Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. No, not A Tale of Two Cities, but the terrible rash of Austen-ophilia that is crawling all over our screens. Not content with Anne Hathaway as a slimline Hollywood Jane (couldn't someone just cast her as the original Anne Hathaway? I'd love her to end up in the second-best bed just once), we've also got Billie Piper as Fanny Price, with a supporting cast (and I use the words advisedly) of bouncing bosoms.
Why are film and television adaptations of historical novels or events so bad? Why are they so bland, so shallow, so dull? It's not as though other forms of historical reconstruction automatically fail. Charles Palliser and Sarah Waters created creepily wonderful 19th-century worlds in their novels. Clare Clark and Hilary Mantel did the same for the 18th century with theirs. And yet, somehow, the films never work.
Patrick Suskind refused to sell the film rights to his novel Perfume for two decades, fearing the desecration that might take place. A reported 10 million euros seems to have changed his mind, but the movie that finally emerged was - well, it was just not smelly enough. It seemed to think that frills and furbelows would compensate for emotions and narrative. Sofia Coppola did the same in a rather more knowingly self-conscious, but no more successful, stab at period with Marie Antoinette.
But period doesn't only work in fiction. Next week one of the best examples of an adaptation of a historic event will appear. It will have everything: sex, drugs, rock and roll (well, Franz Liszt, but you get my drift). It will have high drama, it will have posh frocks and it will have camp soldiers. Most importantly, it will have an emotionally dense story, a (fairly) accurate historical basis, and an afterlife that will resonate with its viewers for hours if not days.
This is Kenneth Macmillan's Mayerling, which the Royal Ballet revives all too rarely. There are, I admit, drawbacks to this hypnotically self-involved view of the crumbling of the Austro-Hungarian empire. On first viewing it is hard to tell Prince Rudolf's wife, mother and mistresses apart, and the plot is hideously complicated. It features one of the most embarrassing hunting scenes ever staged and the camp soldiers often more closely resemble a boy scout's jamboree. But the core is there. This is not about frocks. Or bosoms. It is about real people whose lives were as complex and emotionally fraught as anyone today. Prince Rudolph is not just a pretty uniform and a moustache, but a drug-addled heir to a self-destructing empire, a man cut off from any useful function, unloved by his parents, rushed to destruction by Marie Vetsera, a crazed, fin-de-siecle hot little number.
We may not personally know any princes of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but everyone knows someone who has failed to live up to his potential, and is crushed by it. Everyone knows people in doomed relationships, and has watched them steer closer and closer to the rocks until the smash becomes inevitable. These are real people experiencing real suffering.
And that is, ultimately, the failure of bonnets-and-frocks films: they aren't about people. The characters have no lives. They have no emotions. They have no thoughts. They only have costumes. And bosoms, of course. Mustn't forget the bosoms.
