"Wide Sargasso Sea"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
               "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM, Tampa

    There is a really interesting film, "Wide Sargasso Sea," based
on Jean Rhys's novel of the same name, playing in the Tampa Bay
area for at least another week.  Because it has an NC-17 rating (no
one under 17 admitted) not many theaters were willing to book it,
so if you want to see it you'll have to venture over to The Movies
at Pinellas Park--a multiplex that has been consistently more
adventuresome in its programming than most.

    For those who might not know the novel, it is, to use today's
jargon, a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's novel _Jane Eyre_.  Jean
Rhys, who is from the Caribbean island of Dominica, read _Jane
Eyre_ as a child and encountered the mysterious "madwoman in the
attic," named Bertha Mason, Rochester's first wife who's from the
Caribbean but whom we never learn very much about in that book.  As
Rhys mentioned once in an interview, "I thought I'd try to write
her a life," and she did in her 1965 novel _Wide Sargasso Sea_.

   The title alludes to a vast area of the Atlantic covered with
seaweed so dense that sailors can become entangled in it and
perish, as happens to a man during Rochester's voyage from England
to Jamaica.  The opening sequence of the film shows menacing shots
of these huge underwater plants projected kaleidiscopically so they
look like eerie Rohrschach patterns.  The killing seaweed is
reprised in Rochester's nightmares as he finds his whole sojourn to
this newly emancipated colony as disorienting and threatening as
the Sargasso Sea.  Rochester (played by Nathaniel Parker) is there
because a marriage has been arranged for him with a young Creole
woman of property, Antoinette Costray (played by Karina Lombard),
the step sister of one of his family friends.  In flashback we see
Antoinette's troubled childhood. The emancipation of the slaves had
left her plantation-owning family destitute.  Her French father
drank himself to death and her mother, a beautiful Creole from
Martinique, was ostracized by the English landowners in Jamaica for
not being one of them, for her supposed looseness, for having given
birth to an "imbecile" son.  To survive, Antoinette's mother
married a Mr. Mason, newly arrived from England and totally
ignorant of her reputation, the politics of the island, and the
smouldering hatred of the former slaves for their former masters.
One night those former slaves attack and burn the house, killing
the retarded child and Mrs. Mason's favorite parrot which is
immolated in a fiery flying arc.  She goes mad and is locked away
forever in an old house, the first madwoman in the attic.  That was
Antoinette's childhood; her only support came from her aunt and her
fiercely loyal nurse Christophine (played by Claudia Robinson), the
one former slave who remains with the family and who will defend
Antoinette against anyone, including Rochester, as it turns out.

   Antoinette first refuses to marry the young Englishman who has
come to ask for her hand but she ultimately agrees and they move to
the summer house in the mountains where she had known happiness
with her mother as a child.  She knows happiness there again, too,
as she and Rochester fall passionately in love.  Paradise doesn't
last long, however, after Rochester's mind is poisoned by a sleazy
character who plants the idea that she's likely to end up exactly
as her mother did.  How she goes from being this radiant young
bride to the actually not-so-insane but utterly enraged Bertha
Mason who finally rises up and burns the house of the master who
has enslaved her in his attic for years, is the rest of this story.
You'll never read _Jane Eyre_ the same way again after seeing "Wide
Sargasso Sea," and you certainly won't think that Rochester's such
a hero.

  This film has been beautifully directed by Australian John Duigan
whose last work was the utterly different romantic comedy
"Flirting."  It's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of
evoking the steamy, lush, tropicality of the Jamaican setting than
he and his cohorts do.  This one is worth your time and effort to
see and it will certainly get you to thinking about colonialism,
dominance and subordination, subjectivity and identity, what it is
like to be utterly the Other, and so on.

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

Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  No portion of this review
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission of the author.