The House of Mirth (Davies, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.20pm
This superb Edith Wharton adaptation, on an extended run at BFI Southbank, is part of the Terence Davies season at the cinema. Full details here.
New Yorker review:
In his exquisite and anguished adaptation, from 2000, of Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” Terence Davies brings to life the book’s daring societal X-rays—the
revelations of codes and norms, unspoken rules and silent judgments,
that govern the glittering whirl of fin-de-siècle New York high society,
especially those that limit women’s independence. Gillian Anderson
stars as Lily Bart, the orphaned heiress to a vanished fortune, who
depends entirely on an elderly aunt’s charity. The alluringly
free-spirited Lily’s only hope to maintain her lavish life style is to
marry into money, but the man she loves (Eric Stoltz), a lawyer, hasn’t
got much, and she spurns rich men she doesn’t love. Pursuing her desires
with an ingenuous sincerity, she risks exposing the falsehoods of other
women, who eject her from their social ranks, sending her into free
fall without a financial safety net. The tragic contradictions of Lily’s
brilliant character—her refined aestheticism, lacerating wit, and
heedless passion—are matched by Davies’s rapturous yet rueful display of
the era’s sumptuous fashions and furnishings, which quietly shudder
with the crushing power of the unwritten laws that sustain them.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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