Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is a sporadically effective attempt to bring an unfilmable novel to the screen. Two elements make Virginia Woolf's complex novel difficult to interpret in a screenplay:

(1) The story intertwines two stories which are virtually unrelated. Woolf created the novel by combining two of her short stories without actually bringing them together. In one of the stories a 60ish English matron recalls the decisions of her youth which led her to her current station, and which might have led to a very different life if reversed. In the other story, a shell-shocked veteran of WW1 loses his grasp on reality, and some insensitive decisions by his doctor provoke his suicide. Every Virginia Woolf story seems to include at least two occasions when people contemplate suicide, often followed by a successful attempt. Woold herself committed suicide about twenty years after this story was published, by filling her pockets with heavy stones and walking into a river.

The two stories have only the vaguest connection. Mrs Dalloway finds out about the young man's suicide because she has invited his doctor to one of her parties. Hearing his story prompts her into a Hamlet-style monologue (interior monologue in this case) about the nature and frailty of existence. It's not uncomfortable to treat two such unrelated stories in a novel, but there is a major problem in forging the novel into a screenplay. If it is truly the story of Mrs Dalloway, and if we really care about that story, all the screen time devoted to the troubled veteran seems like an interruption of the film's momentum. The uninformed treatment of mental patients is certainly a worthwhile topic, and one that Virginia Woolf knew intimately and well from the emotional distress she suffered throughout her own life, but one that seemed too ambitious to add to the to-do list this short film.

(2) The novel is told with a modernistic narrative style, ala Joyce's Ulysses. The actual time frame of the story is a single day in Mrs Dalloway's life as she prepares to host a lavish soiree for the creme de la British creme. Within that time frame are her recollections of the summer thirty years earlier when she was being romanced by three people - two male and one female - and her musings about how her life might have been if she had made one of the other choices. In addition to her thoughts, the narrative slips into the minds of others, including the disturbed former warrior.

The screenwriters had some success in meeting the second challenge. The narrative problems seem to have been handled quite smoothly through a combination of flashbacks and present day drama, with the occasional use of voice-over narrative to represent Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts. Unfortunately, the script really struggled with the other problem, to the point where the audience is left entirely baffled by all the scenes with the deranged soldier, and viewers feel stranded in episodes which seem at the time to have absolutely no bearing on the main plot. Although the soldier's final day of life does later generate an important reaction from Mrs Dalloway, that reaction is no more dramatic than it would have been if she had merely heard about it and imagined some details. The script came up with no good reason to portray the soldier in flesh and blood, and would have been better off if he had been kept as an off-camera anecdote, thus allowing more time to develop Mrs. Dalloway's two jilted lovers. When the great party finally begins, it just so happens that the two ex-pseudo-lovers both appear, although Mrs. Dalloway has seen neither for many years prior to the day of the party. The viewer is left wondering what their lives have been like in the interim, and that exposition would have been more interesting than the lunatic babbling of the soldier turned mental patient.

In my opinion, the film had a problem greater than the sticky narrative structure. As portrayed on screen, none of the three main characters is very interesting. Mrs. Dalloway seems to be a nice person, but is also a superficial twit who thinks of nothing but her social affairs. Her husband is a boring aristocratic bureaucrat of limited intellect and no imagination. The jilted male suitor is whiny and spends three quarters of the time pouting. While Mrs. Dalloway wonders whether she should have chosen the brainy, adventurous guy, it is apparent to us that their relationship really had no promise at all. She was too superficial to fit into his world, and he was just too immature and idealistic to handle marriage. He was in love with her only because he was young and she was a beautiful woman with a generous, pleasant nature and no intellectual curiosity. In his youth he failed to realize that those were not the ideal qualifications for a woman who would have to endure significant hardships in sweaty foreign assignments. Mrs Dalloway never shows any depth until she enters her "to be or not to be" monologue, but by then the credits are about to roll, and it is too late to show us what the jilted suitor ever saw in her in the first place.

The other problem is that Mrs Dalloway is not shown to have any real attraction for either man. In fact, the only time when she truly seems in love is when her idealistic girlfriend kisses her passionately, and she seems to be transfixed under a spell of delight and satisfaction. She has no similar response to either man! It seemed to me that the script seems to say that she chose the one man for security over the other man who was her true love, but the body language of the actors showed that the female suitor was actually her true love. The female suitor also seemed to me like the liveliest, most imaginative, best read, and most interesting of the four characters in their youth, so I was left wondering why Mrs. Dalloway never considered how her life might have been as a Boho lesbian! There is some defense for that in the novel, as well as in Virginia Woolf's own existence. After all, Woolf wrote about what she knew. She was not only a suicide and a frequent mental patient, but a bisexual who preferred women. I suppose that Vita Sackville-West, not Leonard Woolf, was the true love of Virginia's own life.

The thing I found most impressive about the film was the way Vanessa Redgrave and Natascha McElhone managed to seem like the same person, even though they do not look so much alike. I don't know how the two actresses worked it out, but they did a marvelous job of creating a mutual set of mannerisms which were identical down to the tiniest visible nuances: the same way of holding their hands, the identical accent and phrasing, the same spontaneous nervous smile, and so forth. The film featured good performances from both women, as well as from Lena Headey as the female suitor (playing a very young woman, although 31 at the time!) I might have been drawn into the story if only there had been some worthy males for them to play against!

Lena Headey (film clip)

 

 

 

Vita coi figli

I didn't do this film clip of a seventeen year old Italian TV show. Never seen it, probably never will, but when you see it you'll surely understand why I had to do some captures. Monica Bellucci, quite naked, 25 years old and jaw-droppingly beautiful ...

The guy with her, of course, is the legendary Giancarlo Giannini, but somehow I don't think your eyes will ever wander over to him.

Monica Bellucci (film clip)

Who Killed Buddy Blue?

Who Killed Buddy Blue (1996) is a made-for-cable erotic thriller targeting a couples audience.

Porn superstar Buddy Blue, adored by fans, and universally hated for the creep he his by everyone in the industry, is murdered during an orgy scene on set, which opens the film.  Someone injected an air embolism into his neck. Since they were filming, all possible suspects were on film. Only half of those were close enough to have committed the murder. The only forensic evidence was female genital secretions on the syringe, pointing to a woman murderer.

Detective Matt Munro (Anthony Addabbo) is divorced, his previous partner having stolen his wife. His current partner (Scot Atkinson) is trying to get his wife (Beth Tegarden) pregnant. The DA cuts a deal that has the porn producer/director cooperating and Addabbo splits the suspect list into likely versus unlikely and assigns the unlikely ones to Atkinson. Addabbo starts with the female superstar Ivy Saxon (Kimber Sissons). He interviews her in her home with nobody else present and he hasn't been laid in a year. Considering she is drop-dead gorgeous, a porn star, and sexy as hell, the obvious happens. She agrees to a lie detector test to clear her name, and passes it with flying colors. The mystery remains -- Who Killed Buddy Blue?

Beth Tegarden shows breasts trying to conceive with her husband. Kimber Sissons shows everything in sex scenes with Addabbo. Tane McClure, as another porn actress, also shows everything working and being questioned. Two unknowns also have substantial nudity in long scenes, but their characters are not identified in the dialogue, and I did not recognize them.

IMDb readers have this at 2.8, but with only 54 votes. Women score it 8.8 compared to 2.6 from men. While the absolute numbers are meaningless, the differential makes sense to me. The porn actresses are shown to be real people and not brainless bimbos or sluts, and Beth Tegarden plays an attorney. A sexy story with plot content that empowers women should appeal to the estrogen demographic. What I haven't mentioned is that the film is intentionally witty and low key. The dialogue is smart and clever, making it a fast watch. For instance, in a flashback, a porn actress is doing a scene with Buddy Blue, when he tries to enter her backdoor. She stops him, saying that is not in her contract.

To me, this is a solid C, but is probably only for the target audience. The sex scenes are too soft core for porn lovers, and there is too much screen time devoted to nudity and sex for erotic thriller fans, leaving what is actually a rather charming film with a very small audience of couples only.

It is finally available on DVD from RLDVs.com in a dual region (1 and 4) Mexican edition. The sound track is in English, and it has optional Spanish subtitles. Click on the image for purchase info.

 

Beth Tegarden

Tane McClure

Kimber Sissons

Unknowns

Varietes

 

Sara Montiel, one of the biggest stars in the history of Spanish Cinema, appeared in this provocative movie in 1971. It was a remake of Comicos, another movie from the same director, but instead of taking the story of an actress trying to get the lead on her theater group, he changed it to a Showgirl trying to do the same in a company.

Ana (Sara Montiel) leaves her boyfriend to start a relationship with the director of the company, who promised her the lead in the show. She gets her chance when the lead Showgirl, the old and washed-up Carmen gets sick. She has a lot of success, but when Carmen comes back she loses the lead. Time goes by and her relationship with the director changes, as both of them start to have real feelings for each other. Carmen finally retires and Ana has the chance to be the lead again and one more time she has a lot of success.

The end.