The Intended.

Wood, Robert Paul

I thought Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive one of the finest, most fascinating films I saw in the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. I appear to be in an invisible minority over this. The press screening was very sparsely attended, I read no reviews of the film anywhere, and it has still, two years later, not had a release in Canada, either theatrically or on video. This is the more surprising in that it has an international 'name' cast, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Romane Bohringer, Janet McTeer and Bruce Davison. Surely, at least, someone will have the enterprise to bring it out on DVD. In view of this apparent blanket rejection I had begun to wonder whether I was completely wrong about it, but The Intended convinces me that I was not. I hope it doesn't suffer a similar fate. (Note: I cannot write about this film with any adequacy without giving away its plot, which is built upon surprises. If it is available in any form when this is published, I ask prospective readers to see the film first).

Taken together, the two films are a gift to auteurism. True, The King Is Alive was an official Dogme film and The Intended isn't, but its staging/shooting methods, if somewhere outside the strictures of the celebrated 'Vow of Chastity', remain reasonably chaste: the entire action takes place within a single location and the film is nowhere afflicted by 'special effects', cheating over spatial relationships, or the kind of razzle-dazzle editing that seeks to prevent one from noticing that the characters couldn't possibly be doing what we are supposed to believe they are doing. In short, an honest film, such as is no longer the norm today.

Thematically, the links are very strong. The King Is Alive was built partly on the premise that it might be helpful for people in extremis to act out King Lear rather than try to deceive themselves or simply blot out their situation. (Perhaps the reason the film has not been distributed is that few people today under thirty seem to know the difference between King Lear, Edward Lear and Evelyn Lear, nor be in the least worried that they don't). The Intended abandons Shakespeare, but not the 'feel' of the Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedy/melodrama: the latter term, which didn't exist then, seems today the more apposite to such works as Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, or The Revenger's Tragedy. I would describe Levring's film as a Jacobean melodrama set about three hundred years later, a genre marked by passion and excess, crime, treachery, violence, characters driven to extremes of behaviour, a consistently high emotional voltage.

The basic premises of the two films are also startlingly similar: a group of people isolated, far from their native culture, in a primitive environment (the desert, the jungle), unable to contact anyone for help, with no apparent hope of rescue, struggling to survive either nature or their own fellow-humans or both, driven to extremities of desperation and action. Ultimately, both films are about the testing of character in extreme circumstances, the relentless exposure of one's ultimate nature. From this viewpoint, one of the things that gives the film its distinction is that it contains such surprises while convincing us of their logic. We come to realize that the surprise comes from our own cinematic conditioning: the character development refuses (for example) to conform to the expected course of guilt/retribution/punishment/ remorse/suicide that would be the typical cinematic consequence of hideously murdering one's own mother. Deprived of this, we have to make an adjustment, yet the film's own logic seems completely convincing.

Janet McTeer co-wrote the screenplay with Levring and has the central (indeed, the title) role, though this only becomes apparent gradually and she never 'hogs': if the film is a 'star vehicle', it is also very much an ensemble movie, with a uniformly perfect cast. McTeer is magnificent. Some may find her 'over the top', but this is an over-the-top movie filled with over-the-top situations, about people who are driven over the top by circumstances (as well as by each other): a 'melodrama of excess', a perfectly legitimate (if not always popular--some are embarrassed by it and the film might at times evoke nervous laughter) sub-genre. It is also, ultimately, a woman's melodrama, although at first Hamish/JJ Feild is the dominant character (though we are already very much aware of Sarah as a powerful presence), taking charge, making decisions (to abandon his job and return to civilization tomorrow, when denied his promised half-pay). The film has him progressively reduced in power and authority, marginalized, and finally rendered completely helpless (unconscious, perhaps dying), as Sarah rises in strength, takes charge, makes decisions (though some are forced on her), discovers herself. Above all, Sarah surprises us; Hamish doesn't, or never to the same degree.

But is is William/Tony Maudsley (or, more precisely, the way in which the film allows him to develop) who surprises us most. (One cannot but wonder what censorship, where it still exists--e.g., Ontario's notorious so-called 'Review' board--is going to have to say about this. But our censors seem exclusively preoccupied with explicit sex, so perhaps they won't notice). William begins as a stereotypical creep and loser, the 'castrated' son totally dominated by his mother/Brenda Fricker (who runs the isolated jungle trading-post, controls the finances, and can choose her successor); we feel for him nothing but distaste and contempt. The filmmakers' decision to have him murder her in a particularly grotesque and sadistic way is important: we are certainly not meant to endorse or pardon it. Nor do they make the mistake of presenting her as wholly monstrous: no character in the film is simple, we are made to understand that Mrs. Jones, a woman forced by circumstances into a male role, and a precarious one at that, has become what she is from necessity, and we are allowed glimpses of genuine, if partly suppressed, human qualities. William is never punished for his monstrous crime, neither does he ever show remorse. Instead, he regains his manhood and the self-respect he forfeited when he returned from his British university, confidence, dignity and (eventually) generosity. I cannot think of a film that has offered a more disturbing challenge to our moral sense, with this suggestion that, indeed, nothing is simple.

The challenge is reflected in the development of Sarah. Her husband is dying of some unspecified jungle fever; William's doting aunt (who previously helped him out by masturbating him) is the only person who knows the cure; she will save Hamish's life if Sarah will give herself to William. Horrified and disgusted, Sarah initially refuses, but acquiesces when the aunt adds to her 'payment for services' the money that will make escape possible. Sarah invites William to a romantic candlelit dinner, but (not quite inadvertently) lets slip that she is being paid. The early (pre-murder) part of the film led us to expect that William would attempt to rape her; now he is shocked that she is making herself a 'whore', and rejects her, clearly for her own sake. This leads Sarah, in her turn, to begin to see a different William. They develop a mutual attraction, and when they make love it is not only to save Hamish's life. Further, the film makes it clear that Sarah experiences with William a degree of physical pleasure she has never had with her intended husband ...

The King Is Alive was already striking for the unpredictability of its development. In my opinion these two films, taken together, indicate a major talent, notable for its refusal to accept without challenge the moral norms of our culture and the familiar progressions of our narratives.