The Aspern Papers

Henry James is the most reticent and elliptical of writers -- his art suggests and implies.  Reduced to a bald statement, James' perfumed fogs of words simply seem silly.  Julien Landeis' version of James novella, The Aspern Papers treats its rather recondite subject in a direct, declarative manner, that is, exposing all implications, and, literally, denuding the book's characters -- it's a perverse approach to this material that results in a ghastly mess on-screen.  Curiously, Landeis and screenwriter Jean Pavans ignore the actual suspense that James carefully built into his tale and visual cues that the writer embedded in the text are also simply ignored.  

The novella chronicles in a relatively straight-forward chronological manner the campaign mounted by a smarmy editor to extract from an old woman love letters from a famous Romantic poet.  The writer is imaginary -- Jeffrey Aspern, but James' constructs this character, who haunts the story with a sort of eerie glowing absence, from elements of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.  (James' Aspern is an American who died as expatriate in Italy -- this is an odd detail and suggests that the author identifies with his fictional poet and, perhaps, poses the tale as a cautionary "No Trespassing" sign as to his own biography.)  The literary critic and editor is smug with a dishonest wheedling courtesy and he takes up lodging as an "inmate" of the old lady's decaying Venetian palazzo.  A duel of wills transpires between the critic and the frail elderly woman; despite her age (someone says she "must be 150 years old), the poet's old flame turns out to be a formidable adversary.  Concerned for the well-being of her hapless, spinster niece, the old woman nudges the critic into a relationship with the younger woman.  Her plan seems to be to trade the ancient love letters for a marriage vow between the critic and her niece, the forlorn Miss Tina whose forlorn life was, at least, partially, blighted by the arrogant, stubborn, and sadistic old lady.  The critic, tiring of the chess game with the ferocious old woman, simply tries to steal the letters.  The old lady confronts him with a wild denunciation and, then, expires.  Miss Tina proposes marriage to the critic offering as her dowry the love letters.  The critic, who fancies himself an amoral freebooter, is disgusted by the proposition and flees.  But his desire for the love letters overcomes him and he returns to the moldering mansion, fully intending to propose to the old maid.  It's too late:   he finds that the niece has something of her aunt's savage ferocity -- the niece has destroyed the love letters burning them, as she says, "one by one."  James' artistry resides in this paradox:  he makes the rather slight tale, based on a mere after-dinner anecdote, suspenseful; but the suspense pivots around an artifact of passion spent 60 years earlier, a sort of heroic romance that the critic and Miss Tina are wholly incapable of -- James' suspenseful tale is about wan vampires competing for written traces of emotions that they can't feel.  The trick is that we are led to care about an objective that James despises -- that is, the possession of letters enacting a grand romance irrelevant to his pale, neurasthenic Victorian readers.  

For some reason, this slight plot with its unsettling denouement has inspired several adaptations.  In 1988, Dominick Argento composed an opera on the subject.  A film noir called The Lost Moment (1948) also dramatizes the story.  There have been several other film versions, culminating in the Landeis film, cast with prestigious actors and shot with full Merchant-Ivory production values:  the filmmakers can't resist turning the squalid and decaying manor where the two women live into a sumptuous palace with forty-foot high ceilings and vivid frescos over gorgeous pietra dura floors; the impoverished women wear spectacularly sumptuous garments, and the director stages flamboyant bisexual threesomes, flashbacks shot in amber Italian light and featuring huge close-ups of thrusting loins.  (All of this falsifies James' novella in conspicuous ways and rips up the motivation that the author implanted in the tale -- why would the women even consider allowing the critic into their apartments if they were not almost wholly impecunious? but in a Merchant-Ivory film shot in the grand manner there is no room for any depiction of actual poverty.)  The story, in itself, is too slender to support a ninety minute movie and so Landeis has to trick out the material with flashbacks to the poet and his male and female lovers -- we see him washed up on the beach in a picturesque landscape and, then, his funeral pyre.  There are ridiculous scenes of the two Romantic poets cavorting naked with the beautiful Juliana between them -- it's all overlit, looks like an MTV video, and features lots of lascivious finger-sucking.  Toward the end of the film, Landeis despairs and introduces a subplot wholly foreign to the material -- it seems to be a variation on James' crepuscular ghost story "The Jolly Corner" in which the Aspern Papers' critic (James didn't name him -- here he's call Morton Vint) spawns a doppelganger and, then, roams about the alleyways of Venice like Dr. Jekyll committing all sorts of brutish mayhem -- I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and these scenes are shot so incompetently that the audience can't tell what's happening.  Juliana is given a baby who, then, dies and Landeis, who seems to have completely misunderstood the novel, actually shows Miss Tina destroying the letters while the film labors mightily to stage the love story embodied in that correspondence.  

The curious feature of this film is that the director ignores visual imagery that James, who is not ordinarily interested in the mere realism of things and places, carefully inserted into the story.  Just before the end of the novella, the protagonist sees the statue of the brutal condottieri Bartolommeo Colleoni -- this is intended as an ironic contrast between the paltry crimes committed by the narrator and the heroic mayhem arising from fiery, grandiose passions that characterized the Italian renaissance.  There's no trace of this in the movie.  The director makes hash of the climax -- for the story to sing, there has to be suspense as to whether Tina has destroyed the letters:  James saves this revelation for the penultimate paragraph in 70 page story.  Landeis just shows the woman burning the letters in a spectacular vulgar and misguided scene (intercut with lurid soft-core pornography) -- this wrecks the ending and Tina's quietly chilling and intensely cruel statement that she burned the letters "one by one."  In fact, Landeis suddenly shifts gears and implies that it's all for the best -- Tina is now liberated from the dead hand of the past and can go about her business as a free woman; suddenly,  the film takes on the feminist implications of something like A Doll's House.  James sees Tina as a pawn caught between the wiles of the editor and the cruelly manipulative old lady.  Landeis promotes her to heroine in the last ten minutes of the film and makes the movie about her liberation.  It's an interesting idea, but developed too late in the film to save the thing and, of course, completely alien to James' novella.  

I don't think the film is worth watching.  But the performances by Vanessa Redgrave as the old woman and Joely Richardson (Redgrave's actual daughter) are extraordinarily fine.  Redgrave in particular stands out and gets to deliver the most pungent dialogue -- it's extracted verbatim from the book.  Joely Richardson is far too attractive to embody the aging spinster, but someone has stuck a long fake proboscis on her face to make her seem plain and she is also does a superb job with her part.  (Again, all the best lines come from James.)  The film's most obvious defect is the smug performance by the Irish actor Jonathon Rhy Meyers -- he's terrible and miscast to boot.  (I don't know why a man with gorgeous matinee idol features who seems to be about 25 is playing the part of the middle-aged pedant in this film.)  Rhys Meyers speaks with the standard honking accent that English and Irish actors use to imitate Americans -- his articulation rings false in every single syllable.  Even more bizarre is the director's interpretation of the role of Mrs. Prest.  This woman, in James' book, is the hero's advisor and confidante and she hatches the scheme by which the editor-critic becomes an "inmate" in the old woman's household.  Landeis obviously fears that the audience will lose interest in the film and so he depicts Mrs. Prest as a glamorous goth Lesbian who trots around in equestrian dominatrix gear -- she has a princess in tow who seems equally depraved and two ingenues who apparently lust after the critic.  It's absurd to the point of being actually funny.  

I don't know for whom this movie was made.  If you don't know James' book, you won't have any interest in the proceedings at all.  If you've read the book and know James, you will despise the film.  I think the movie may have been produced for people who vaguely recall that they read the novella in college or those who would like to claim acquaintance with novella but would rather not read it.