Washington Journal II: Millais’ Ophelia

Ophelia by John Everet Millais (1851-2)

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, op. 18 is indubitably moving. But is it great art? The strains of it accompany the ill-fated lovers in David Lean’s l945 film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, a powerfully moving work of emotion in its own right. The Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design 1848-1900 begs the same question. One of the most famous works of Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting of the drowning Ophelia by John Everet Millais, is a centerpiece of the exhibit. As you walk into the gallery in which it’s displayed, it hits you right between the eyes. You are struck by the apparition of sepulchered beauty. Millais in fact has gone where Shakespeare feared to tread, showing what in Shakespeare was only spoken by Queen Gertrude (Act IV, Scene VII) and ambiguously at that. Did Ophelia kill herself or was the drowning accidental? It’s a question Shakespeare scholars have troubled over  for centuries and which Millais doesn’t answer in the painting. But what is the difference between romanticism and estheticization? The Pre-Raphaelite movement which came into existence during the height of the Industrial Revolution was known for the propagation of the esthetic as a counterpoint to material values. Yet this romanticized Ophelia in all her sublime glory embellishes the bard’s words in way that ultimately lessens their imaginative effect.

Brief Encounter

Joyce famously defined sentimentality as "unearned emotion." David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), the movie version of Noel Coward’s Still Life (1936), currently revived in all its black and white glory at Film Forum is an unearned emotion party. That which doesn’t exist is always a hands down favorite over the known and the predictable--in a sentence the theme of this grand old war horse. But from there on all bets are off. The story is told as an interior monologue, an imagined rendition to the one person in the world that our heroine could talk to, her stolid husband, Fred (Cyril Richmond), who does his Times crossword puzzle in his pinstripes and is looking for a seven letter word based on a line of Keats--which turns out to be “romance.” The movie begins where it ends as Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) are interrupted by reality in the form of a chatty acquaintance. In the throes of impossible love or passion ( the Liebestod, that Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde suffer from), the world seems to recede which turns out to be a perfect segue way to the comic romantic subplot in which Stanley Holloway plays the randy stationmaster. We see only the garish lips of the woman talking like Billie Whitelaw’s mouth in the film version of Beckett’s Not I and incidentally the interiority recalls O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, just as the final sequence in which Laura almost throws herself in front of a train, Anna Karenina. When Laura exclaims that she rather be dead, Alec says “If you die, you’d forget me and I want to be remembered.” What begins to be apparent is that Lean earns his unearned emotion in this masterpiece, which is to say that genre art can rise to brilliance. Love Story is not a good example of this, but Brief Encounter, Romeo and Juliet and the Ring cycle all are (indeed Laura and Alec walk out of a cheesy romance called Flames of Passion). Our two forlorn lovers meet when Laura gets something in her eye and the iconography of subjectivity starts with this brilliant device which involves the distortion of vision, all to the background of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2. Laura’s husband refers to her as looking piqued and indeed she is suffering from an illness known as the romantic agony in which clocks appear everywhere, a train shooting through a station becomes a symbol for consummation that never occurs and a fedora lying on a foyer table connotes personhood.  But speaking of consummation, one wonders if there are any brief encounters left to be had in our disenchanted post-modernist universe. Today you hook up before there’s a chance to manufacture any of the feverish and resplendently unrealistic fantasies that characters like Laura and Alec suffer from and then you “sext." 

Brief Encounter

Joyce termed sentimentality “unearned emotion.” The same could be said for melodrama. The film Brief Encounter, based on Noël Coward's play Still Life, is a classic piece of melodrama, pulled along by the engine of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number #2.  Stéphane Brizé’s Mademoiselle Chambon has all the ingredients of melodrama. The music, in this case more subtly rendered by the British composer Edward Elgar, underscores the impossible love relationship between a shiftless, cultivated school teacher and a Lawrentian construction worker, Jean, trapped in the provinces, with a muted pre-verbal physicality. If there is a Madame Bovary in the film, it is in Jean’s muted aspiration for the world that Veronique Chambon represents. Yet there are so many lovely touches in Mademoiselle Chambon, underscored by the leitmotif of the window which runs through the film—the romance begins with Jean repairing Chambon’s window and ends with the vision of Jean and his wife Ann-Marie, now pregnant with a second child, viewed through a claustrophobic window shot. If there is any melodrama here, it is overshadowed by subtlety and artistry. In this regard, the movie is reminiscent of the understatement of Evan Connell’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge novels. The affair is only one of a series of life passages Jean confronts, including a visit to a mortician with his father to decide on interment or cremation. Jean leaves a message on Veronique’s answering machine culminating in the simple phrase, “C’etait Jean,” and Veronique’s students write “Au revoir Mademoiselle Chambon” on a blackboard. In another exchange, Ann Marie says, “I think your father enjoyed his birthday,” to which Jean replies, “Yes, it was a good party.” In a previous epiphanic scene, Ann Marie, having seen the way her husband looks at his son’s teacher, understands everything. What is truly moving about Mademoiselle Chambon are the succession of moments that contain what Henry James termed “felt life.” In the end, Madame Chambon earns its emotion.