"The Portrait of a Lady"
                             A Film Review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                          WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL
                             January 18, 1997

     A new Jane Campion film is always an important event for feminist film
lovers. She consistently makes intelligent, complex, emotionally challenging
films about women in great conflict with culture and society. While she
started out as a teenager making small but powerful films, since "An Angel at
My Table" her work has been on a large, ambitious scale. This adaptation of
Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady" may be her most ambitious work to date,
though I don't think it's her most effective as a film. Adapting a well-known
novel to the screen is always a tricky business and I'm tempted to say you'd
be better off seeing this if you haven't read the novel, allowing Campion and
her brilliant actors to create their characters without having to fight with
your preconceived images of them. On the other hand, where the film falls
short is that some of the actions are not clearly enough motivated so, from
that poing of view, knowing the story already will help you fill in at those
junctures. Though at 144 minutes this film is already very long, I found
myself wishing Campion had done what Kenneth Branaugh did with his new four
hour long Hamlet, namely take as much time as she needed to really do the job.
Not that she had a prayer of really doing that in the film industry which,
with the rarest of exceptions, requires films to be not much more than 2
hours. I do strongly suspect, however, that Campion shot the footage to make
this a much more thoroughly realized film than it turned out to be.

      This seems to me to be a film about a young late 19th C. woman that is
aimed squarely at an audience of late 20th C. women. It is a film from a
feminist filmmaker to a feminist audience.

     Why do I say that? Several reasons. It opens with a sequence of
contemporary young women in an outdoor setting speaking, as if in a
consciousness raising group, of their feelings about kissing, about
sensuality.  The camera and, therefore, you in the audience, focus on several
of these young women and they look back at you, directly, straight into your
eye, open, honest, unafraid. The title comes up, in script, inscribed on the
hand, i.e., the body, of one of these women and we cut back nearly a century
to Isabel Archer who does not, cannot, should not look you or her suitor, Lord
Warburton, straight in the eye, though she comes close and you soon come to
think that's what she'd like to be able to do.

Isabel (Nicole Kidman), having lost her parents in America, is visiting
relatives in England, and turns down the proposal of this most worthy and
affluent gentleman. Why? Because she does not want the confining,
conventional, stifling life of an upper class married woman. She wants to
throw herself into the world and experience things, as her cousin Ralph
Touchett (Martin Donovan) expresses it. He is also in love with Isabel, but
because he is ill with consumption and knows he hasn't long to live, he does
not pursue her. Instead he prevails upon his dying father to leave Isabel a
large bequest so she'll be rich, in the sense that she'll be able to "meet the
requirements of her imagination" and Ralph's pleasure will be in seeing what
becomes of her. It should have given her the independence to be her own
person, to reject marriage and conventional expectations, to live life to the
fullest. It doesn't. Instead, thanks to the intervention of Mme. Serena Merle
(Barbara Hersey), it has quite the opposite effect. Isabel is enthralled by
her and then, at first, by Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich) the expatriate
artist Serena introduces her to in Italy.  Perhaps this setting and
this man with his rather effete manner and exquisite taste are as much
experience of the world as Isabel thinks she needs. For whatever reason, her
resolution not to marry evaporates under the Italian sun and she becomes Mrs.
Osmond. She is soon a prisoner in a soul-crushing marriage, with no money of
her own and little power to resist, except indirectly, through encouraging
his daughter Pansy to break free.  Either you know how it ends, or you'll
find out when you see the film.

     One of the things Campion manages very well here is to suggest the
repressed sexual desire simmering under the surface. There's a remarkable
fantasy scene in which Isabel's sexual longings are revealed but the male
partners in the fantasy seem to distress her rather than attract her. The most
erotic sequence is a scene in which Isabel hears someone playing Schubert on
the piano and there is a long backward tracking shot of her as she is drawn to
the source of the heavenly music. Hollywood conventions would lead you to
expect that the romantic hero would be at the keyboard, but it's Serena Merle.
When she says she'll be happy to play for Isabel if it will give her pleasure,
the erotic tension is palpable.

     Campion has gathered a supporting cast for this film that is amazing.
John Gielgud and Shelley Winters as Mr. and Mrs. Touchett; the enormously
versatile Mary-Louise Parker with a spot on, almost comic turn as Isabel's
pushy but ineffective friend Henrietta Stackpole; Shelly Duvall as the
Countess Gemini, Osmond's sister; and others equally good if less well known.

     One of Campion's strengths is always the fluency of her visual
vocabulary, and this film is no exception. There's a kind of jump cut from an
insect trapped under an inverted glass in a sunny garden, to Isabel pacing be
hind a wall of windows in a rainstorm. A truly Jamesian visual metaphor shows
Isabel walking along one of those distinctively European roads with a long
line of trees on each side, where the vertical trunks are like the bars of a
jail. And, after repeated shots during the course of the film of Isabel
walking from light into shadow darkening her face, we see her, in the final
sequence running through the dark snowy outdoors away from another man who
would control her toward the welcoming light of the house. You think she's
going to make it back into the light. That would be the unambiguous feminist
happy ending metaphor. (Falling into the arms of the suitor would have been
the classical Hollywood happy ending). But unlike in "The Piano," this time
Campion has not been prevailed upon to tack on a happy ending. Suddenly the
house is dark; Isabel turns at the door and faces back out toward the cold,
grey night--off balance, uncertain, facing, again, the forces that would
entrap her. The screen goes dark and there is just the afterimage of her form
lingering on the screen for an instant before the credits roll. It's very
powerful filmmaking.

For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.