New Articles
(no particular order)
Nov. 25/98 (B)
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From the Guardian-Observer...
Friday October 2, 1998
Liz the lionheart
If Shakespeare had made a film, it would have been like this. By Richard
Williams
Deploying the richness of a pageant and the sweep of a thriller, Shekhar
Kapur's Elizabeth is the very model of a successful historical drama -
imposingly beautiful, persuasively resonant, unfailingly entertaining.
It's tempting to suggest that if Shakespeare had come back four
centuries later to make a movie about his Queen, this is how it might
have turned out.
Instead the job fell to Kapur, the Bombay-born director whose Bandit
Queen established his international reputation five years ago. His new
film deals with the period from 1554, four years before the coronation
of Elizabeth I, to 1572, the year in which she finally extinguished the
enemies who had plotted to remove the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII
and reinstall the Church of Rome.
Kapur's commercial hook is provided by the well-publicised decision of
Kapur and Michael Hirst, the author of the screenplay, to deal boldly
with the issue of Elizabeth's single most legendary characteristic. "I
had to make a choice," the director told a journalist last week,
"whether I wanted the details of history or the emotions and essence of
history to prevail." For once, the commitment to emotional truth appears
to have incurred no penalty in terms of historical integrity, thanks not
least to the qualities brought to the central character by the
remarkable Cate Blanchett, who manages to persuade us that, given enough
willpower, a woman can regain - yes, regain - her virginity.
There have been many celluloid versions of Elizabeth, from Sarah
Bernhardt to Glenda Jackson via Flora Robson, Bette Davis and Jean
Simmons. Blanchett's triumph is to create a thoroughly convincing
depiction of the journey from canoodling girlhood to the threshold of an
imperial monarchy, battling her fears, shedding illusions, absorbing
pain, learning judgment, turning anxiety into resolution, acquiring
steel and sinew.
When we meet her, she is aged 21 and already in love with Lord Robert
Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (the liquid-eyed Joseph Fiennes). The
untimely death of the childless Queen Mary (Kathy Burke) brings her
reluctantly to the throne, unprepared for the pressure to marry a
Catholic - either the King of Spain or the Duc d'Anjou, for preference -
and to produce an heir.
This is a world of tallow candles and velvet drapes, of menacing shadows
and distant footsteps echoing on flagstones, of the camera looking
directly down on momentous events (the burning of martyrs, an
interrogation, a coronation) like a recording angel. Kapur and his
designer, John Myhre, and costumier, Alexandra Byrne, make an
intelligent mainstream assimilation of the visual vernacular created by
Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman - a stylised and ornate idiom which is
counterbalanced by Hirst's dialogue, written with an economy that keeps
the sumptuous images from dragging at the heels of the narrative. Unlike
Patrice Chereau's otherwise not dissimilar La Reine Margot, the viewer
is not made to feel that the project has suddenly been hijacked by Bruce
Weber and turned into an ad for Calvin Klein underwear.
Knights, courtiers and bishops loom like giant chess pieces, with
Elizabeth pursued across the board by her chief adversary, the sinister
Duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston), whose advocacy of the Catholic
cause is abetted by the ambassadors of Spain (James Frain) and France
(Eric Cantona), pressing the suit of their masters. The young Queen's
support comes first from the ineffectual Sir William Cecil (Richard
Attenborough), whose advice leads to a massacre on the Scottish border
at the hands of the French, and later from Sir Francis Walsingham, her
Master of Spies and consigliere, given a cool, dangerous and watchful
presence in Geoffrey Rush's memorable portrayal.
At the head of a small but distinguished French contingent, Cantona
refrains from kicking anyone, but raises his eyebrows and delivers his
lines with a hauteur that will give his old fans a nostalgic thrill. If
the business of Elizabeth's betrothal to the Duc d'Anjou had gone to a
penalty shoot-out, you wouldn't have bet against the Frogs as long as
Eric le Fou was on the park.
As the hilariously perverse Anjou, Vincent Cassel invests the repetition
of a single word - 'Well? Well?' - with a world of comic petulance,
broadening still further the range he showed in La Haine and
L'Appartement. Fanny Ardant plays his bloodthirsty aunt Mary of Guise,
the widow of James V of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who
sends Elizabeth a gift from the battlefield: a French flag stained with
English blood.
The enemy inside the palace wall is embodied in the scheming priest John
Ballard, played by Daniel Craig, who thus leaps in the space of a
fortnight from one screaming Pope to another: from Francis Bacon's
canvases in Love Is The Devil to an audience with John Gielgud's
pontiff, issuing a papal fatwa against the Queen of England. Craig's
mission involves the use of a poisoned frock, one idea that has so far
eluded even Alexander McQueen.
In two very different sequences - the rehearsal of her key speech to
Parliament, cleverly mounted by Kapur and his cinematographer, Remi
Adefarasin, and the delivery of the speech in which she claims
possession of 'the heart of a man' - Blanchett is nothing short of
electrifying. And in her climactic transfiguration, the face that first
presented itself in undefended mobility is finally hardened into a mask,
while the voice, interestingly, descends to a Thatcherian contralto
profundo.
Kapur fills his palaces and cathedrals with enough diseased ambition to
rival Kane's Xanadu, creates a picturesque battlefield, and lights a
night-time riverscape with fireworks that appropriately cast more shadow
than light. Fans of Coppola's Godfather series will nod approvingly at
the dark choreography that brings the various traitors to their
simultaneous fates, accompanied by a soaring choir. Elsewhere there is
sometimes a little too much reliance on orchestral music, although the
choice of Elgar's stately Nimrod to underscore Elizabeth's final
mettlesome confrontation with Leicester is inspired.
In fact, you can't help hoping that the same team is already planning
the sequel. On this form, their Elizabeth II would be something to see.
----
From the Telegraph...
ISSUE 1225 Friday 2 October 1998
Good Queen Bess as a born-again virgin
Quentin Curtis on this week's new releases: our critic is charmed by
Elizabeth
THE cutting of the Queen's hair in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth - unlike
the case of Samson - signals the confirmation of power rather than its
shedding. You can trace the progress of Elizabeth, from commoner to
novice monarch to secure leader, through the state of her coiffure.
Long, flowing tresses give way to formal curls and, finally, as the
lady-in-waiting's shears come out, to the fiery fringe, bonnetted and
bejewelled, that flares at us from the paintings. We see too, in
Elizabeth's last, transformative scene, the young Queen apply the white
cream to her face to give it its familiar pallid intensity.
It is a strength of Elizabeth, part of its originality, that it ends
where most Bess biopics begin. The Queen is young at the movie's close.
A list of clichés we are spared includes Sir Francis Drake, the Armada
and "the singeing of the King of Spain's beard", Shakespeare and
Spenser, and the Earl of Essex. Instead we have the death of Queen Mary
(Kathy Burke); Elizabeth's fraught succession; her dalliance with Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes); the romantic suits of the
Duc D'Anjou and King Philip II of Spain; trouble with Mary of Guise
(Fanny Ardant), and treason at home, both trumped by Elizabeth's ace
adviser, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush).
Elizabeth I has had a hard time of it cinematically - a rough, as well
as a ruff, ride. In most films of her story she has seemed tetchy as
well as imperious, whether it be Flora Robson's school marm in Fire Over
England or Glenda Jackson's Islington councillor in Mary, Queen of
Scots. Elizabeth is the first film to allow Elizabeth to be a person
first: an ordinary woman stuggling towards becoming a queen - and an
icon. Cate Blanchett captures marvellously the sense of a woman
grappling with her own destiny, from the moment when pleasure mingles
with fear in her face as she is told of her succession.
With her high brow and strong, mettlesome features, Blanchett has the
face for the skull-like intensity of Elizabeth. She uses her wry humour
to suggest the glimmer of amusement that sustained Elizabeth. If you are
looking for modern equivalents, there is a trace of Margaret Thatcher in
her making a virtue of single-mindedness; of Diana, Princess of Wales in
her (power-) playful flirtation. This is an Elizabeth who, entangled in
brutal politics, acts on impulse, and is saved by having an instinct
that is naturally righteous.
Her other saviour is Walsingham, a Machiavellian security adviser and
safe pair of hands (never safer than when around a traitor's neck). This
is Geoffrey Rush's best performance since Shine. Grave and intelligent,
his Walsingham is a man who has supped full on horrors and learned to
digest them with an even disposition. "There is so little beauty in this
world," he tells a man sent to kill him, before slitting his throat,
"and so much suffering." Pondering the absence of God, he wonders
whether we are alone with our frailties. His ruthlessness, a weary
pragmatism, stems from dark insight. In Rush's hands, he is worthy not
only of Elizabeth but of Elizabethan drama.
Elsewhere the casting is stranger, not to say sillier. Indeed, it
sometimes seems as if the whole movie was cast over a drunken dinner
party. Christopher Eccleston is suitably intense as the plotting
Norfolk, but Richard Attenborough is a little flat as the faithful if
misguided adviser, Sir William Cecil. There is also the mandatory
appearance from Sir John Gielgud, as the Pope, and a host of bizarre
cameos from the likes of Wayne Sleep, Angus Deayton and Eric Cantona.
Cantona, renowned for his ghosting in on goal on the football pitch, has
timed his transfer from Old Trafford's fading Theatre of Dreams to the
sound-stage well and performs creditably as a French ambassador.
The celebrity casting is all of a piece with the movie's overall
flashiness. Shekhar Kapur, the Indian director of Bandit Queen, has
undoubted visual flair. An early sequence switches from tight close-ups
of faces of heretics burning at the stake to a shot from the ceiling of
a vast cathedral. Towards the end, Kapur cuts the murders of
conspirators, Godfather-style, to choral music. His editing too has a
thrilling economy. But, occasionally, the bouncy, kinetic flow of images
and the shafts of light that too artfully pierce through the shrouded
chambers of various castles resemble a pop video. A stark montage of
corpses on a battlefield feels too art-directed really to shock.
That the film avoids toppling over into preposterousness is down to its
conviction and ultimate seriousness. Elizabeth's journey is a believable
one, from natural sensuality to self-imposed severity. "Her majesty's
body and person are no longer her own property: they belong to the
state," she is told, and she adheres to the injunction, as modern
statesmen no longer do. It is the thesis of Michael Hirst's perceptive
screenplay that Elizabeth was not a virgin - but that she made herself
one. Partly, this was a ploy to replace the Virgin Mary in the
affections of her (formerly Catholic) subjects. But it was also an
acknowledgement of the nature of power, its isolation and literal
untouchability.
"I am one most innocent in the ways of the world," the Queen professes
early on. It is a profound irony of this fine and thought-provoking film
that her gaining of experience lies in embracing virginity.
----
Colin Firth site with SIL mention:
http://www.geocities.com/~murphyat65/roles/sil.html
--
The Independent - London
Date: 19980927
Interview: Shekhar Kapur - The original Elizabethan 'What was it like
being Elizabeth I ?' Shekhar Kapur's new film answers the question in a
spectacular, sometimes shocking, fashion. By Rosanna de Lisle
PEOPLE are saying I have sullied her reputation," says Shekhar Kapur. "I
read it in the press all the time." He sounds unfazed: this is not the
first time he has been accused of defaming his subject. In 1994, Kapur
made Bandit Queen, his "true story" about Phoolan Devi, the low-caste
Indian who survived gang-rape and marriage at 11, became a bandit, and
spent 10 years in jail charged with killing 22 high-caste men. Devi
claimed Kapur had cheated and misrepresented her, and tried to get the
film banned. She failed; and Bandit Queen established Kapur as a
director of unusual vision. The dead cannot sue, so with Elizabeth,
Kapur has less to fear. But pedants, particularly puritanical pedants,
won't like the film at all. What's getting their goat is that Kapur has
taken the hallowed notion of the "Virgin Queen", turned it on its head
and twisted it. Elizabeth (played by Cate Blanchett) is first shown
quite clearly consummating her affair with Lord Robert Dudley (Joseph
Fiennes). Then, at the end of the movie, she emerges in full majesty and
declares, "I have become a virgin."
Kapur sees the film as telling "the story of a journey from innocence to
loss of innocence". Paradoxically, he depicts it to have been a journey
from sexual activity to celibacy. "The idea emerged between the
screenwriter {the historian Michael Hirst} and me," he says. "Whether
she was or wasn't a virgin I think is unimportant. I was interested in
the idea that people made such a big thing of it. It must have gone
beyond a physical fact. She made a declaration of virginity as a
political statement. So then you ask, what was behind that? She had at
least three very well documented relationships. No reason has ever been
given for her not having consummated her virginity." Except that
Elizabeth was hardly ever alone: her ladies- in-waiting slept beside
her; she was proud of her purity and protective of her public image -
her mother and stepmother had gone to the block for alleged adultery;
she never got pregnant - and all the reliable evidence suggests that
there was nothing to stop her having children. But Kapur insists that
his portrayal is plausible. "History has not proved she was not a
virgin. It was important for her to make a statement that she was: to
get the respect of her council and parliament. There was also some kind
of guilt about having tried to deny the concept of the Virgin Mary: she
needed to make up for that."
Kapur is not interested in factual small print. "I had to make a choice:
whether I wanted the details of history or the emotions and essence of
history to prevail." Instead, he paints with a broader brush. "It was
almost like composing a musical score. My main concern was to tell the
human story. She was a living, everyday human being - and then she
became a queen. We took the icon, and went behind the icon."
For all he says about disregarding literal history, the movie is linear,
distilling key events and themes from the time just before Elizabeth's
ascension to the throne in 1558 through to her eventual triumph over her
enemies in 1572. It belts along at such a pace, you hardly have time to
work out what's going on. Elizabeth is bombarded by political
rebellions, religious conflicts, marriage suits, scandalous gossip,
attempts on her life, and war with Scotland. But the hectic effect is
intentional. "Film is drama," says Kapur. "You've only two hours, so you
lie by exclusion, and try to make up for it by portraying the
environment. There was so much plotting, and it was so complicated: to
describe it all would have made the film very simplistic, and it would
have taken away from the character arc of Elizabeth. I saw an
omnipresence of deceit and conspiracy, and tried to convey that in the
way the camera moved and the lighting was done. The question was: what
would it have been like to have been Elizabeth? There is no logic to it
- but there is an emotionality to it."
For a historical film, Elizabeth is inherently dramatic, even
melodramatic: an extraordinarily vivid recreation of a horrifyingly
turbulent time, more La Reine Margot than A Man For All Seasons. Shot on
location, steeped in atmosphere, and alternately moodily and blindingly
lit, it shows up the studio stiltedness (and harsh shadows) of the
much-admired 1973 BBC version of Elizabeth's life, which starred Glenda
Jackson.
Every age seems to throw up an Elizabeth for its time. Sarah Bernhardt
played her, silently, in 1912; Flora Robson took the role in Alexander
Korda's Fire Over England (1937); and Bette Davis did her twice, in The
Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and in The Virgin Queen
(1955). More recently and spoofily, we've seen Miranda Richardson in
Blackadder and Quentin Crisp in Orlando.
Shekhar Kapur knows how lucky he's been to land Cate Blanchett. And
Blanchett, who was little-known outside Australia before the release of
Oscar and Lucinda, was lucky to come to his attention. It happened
almost by accident. Kapur was in the London offices of Working Title,
the producers of Elizabeth, who had already taken a punt in appointing a
director with just one, very different film behind him. The movie was
partly cast, but they had yet to find their Elizabeth. Kapur and Tim
Bevan, one of the co-producers, were watching trailers when an early
promo for Oscar and Lucinda came up. "The moment I saw her, I knew I had
found my perfect Elizabeth," Kapur remembers. He met Blanchett in Paris,
and would have given her the job there and then, if she hadn't insisted
on doing a formal screen-test.
His hunch has paid off - handsomely. Blanchett gives a performance
that's so powerful, it might over-dominate the film - were it not
supported by a cast that includes Kathy Burke (as Queen Mary Tudor),
Christopher Eccleston (the Duke of Norfolk), Geoffrey Rush (Sir Francis
Walsingham), John Gielgud (the Pope) and Eric Cantona (the French
ambassador). Blanchett's Elizabeth is passionate, determined,
quick-witted, knowing, pragmatic and flirtatious; she's also distraught,
scared and vulnerable. Kapur first shows her as Princess Elizabeth,
living in relative freedom, madly loving Dudley, and standing a chance
of never having to become Queen, if her half-sister Mary could only
conceive. When she does ascend, there's a strong sense that her
sovereignty cannot just be assumed - she was declared a bastard as a
child, ruled out of the succession for most of her life, and accused by
Mary of being a traitor and heretic. Elizabeth has to work to generate
her majesty. Blanchett lets the private doubts flicker across the sere
ne, omniscient public face.
All 20th-century portraits of Elizabeth have focused on her isolation as
a woman in a man's world - perhaps that's what attracts us, in the
century of female emancipation, to her story. She was a woman in an age
in which men considered women incapable of government. Yet Elizabeth
reigned successfully for 45 years.
Now, in the 1990s, the life of Elizabeth has a new resonance in the life
of Diana, Princess of Wales, who happened to die as Kapur's cameras
started rolling. He plays down the relevance, and says he didn't think
about Diana much as he was making Elizabeth. "I can see only one
connection: a girl fighting to keep her joyous, loving, normal nature,
whilst also being royal," he says. "The whole film is about the humanity
of royalty."
Cate Blanchett was more affected by the parallel. When we met in Sydney
a few weeks after Elizabeth had wrapped, she told me: "It was incredible
to begin filming two days after her death. The first line of the shoot
was 'The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.' And it was just very odd,
very odd."
Blanchett knows her history, and read original sources in her research
for the role. But for her, like Kapur, the human element is more
important than the political. "The film is more a metaphorical thing
about what it means to be queen. It's about what happens in public to
the private self, and the melding of the heart and the head when there
are not only political expectations but political ambitions. Shekhar has
asked: what if? What if Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was in fact
the love of her life? Which may or may not have been true. There are so
many varied reports about her - that she was a hermaphrodite, she was a
man, she was asexual, she was unable to have children - and I think it's
similar to what happened to Diana."
She found the role a steep challenge. "It's very hard, when you play an
historical character: you know there are certain facts, but you do need
to find the dramatic reason for telling the story."
What was it like making the film? "It was a very tense experience.
Shekhar is quite relentless; he's able to put his fingers into all pies,
and he's very, very excitable. It can be quite enlightening and
stimulating as an actor to work with someone who's indefatigable. He's
got boundless energy - and I really don't think he slept for four
months."
It doesn't sound as if Kapur will be getting much sleep in the coming
months either. His next project is another biopic - of another national
leader, another legend. He has acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela's
autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. "We're calling it The Birth of a
Nation: the Story of South Africa," he says. Will it be a documentary or
a drama? "Very much a drama. It'll be the new Lawrence of Arabia." From
Shekhar Kapur, what else would we expect?
'Elizabeth' (15) opens in London on Friday and nationwide from 23
October.
----
Speaking of Elizabeth (& Joe).... Here's a silly bit from
The Guardian-Observer. Very tongue in cheek/sarcastic
(as usual ;). They did one of these 'Pass Notes' things on
Ralph years ago and it was about equally as silly (in fact,
I think they use some of the same jokes here, tsk tsk ;-).
The Guardian
September 29, 1998
Pass notes: No 1284: Joseph Fiennes
Age: 27.
Appearance: Lovelorn Trustafarian.
And is he . . . Related?
Yes. Youngest brother of Ralph, second cousin to Ranulph,
twin sibling of Jake, the gamekeeper.
Gamekeeper? I thought they were all arty.
The other five are - there's a director, a set designer, a
composer . . . oh, and a couple of actors.
And how does young Joe feel about being compared to the great
English Patient?
He's `waiting for one original journalist not to mention' his
brother.
Sibling
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Email: Lynn