Period pieces

Perhaps you think that Jane Austen is an author who has been squeezed dry by repeated film and television adaptations – you’re entitled to your opinion, but mine differs.  Any effort to revive my touchstone novelist will lure me in, whether a Masterpiece-y re-creation or a contemporary update, though there are some that wind up repelling me.  Sanditon (MC-71, PBS) falls a bit short, but does not fail to satisfy the basic requirements of all but the most devoted Janeite.  Adapter Andrew Davies has cut a wide swath through the 19^th century British novel, from Austen to Dickens, with many stops and sidetrips along the way.  Now he makes bold to complete the novel that Austen had just started at the time she fell ill and soon died, perhaps feeling a bit less constrained, and free to add dollops of sex and social issues.  The premise is simple, a humble but well-educated rural girl (played by Rose Williams) gets the chance to go and stay with the developer of the coming seaside resort of the title.  He has a Darcy-ish brother (Theo James); pride and prejudice are exchanged, sense and sensibility demonstrated.  There’s an old dowager (Anne Reid), for whose favor and inheritance various parties vie.  The setting is delightful and picturesque, the characters flavorsome, the intrusion of sex and slavery not altogether inappropriate (as in the excellent Mansfield Park of 1999).  It’s not Austen, but Austen-ish, and concludes in a manner that begs for another season, which I’m not sure I will want to see, but probably shall.  I tried to give up on this one, but nonetheless persisted.  

[P.S.  I've been admonished by one of those devoted Janeites that I was much too tolerant of this drivel, the taste of which she felt compelled to get out of her mouth by an umpteenth viewing of the Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice.  Not sure whether I should point out to her that screenplay was written by the very same Andrew Davies, or whether that fact merely proves that he can adapt great texts but not write himself.] 

A few years ago, Davies branched out and adapted Tolstoy.  I happened upon his War & Peace (2016, MC-72, Hulu) when Wild Rose sent me looking for more of director Tom Harper and star Jessie Buckley.  I wound up enjoying it so much that I went back and re-watched two older film adaptations of the book, for a compare and contrast exercise.  (I did not go so far as to reread the fat novel, but my partner in viewing did, so I kept asking her, “Is that the way it is in the book?”  For example, the brother-sister incest that also crops up in Sanditon – is that just a telltale Davies obsession?) 

Anyway, this is a version I have no problem recommending, a lavish production with settings to rival The Crown (though shot more in Baltic states than in Russia itself).  And with many familiar actors who grow into their roles, most impressively Paul Dano as Pierre, though Lily James makes a surprisingly successful transition from Disney Cinderella into a believable Natasha, and James Norton is a credible Andrei (with the likes of Brian Cox, Jim Broadbent, and Gillian Anderson filling subsidiary roles, as well as Jessie Buckley as Princess Marya, quite a change from a Glaswegian country singer, or the Russian fireman’s wife in Chernobyl). 

There was never any doubt whether I would watch this series through to the end.  My one quibble was one I rarely take note of, the inferior visual quality of HD video vis a vis actual film, though I appreciate the difference in expense that makes such farflung and grand-scale location shooting possible.  Nonetheless if you’re only going to watch a single epic adaptation, this is the one.

As for the 1956 King Vidor version of War and Peace (AMZ), I had unfinished business.  When it came out, I was nine and attending the Saturday kiddie matinee at my neighborhood movie theater, and happened to stay over for the first showing of the evening feature, probably wanting to see the battle scenes.  The problem was that I had never seen a movie with an intermission, and left at that point thinking it was over (or maybe I had to get home for dinner), missing the battle of Borodino.  So I was eager to revisit this film and see the rest, even though it was far from great.  Henry Fonda was badly miscast as Pierre, and while Audrey Hepburn was enchanting as Natasha, she was too old and too regally self-possessed for the character, and her actual husband Mel Ferrer was mistakenly given the role of Andrei. 

This was a time when the movies were trying to go big to compete with television, and they mounted monumental productions, of which this was one.  So it is sometimes clunky and sometimes impressive.  (Reminding me how each innovation in film technology involves a step backward in film artistry, until it is absorbed into practice, whether it’s the coming of sound, or of color, or of widescreen, or digital cinematography.)  The film turned into a monumental flop in this country, but as a cultural exchange in a Cold War thaw, became a big hit in the Soviet Union.

Stung by the cultural appropriation, the Soviets decided to mount the most massive film production in their history, a moonshot to rival the Americans in the same era.  Sergei Bondarchuk’s Voyna I Mir (CC) came out in four parts in the late 1960s, and in some ways it’s redolent of the Sixties, with a mix of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and oh-wow-psychedelic effects.  Though massacred by a dubbed and abridged release in the U.S., it was the first Soviet film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  The newly-restoredversion now on Criterion Channel is certainly the best I’ve ever seen.

With rubles no object, the result was predictably spectacular, in peace but especially in war, with fifteen thousand Soviet troops on assignment as well as hordes of extras.  While Vidor relied on impressionist sketches in battle scenes, and Harper had use of CGI enhancements, Bondarchuk mounted reenactments of the battles themselves and filmed them from every conceivable angle, including god’s eye view.  The effect is sometimes overwhelmingly real, and sometimes a bit tedious (where exactly are all those calvary galloping off to? can we glimpse a familiar face in the general chaos and mayhem?), which in fact fits my memory of reading the book oh-so-long ago.

Bondarchuk himself plays Pierre, not badly but nowhere near as well as Dano, who is closer to the character’s age.  A ballerina plays Natasha with the appropriate gamine quality and looks reminiscent of a younger Audrey Hepburn.  I thought the Prince Andrei was quite good, if suitably stiff, but his friendship with Pierre seemed overshadowed by the on-set enmity between the two actors.

Mixed in with its spectacle of ballroom and battlefield, and expressionistic flourishes like freeze-frames and superimpositions, the film is over-reliant on voice-over narration rather than dramatization, but it’s big and bold and oh-so-Russian, as well as Soviet.  A mixed bag, but a full one.

As we learned in textual studies back in the day, whether in English or history or bible analysis, any historical document is more reflective of the period it was written in than of the period under discussion.  This seems to apply to these films as well, more indicative of the times and means and aims of their production than of the original source material, whether it’s Hollywood in 50s, the Soviets in the 60s, or the BBC in this century.  But Tolstoy’s story endures – and compels.