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New "Brideshead Revisited" film opening 7/25/08 (spoilers)

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Aloysius J. Gleek:
The new film? Wrongheaded and stupid; I have so much to say I'd better say nothing before I sputter and fume.

Nice touch, with the apple (see photo immediately following)--very subtle, no??

Gah!



There's a pre-review of a review in the New York Times called Revisiting ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ which is here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/movies/20lyal.html

Here are the accompanying 'band-box' photos with The NYTimes captions:



With the film version of "Brideshead Revisited," costuming is central to the narrative. In a phone interview, Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, the film's costume designer, spoke about some of her designs.

From left, Ben Wishaw as Sebastian Flyte, Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder and Hayley Atwell as Julia Flyte.



"The period of dress here is a classic English look," said Ms. Mhaoldomhnaigh. "The tailoring of the men's suits are quite relevant to today. For a contemporary American audience, it's very similar to Ralph Lauren, who, I'm sure, has taken a lot of influence from English tailoring. " (Hah!--The cynical JG)



"This scene is at Oxford. And it's one of the first times that Charles sees Sebastian (seated). So I wanted to portray a contrast to Charles's dark and dreary life at home with a complete release for him to do whatever he likes. Sebastian represents that freedom for him."



"Charles and Sebastian become friends and Sebastian has this beautiful sense of style. Here, you can see already that Charles is looking at Sebastian and, in a quite crude way, trying to copy what he's wearing. It doesn't look nearly as flamboyant or bohemian as Sebastian, but still, it's his attempt to become part of that whole set."



"I think that with Lady Marchmain, Emma Thompson's character, her religion was really important. But also, she was very fashionable. At that time, a lot of women went to Paris twice a year to pick out their wardrobe. So I wanted her clothes to be influenced by French fashions of the time."



"I wanted to use certain colors with her. Of course, not primary colors, but teal blues and purples. I felt like she could never look disheveled. She always had to look like 10 maids had dressed her in the morning."



"I just love this dress. And it was kind of a Eureka moment. Julia's costumes were made in Paris because her clothing also was influenced by French fashion. So I went to Paris to meet with the people were going to make the costumes. And I went to a flea market, where I found the Japanese embroidery that we put on this dress."

Aloysius J. Gleek:

Evelyn Waugh (who has been spinning in his grave since the first shovel of dirt hit the coffin in 1966) has burrowed through the center of the Earth, came out in Papua New Guinea, and launched himself into outer space.


http://
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/movies/20lyal.html

From The New York Times

Film

Revisiting ‘Brideshead Revisited’
 
By SARAH LYALL
Published: July 20, 2008 LONDON

THE images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later. Louche young Oxford students in crisp linen suits (and one teddy bear) drinking endless cocktails. A spectacular country estate, dripping with treasures and crackling with religious, sexual and dynastic tensions. A delicately beautiful Jeremy Irons.

It is those lingering memories, even more than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, that anyone attempting to turn “Brideshead Revisited” into a feature film for the first time naturally has to contend with. And so as not to contaminate his approach Julian Jarrold, the director, studiously avoided the mini-series — all that elegiac emotion, spread out over 659 languorous minutes — and returned to the book.

“It exposed some of the myths I’d had about ‘Brideshead,’ ” Mr. Jarrold said of his rereading. “I’d had the memory of it being a nostalgia trip about the passing of English life and a bygone era, a glorification of aristocracy — about people wearing odd clothes and poncing around Oxford.” That was part of it, he said. But there was also a bite and a sharpness that are as relevant now as they were in 1945, when the novel was published.

“One of the reasons for the book’s popularity is, it is an archetypal type of story of this young individual from a poorer, less interesting background who is welcomed into this beautiful, magical, alluring kingdom with wonderful, magical people,” Mr. Jarrold said. “And then he begins to realize that everything is not what it seems.”

The film, which is to be released on Friday, is set in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and stars Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the unworldly student whose friendship with the aristocratic Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) introduces him to a whole new world of money, class privilege, deep happiness and deep despair. Castle Howard, an estate in Yorkshire, stands in for Brideshead, home to Sebastian and his family, a symbol of a dying way of life and a character in itself.

The mini-series was written by John Mortimer and stars Anthony Andrews as the teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian. It opens and ends with Charles (Mr. Irons), now a British Army officer, unexpectedly encamped at Brideshead during World War II. He begins to replay in his mind the role Brideshead, with its dark sorrows and bewitching delights, played in his life some 20 years earlier.

In this new version the filmmakers have, of necessity, pared down the story. World War II comes up only at the end. There is less time to dwell on the seemingly endless summer when Charles and Sebastian meet and their lives gradually become entwined. Some supporting characters given prominence in the mini-series — Sebastian’s younger sister, Cordelia, played in the original by Phoebe Nicholls, for example, or his waspish friend Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace in the series)— appear only glancingly in the film.

“It was a terrible struggle, and we worked for many, many hours on the screenplay in order to make the right choices,” said Jeremy Brock, who wrote it with Andrew Davies. “But bluntly, you have a 330-page novel and a two-hour film, and you don’t have the luxury of being able to include everybody.” (So why do it at all, you idiot--JG. Sorry.)

The filmmakers also have played up the love triangle of Charles, Sebastian and Sebastian’s bewitching sister, Julia (Hayley Atwell). An extended scene during a night of erotic possibility in Venice serves to advance Charles’s romance with Julia. (All the changes — including placing Julia in Venice — were approved by the Waugh estate, the filmmakers said.) (Ugh!!--JG)

“This puts Julia center stage,” Mr. Brock said of the Venice scenes. “When you read the novel, there is a sense that she is slightly the one who comes after Sebastian, that she is No. 2, and I think it’s not quite fair. The true love story for Charles is the one with Julia.”

And while the homoerotic longings between Charles and Sebastian are more implied than explicit in the earlier incarnations, in the film they share a quick kiss. Instantly their easy camaraderie is polluted by a new awkwardness and inhibition.

“There’s a sense that maybe they’ve crossed a line that one of them isn’t ready to cross,” Mr. Brock said of the kiss.

In a surprising casting move Lady Marchmain, the matriarch whose deep religious faith reverberates so tragically through the lives of her children, is played by Emma Thompson, made up toward the end of the film to look much older.

“I always associate Emma Thompson with being youthful and contemporary and playing decent, sensitive characters, whereas obviously this is the complete opposite,” Mr. Jarrold said. But Ms. Thompson can play old as well as young, lacing her character’s prodigious charm with a chilly savagery.

As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives.

A scene toward the end, when the Marchmain family tussles over the soul of Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) as he lies on his deathbed, is wrenching and even shocking. After abandoning his wife and her self-sacrificing piety for a life of sensuality and ease in Italy, Marchmain has returned home to die. But what sort of role should Catholicism play, with its ability to pull in lapsed members with a “twitch upon the thread,” as Waugh put it, citing G. K. Chesterton, at the end of Marchmain’s life? To Charles’s fascinated horror, the question is of central importance to the family, and there is only one possible answer.

“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”

An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.

In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”  (Of course they did--they ARE Hooper!--JG)

belbbmfan:
Oh, dear me!  :-\

Have they really made such a mess of it?

Maybe I should just order the tv series on dvd instead.  :)

southendmd:
"This puts Julia center stage,” Mr. Brock said of the Venice scenes. “When you read the novel, there is a sense that she is slightly the one who comes after Sebastian, that she is No. 2, and I think it’s not quite fair. The true love story for Charles is the one with Julia.”

True?  According to whom?  I have to dig out my copy of the novel.  I seem to recall more of a sense of ambiguity.  There's even a line, something like, was Julia a stand-in for Sebastian, or, was Sebastian a precursor to Julia?

Just who is the Waugh estate, anyway? 

Meanwhile, I'll have another plover's egg...care for one, John?

(I have a feeling this film is going to lay an egg...)

Aloysius J. Gleek:

--- Quote from: southendmd on July 22, 2008, 03:49:25 pm ---
Meanwhile, I'll have another plover's egg...care for one, John?


--- End quote ---

I'd love one! And now, thanks to aphasia, I stutter like Anthony Blanche, I should learn how to be wicked and depraved like Anthony!  ::)

I saw the trailer, by the way--hilarious where not angry making. I feel for the actors, decent types, who must take the paycheck and gag behind the hand.

At one point, Emma Thompson has to say "Mr Ryder, I hope you are enjoying your vacation," rather then saying 'holiday.'

I mean as if!!!

Please--

Lady Marchmain using the word 'vacation'??

Ugh!!

Wikipedia: vacation

Vacation is a term used in English-speaking North America to describe a lengthy time away from work or school, a trip abroad, or simply a pleasure trip away from home, such as a trip to the beach that lasts several days or longer. In the rest of the English-speaking world the word holiday is used, whereas in North America, "holiday" normally applies to a specific national holiday or long weekend related to such a day. In some cases "vacation holiday" is used in North America, which signifies that a vacation trip is taken during a traditional national holiday period, extended on either end of the period by taking additional time off from work—creating a longer time unencumbered by work, an extended "long weekend", as it were. This practice is common in the United States where employers give far fewer annual vacation days (see below) than European employers—so stretching the related national holidays tends to conserve one's accumulated total of eligible days available for longer quality vacation excursions.

In England the word "vacation" referred specifically to the long summer break taken by the law courts (and later universities)—a custom introduced by William the Conqueror from Normandy where it was intended to facilitate the grape harvest. The French term is similar to the American English: "Les Vacances." The term derives from the fact that, in the past, upper-class families would literally move to a summer home for part of the year, leaving their usual family home vacant. Most countries around the world have labor laws mandating a certain number of days of time off per year to be given to a worker. In Canada the legal minimum is two weeks, while in most of Europe the limit is significantly higher. Neither the U.S. nor China requires that employees receive any vacation time at all. There are movements fighting for laws requiring more vacation time for American workers such as timeday.org.

In modern employment practice, vacation days are often coupled with Sick leave, official holidays, and sometimes personal days.

Americans and Canadians, especially those of recent British or European descent, may also use the word "holiday." "Annual Leave" is another expression used in Commonwealth countries. Many Canadians use both "holiday" and "vacation"; "...I'm taking holidays..." is a common expression, something not often heard in the United States.

(Ok, I know I'm a pill, but--still!)

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