Word: gaudier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fact, a comparatively restrained one. The messiah in question was Henri Gaudier, a gifted French sculptor who, having emigrated to London, became a central figure in the avant-garde before being killed in World War I at the age of 24. Russell's theme is the long, violent and platonic love affair between Gaudier and a neurotic Polish writer almost twice his age, Sophie Brzeska, whose name he joined to his. Hampered by poverty, his life truncated at a moment when most artists are only beginning to work, Gaudier-Brzeska did not produce a large body of sculpture...
EARLY IN THE FILM, Gaudier Brzeska is chased by guards from the Louvre for indecent dress, an untucked shirttail. He cludes them to emerge sprawied stop a giant Negro sculpture, screaming with messianic fervor. "Art is alive! People have to be shocked into life!" At a Bohemian dinner Gaudier Brzeska's lack of restraint disgusts his pseudo-sophisticate hosts. An art dealer, Shaw baits him maliciously until his braggadaccio traps him into promising an exhibition of non-existent marble sculptures the following morning. So the irrepressible Gaudier Brzeska drags a simpering homosexual friend out of bed rushes to a cemetery...
...straddling he peak, black cape whipping in the winds, he cuts a lone prophet figure against a clear sea; meanwhile the dances out her care-free spiritual applause on the sand, crying. "It will be a hymn to Truth and Beauty!" Or take the ending of the film: Gaudier-Brzeska's last unsculpted block of stone stands forgotten in a Paris sewer. Through the grating above, all of Paris can be seen celebrating the end of the war, while below Sophic Brzeska circles the stone in silent mourning...
...problem is that Russell's idea of a psychological study probes no deeper than surface sensuality. He is indifferent to the artist beneath. For his empathy with Gaudier-Brzeska is based on no more than the latter's rebellion against society's distrust of freely expressed emotion. It is finally a shallow empathy that perverts sympathy into sensationalism. He sees himself as the artist messiah, bridging the gulf between art and life with a film style incarnating creative energy. But his subject depends on its special social and artistic history for its form and interest, and Russell piles on period...
Russell films as if life were a field day for the senses, but senses robbed of the emotions that give them substance. He makes Gaudier-Brzeska's tragic sex life into a raucous wrestling match, and uses dazzling film effects as if they came off a camera's vanity table. As he wallows in style he turns what should be a tribute into an exercise in his taste for the absurd. This is simply anti-erotic and all too conventional...