A Cottage on Dartmoor

A Cottage on Dartmoor is a silent film directed by Anthony Asquith, an English filmmaker who worked efficiently and rather tediously for British studios until the mid-fifties. Also made in 1929, the film is unusual in that it records, and satirizes, the rise of talking pictures: an important plot motif is an invitation to “go to a talkie” and one impressive sequence depicts the characters in a darkened theater watching such a movie. The picture is pictorially extraordinary and provides more evidence that silent films verged on pure lyric poetry in the era of their obsolescence. Narrative is secondary to A Cottage, a delirious film about a near-fatal romantic rivalry told primarily by flashback. As seems typical of prestigious British pictures of this period, the movie feels padded and far too long – it’s the kind of material that Alfred Hitchcock would present in a half-hour TV show expanded here to almost two hours. The plot is also inadvertently absurd: the hero is a Byronic hair stylist who has fallen in love with a female pedicure/manicure specialist. He admires his lady-love from afar, brandishing a scary-looking straight razor. A plump gentleman also admires that heroine and comes into the barber shop daily for “beauty treatments” that really are just an excuse to flirt with the hero’s object of affection. The hero slashes the plump guy, apparently gets sent to jail, and, then, escapes, fleeing across the wild moors to the cottage on Dartmoor where a final, fatal confrontation occurs. The imagery of the moor is wild and desolate; the hero literally drops into a shot of barren trees, falling as if from a plane into the picture. Then, he darts across picturesque landscapes to the cottage triggering an extended flashback set in the hair salon. The salon which is full of mirrors gives Asquith plenty of opportunity to experiment with wildly baroque camera angles, complicated reflection shots, all interpolated with huge febrile close-ups of symbolic objects and faces. The picture is a strange blend of uber-Romantic landscape photography, steamy hair salon sequences, and weird comic byplay. Asquith’s sequence involving the talking picture is extraordinarily resourceful and bold – he stages the scene entirely in a series of close-ups of people watching the talking picture and each other in the darkened auditorium. The effect is remarkably similar to Kiastoarami’s Shirin which is ninety minutes of women’s faces shown as they watch a romantic film. Asquith’s joke is that the people watching the talking picture seem to be more interested in talking to each other, bickering about hats (an ancient silent film conceit), and flirting than in watching the movie. The climax of the movie is staged in giant close-ups intercut with images of flowering trees and looks like Dovhenko – indeed, much of the nature imagery seems very much like Dovhenko’s films, particularly Earth, although, of course, the tenor of the two pictures couldn’t be more different. And, in fact, the morbid, intensely romantic climax has some of the character of early Tarkovsky – huge imagery of maternal faces, people dying, trees bursting into blossom. (These similarities must be purely accidental – Tarkovsky admired Dovhenko and his early pictures look like Dovhenko for that reason; I doubt that he ever saw anything by Asquith). Something doesn’t quite work with this film: as is often the case with early British pictures, the actors and actresses don’t quite look handsome enough for the big screen. The heroine in A Cottage is shaped strangely; she’s like one of Parmigiano’s mannerist madonnas, almost too grotesquely long-throated to be beautiful – and the leading men look half-crazed or strangely mundane.