a snog with Jennie Linden then turns into a scene of them both naked, running through fields at each other - but shown sideways so it looks like he’s falling and she’s rising. It’s madcap but they’re clearly enjoying trying new things.
Is it a masterpiece? I don’t personally think so. It’s fallen into the category of ‘interesting films that belong in their era’ along with Room at the Top and Darling. Jackson isn’t particularly impressive here so I’ve no idea why she won the Oscar - she did a lot more amazing work that shows off her skills elsewhere.
But then, Alan Bates is extremely fit, so…
Eleanor Bron does a symbolic dance at one point and frankly it’s the (unintentionally) funniest scene of the film. If nothing else, this surely put her on the track of comedy acting that saw her later steal scenes in Absolutely Fabulous as Patsy’s awful mother.
I do not get it. I do not get it!
Mark
2/10
I’ve never read a DH Lawrence, having been put off by a young, acerbic English teacher at school who moaned about how comparatively tame and turgid Lady Chatterley’s Lover is. This film hasn’t inspired me to take to the controversially sexual early-20th century author.
The most noticeable aspect of the film is Ken Russell’s direction. Russell is probably most famous in our generation for walking out of the same Celebrity Big Brother series that saw Jade Goody, Jo O’Meara and Danielle Tinsley subject Shilpa Shetty to appalling acts of racist bullying. I remember he came across as a randy, and rather tedious, old eccentric. This film confirms my perception of him.
The direction is equally eccentric as well as lively and unpredictable. There are deliberately incongruous jump cuts where characters speak off-screen and suddenly appear in different positions in the scene with no movement depicted. Scenes end without the usual conclusion and characters move and speak with erratic and impromptu actions. To be fair, it’s not so arty that it descends into esoteric surrealism. I liked some touches such as a sudden cut from one young couple entwined naked together in post-orgasmic exhaustion to another young couple also entwined naked together but having just drowned tragically in the estate’s pond during an erotic liaison. It’s interesting that any sex scenes come across painful, uncoordinated, desperate and animalistic, while any death scenes and especially the extremely gay naked wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, tend to be much more pleasurable, sombre and peaceful. The conflation of death, conflict and sex permeates the film and its experimental style is demonstrative of a very different, daring and changeable era of film-making.
The problem is, though, none of it really goes anywhere. I don’t think this is a problem with the film but more with the source material. The story is evidently about people struggling to marry their restrictive, repressive Victorian upbringing with the post-war rebelliousness, decadence and nihilism that 1920s upper-class society had to offer. A sultry, balletic dance recital is interrupted with what the characters really want - a sexy, crazy jazz party; Gudrun symbolically demonstrates women’s confrontation of men by successfully fending off a herd of bulls with an avant-garde dance. Roles and responsibilities are becoming questioned, fluid and discarded. But characters behave with such random forcefulness and self-absorption that the film becomes tedious after the halfway point. By the time our core four are climaxing (in all senses of the word) in the Alps, I wanted one of them to burst into flames or something just to change up the pace. I lost track of how many times someone decided to just throw themselves on the floor laughing, crying, both, or just prance about whilst speaking for no reason other than to be anarchic.
And our Glenda? She was a truly great actress. We saw her as King Lear alongside Celia Imrie and Jane Horrocks and she was notably the only one of the three who knew what she was doing, and owning it. Her performance as Elizabeth I on the BBC is considered one of the best representations of the Queen ever (yes, even better than Blanchett and Dench’s versions). And her second Oscar win was right around the corner, so we will see her again soon.
However, I don’t think this is truly representative of her skills. She seems to be having a good time with the energy and exuberance required for a character who, admirably, doesn’t seem to give a shit what people think about her. But some of the more histrionic scenes (such as a sex scene in which she yells out “SHALL I DIE?!” in the throes of passion) elicited laughter as opposed to awe.
Coming after a series of astonishing Oscar-winning performances of the '60s from Dame Maggie Smith, Taylor, Streisand and Hepburn, Women In Love won’t go down as one of my favourites in the Best Actress canon even if it did have some fun and memorable directorial touches.
Eleanor Bron owns every scene she is in as a haughty, snarky, pretentious and awful character. I feel I would get along with her. We once saw her on stage with Anne Reid in A Woman Of No Importance. At one point, a character nearly knocked down the scenery (the entire frontage of a late-Victorian house), to which Bron, without breaking character at all, ad libbed “Lady Hunstanton, I had no idea your house was in such a state of disrepair!”
The final half hour in the Alps where the story descends into chaotic hysteria.
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