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Feast of July
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Look,
I try to be good. I try to approach each new film fresh, on its own terms –
even if it does have that dreaded label A
Merchant Ivory Film affixed. I know that to simply dismiss a whole slice of
cinema – tasteful, middlebrow, beautifully photographed – is an abhorrent
critical practice. And haven’t there actually been one or two decent Merchant
Ivory films, The
Remains of the Day (1993) for instance? At least Feast of July – assigned to a new director
(but already a television veteran) in the stable, Christopher Menaul – is
vastly more watchable than that Ivory-handled dud, Jefferson in Paris (1995).
But,
watching another lush, undoubtedly well-put-together Merchant Ivory adaptation
of an old novel about love and desire strangled by the manners of another era,
I find myself inevitably wondering: Why do they bother? What is the appeal? I
continue to suspect the worst: that these films are made for audiences who only
like cinema when it is legitimated by heavy reference to respectable canons of
literature, theatre and music.
Feast of July is
not as leaden or as obsequious as some other Merchant Ivory productions. Now
that the literary oeuvres of D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster have been throughly
excavated for screen adaptations, it’s H.E. Bates’ turn. This one comes hot on
the heels of A Month by the Lake (John Irvin, 1995). It deftly combines a wash of pastoral lyricism, a dash of
Thomas Hardy Tess-like
tragedy, and a sombre note of working-class realism.
The
plot begins grimly. Bella (Embeth Davidtz from Schindler’s List) is desperate
and alone. She’s just suffered a miscarriage, and is now wandering about the
countryside, looking for the cad who promised to marry her – that’s Arch (Greg
Wilson), a right piece of work. Putting this whole sorry mess behind her, Bella
settles into a family that kindly takes her in. Then the three adult sons in
this family all take a shine to her, and tensions start to simmer.
Bella
is an innocent who inadvertently creates havoc wherever she goes. It would have
been easy for the filmmakers to portray her as an insidious Eve/femme fatale
figure, driving men to their doom, but Davidtz is allowed to give this
character a welcome, introspective depth. But here, to upset the balance of the
piece, comes the fascinating male, armed with his pathos. (For more on this
theme, see my discussion of male pathos in The Baby-Sitters Club [1995].)
As
the drama of the piece proceeds, Bella is virtually upstaged by the magnetic presence
of Con (Ben Chaplin). Con wins Bella’s hand just as the devilish Arch reappears
on the scene with his vulgar taunts. Con is a fascinating character: brooding,
inarticulate, simple, soulful, yet powered by a subterranean propensity for violence.
It’s this violence that is, in fact, the key to the pathos – for, as in Clint
Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the drive to violence registers as a species of Original Sin marked
upon the male soul. Because of Con’s overpowering urge in this direction, the
story eventually becomes as much his tragedy as Bella’s.
“There
is no escape from the past”. This is the extremely well chosen promotional line
that comes with Feast of July. It
signals the obsessively recurring theme of many Merchant Ivory productions: the
burden of history, and of an individual’s past sins, which return to haunt the
protagonist (as in The Remains of the Day).
However, the marketing tag may also announce an even darker truth: that the
Merchant-Ivory team intend to never stop making pretty period pictures.
It’s
all neatly done, but instantly forgettable. Of course, merely choosing to make
a historical piece and giving it a glossy sheen does not immediately condemn a
film to vacuous irrelevance. When some filmgoers derided Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) as “Merchant Ivory fluff”, I fumed. But Feast of July, for all its unquestionable craft, is, alas, one of
those stately historical films that indeed feels like it is still locked up in
a chest of yesterday’s literary greats. It simply did not speak to me on any
level. That could be my fault, but (at least in this case) I strongly suspect
it’s the film’s sole responsibility.
Postscript:
This review expresses a long-held antipathy on my part to a certain kind of
cinema, but I did eventually turn around on the case of Merchant Ivory – when
the quality of their work increased steeply (in my view) in the later 1990s.
See the column “Halls of Ivory” in my Patreon PDF View from the
Couch (2000-2002), as well as some
reviews linked below.
MORE Merchant Ivory: Le Divorce, The Golden Bowl, Cotton Mary, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries © Adrian Martin January-February 1996 |
