Hedda

 Hedda is a 2025 film adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.  The film is reasonably entertaining but tone-deaf to Ibsen's particular ambience of entrapment and anxiety.  The movie compresses Ibsen's script into a debauched all night party with about forty celebrants reveling in a huge Downton Abbey-like mansion complete with a hedge maze for convenient and discrete copulation.  Hedda's party is like something thrown by Jay Gatsby -- it has a wild, lavish aspect with formally dressed young people (and their elders as well) misbehaving in vast baronial halls or on the dark manicured lawns of the mansion or carousing in the aforementioned hedge-maze.  This is vastly different from the milieu characteristic of Ibsen's famous later plays -- in Ibsen, the characters might pretend to be rich but they aren't; everyone is impecunious, in debt, living off the diminishing profits of some half-forgotten and neglected sawmill somewhere in the north near the Arctic Circle.  The parties are generally squalid affairs in which cracks and bleeding fissures open in the landscape of shabby genteel aunts and widows and alcoholic young men.  By contrast, Hedda shows us handsome, self-assured aristocrats, performing for one another at a lavish feast with a dozen servants in evidence -- there's even an upstairs-downstairs aspect to the manor house.  At one point, a servant in the kitchen comments on the debauchery upstairs.  

Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen's most diabolical and charismatic villains, a lethal narcissist bent on destruction for its own sake.  She flirts with a vicious judge who later tries to blackmail her  (she has blithely taken a shot at the judge with her revolver at the start of the play).  Hedda resurrects a dead sexual relationship with a brilliant, but fragile, alcoholic, snatches his manuscript that everyone proclaims as brilliant and burns the sole copy of the book.  (She claims to do this to support her sexually inert and dimwitted professorial husband -- he won't make tenure if he has to compete with the genius alcoholic.  She get the alcoholic to drink, destroying his sobriety, and, then, when he realizes that he has lost his book, she gives him her pistol so he can shoot himself.  After the alcoholic, Lovborg, is dead, the weapon falls into the hands of the corrupt Judge Brack.  Brack decides to coerce Hedda into sex with him -- if she will become his mistress again, he'll withhold the scandalous evidence that Hedda's gun was the instrument that killed the man. Hedda is not willing to be compelled by any man to do anything and, so, she escapes the trap by killing herself.  Hedda's feckless husband with Lovborg's mistress sets out to reconstruct the lost book, utterly ignoring poor Hedda -- an insult that is another basis for her killing herself.  Ibsen makes this all jump off the page, propelling the plot through a series of misdeeds by Hedda, ranging from the catty and trivial to the murderous.  The movie, more or less, follows this plot but makes a couple adjustments beyond the pretentiously lavish setting in the vast medieval-looking manor.  

Lovborg, the brilliant alcoholic and former lover is played by a woman.  This imparts a lesbian angle to the story.  It also mutes the competition between Lovborg and George Tesman, Hedda's hapless husband -- in the play, he is an authority on something like 14th century Flemish furniture, and portrayed as a weak, pedantic academic.  Lovborg's brilliant book and his second writing in the form of the manuscript that Hedda ultimately burns to ashes seems to sufficiently qualify her for the tenured professorship job that is necessary for George Tesman to survive.  Everyone agrees that Lovborg, if she is really rehabilitated from her alcoholism is a far superior candidate for employment at the University than Tesman. Hedda is a portrayed as a Black woman providing a racial component to the character's discomfiture and debilitating boredom -- her opportunities are severely limited by her race.  But this isn't consistent with the decision to make the libertine, Judge Brack, also a Black man.  If racial discrimination is operative in this environment (posited to be United States in the nineteen fifties) then how is it that Brack has such wealth and power.  The action takes place from dusk to dawn at the glittering party that Hedda hosts.  This gives the movie a unity of time and action that Ibsen doesn't insist upon in his source.  Lovborg wears a ludicrous costume; she's dressed like a milkmaid in the black halter; her breasts occupy separate white bags between the various straps and suspension apparatus holding up her peasant blouse. At times, her nipples are clearly visible through the white breast-bags.  It's garb that makes the actress look more naked and exposed that if she were, in fact, nude.  I don't think anyone would voluntary dress like this -- it's a vulgar and exhibitionistic display.

The movie is pretty good and most audiences will enjoy this steamy melodrama.  But there's nothing particularly distinctive about the picture.  Ibsen manages to make his Hedda a monstrous criminal but, also, a sort of feminist insurgent -- although we are appalled by the things she does (she threatens to light a female rival's hair on fire), we also admire her for her spunk, spirit, and bloodymindedness.  The film achieves the same general effect and, so, on its own terms seems successful.