A Woman Who Left, A Man Who Stayed
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen A WOMAN WHO LEFT, A MAN WHO STAYED BY JOHN SIMON is not surprising that Ibsen's A Doll's House should enjoy such renewed popularity all of a sudden -with a current film version based on...
...But Nora, too, is a fine little egoist...
...rectify this, and some, though not all, hypocrisy will be eliminated...
...until we get, predictably, a capping two-shot in the end...
...she just about carried off the near-impossible task of growing up in the play's short time span and changing from self-avowed squirrel and secret macaroon-eater into a sad yet determined woman willing to pay the high price of freedom...
...Anthony Hopkins would be a very good Torvald if he did not try too hard to make him jolly and likable and downright cute...
...It is an ingeniously constructed, quietly eloquent film, whose only and very minor fault it is to leave us excessively hungry for more...
...As Michael Mayer has correctly noted, "A Doll's House is no more about women's rights than . . . An Enemy of the People [is] about public hygiene...
...Still, the basic problem remains: that you virtually cannot transpose a great play successfully to the screen...
...A great deal of teeming, multifarious material has been packed into some 90 minutes of running time, giving the film an extremely rich, as it were novelisric, texture...
...On Screen A WOMAN WHO LEFT, A MAN WHO STAYED BY JOHN SIMON is not surprising that Ibsen's A Doll's House should enjoy such renewed popularity all of a sudden -with a current film version based on a successful off-Broadway and London revival of the play, and another movie treatment due here shortly...
...Its theme k the need for every individual to find out what kind of person he or she really is and to become that person...
...When her friend and admirer, Dr...
...The problem is compounded by the director and the cast...
...A bolder director would have ended with Nora, and disturbed us more by suggesting the ostracism, hardships and life in a declasse demimonde that await her...
...race riots seen on television, titles introducing the names of certain characters as chapter headings, short takes nevertheless containing key incidents-These and other devices are intermingled smoothly and often amusingly to give the film the shape of a neatly rolled-up ball made of variously colored pieces of string: The disparate incidents become unified because they are the constituents of a human life...
...In setting all of the action in the Helmer living room, the playwright conveys the notion that he is not telling you the whole story, only such significant parts of it as take place in this strategic spot...
...self-centered but not, like so many other Torvalds, to the point of repugnance...
...a usually competent cine-matographer, has apparently been instructed to keep his colors cool to convev the chill of Scandinavia: his palette of almost unrelieved blues and greens makes the Helmer home not so much a doll house as a sparsely lit aquarium...
...Rank...
...But that is Ibsen's point...
...Following a troubled history with our Treasury Department, the Cuban film, Memories of Underdevelopment, has finally reached us five years after it was made...
...When he is serious, though, he is fine: conventional and stuffy but not insufferably smug...
...Claire Bloom was an enchanting Nora on stage...
...Beyond that, to be sure, is the theme of the doll house (which is what the play's title should be in America, but the Britishism "doll's house" has stuck...
...when Castro takes over...
...The script, from the novel by Eduardo Desnoes, is by him and the able director Tomas Gutierrez Alea...
...situations and dialogue are seldom lacking in wit or speculative penetrancy...
...The acting is always spontaneous yet proficient, whether it is Sergio Corrieri's protagonist quietly and sardonically going to seed, or Daisy Granados' superficial, silly, ultimately touching little schemer who almost traps him into marriage...
...If Memories of Underdevelopment lacks a clear resolution, the density of its texture and the very palpability of its aliveness are nonetheless immensely satisfying...
...Little discrepancies creep in between images and words...
...The work's supposed message fits the Women's Liberation Movement's aims, and its heroine, Nora, has been the symbol of the new, emancipated woman ever since her first appearance in 1879...
...the conventions of film work against it, at least in its present form...
...The characters are sharply but not unsyrnpathetically observed, including those who are morally unprepossessing...
...Most people are not brave or strong or nice...
...their unselfishness, if any, lasts only until it is put to a real test...
...Arthur Ib-betson...
...Garland has no cinematic experience and does a great many things schematically, as a neophyte would...
...Rank, of course, is not very generous, either...
...He remembers the past with amusement, observes the present with irony, and reflects about the future with the detachment of someone who no longer belongs anywhere...
...It is, therefore, to the credit of Patrick Garland's direction and Christopher Hampton's adaptation that the Women's Lib angle is not played up in this movie version, as it is in the one by Joseph Losey...
...Although Anna Massey is a decent Mrs...
...As for the cast, Edith Evans may well be too old to be the children's nanny, and Ralph Richardson, with what seems to be Parkinson's disease (does he have it, or is this his way of suggesting terminal syphilis...
...Ibsen did not believe in a marriage based on lies: on role-playing, make-believe and childish games, such as Nora's pretending to be Torvald's little squirrel...
...Gutierrez Alea's camera can glide broodingly over the past-ridden accumulation of objects in Sergio's apartment, or dart about the streets to the accompaniment of tart observations by the hero...
...Her performance on screen is just as good, but the camera records her age with merciless candor, and Miss Bloom is simply too old for the part, so that some of her youthful mannerisms affect us unpleasantly...
...He is no Marxist and even less a revolutionary, merely someone fed up with the banality of bourgeois existence...
...Linde, Denholm Elliott makes Krogstad unduly slimy rather than just ordinary and desperate...
...When he ever so faintly hints at some erotic compensation, she is shocked...
...The point is that in a world of dishonesty, women have been forced into still greater dishonesty by being rushed into marriage without first acquiring experience, self-knowledge and concomitant pride...
...political or social paradoxes are fixed in a verbal or visual epigram...
...It is Tor-vald's selfishness and lack of gallantry, rather than his narrow patri-archalism, that drive Nora away...
...The film is daringly free of party-line cant, though its cinematic freedom is more impressive even than its political one...
...now he is bored with the material goods he will soon be stripped of anyway...
...This is why Nora replies to Torvald's "Nobody sacrifices his honor, not even for the person he loves" with "Millions of women have...
...Documentary footage of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the subsequent trials, bits of staged but very realistic cine-ma-verite, voiceover interior monologues, flashbacks, clandestinely recorded tapes of marital fracases, brief scenes from the protagonist's fantasy world, overlappings of past and present, Castro hurling defiance and U.S...
...In the play, for example, you never see Nora's children?wisely, because it makes their mother's abandoning them more acceptable...
...Sergio, a wealthy, upper-middle-class Cuban, refuses to join his wife, parents and friends in emigrating to the U.S...
...Once, however, the camera starts moving around the house, including the nursery (which, in a film, seems inevitable), and even steps outside (which, though avoidable, happens here), we begin to wonder why so little is shown us-why, for instance, there is no more than an occasional glimpse of the children, and why nothing is made of their mother's farewell to them...
...Then, to preserve the famous final stage direction, we hear the front door closing behind Nora from Torvald's point of view-or, rather, nonview-as the camera peers into the empty hallway and comes to rest on Tor-vald...
...Rank, reveals that he is dying of syphilis inherited from his father, she proves quite callous, being interested only in whether he might not first bequeath on her enough money to pay off her debt...
...is certainly too old for Dr...
...Once long ago he let the right girl slip by while he concentrated on acquisitiveness...
...From then on, women leaving their husbands, and perhaps also their children, had Nora's name on their lips for battle cry, and Ibsen's rebel doll-woman became the patron saint of reformers fighting for feminine rights...
...There is a sparingly used but remarkably evocative score by Leo Brower, and the black-and-white photography by Ramon Suarez captures equally well the exhausting white heat of the exteriors and the enervating shadowless of the interiors...
...He has turned into an interested but skeptical bystander, vaguely deluding himself about becoming a writer, but really kept alive in his idleness by curiosity concerning the new regime's ability to remedy Cuba's underdevelopment, and by some real or imaginary sexual escapades...
...Yet, when you come right down to it, Nora is a curious Women's Libber...
...Thus in the great final confrontation scene there is steady cutting from closeup to closeup of whoever is speaking...
...The conventions of the stage work toward making the story more credible...
...Its sense of rhythm is matched by its sense of humor, sometimes irreverently reiterating an awkward image on a screen grown obsessive or redundant, sometimes saucily foreshortening an episode that might have used some lingering over...
...She leaves because her husband, Torvald Helmer, refuses to assume chivalrously the guilt she incurred on his behalf, and rants and roars instead about the scandal and setbacks he must endure...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 13
