WIDE SARGASSO SEA
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1993 Frank Maloney
WIDE SARGASSO SEA is a film directed by John Duigan. The case includes Karina Lombard, Nathaniel Parker, Rachel Ward, and Michael York. Music is by Stewart Copeland. Rated NC-17, for (frontal) nudity and sexual situations.
John Duigan is a great Australian director who has made his reputation with small, personal films including FLIRTING and THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE. In adapting Jean Rhys' 1966 novel to the screen, Duigan has eschewed the small, the personal, the Australian and given us a slight and slightly dull Gothic romance. He turns the beauty of Jamaica into a moody, dangerous haunt and peoples it with ciphers whose actions we cannot begin to understand, unless we ourselves just happen to be characters in a bodice-ripper. Rhys was bold enough to take the moody hero of JANE EYRE, Edward Rochester (played by Nathaniel Parker), and attempt to explain why he was the way he was to poor dear Jane. Probably not that good of an idea to be begin with. And Duigan cannot help but make more of a muddle of the thing.
Rochester's first wife, mad and locked away in the attic, turns out to have been Antoinette Cosway, the creole daughter of an English planter and ex-slave-holder and his French wife. One nice thing about Antoinette's story is that we get to see Michael York and Rachel Ward in brief parts as the parents. Antoinette, played by newcomer Karina Lombard, is eventually married off to the penniless second son of a wealthy English family. After some initial difficulties, they settle into one of her family houses tucked up in the mountains and enjoy what is supposed to uninhibited lovemaking. As these things go it isn't much and probably the only reason the film got its NC-17, which Duigan reputedly set out to get, is a lamentably short shot of Parker's penis.
Both of the principals are handsome people and look marvelous in the nude. Duigan hasn't given them a lot to do in or out of their clothes. And most of their actions are pretty hard to fathom. He gets a poison-pen letter that his wife has the seeds of insanity in her and suddenly he no longer loves her. *And* she starts to lose it.
Lombard is no great shakes as an actor and that doesn't help us any to understand her character. Parker's acting is better, but meaningless and unmotivated. Some of the black supporting actors are actually interesting performers especially the woman who plays a combination witch and nanny and another woman who plays one of the servants with a combination of coldness and pity and secret jokes that is quite appealing.
I cannot recommend WIDE SARGASSO SEA to anyone at any price, except die-hard Duigan fans, perhaps.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews