A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, August 20, 2022

M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993)






 

Cast: Jeremy Irons, John Lone, Barbara Sukowa, Ian Richardson, Annabel Leventon, Shizuko Hoshi, Margaret Ma. Screenplay: David Henry Hwang, based on his playCinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

If M. Butterfly were made today, 30 years later, I have a feeling that it would be a very different film, more acute in its treatment of sexual identity and in its exploration of cultural disjunction. Though both elements are touched on in David Cronenberg’s film, they are subsumed in the more traditional movie preoccupations, love story and spy thriller. Cronenberg’s rather languid pacing doesn’t help bring out its subtexts, and I think Jeremy Irons is severely miscast as the deluded, obsessed diplomat. Irons is strongest at creating dryly ironic characters with a hint of menace, but he doesn’t quite get at Gallimard’s vulnerability and naïveté. John Lone, on the other hand, is remarkable in his transformation into Song Liling, so much so that when he appears with short hair and in suit and tie late in the film, it’s momentarily hard to realize he’s the same person. This is, I think, one of those films that were much better and more provocative as plays. 

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