kweejibo stories, December, 2012: Angels and Insects, film with Mark Rylance, Kirsten Scott Thomas, Patsy Kensit

DEC : film review/story of culture-pop-culture

by Philip Haas, Screenplay by Philip and Belinda Haas, 1995

based on the story, Morpho Eugenia, by A.S. Byatt, 1992

cinema evolution costume period piece England Shakespeare historical drama Mark Rylance media writing short story south east Asia pop culture Bangkok travel Thailand voyage articles author art journal magazine museum gallery exhibit crafts ceramics clothing designer small business local manufacture San Francisco Haight street-life Paris fashion photographer show café cool mode style models Europe France French China HongKong film review movie director actor Japan Book Murakami Reading literature video icon music Group underground graffiti news performance

When David O. Selznick produced Gone With the Wind, he demanded full costume for his actresses, including all the requisite petticoats, underwear involved. Many people asked why he needed that... this costs a lot of money and effort, and nobody would see it. Mr. Selznick said, "The actresses will know." And this is true... the presence of the petticoats makes itself felt. The actresses move with the weight of so many yards and pounds of material... this film is without a doubt one of the most authentic of its genre, Civil War 1860's.

Costume weighs a surprising amount in the 1995 film, Angels and Insects, which takes place in the same time period as the great GWTW, but this location being a very aristocratic England. Charles Darwin, his theories of evolution and scientific studies, are an obsession of several characters of this film, as being one of the hot topics of the day.

The leading character, aristocrat Eugenia, played by Patsy Kensit, often wears taffeta the color of the sky, the color of the Morpho Eugenia butterflies collected by her paramour, a commoner naturalist William Adamson played by Mark Rylance. She is pale and lovely, her younger recently-engaged sister Rowena, is pale and plain.

She has three additional sisters, about twelve years of age, eerie triplets, identical in dress and looks, very pale, and wearing horizontal thinly striped red-and-white dresses. This pattern ever more eerily resembles the red ant queen, a dark red creature with paler stripes, that the young children study under the tutoring of the naturalist. Their mother Lady Alabaster, played by stupefying Annette Badland, an even more luminously pale creature (Is this possible?), is so white and swollen that she resembles a termite queen, a large assemblage of eggs, and is similarly unable to move.

William Adamson conducts studies of different ant colonies, the aggressive fire red and the ordinary black... with the additional help of the children's governess, Mathilda, who is possibly very deliberately, plain and grey. There is a lot of talk of the providence of plainness, in nature whether by accident or premeditation, as a way of disguise such as in the case of the plain brownish female Morpho Eugenia, who has little other self-defense. In one particular scene, where William shows Eugenia her namesake butterflies, she professes to much prefer the striking color of the males. A presentiment to her own fate, her own vulnerability present in her overly striking presence. Or a warning sign of danger to others; as intense beauteous color in the tropics often warns of such.

Over time Eugenia herself grows to resemble a large inanimate queen. She marries William the commoner, and becomes constantly pregnant and enormous, while producing identical ever-white females offspring.

Anthropomorphism, the idea of endowing other animals with human characteristics, is not an original film subject. Angels and Insects reverses this story with Eugenia presiding, after the death of her mother, over an enormous colony of servants who appear to spend all their waking hours tending to the needs of her and her brood. Literally faceless servants, as they are instructed to turn away from their masters whenever they cross paths. Ever more inevitable, are the parallel stories between her own life and the observations of the ant colonies made by her husband William.

William Adamson : "... The red ants had one purpose only : to snatch the unhatched black ants from the nest and carry them in their fine jaws to Red Fort (home of the red ants). From that moment on, the fate of the captured black ant nestlings was sealed. They would live and die as red ants, not true black ants, they would feed and nourish little red ants, and in time would respond to the sun by massing to attack their forgotten families. It is as if environment were everything and inheritance nothing." Slowly, he becomes aware that he is referring to his own story and how he is drawn into the service of a people and even a family that is not his own.

Mark Rylance has a gift for rhythm and tone in speech. He has one of the most compelling cadences that I have heard in a film actor. In an interview, he once confessed to fascination for simply pronouncing words for their sound. He plays William with earnestness.

Mark Rylance was the first Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, 1995 to 2005.

He has won several Olivier and Tony Awards, played in both theater and film, he played a Shakespearean actor in the 2011 film Anonymous.

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October 2012

for Charlotte Rampling story and photo collection,

click here, you are leaving the main kweejibo stories blog for a kweejibo stories "past issue" blog now! click here :

http://madeinoaklandkweejibo5.blogspot.fr/

also featuring, Like Someone In Love, new film by Abbas Kiarostami...and

Made In Oakland....continuing series

plus....short fiction, Story of the Baba

Exhibition, Maison Européanne de la Photographie, Paris, August 2012

for Charlotte Rampling story and photo collection,

click here, you are leaving the main kweejibo stories blog for a kweejibo stories "past issue" blog now! click here :

http://madeinoaklandkweejibo5.blogspot.fr/