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 play. Cinematography: 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. 

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, based on a  book by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

Jeremy Irons's performance as the twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle is spectacular in its subtle differentiation between the two men. It's one of David Cronenberg's body-horror films, and is said to have given many viewers, especially women, nightmares. 

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan, Charlotte Mitchell, Lynsey Baxter, Peter Vaughan, Colin Jeavons, Liz Smith, Patience Collier, Leo McKern. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by John Fowles. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Carl Davis. 

When I used to teach a course on Victorian literature, I would assign, in addition to Dickens and George Eliot and the Brontës, John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman because, more than any other critical work I know of, it illuminated what those 19th-century novelists were up to: what they were telling us that their contemporary readers knew firsthand about the manners and morals and sexuality of their times. And about the intellectual controversies, such as Darwinism and societal change, that raged in the times. And crucially, about the conventions and evasions of fiction itself. Not much of this is readily translatable into cinematic terms, so when Karel Reisz came to film the novel and Harold Pinter to write the screenplay for it, much of that, especially the metafictional aspect of Fowles's book, had to be jettisoned. Instead, Reisz and Pinter chose to tell the main story of the novel -- the love affair of Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) and Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) -- within the framework of a story about the actors, Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons), also having a affair while performing in a movie about Sarah and Charles. The result, for anyone who relished the novel, was bound to be disappointing, even with actors as skilled as the film's stars. The movie is splendidly mounted and photographed, the music score is ravishing, and the performances are subtle and witty. But the frame seems gratuitous. Fowles's novel famously had alternate endings for its story about Sarah and Charles: one conventionally tidy in the manner of Victorian fiction, the other enigmatic in the manner of modern novels. The film instead assigns the Victorian ending to Sarah and Charles, the modern one to Anna and Mike, which only approximates the point Fowles was trying to make about fictional conventions. Streep got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and it's her usual carefully detailed work. To some it's a little too detailed and self conscious, and it doesn't quite match with Irons's performance: He admitted that, as a stage-trained actor making his first major film, he was puzzled by what Streep was doing until he realized that she knew much more about acting for the camera than he did. It's possible that if you haven't read the book, you're at an advantage, but as one who admires the original, I find this version pretty but flat. 

The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004)

Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins, Al Pacino, Zuleikha Robinson, Kris Marshall, Charlie Cox, Heather Goldenhersh, Mackenzie Crook, John Sessions, Gregor Fisher, Ron Cook, Allan Corduner, Anton Rodgers, David Harewood, Antonio Gil. Screenplay: Michael Radford, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Bruno Rubeo. Film editing: Lucia Zucchetti. Music: Jocelyn Pook.

Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice is a respectable, almost satisfying version of an unsatisfying play. To put it mildly, The Merchant of Venice has not worn well over time, especially in the post-Holocaust world, and not just because of the potential for anti-Semitic caricature in the presentation of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Taken as a whole, it's one of Shakespeare's most cynical plays, a portrait of mistrust, not only between Christians and Jews, but also between men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, rich and poor, and perhaps, if we adhere to the contemporary reading that seems to inflect Radford's version, between gay and straight. It's a play full of "othering." In that context, the play's two most familiar speeches, Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" and Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strained" stand out, not as the homiletic antidotes to the prevalent mistrust in the play that they have often been taken to be, but as an ironic response to the omnipresent reality of avarice and prejudice that informs the play. Radford has done a good job of emphasizing the unsavory side of the mercantile life presented in the play. For all that Bassanio and Portia are embodiments of the traditional romantic hero and heroine of Shakespeare comedy, it also becomes clear that they enter into their relationship with less than noble sentiments: Bassanio needs money, which is why he goes to wive it wealthily in Belmont. Portia needs to be relieved of the absurd burden imposed by her late father's will, which leaves to blind chance the identity of her future husband. Radford also underscores the fact that the real love match of the play is between two men, Antonio and Bassanio, with the former willing to risk his fortune and eventually his life for the latter, whereas Bassanio can't even be bound not to part with the ring Portia has given him. It's a queer play indeed. The film is full of good performances, starting with Al Pacino's as Shylock, perhaps the raison d'être of the film. The part could have brought out Pacino's worst scenery chewing, but he reins himself in to emphasize the long-suffering Shylock, not the bloodthirsty Shylock, and in the end makes the character less stereotypically avaricious. Jeremy Irons is most effective when he shows Antonio's increasing awareness that he has been trapped, partly at least by his love for Bassanio. Joseph Fiennes is less effective as the wooer of Portia than he is as the stalwart friend of Antonio, but that's partly because Lynn Collins maintains Portia as the upper hand in their relationship -- so much so, that we might wonder what she sees in him. Radford has trimmed and rearranged some of the play, downgrading its great purple passage, Lorenzo's speech to Jessica that opens the somewhat anticlimactic Act V, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank." In fact, he gives the opening lines of the speech to an off-screen singer, and lets Lorenzo pick up with "Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." It's a sacrifice of poetry for the sake of drama, and I won't complain. There's poetry enough in the handsome production design and cinematography, full of echoes of Renaissance art. 

Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff, 1984)

I certainly don't think that Proust's In Search of Lost Time couldn't, or shouldn't, be adapted to another medium: a well-produced miniseries might well do the trick. But for all the talent involved in this adaptation of the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way, the return on investment is slight: an opulent trifle, a pretty picture of the Belle Époque. The most significant contributions to the film are made by its production designer, Jacques Saulnier, and its cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who keep the eye ravished even while the mind feels hunger pangs. There are some remarkable performances that make you feel that at least Proust has been read, including Fanny Ardant's Duchesse de Guermantes, Marie-Christine Barrault's wonderfully alive and vulgar Mme. Verdurin, and especially Alain Delon's Baron de Charlus. Yes, Proust's Charlus is fat where Delon is lean, but Delon's dissipated beauty -- he's like the picture of Dorian Gray when it had just begun to reflect its subject's debauchery -- and his sly appreciation of the Guermantes footmen give us something of the essential Charlus. I have a sense that Swann should be a good deal less handsome than Jeremy Irons and that Odette was not quite as sex-kittenish as Ornella Muti, but they move through their roles well even if their voices have been dubbed by French actors. (The dubbing is most noticeable in Irons's case, since his purring lisp has become so familiar over the years.) The screenplay, by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and Schlöndorff, plucks scenes from here and there in the Search, not confined to the titular section, but fails to put it all together in a satisfying whole. If ever a case could be made for a voice-over narrator, reflecting Proust's own Narrator, I would think it would be here.