Word: campion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...certainly not by the opening credits of "The Portrait of a Lady." As images of young women in various poses and distinctly 20th century attire drift on to the screen, you think for a moment that you've stumbled into the wrong theatre. Then you realize it's Jane Campion directing, and you brace yourself for a completely "reinterpretive" take on the Henry James classic...
These questions are inherent in the book as well, but there is more psychological penetration in James than in Campion, even if the same ambiguities remain. Watching the film, you may wonder once or twice whether there isn't a strain of masochism underlying Isabel's sexuality--or vice versa...
...film opens with black-and-white shots of modern young women in the postures of liberation. An hour later there is a surrealist and, by Victorian standards, very racy peek into Isabel Archer's fantasy life. In every way, The Portrait of a Lady, director Jane Campion's version of the Henry James novel, provides steeply raked, hugely self-conscious angles on Isabel, who is often glimpsed in a murky bluish light. It's as if Campion were determined not to shoot a single frame that might be confused with a Merchant-Ivory production...
This is, perhaps, a commendable ambition. But it is also a mannered, distancing and irritating one. Campion's style is not helpful in involving us in one of James' most admired variations on his most basic theme: an innocent young American confused and seduced by wily European sophisticates. Neither is the near catatonic coolness with which Nicole Kidman plays a woman whose impulses toward self-definition are balanced (or unbalanced) by equally strong impulses toward self-destruction...
...easy to see why Isabel would attract Campion (The Piano), who is drawn to women trying to assert themselves against the social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction...