This year has been an annus mirabilis for the period drama, a once-dessicated, inert, bourgeois-pampering sop enlivened by intellectual and formal rigour, cinematic innovation and visual beauty. Now that 'Le Temps Retrouve', 'Mansfield Park' and 'In the Mood For Love' have set the stakes, certain famous practitioners (or embalmers) of the genre for a lazy, cinema-hating, I-don't-have-to-read-the-books-to-be-classy audience have been made redundant.
'House of Mirth' belongs to this iconoclastic group. If the period film is traditionally concerned with offering pleasure - costumes, big houses and estates, decor, dialogue etc. - than 'Mirth' is not traditional - it is a relentlessly observed depiction of one not particularly remarkable woman's fall from grace, lingering particularly on her decline into the working classes (quelle horrible surprise!). It is a rigorously austere film - the surface trappings are minimised, made deliberately artificial or obscured by dull lighting; the use of music is economical, what little there is comes from over a century before the drama is set, less lush, less wallowing, more ascetic, brittle, thin than contemporary late Romantic music would have been; there is no witty dialogue - the dramatis personae are either bores or monsters, all speak with elaborate stiltedness.
Moments of epiphany or beauty are rare; what few there are usually end in artifice, banality or irony. This is a gruelling film to watch, especially in the second half; this doesn't mean that it isn't very moving, or beautiful in a non-superficial sense (much of the emotion comes not from the plot or characters' reaction to it, but Davies' subtle camerawork).
Edith Wharton's story is basically an elaboration of Henry James subject matter, a showing of what he conceals or implies. There is the same horrified fascination with the machinations of class - a viewer has to be quick and alert to catch what's going on, the rules and transgressions only acknowledged by a look, or a seemingly irrelevant sentence, but which have devastating, life-threatening consequences.
Davies doesn't offer us a traditional fall from grace narrative - it is clear from her opening scenes that Lily is no grande dame about to be felled; she is barely hanging on to a hierarchy that barely notices her. Her first appearance announces Davies' intentions as she emerges from the dense steam of a railway engine in a dank railway station. As she walks in the centre of a perfectly symmetrical composition against a neo-classical background to neo-classical music, she looks out of place, almost out of time, a dark silhouette, with no visible features, like the shadow or ghost she will eventually become, or like a strange, mocking figure of 18th century Venetian theatre, with her strange, birdlike hat.
This sense of weightless rootlessness also makes us enquire about her elusive background - Lily literally seems to emerge from nowhere. She is slowly, but definitely, thrown from the unwritten laws of society to a very real material social order, reduced to making hats badly for a living. Her sense of time altars radically too - although society life seems a distinct realm from the 'real' world, there is a noticeable narrative flow, in spite of all the gaps (and this is a film so full of narrative holes, you often think you've been nodding off) and temporal elisions.
But when Lily joins the world of work and time-keeping, narrative time seems to suspend - narrative events don't seem to follow coherently, but in a blur; when Lily first takes laudanum, and the camera floats out the window to the babble of voices from Lily's life, we assume she is dead. Of course, in a sense she is, and this painful second half is like a nightmare hallucination, as Lily floats away from whatever tenuous moorings she ever had.
Her opening scenes with Sheldon have a brittle, nervous quality that initially seems false and irritating, until we realise the full extent of Lily's plight, her ineptitude for the role she is required to play - Gillian Anderson's performance is remarkable, as quietly tragic as those great actresses of the 30s and 40s, her face doing all the acting as she registers the horrors she cannot verbally acknowledge.
