After a childhood of abuse by his evangelistic father, misfit Oscar Hopkins becomes an Anglican minister and develops a divine obsession with gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a rich Australian heiress shopping in London for materials for her newly acquired glass factory back home. Deciding to travel to Australia as a missionary, Oscar meets Lucinda aboard ship, and a mutual obsession blossoms. They make a wager that will alter each of their destinies.
19 Feb Oscar and Lucinda (1995)
Obsession, Compulsion
This is one of my favourite movies. Regular readers of my comments will wonder why I elevate it to my “must see” category
Part of the reason I want you to see it is because of how well it pairs with Cate’s masterpiece, “Heaven.” Now, that film can stand on its own as a transcendent cinematic experience. It easily shifts us from a “real” world into one more magical and over the course of the experience that distance increases.
It took Kieslowski’s notion of cinematic distance and added the journey to that distance. It is one of the most important successful experiments in cinema and it owes much to the collaboration of Cate.
That reflects on this. A smaller project. A less ambitious director, but still with an affecting emotional directness. A pre-existing story that has literary strengths that become cinematic defects. And yet there is that same collaboration with the creating of an alternative magical reality fuelled by obsession.
There is that same smooth slide from here to there. There is that same equating of wilderness (a Herzogian river) to the internal landscape. The same trigger of the gamble.
And also, there is the remarkable glass chapel. One shot has it moving down the river, but it seems as if it is floating through the trees. You are dead if that does not stick with you for years.
Alas, not much is made of a central image in the book: the tensed glass tears that explode when gently traced at their origin.
The major flaw is Fiennes. Both brothers have a sort of forehead acting style which unravels much of the subtleties of Cate’s acting by breathing. But she is so breathtaking an actress in both these films, even though she is only the referent in the last part of this.
See the two films in one night. Any order.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
No Comments