As we head towards crunch time (i.e., packing up 34 years' worth of My History In New York), I hope to keep up with my self-allotted goal of three blog posts a week. We shall see how that goes. Some will probably be short, and I will try to keep the kvetching to a minimum, as it is hardly earth-shattering news that Moving Sucks - if you've so much as moved into a college dorm room, you already know that.
My husband is under the fond misapprehension that we are going to be throwing a lot of things away so as to lighten the load, and I am absolutely fine with that, as long as they are all his things. And yes- I do need the box under the bed that holds the book report on George Washington that I wrote in the third grade - the one with the incredibly awkward crayon drawing of himself crossing the Delaware, ineptly copied from the dust jacket of a Landmark Book entitled Meet George Washington! As dear Judith "Miss Manners" Martin's mother was so fond of remarking, "Be kind to your biographer." My kindness will consist of the fact that only documents that cast me in an unattractive light will be going into the shredder (by my count, two, or, at the most, three pages of notes on a long-ago crush who is now...well... over fifty.)
Speaking of history, and I believe we were - I went to the movies last week, which is something I do very seldom because I am Getting On in Years and thus am outraged at the thought of paying $14 to see a movie, especially since the AARP card that was urged on me when I hit the half-century mark is very deceptive at this stage of the game and won't entitle me to any significant discounts for at least another decade. But - forgive me, I wander, as happens at my age...where were we...? Ah - history.
The film in question was Belle, which has nothing to do with the heroine of that saccharine Disney flick about an interspecies marriage between a bookish French lass and a Beast who apparently keeps a Pilates machine in the basement.
Belle is actually named Dido Elizabeth Belle, and is referred to throughout the film as Dido, so I don't really know what made them call the movie Belle, unless it was that not many contemporary people have heard of the name Dido, and anyway Dido might be confused with Dodo. Since this is not a movie about an extinct bird who run a caucus race with Alice in Wonderland, the filmmakers prudently decided to err on the side of familiarity. Then, too, those film-goers who had suffered through four years of high school Latin would have shown up in the expectation of seeing an eighteenth century version of the Queen of Carthage being seduced and abandoned by a latter-day Aeneas and petulantly stabbing herself at the top of her own funeral pyre, because that would show him. (Wait...that's Tess of the D'Urbervilles...kinda, sorta.)
Belle is based on what is known of the biography of a young woman, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, who was born to a white English nobleman and an enslaved woman named Maria Belle. Maria Belle died when Dido was a small child, and Dido was taken by her father, an Admiral in the British Navy, to be raised side-by-side with her cousin Elizabeth Murray, another quasi-orphan being raised by their mutual great-uncle, William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield. At the mention of Mansfield, all of the Jane Austen fans (q.v. Mansfield Park, 1814) in the audience start thinking in an entirely wrong direction... well, maybe not entirely wrong, since Austen's most irritatingly meek and mealy-mouthed heroine, Fanny Price, is raised side-by-side with her more privileged cousins and is never allowed to forget that her social stature and her consequent value on the marriage market is far lower than theirs, and this is certainly a theme that runs through Belle. Although now that I think of it, Fanny, like Dido, is pursued by a high-class twit whose snobby family thinks he is throwing himself away, simply because he is condescending enough to want to marry her and then spend the rest of their mutual lives rubbing it well in that he "could have done a lot better, so be grateful, dear, and pass me those kippers."
Okay, so maybe the screenwriter's avowed aim of turning Dido Lindsay's story into a Jane Austen piece worked out better than it appeared to have done at first lorgnette-view... although all you have to do is look at the costumes (the film is set in 1779, or maybe it's 1781) to see that this is not the Empire-waisted Austenland that has been such a boon to the Historic Costumer Film Factory. The problem with the script seems to be that it can't quite decide which genre it wants to be. Is this a comedy of manners with the conventional happy ending (i.e., the marriage of the heroine to the only guy in sight who's not totally impossible)? Or is it a scathing critique of eighteenth century Britain's participation in the slave trade? Is it about the disenfranchisement of eighteenth century women, whatever their rank or color may have been? As Dido's cousin Elizabeth observes, Dido, who has been left a fortune - £2,000 per annum, which in those simpler days was Very Big Money - by her father, the Admiral, has increased in value on the marriage market - whereas the equally physically attractive Elizabeth has plummeted precipitously, due to the fact that she has no fortune. Why, Elizabeth wonders, would Dido want to enslave herself by marrying at all, since a married woman and everything she owns becomes the property of her husband? It's a good question, and one that is never answered - contemporary moviegoers mutter, "Biological imperative" and grab another handful of popcorn, squirming in our seats, because B.I. made all of us do stupid things, too.
There are elements of Fanny Burney's Evelina as well, particularly in the Vauxhall scene. I, for one, was delighted to see a cinematic representation of Vauxhall, for the pleasure garden figures heavily both in Evelina and Vanity Fair. In fact, it was while Dido's unsuitable suitor was conferring with his snotty brother (who is all set to woo Cousin Elizabeth, until it turns out that she has no money) as they strolled about the gardens admiring Dido, Elizabeth, and the fireworks, that I suddenly recognized the actor playing the snotty brother and cried out delightedly, "Crikey! It's Draco Malfoy!" As, indeed it was. Blessed or cursed with a countenance that always makes him look like he smells excrement, Tom Felton seems doomed to a lifetime of playing supercilious creeps whose sole mission is to sniff haughtily about the importance of keeping inferiors in their places.
While the movie was visually sumptuous and the actress playing Dido is so lovely as to make one feel churlish for finding fault of any kind, her very beauty was a factor that nagged at me as a flaw - not in her, but in the script. All of the characters are stock characters - within the first two lines of dialogue that comes out of anyone's mouth, we know who's a Good Guy and who's a Bad Guy. Of course it is unfair that Dido is considered less marriageable than her white cousin - but the inference is that the unfairness lies in the fact that, while both are equally pretty, Dido plays the piano better than Elizabeth. Suppose the casting director had made the brave and unconventional decision to have Dido played by an actress who was - not hideous, perhaps - but not outstandingly beautiful, either? A woman, in short, of ordinary beauty. A woman whose greatest beauty lies in her character, her integrity, her intellect, and her daring to defy the conventions of the society that raised her? We are offered a brief glimpse of this quality in the eponymous heroine, but then the camera swoons again over the heroine's chiseled cheekbones and Dido is sacrificed upon the altar of the Happy Ever After ending.
And here, I think, lies the major flaw in this movie - it is simply too pretty. The script goes pussyfooting around some very ugly subjects for fear of becoming ugly and disagreeable to the audience. Dido's Consciousness Raising Moment results from learning of an atrocity on which her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, who is also the Chief Justice of England, is to make a ruling that could affect the British slave trade - the real-life massacre of more than 140 slaves who were thrown overboard from the slave ship Zong so that the owners of the "human cargo" could collect the insurance on their ailing "merchandise" (who, of course were ailing precisely due to the inhuman conditions under which they were being transported.) For the first time, she seems to identify with her matrilineal side, and to realize that, but for a most unusual circumstance, such a fate could have befallen her, as well. Why, I wondered, did the screenwriter choose not to juxtapose scenes of the horror of the massacre with the ultra-civilized breakfast table of the Earl, where Dido makes abortive attempts to assert her new-found consciousness of the fact that her privileged upbringing as the niece - illegitimate, but still acknowledged - of an Earl means she would never be exposed to such atrocities, but that she is now aware of societal ills that had never troubled her hitherto? As the details of the massacre were related by the actors, I had no trouble imagining what it would have been like to be in that situation - sick, tortured, kidnapped from my home and all I hold dear, and finally forced overboard to my death, shackled, helpless to save myself. My inner eye saw it all vividly, and I was sick with this fresh evidence of the abominations mankind has perpetrated in the pursuit of wealth and power over other human beings. Why not show what would surely have flashed with equal vividness through Dido's mind?
All of which is not to say that I disliked the film - far from it. It held my interest, although there were very few surprises, and there was nothing objectionable to be found in its hour and forty-five minutes. It was easy on the eye in every possible way - the people, the scenery, the architecture, the costumes - all very pretty. But it nags at me that, while it is a good film, it ought to have been a great film - and is not.
B+, and we await this filmmakers next effort with interest.
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