Screen Scene
SCREEN SCENE
By John-Carlos Cantu
SENSE & SENSIBILITY
[1995. Directed by Ang Lee. Cast: Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet. Columbia Pictures. 135 mins.]
Who does Emma Thompson think she is? ... everybody? Make no mistake about it. Sydney Pollack produced Sense and Sensibility. Ang Lee directed Sense and Sensibility. For that matter, Jane Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility. But it's Thompson's film.
Perhaps the single most heartwarming thing about this recent translation of Austen's novel is Thompson's exceedingly generous screenplay. She's written a sure Oscar-winning script that gives most of the great dialogue to the film's supporting cast.
Yet make no mistake about it: This Thompson's movie ... all the way.
Jane Austen's romance concerns the three Dashwood sisters- sensible Elinor (Thompson), dreamy Marianne (Winslet), and youthful Margaret (Emilie Francote) - whose temperaments are as very different as night and day. When their father dies unexpectedly, the family's mansion passes to the son of his first marriage. And just as suddenly, the girls are displaced from their warm gentry life to being perilously close to impovershment. Fortunately, they and their mother (Gemma Jones), are given the use of a relative's cottage and they adjust themselves to their new circumstance.
But before they vacate their estate, Elinor meets her sister-in-law's brother, Edward (Hugh Grant), and they are immediately smitten by each other's practical outlook on life. Elinor's pragmatic nature is readily attracted to Edward 's insecure longing to be a rural church pastor. Yet, alas, Elinor's lack of fortune also conspires to separate the reserved, and secretly infatuated, couple.
By contrast, after the girls have settled into their modest new surroundings, the high-spirited Marianne is immediately courted by a wealthy neighbor, Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman). Almost simultaneously, she's swept off her feet by the passionate John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Brandon is the more secure of the two men, but Willoughby is clearly the love of her life. Given Marianne's mercurial temperament, she's torn between her visceral attraction to Willoughby and Brandon's honorable comportment.
In this tidy contrast between resolute characters, Jane Austen has crafted a tale of manners whose sibling ups and downs are both delightful and incisive. Indeed, perhaps Thompson's wisest move is not to fiddle too much with an already proven commodity. She merely modernizes its premise without being pushy.
There's a thoroughly neo-feminist smarts about Thompson's play that allows us to see through the patriarchal class structures of 19th century England without being too oppressed about these sisters' romantic relations. Thompson tums the tidy trick of having her proverbial cake ... while eating it, too.
The intelligence of this talented actress is now coming more clearly into view. Thompson's obviously absorbed that time honored notion that the best way to look smart is to make everyone else around you look smarter. Thompson's generosity with her peers in Sense and Sensibility tums her work in this film - both written and performing - into what may be a future film classic. At the least, there can be no question now but that she, and Jodie Foster, are the signal actresses of her generation.
Jane Austen's not having such a bad year, either.
With this film; last year's BBC production of Persuasion; Amy Heckerling's cheeky updating of Emma by way of Clueless; and the up-coming Mansfield Park, Austen's got a serious hot streak going. Add to these films the ever-popular 1940 Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson Pride and Prejudice and Austen's pretty much set on the big screen.
What she says about 19th century England 's social life will be of perennial interest as long as there is a palpable division of the sexes by money, morals, and personal obligations. By shrewdly casting her dilemmas in thoroughly human foibles, Austen has crafted characters and predicaments that have - and will always have - a timeless emotional resonance.
It says quite a bit of Emma Thompson that at her comparatively young age, she's seen her way to this considerable bit of wisdom. Following the success of Sense and Sensibility, it's good to know that nice people can indeed finish first.
BURNT BY THE SUN
[1994. Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov. Cast: Nikita Mikhalkov, Oleg Menshikov, Ingeborga Daupunaite. Russian with English subtitles. Sony Classics. 134 mins.]
Repentance may have been among the first 11 of a Russian film cycle to criticize the Soviet Stalinist model. Although, of course, the Eastern Europeans turned this sort of cinema into a state-subsidized cottage industry during the Cold War. Yet critiques of communism aren't likely to get much more effective than Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun.
A love story, a morality tale, and a searing political condemnation, Burnt by the Sun packs a considerable wallop in its short running time. Mikhalkov has quite a bit of bitterness to get off his chest. And he does it with an economy, wit, and intelligence that clearly deserved last year's Academy Award Foreign-Language Oscar.
Dmitrii (Oleg Menshikov) shows up at his ex-girlfriend's home a decade after his sudden disappearance. Marusia Ingeborga Daupunaite), tried to commit suicide after he left, but she is now married to Sergei Petrovich Kotov (Mikhalkov), a fabled Bolshevik military hero.
Kotov and his in-laws live a countryside idyll away from the bustle of the revolution. He still serves the party, but only in that time-honored tradition with which revered military men are admired once they're out of power. Life is better than any of them can imagine.
Yet Kotov is vaguely aware that Dmitrii 's sudden return is not the benign event it ostensibly seems. For it tums out that Dmitrii is a former White Russian now working for the Soviet secret police and Kotov is to be the casualty of one of the Communist party's recurrent purges that took place in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
Both men know the decision has been made and the players must take their positions. What is left is the slim reed of hope.
With this knowledge in our hands, Mikhalkov - who starred, directed, and wrote Burnt by the Sun - allows us to witness the subtle, almost diaphanous, illusions each of these characters cherish despite the growing shadows that ominously surround them. And what, in a less sensitive circumstance, might have turned into a heavy handed diatribe, is instead a painfully all-too human tale of lost opportunities and deliberated considerations. Mikhalkov is concerned about those loves radiating outward like penetrating rays of the sun muted by a thoughtless and insidious evil.
Surely the greatest villain of the 20th century - despite his dedicated competition - Stalin emerges from this side-long portrait as an all pervasive omnipresent malignancy whose hypocritical and mendacious stewardship wrecks devastation upon his people. But Mikhalkov is far too clever to launch heedlessly into crude polemics.
Rather, he allows Kotov's belated recognition of his fate to do his painful work for him. By this film's ironic and bittersweet end, it's clearly evident Mikhalkov believes totalitarianism is a cruel blight upon the human soul. Winner and losers alike are burnt by the irrational cruelty of Stalin's oppressively mindless political convulsions.
The heat generated by Burnt by the Sun is most certainly hot. By Mikhalkov's reckoning, Stalin's totalitarianism is sufficiently scalding as to scorch the memories of the victims who lived and irreparably tarnish the memories of those unfortunates who perished through it. His subtle masterwork adds us to its charred casualties.
RATING KEY
Acting
Cinematography
Direction
Editing
Narrative
Sound
Special Effects
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