Nearly all of Balzac's novels dramatize Karl Marx's observation in the Communist Manifesto that "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation." Des McAnuff's film "Cousin Bette," based on Balzac's novel of the same name, is faithful to both Balzac and Marx on this score.
This is no bland and pretty costume drama in the Merchant-Ivory mold. The aristocrats and the haut-bourgeoisie are repellent gargoyles in McAnuff's film, just as they are in Balzac. The film is a gritty, radical satire of bourgeois mores that constantly reminds us of the price-tag attached to all human relations. McAnuff explains what drew him to the Balzac novel:
"When it comes to choosing a project, I look for something that illuminates my life and times. 'Cousin Bette' began to feel more and more like a story about a large American city, where we have perhaps some of the same social and political problems that Paris faced in the nineteenth century...Paris was in a depression in the 1840s and no one in fact saw the turmoil coming. Having gone through the riots in Los Angeles, it began to feel remarkably similar. When I saw this link to current times, that's when I really climbed aboard and started to shape the story."
Cousin Bette (Jessica Lange) is a forty year old seamstress who works backstage in a music hall. Her sister has just passed away and she hopes to snag the wealthy grieving husband Hector Hulot (Hugh Laurie). When he meets with her, he certainly seems to have this intention since he speaks about the vacuum in his life and the need for someone to look after his college-age daughter. To her disappointment, she discovers that he is merely offering her a job as a housekeeper. This blow to her self-esteem ratchets up her resentment against the world one more notch. While she is the protagonist of the film, one can feel no sympathy toward her or any of the other characters for that matter. The key to the success of the film, and the novel it is based on, is that it caters to our morbid curiosity. The cast of players, who are all essentially corrupt and money-hungry, fascinate us like a bunch of scorpions under glass.
We are introduced to Hulot's daughter Hortense (Kelly MacDonald) as she is being propositioned by the superrich Crevel (Bob Hoskins), who offers her 200,000 francs to look at her naked body. She turns him down.
Another central character is the young, handsome fallen aristocrat Wenceslas (Aden Young) who lives in poverty in the same rundown tenement as Cousin Bette. He is trying rather unsuccessfully to launch a career as a sculptor. At night he tiptoes into her apartment in order to steal cheese from her rat-trap and sneak a drink of wine from the bottle she keeps on a shelf. He is not aware that she has been awake when he makes these nocturnal visits and, moreover, has fallen in love with him.
One day Cousin Bette discovers Wenceslas unconscious in his flat, where he has tried to kill himself by filling the room with fumes from his coal-stove. She throws open the window and revives him. Then she offers to subsidize his career, albeit in a modest fashion. She will pay for his rent and his meals, but emphasizes that she will keep a strict account of all sums advanced. Like Crevel, she is consumed with love but knows that everything has a cash value as well.
The singer-dancer Jenny Cadine (Elisabeth Shue) rounds out the cast of miscreants. In her spare time, she is courtesan to Hulot. We meet her onstage as she is complaining that her costume does not show off her best features. Cousin Bette, her seamstress, approaches her from behind and cuts a large patch in the fabric covering her backside. She then announces that everybody can now see the star performer's best feature. Jenny looks at her naked ass and likes what she sees. From that night on, she performs bare-assed.
After Wenceslas has become Cousin Bette's protégé, the young Hortense decides to steal him away. After Bette discovers that the two have become lovers, she confronts him in his studio. What about us, she asks. He tells her that he will always love her as the mother in his life. This rejection inspires her to take revenge against all who have caused her misery and disappointment. Like Iago, she conspires behind the scenes to set one character against another until they are all ruined. In contradistinction to Othello, the major character in Balzac's tale is the villain, not the hero. Since Balzac's cynical world-view excludes heroism, this has an air-tight logic. Furthermore, in some sense, villains are more interesting. Milton's Lucifer is one of the great characters in literature. We remember him, not any of the angels.
One of the greatest achievements of the film is the casting and the way McAnuff directs his cast. You lose track of the associations you have with the various actors in previous films and only know them as the Balzac characters. Jessica Lange is perfect as the dark and vengeful Bette. Hugh Laurie, best known for his Bertie Wooster on the PBS series, brings the vain spendthrift aristocrat Hulot to life. Hoskins has often played vulgarians, so his perfection as Crevel comes as no surprise. What is a surprise, however, is Elisabeth Shue's Jenny Cadine. Shue is best known for her role as another prostitute in "Leaving Las Vegas." What she brings to the role of Jenny is a keen sense of the class antagonism between her and Hulot, who pays for her love. When he--or any other of her wealthy clients--can no longer pay for her services, she instantly turns cold and haughty. As such, she is the perfect illustration of Marx's dictum that capitalism has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." By implication, the same thing is true of man and woman.
What makes "Cousin Bette" exceptional cinema is the modernist aesthetic vision of director Des McAnuff, who never worked in film before. He is a two-time Tony Award-winner ("Tommy," "Big River") who understood completely how to bring Balzac alive. He has entirely rejected the temptation to romanticize 19th century France. Thus, certain directorial decisions make perfect sense, among them the decision to use cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, who worked previously on "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs." Instead of the languid camera work of an Ivory-Merchant film that dotes self-consciously on wallpaper or petticoats, we get a hard-edged vision of the underbelly of French society.
McAnuff was clear about the look he expected from Sekula:
"This film is about outsiders and insiders, about contrasts...Visually, it was a question of finding a chateau for the Hulots that was spacious and had that fading first Empire look, reflecting the end of an age of abundance and plenty. Then, we wanted to contrast that with Bette's neighborhood, a medieval city that was suffering from the diseases of the early industrial revolution...We wanted to avoid romanticizing the suffering of the people...We wanted cobblestone streets, very narrow lanes, a sense of claustrophobia, almost a rat's maze, full of smoke, coal dust and dung, alongside spectacular eighteenth century architecture."
In other words, he wanted to convey sharp class distinctions.
The film concludes with fighting in the streets as the revolution of 1848 erupts. The decadence of aristocrats and haut-bourgeoisie like Hulot, Wenceslas and Crevel has finally brought the masses into the streets. The most resolute section of the masses was the proletariat, of whom Marx wrote the following in "Class Struggles in France 1848-1850":
"It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and ingenuity, without leaders, without a common plan, without means and, for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard, and the National Guard that streamed in from the provinces. It is well known how the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it suffered by unheard -- of brutality, massacring over 3000 prisoners. The official representatives of French democracy were steeped in republican ideology to such an extent that it was only some weeks later that they began to have an inkling of the significance of the June fight. They were stupefied by the gunpowder smoke in which their fantastic republic dissolved."
Balzac hated the bourgeoisie and workers equally. Only as the industrial working-class became better organized politically and more self-confident, did novelists such as Zola begin to champion its cause. Balzac's importance is that he wrote brilliantly about the social decay that capitalism breeds. Thus, he is a novelist who remains very contemporary. As such, McAnuff's bitter, dark comedy "Cousin Bette" does Balzac perfect justice.
(For Marxist discussion: //www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
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