The House of Mirth
Uhhh, what a Sittenroman, what a period drama. I have not seen a great story about a woman ever since “Die Ehe der Maria Braun” which was just as brilliant, emotionally touching and entirely devastating. This film is perhaps just a different form of what I have come to get used to in “Madame Bovary”, “Anna Karenina” or even the dreadful “Effi Briest”. But every one of them is a little different, and besides the apparent main difference between “The House of Mirth” and the aforementioned stories (Lily Bart is unmarried), the protagonist here is inherently ‘flawed’. She loves luxury like Marguerite Gautier in “La dame aux camélias” and while Marguerite downfall comes with her attempt to become a better person, Lily is never really given the opportunity to. In fact, her problems could have all dissipated if she never took up gambling and just married Mr. Selden. But here is where the beauty of her story is, and why she is more interesting than all those characters who are not bad, but plainly incapable. She is the own reason for her downfall.
But, Lily cannot be a different person than she is. While “La dame aux camélias” is an ode to the power of love and highly romantic and unrealistic that way, Lily is much more realistic in how she is torn between herself. She has all the power of changing or choosing one life over another, and so painfully many occasions too, but she couldn’t. Love, luxury, gambling, arrogance, ignorance towards other people – if she had been able to free herself from a single one of these ‘vices’, she would not have ended so tragically.
On a side note, I was so annoyed with that “French poet” who can’t pronounce French properly and, on top of that, fails at reading poems with the proper tone. Luckily he finished reading very quickly, ahahaha.
I thought Gillian Anderson was brilliant and completely outacted the entire cast (except maybe Laura Linney who was quite great as main evil character as well). I especially liked the way she talked and the way she kind of throws her head a little and laughs. She might not be a dashing beauty, but she can play a dashing beauty, which I find absolutely amazing. Her charm is like a role model like Anna Karenina when she seduces Levin, perhaps one of the greatest short scenes in the book.
For better or worse, I saw myself in the main character, and most likely it clouds my impression on the movie so different from “Distant Voices, Still Lives”. I thought the film was marvelously done, had a brilliant protagonist and as a result, it depressed me on many levels. Whether this means that the movie is so good that it made me feel depressed, or actually worse than I think because I associate myself too close with it personally – I do not know.