Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (1)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 March

* Contains a splashing of spoilers *

I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.

As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.

As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.

So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)

Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).

There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.

Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).

This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.

Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)

I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)


So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.

Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)

Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.

Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).

There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.

Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.

Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.


PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).

All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)


For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...


End-notes

* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.

** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.

*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).

**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)

***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.

****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.

******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!


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