Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Director: Jane Campion
Director: Jane Campion
Stars: Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey, Martin
Donovan, Viggo Mortensen, Shelley Winters, Shelley Duvall, Richard E. Grant
The
Portrait of a Lady opens with voiceover of modern liberated women (with
predominantly Antipodean accents) talking about kissing. A montage follows
during the film’s opening credits, showing contemporary women of different
cultural backgrounds lying in a circle, dancing, staring into camera, and so
on. The film then cuts to Nicole Kidman—as the film’s heroine Isabel Archer—in
1870s England, dressed in period garb, frizzy hair severely curtailed, and
hiding away following an unwanted marriage proposal. The film’s opening minutes
nicely encapsulate Campion’s interest—an interest that pervades her
filmography— in women both past and present, their spirits and agency, and
attempts to domesticate and discipline them by various, frequently patriarchal
entities.
Following
our previous looks at Australian directors working overseas (see here and here), The Portrait of a Lady finds
Campion—like Sam Neill and Russell Crowe a product of both New Zealand and
Australia—adapting Henry James’ door-stopping 1881 serial turned novel to the
screen. Kidman’s Isabel Archer is a young woman of independent mind bequeathed
a considerable inheritance following the passing of her uncle (John Gielgud).
Rejecting various romantic suitors, she seeks to travel Europe. However, her
supposed friend, the scheming Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey), orchestrates a
union between Isabel and the cruel Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), and Isabel
becomes trapped in an unhappy marriage, tormented by her psychologically
abusive husband.
Campion
studied at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in the early 1980s,
following in the footsteps of former graduate Gillian Armstrong, whose
film Mr Brilliant Career was
impressionable on the younger director. She recalls how “Seeing Gill Armstrong
make My Brilliant Career,
it was just like ‘God they’re going to let girls do it too’ … it just opened up
that door in my mind that maybe it would be possible for me too” (Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity,
p. 282). That first shot of Kidman in The
Portrait of a Lady—period garb, curtailed frizzy hair—
intertextually evokes My
Brilliant Career’s heroine Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis in her
star-making role), but where Sybylla’s rejection of suitor Harry Beecham (Sam
Neill) serves as that film’s denouement, here Isabel’s rejection of Lord
Warburton’s (Richard E. Grant) proposal is the story’s starting point. Their
reasons for rejecting these proposals are the same, yet where My Brilliant Career ends
on a note of promise and self-possession, Campion’s film chronicles the erosion
of its protagonist’s agency and self-possession over the course of the story.
Gender
politics, the politics of relationships, and how women negotiate their
identities within relationships are recurring motifs in Campion’s work (Bright Star, her film about the
romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, is anomalous in its positive
presentation of a healthy, but still ultimately tragic, onscreen
romance). The Portrait of a
Lady is potentially Campion’s bleakest meditation on these
themes. Its critical reception was chilly in the aftermath of The Piano, and it’s easy to see
why: it lacks the former film’s novel setting and hooks; it’s heavily
dialogue-driven (which The
Piano wasn’t by virtue of its central conceit), though not
without moments of expressionism; and it’s an unsentimental, resolutely
no-swoon zone, turning a cold shoulder to The Piano’s complicated romanticism and eroticism.
Yet even at its most baroque and remote, there’s much to admire about The Portrait of a Lady’s
infusion of Gothic romance with feminist lament, and there’s a tactility to the
film not typically seen in heritage cinema, nor in those other noteworthy
adaptations of Henry James by producer-director team Ishmael Merchant and James
Ivory (i.e. The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl).
The
film’s cast list reads like the Tombstone of
heritage cinema, peppered with veteran performers (Gielgud, Shelley Duvall,
Shelley Winters) and newer talents and stars on the ascent (Grant, Mary Louise
Parker, Christian Bale, Viggo Mortensen). Malkovich brings some of his Dangerous Liaisons baggage to
the part, and while his character is somewhat more one-dimensional here he
excels in exuding Osmond’s nonchalant cruelty. Hershey, who’d do further noteworthy
work with Australian directors in subsequent years (see Passion, Lantana, Insidious), similarly excels as
the inscrutable and damned Madame Merle and was Oscar-nominated for her
efforts. Also doing great work is the great Martin Donovan—best known for his
caustic everyman roles in Hal Hartley films like Trust and Amateur—as Isabel’s ailing
cousin, sympathetic ear, and unrequited romantic prospect. Front and centre
(see the poster above) is Kidman, perennially underrated and skilfully essaying
the curdling of Isabel’s ambitions and spirit. Alas, the film was released
between Batman Forever and The Peacemaker, which is like
being released between a hate crime and cardboard, and it would be a few years
before Kidman started earning the props she deserved.
The
Portrait of a Lady likewise deserves some props. The film and its director’s
post-Piano bad
rap continued with her next project, Holy
Smoke, leading to numerous articles (frequently by male critics)
lamenting or lampooning her fall, such as ‘Losing the Way: The Decline of Jane
Campion’ by Adrian Martin and ‘Holey Smoking Reputation’ by Phillip Adams. But
Campion has proven her longevity and vitality, and her cold and coolly
received The Portrait of a
Lady warrants a similar reassessment.
Ben Kooyman