Whilst I have not crunched the numbers in any conclusive way, I would wager the ratio of major modern Australian directors to tackle period films is quite high. This predilection is not unique among national cinemas, but it is noteworthy, and explicable for a few reasons: the adaptation of canonical (on a curve) literature in the 1970s to legitimate the burgeoning film industry, the extension of this into television miniseries (e.g. For the Term of His Natural Life, Robbery Under Arms) in the 1980s, the cultural brand recognition carried by the ANZACs and Ned Kelly, and the 21st century turn towards murkier revisionist histories, among other things. Off the top of my head, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce, John Duigan, Simon Wincer, Richard Franklin, Rolf De Heer, Scott Hicks, Andrew Dominik, Gregor Jordan, Justin Kurzel, Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins, Kiev Stenders, and Jennifer Kent have all tackled period assignments, whether locally or abroad.
The American-born director John Curran is an interesting case, as someone who only moved to Australia in his mid-20s. Nonetheless, Curran made his debut feature in Australia, 1998’s Praise; was awarded Best Director for his efforts by the Film Critics Circle of Australia (the AFI Director award that year went to Gregor Jordan for Two Hands); and would subsequently make Tracks in Australia between American assignments Stone and Chappaquiddick (featuring an Australian, Jason Clarke, as bad driver Ted Kennedy). Having not seen Praise nor Curran’s sophomore feature, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, I can’t speak to how Curran made the leap from those contemporary-set independent features to the pricier, Warner-distributed period drama The Painted Veil (2006). However, on its own terms, The Painted Veil is an assured, modest but handsome undertaking. The antithetical phrase “chamber epic” springs to mind: it’s an intimate drama—at its core a two-hander—told against the larger sweep of a historical, multi-continent canvas.
Set in the 1920s and adapted from a work by M Somerset Maugham, the film follows bacteriologist Walter (Edward Norton) and his new bride Kitty (Naomi Watts), who move from London to Shanghai for his work. After Kitty has an affair with a diplomat (Liev Schrieber), they relocate to a remote village besieged by cholera outbreak, and their marriage is similarly ailing. Much of the film is focused on what we might call Walter and Kitty’s toxic relationship—before that term fell into popular parlance—anticipating Watts’ similar dip into that terrain in Gus Van Sant’s Sea of Trees. This material and the ultimate redemptive arc are well-handled by Curran and cast, though Norton tends to err towards feebleness in period fare (see also The Illusionist and Motherless Brooklyn). The scale is added by Stuart Dryburgh’s photography (he also shot The Piano) and Alexandre Desplat’s score.
The first screen adaptation of The Painted Veil, less than a decade after the novel’s publication, featured Greta Garbo in Watts’ role. Plenty (1985), directed by Fred Schepisi, is of a piece with both Curran’s film—as a period drama spanning continents (and in Plenty’s case decades) with an intimate focus on character and fraught relations between the sexes—and the woman’s films of the 1930s and 1940s headlined by the likes of Garbo, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. There is a crucial difference, however, in perspective. Unfolding largely in the 1940s and 1950s, but penned for the stage by David Hare in the late 1970s and filmed in the 1980s, Plenty is a period film permeated by an acidic contemporary sensibility and perspective on gender relations and women within male-dominated domains. Its brethren are not so much films like The Painted Veil but the similarly stage-derived Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Closer, interestingly both helmed by Mike Nichols, a regular collaborator with Plenty star Meryl Streep. However, while both those plays focus on a quartet of characters intersecting with one another, Plenty focuses squarely on Streep’s character Susan as she ping-points between other characters.
Schepisi was an old hand at period films by this point, having helmed The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Barbarosa, though Plenty is much more acerbic than those earnest productions. The same can be said for Streep, whose many other period films of the 1980s were more straightforward. I would rank Plenty as her best work of the decade, though it was not among the seven performances nominated by the Academy. The character Susan is traumatized by the Second World War and affected by three male partners—dashing wartime romance Sam Neill, stuffy but devoted diplomat Charles Dance, and callow Sting—who only kindle dissatisfaction and discontent. Streep plays alternately vulnerable and unsympathetic, ably supported by the abovementioned co-stars (interestingly, Dance and Streep did not get along, and this apathy shades their performances) as well as smaller turns by Tracey Ullman, John Gielgud, and Ian McKellen. The film has the heft and texture befitting a meaty, well-marinated piece of theatrical source material, but looks and moves like a film, and Schepisi gives scenes and actors the necessary air to breathe and play.
Ben