Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/27/25

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

Sunday, April 27, 2025

The Raggedy Rawney (Bob Hoskins, 1988)

Dexter Fletcher in The Raggedy Rawney

Cast: Dexter Fletcher, Zoë Nathensen, Zoë Wanamaker, Bob Hoskins, Dave Hill, Ian McNeice, Gawn Grainger, Jim Carter, Veronica Clifford, Rosemary Martin, J.G. Devlin, Jane Wood, Ian Drury, Timmy Lang, Jenny Platt. Screenplay: Bob Hoskins, Nicole De Wilde. Cinematography: Frank Tidy. Production design: Jiri Matolin. Film editing: Alan Jones. Composer: Michael Kamen.

The Raggedy Rawney was not well-received by critics when it was released, and it's certainly messy in tone and narrative. But I found it oddly compelling, if only because it's not quite like anything I've seen lately. It's a fable with anti-war overtones about a deserter in the middle of an unspecified war in an unspecified Eastern European country. (It was filmed in the former Czechoslovakia.) Tom (Dexter Fletcher) is a new soldier who is shocked into deserting by the carnage of an attack. Lashing out and partially blinding his commanding officer (Jim Carter), he escapes into the forest where he encounters a little girl (Jenny Platt) whose family has been killed and strung up as a warning to anyone who would hide men deserting from the army. She is playing with her dead mother's makeup, and the traumatized Tom lets her make up his face and dress him in one of her mother's dresses. Scared off by the movement of troops nearby, he runs deeper into the forest, still wearing dress and makeup, where he spots a caravan of Roma. When he comes across Darky (Bob Hoskins), the de facto leader of the caravan, Tom points him toward a spot in the river where the fish are plentiful, which motivates Darky to bring him back to the group and treat him as a "rawney," a madwoman with second sight. Tom remains mute until he strikes up a relationship with Darky's daughter, Jessie (Zoë Nathensen), who discovers that he's not a woman but keeps his secret. It's a setup with Shakespearean overtones that meanders first into comedy and then into tragedy. The Raggedy Rawney marked Hoskins's debut as a director and is the only film for which he wrote the screenplay (in collaboration with Nicole De Wilde), basing it on a tale told him by his Romani grandmother.