Change Your Image
david-lambourne
Reviews
Nora (2000)
The Polite Version
Nora is a portrait of a strong women with a natural sexual self-confidence dealing with a man whose sexuality is convoluted and self-torturing. This is a fascinating theme, and in the hands of a director brave enough to tackle it head on it might have made a fascinating film.
Unfortunately Nora pulls all the important punches.
It ends, for one thing, with the completion of Dubliners, long before the completion of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. It is in Ulysses more than any other of his works that Joyce portrays Nora's frank and unashamed sexuality through the soliloquy of Molly Bloom that provides its unforgettably affirmative coda:
"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Much of the film is repetitious; there would have been ample space to deal with the composition of Ulysses. Leaving it out points up the film's essential timidity in the face of the historical and literary record.
The film's most daring scene -- and biggest cop-out -- involves the exchange of sexually explicit letters when the pair are in different counties, an exchange deliberately initiated by Joyce for the purpose of sexual relief. Joyce's side of the correspondence can be found in the Collected Letters. Joyce yearned to be accepted sexually for himself, with all his kinks and erotic hang-ups. Nora permitted him to confront those sides of his sexuality both in his life and in his work, and that more than any thing else is the reason they stayed together. The film too needed to confront those issues. Instead his words, spoken in voice-over against an image of Nora discreetly masturbating, consist of a few tame references to 'licking'. All the four-letter words, the masochism and the anal fantasies have been left out. A viewer unfamiliar with Joyce's work would be left with the impression that his sexual preferences were by modern standards pretty ordinary.
Other issues not dealt with are the psychological problems of Lucia Joyce, their daughter, who began to show signs of mental illness in 1930, and was treated for a time by Carl Jung. The image of Lucia in the film makes an oblique reference to Lucia's problems, showing her standing forlornly in the doorway or looking out on the world through iron railings, but a reader unacquainted with her story is unlikely to understand the significance of these images. Here as everywhere else the film turns its eye away from the darkest corner. It closes with Joyce and Nora, soon after the completion of Dubliners, walking arm in arm towards the end of a jetty as the sun sets. This anodyne image is presented to us as the final truth about Joyce and Nora. A film which consistently avoids its subject; an opportunity missed.
The Golden Bowl (2000)
Brave but heavy-handed attempt at the impossible.
This film has much to recommend it, including great performances by both leading actresses. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be watched by anyone but fans of Henry James' novels, and they will find it unsatisfactory in most of the ways that count. The symbolism comes over as creakingly obvious, and some of the performances -- Nick Nolte's in particular -- are mannered in a way that does not work in a naturalistic medium. There is a scene in which he sheds a sentimental tear that I found unbearably fake. An even more toe-curling moment comes when James Fox makes a snorting whahay! noise as he cuddles up with Angelica Huston. She however provides the most Jamesian performance of them all, cool, intelligent, principled, and yet irretrievably corrupt. Kate Beckinsale is perfect in the part of Maggie, a John Singer Sergeant portrait come to life. Uma Thurman as Charlotte provides the required blend of sexuality and desperation. But the impact of these performances is all too often dissipated by heavy-handed direction and an over-insistence on significance at the expense of naturalism. The loaded set pieces like the swashbuckling scene of Italian erotic intrigue and the peculiar oriental mime are unnecessary and laboured to death. The comic song at the Matcham weekend is incredibly irritating and yet it is brought back in over and over again. Overall the film succeeds in capturing the sense of the destructive power of the Ververs with their enormous wealth and passion for collecting things -- people as well as objects. But it does so with an over-reliance on artifice. Unfortunately much the same is true of the novel, as it is of late James in general. This project was doomed from the start.