a letter about lyne, love and the movies
9/4/99 Sydney, Australia
dear huan,
last night I went to the opening of lolita, with michael and melisa, because we were worried the film was going to be banned today by the national film and literature board. in case you haven't heard, some fruity MP's have been agitating against the film on the basis that it advocates pedophilia and child abuse. after the recent decision to re-ban pasolini's salo, and that bungled attempt to ban jarmusch's dead man (what is wrong with this country?!), i would not be surprised if these blinkered reactionaries succeed in blacklisting lolita, a work of art they refuse to see because they can't bear watching pornographic trash. by their own admission, most of the accusers have not even read nabakov's work of genius, yet alone seen the new adaptation by british director adrian lyne. one lady who had, said the book was so disgusting it made her cry and she only forced herself to finish it so she could help get the film banned. this revision of australia's censorship laws is a howard govt initiative - putting ordinary people on the film and literature panel. unfortunately this naive populism has led to the stifling of daring art - works that transgress and challenge the values of its audience. the controversy over lolita has dominated the headlines and airwaves all week, and became a national issue. despite having already been given a R18+ rating, the outcry from the christian brigade and assorted interest groups led to a special re-vote today. the film's distributor has organised a special parliamentary screening in canberra so the politicians could decide whether lolita is filth or freedom of speech, but somehow i doubt many found the time to attend the screening. in any case, the film was already censored - the filmmakers took out the salacious fantasy scene with a 17 yr-old body double rolling around naked on a blue-lit bed whilst poor humbert humbert masturbates in the bathroom. the cut itself is blatantly obvious - as soon as jeremy irons closes the bathroom door it immediately opens again and he's wearing a 2-piece pajama set instead of the three-piece suit he was wearing one second ago. the missing scene has almost the same power by its very omission, which i assume is why lyne was willing to concede the cut in order to secure the R rating.
as you know i'm one of the few who openly admit being a fan of director, adrian lyne, including his previous film, nine and a half weeks, starring kim basinger and mickey rourke. most people are too puritan to get over the animalistic sex and powerplay thing to admire its honesty and beauty. anyway, i knew that lyne's lolita wasnt going to be some tasteless raincoat affair, nor a highbrow intellectual transposition (though you can just feel all the critics wishing this was a more cerebral offering like visconti's death in venice or bertolucci's last tango in paris so they wouldnt have to wet their pants trying to justify liking it). no, i'm glad that lyne is fascinated with food and fucking and all the great earthy things in life. he must be a taurus like myself. like nine and a half weeks, lolita is surprisingly beautiful to look at. lyne loves his lighting and production design. who could forget the white steel, black leather furnishings of rourke's stockbroker haunts in 9 and 1/2, the musty muted tones of basinger's house, all hardwood and muslin cloth, the steamy alleyway sex and the gluttonous gorging scenes?
lyne has great sense of what's tactile in cinema, and despite his rather tawdry stories, manages to keep his tongue mostly in cheek. occasionally his dick gets the better of his direction, and you get shots like dominique swain sucking on a banana, the malevolent quilty fingering the dog leash as if it were a young girl's cunt, the garden sprinkler innocently coming all over the wet dolores in slow motion, as humbert lays his eyes on her for the first time... saucy stuff, but on the wrong side of subtlety. but remember the opening scene of Flashdance? it manages to convey something special about legwarmers, like the vests jeremy irons wears in lolita. even the lampshades have a certain presence, if you're clued into film and set design. there's just so much to see in lyne's films, a layering of objects more than effects or identities. lolita is a magnificent period piece - that gorgeous car! - but even Flashdance and 9 and 1/2 have this vague surprising classiness - good wine going cheap - a little thin in the glass but complex on the palate.
I think lyne fancies himself a bit of an artist - his films are a showcase for strong composition - a way of looking. I remember this scene at the dance institute in Flashdance, where the girl waits in a corridor, and ballet dancers stretch and pose behind her. then there's a scene in 9 and 1/2 where kim basinger goes to visit an old artist who refuses to sell his works, and it goes for a minute or two but it seems much longer, like a moment outside of the film. These otherwise inconsequential scenes stick with me. I'm not sure why - perhaps its the hint of non-filmic time, the need to show these moments that have little narrative significance, but act as poignant bookmarks because they are so simple and understated. you barely notice them the first time you watch the film. its a patience and gestural lethargy that give increased weight to certain moments, like a pregnant pause, an ellipsis, a comma. what is it?! I cant put my finger on it.
what i love about lyne's work is the way he crowds his films with these amazing details and background characters, who may only appear for a few seconds, but enrich the fabric of each film just with their wizened faces, the patience of their pet dogs, their very lack of lines. in lolita, there are some screen-stealing moments by motel clerks, a waitress making an icecream soda, girls in showercaps jumping into a swimming pool, a general storeman giving humbert a dirty half-second look as he books a room "for two... actually one and a half". and i remember with glee the flower courier in 9 and 1/2, who kim basinger watches crossing the street, head-bopping madly to tinny eighties cockrock on his walkman. and the production design on lolita is immaculate post-war. david stratton admired the film for its middle-america locations - the highways, the tacky desert motels, service stations and rusting industrial plants. there is one particularly amusing dive where the rooms are monstrous painted concrete teepees - first glimpsed in ross mcelwee's glorious self-doco, the six o'clock news. mcelwee shows us america in all its present shabbiness and off-the-wall eccentricity, but this singularly bizarre slice of americana slips so snugly into lyne's vision of a cultural landscape already as, if not more, perverse and tragi-comic as its hated pedophiles. the enchanted hunter, where humbert first takes lolita, is both charming and disgusting - there is decay in its fairytale decadence, something unnerving about its beautiful construction. this explains how i feel about lyne's films - and why i like nine and a half weeks, though i've never been able to articulate it to you. these films traverse the great span between artistic restraint and hedonistic gratification. there's something honest in lyne's hubris, his excess. and there's a palpable outsider's affinity between the british-based director and nabakov - the russian emigre.
but its jeremy irons who really makes this film work. humbert's fixations and frustrations are crafted in his every expression, he gives dignity and desire to a character that is most people would prefer to hate or not understand. and his sonorous solemnity is more evidence voiceover is not a narrative shortcut or an underestimation of the audience. if anything, I wanted it to be a little more gloating and conspiratorial, a la a clockwork orange or francis brady in the butcher boy but yes, that'll do, pig. iron's gets under the skin, moreso than dominique swain, who does a good lolita, but its barely a stones throw away from her reality as a 14yr old californian valley-girl. i saw her interviewed on the movie show and her best soundbite was "this movie made me realise that acting is like, really hard - getting into the feelings of a character - actually feeling what they're feeling. i always thought it was, you know, just play-acting!"
peter gammie rang me today, after i left an invitation to come see lolita, on his answering machine. talking about the film, we discovered that everytime someone lights up in the film, they are coincidentally (?) definitively marked for death. according to peter, humbert only starts smoking in the latter half of the film, when he has well and truly lost his grip, whilst sweet lol explicitly lights up in the final reconciliation scene, shortly before dying in childbirth. evil quilty smokes from the first moment we see him, in fact he swims in it, backlit at the back of the theatre, and again just before his spectacular, virtuoso death, caught chewing cigarettes like celery sticks. lol's mother, overplayed and made pathetic by a petulant melanie griffiths, dramatically smoulders like her half-smoked lipstick-stained ciggies just before she runs across the street to conveniently get squashed like a bug. you see, this is the one true moral of lolita. smoking is bad! you smoke you die, pedophile or not. end of story.
lyne' lolita is a comedy. the audience laughed all the way through it.
but I guess that's australians for you.
wonder how they'll take it in kiwiland...
eugene chew
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