THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (71)

Directed by: Jane Campion

Starring: Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey, Martin Donovan

The Pitch: In the late 19th century, a young American living in Europe burns with the desire to live life to the fullest, but becomes ensnared in a loveless marriage to a callous fortune-hunter.

Theo Sez: Whatever one may think about the merits of adapting Henry James (surely, with his internalised narratives and dense thickets of prose, the least cinematic of writers), this is clearly to be admired for seeking a visual equivalent to his hothouse style (instead of just incorporating it via voice-over, a la AGE OF INNOCENCE) ; and it's also among the most sensually - albeit not dramatically - satisfying films of the year. There's a hypnotic stillness to it, its combination of a gliding camera, visual trickery - slow-motion, faded colours, a surreal fantasy sequence where dinner-party canapes turn into a plateful of talking human lips - and Wojciech Kilar's fabulous score (a variation on his DRACULA music) all making for some heart-stopping passages, intense and ethereal at the same time ; it even manages to take the hoariest costume-movie cliche of them all - the big ballroom set-piece - and create something extraordinary, a yellow-filtered threnody with poison in the air and the revellers pale as corpses. Unfortunately, though a feeling of oppression - of being trapped, like a fly in an upturned glass - is powerfully evoked, it's far from clear what exactly our heroine is oppressed by, unless it's her own inexplicable masochism : given the film's vaguely feminist tone one assumes it's intended as a tale of an independent woman stifled by a patriarchal society - yet it's also made clear that the petty tyrant who crushes her spirit isn't representative of that society (he's generally dismissed by the circles who matter). Indeed it's impossible even to fathom why she should have wanted to marry him : Malkovich, no-one's idea of a classic heart-throb, doesn't even get the wolfish wit here that brought out his animal energy in DANGEROUS LIAISONS - he just seems odious, a deeply unattractive little man. The film - as its modern-day prologue suggests - probably wants to use its heroine as a shorthand for all women, but in fact her behaviour is too bizarrely self-destructive to connect with anything but herself. The result is weirdly disoriented, like a song by a brilliant composer writing in pidgin English : the music is lovely, but the words don't quite make sense.