Daphne

Daphne Du Maurier has always been on the periphery of my consciousness, as the author of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, both of which I've not read but have seen the film adaptations. So the revelation that she was bisexual comes as a mildly interesting fact. She is having a hard time defining herself sexually. Gertrude Lawrence says Daphne is really a boy--her play about a young man in love with an older woman is really about her as a man-- and Daphne spends most of the film trying to establish whether or not this is true.

I said Somerville is terrific, and she proves how inward she is with the character. The trip to Florence with Ellen Doubleday that is so fraught with tension between the two women produces some funny lines: "I'm like the river Arno with its falls all pent up, that can't get out to sea... I want to flee to a monastery or a madhouse".

I just watched this movie tonight on Logo and thought it was a wonderful story. I am only in my late 20's and not usually interested in older movies (althought this was recently made), however I found it very interesting and very well portrayed. It was a very tasteful love story.

I had never heard of Daphne Du Maurier before this, but I enjoyed it so much that I am going to read her other stories. Another good movie to watch would be Portrait of A Marriage which was shown as a mini-series. This movie was similar to Daphne. I would recommend either of those movies.

Contrary to what you may have heard, the world is becoming a better place, more understanding, more tolerant. The first thing that an inhabitant of this blessed year 2012 notices about the BBC dramatisation "Daphne" is that it appears to be happening on some other planet. A planet where the very word that begins with L can be "hateful". And yet actress Gertrude Lawrence died only 60 years ago. What if we learned that a popular author of romantic fiction was bisexual? - these days it would be no big deal. It might even explain how she could write so sensitively about "lurv". But AD 1950 puts us back in the Age of Sapphoparanoia (all right, I made that word up). Shock, horror, the old rules might not work any more! The rule went like this: if you could keep your young women (daughters, sisters, wives) separated from the males of the species, their virtue might be preserved, their hormones kept in check. But what if the "predatory seducer" should turn out to be another female? All the elaborate machinery for the segregation of sex would be undermined! Daphne (1907-89) was such a successful author that she was made a Dame of the British Empire. A marvellous book, "Historica's Women" explains: "Early in her writing career, Daphne du Maurier discovered that a large segment of the reading public still yearned for 'old fashioned' stories that featured love and adventure, a touch of danger, a hint of sexual tension, and perhaps an encounter with the paranormal." Geraldine Somerville works hard at the role of Daphne, trying to be a proper wife and mother, humiliated by intrusive and embarrassing questions in the "Rebecca plagiarism" court case, torn between the need to suppress and the need to express her aching, problematic love. Daphne's husband "Tommy" is rather cruelly portrayed by Andrew Havill as that familiar cliché, the ineffectual English gent of yesteryear. In real life "Tommy" was Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning, a distinguished military leader and war hero (article in Wikipedia). It's a slander to represent him as a mushy wimp - his nervous breakdown did not occur until 1957, five years after the action of "Daphne". Janet McTeer has fun as the exuberant and uninhibited Gertrude Lawrence, and Elizabeth McGovern has to be ambiguous and nuanced as Ellen Doubleday, wife of the American publisher.

Daphne du Maurier always left a smidgen of mystery in her stories -what exactly happened? - what really happened? What were people's real motives? Were the good characters quite as good as they seemed to be, and the bad characters quite as bad? Her fans felt that she treated them as if they were sophisticated and intelligent readers - but only just sophisticated and intelligent enough to understand her stories. Hitchcock valued this whiff of the unexplained and turned two of her narratives into great movies, "Rebecca" and "The Birds". This biopic "Daphne" attempts a similar "conundrum" approach, but it's not entirely successful. Soft-edged hints crowd out clarity. We're never quite sure, while watching "Daphne", whether we should be paying more attention to the subtleties, or whether some of these "subtleties" are in fact short on content. One suspects that Daphne herself, the author of "My Cousin Rachel", would have done a better job of writing this script, with rather less messing about.

So is "Daphne" a chick flick? It tries very hard not to be, but inevitably the microscopic examination of facial expressions (does she like me, or does she desire me?) is not going to appeal to many guys. It's an honest attempt to recover a bygone age, when fear and bewilderment clustered around bisexuality, in that limbo land on the far side of Beauvoir (English translation 1953) and Greer (1970). But delicacy and pathos are poised dangerously close to the edge of vacuity. The psychological complexity is nicely done, but you can't help feeling, and hoping, that the real Daphne du Maurier was of a personality and character more robust.

One oughtn't to assume anything yet when something hits home and one is bowled over one shan't but one shall, against all conventions and pre- condition ideologies by which one has lived, for all societal mores saving face to all those who still hold steadfast to dogmas and doctrines which have plagued man, suppressed feelings, subjugated any new possibilities, for any advances that have been balked by the egregious monster that is greed or by any other vice that has enthralled a good descent man to a life beneath his potentials and subjected him to a life as a thrall to an unjust paradigm veiled by a duplicitous propaganda machine that perpetuates blind obeisance bolstered by fear and the threat of sustenance, what is left? Most succumb, others fight, and some of the more sensitive nature and artistic persuasion seek to escape through the disembodied spirit to give free reign to our imagination who wonders deeply what if and why not? If ever there was a creative whose intrinsic essence longed to be borne on the wings of freedom and be transported to the land of transcendence to gambol and life amongst dreams above all that is petty simple bigotry without cause , if ever there was an angel amongst mortals, if ever there was an creative whose spirit touched ever so eloquently on that enigmatic universal thing called Love - Daphne du Maurier is the pure embodiment of this disembodied spirit... They say creatives do not understand the world in which they are misunderstood, they are desired but not needed, they are wont to become cross and bear the wrath in effigy of all that is rot and once there in this welter of obloquy they can become subversive and must be marginalized and if not effaced for the good of mankind, for they become "evil" and outside the hands of providence they do not see the moral walls erected by god and citizen alike wherein one summons the amoral demon inly which will inevitably give rise to a bacchanal of the supreme debauched sinner, this is how society bears the will of the creative - but it is not that they cannot see the walls, they simply break them down with their art which simply begs the question, what if.... why not? The beloved gracious Daphne, whose disembodied spirit survives her on a chill night against the gibbous moon when a soft zephyr wraps lightly on the casement window, listen to the sibilant whispers of time immemorial as her soft tender kiss graces your soft cheek and asks 'what if?'

I found the movie to be the writer/director's failed attempt at teaching the audience their view of social justice.