Word: campione
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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...
...other hand, the character of the superlatively cultured and corrupted Madame Merle, Osmond's female counterpart and ally, is as complex as Isabel's yet far more comprehensible and as effectively conveyed, if not more so, in the film by Campion as in the book. The rest of the acting is good as well, though Malkovich's Osmond is a bit too repulsive to convince us that Isabel could ever have fallen...
Intriguing, visually beautiful, but emotionally distant, Campion's "Portrait" is a spare one--or rather, an abstract one with spaces that are left to the viewer to fill. In the end, viewers will get as much out of it as they are willing to pull from it. Campion doesn't give any answers, only openended questions, powerful in their suggestivenes but frustrating in their essential opacity...
...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...