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It should be obvious that Wharton was not Pushkin, nor is Scorsese Ingmar Bergman.<br /><br />The attempted custombrism of Edith Wharton is false and insipid, lacking grounding in the best French or Spanish tradition, and all attempts at reaching epic proportions pales into insignificance beside the great masters Tolstoy, Sholakhov, Doestoyevsky, among others.<br /><br />That Martin Scorsese, a director who has amply shown his calibre in such films as `The Last Temptation of Christ', `The Color of The Money' and `Taxi Driver' among his best titles, should try his hand at an involuted regentist victorianism so abhorred by Europeans for at least 75 years, is more than surprising and turns out in the end to be even irritating. Pérez-Galdós would have been greatly angered by any similar treatment of his `Fortunata y Jacinta', for example. If Wharton in 1870 was decidedly retrograde, Scorsese in 1993 was definitely on another planet. How or why Scorsese could ever have been inspired to make a pretence replica of anything in the style of the magnificent `Fanny och Alexander' just beggars belief. He builds a sumptuous, even fastidious, set, decorates it with some rather good actors, and uses highly toned up coloring, no doubt as if to add insult to grievous occular harm, which, for 1870 New York, was indeed a gross insolence and incoherent injustice.<br /><br />The dialogues are somewhat akin to the luscious-looking dishes spread out on the extravagant tables: made of plastic and indigestible, however brilliantly sic they may have been filmed.<br /><br />So much mannerism and forced modalities, at times taking on tragicomedy theatrical proportions, seemed as authentic as a penguin acting as a tourist guide in `La Alhambra'.<br /><br />The non-original music included some good pieces, even though `Alerte! Alerte!' from `Faust' by Charles Gounod did not appear in the Paris Opera in its final grand opera form until March 1869, making its début in the Metropolitan a few years later; using the same recording as that used by Tony Richardson in `The Phantom of the Opera' three years earlier is not merely an unhappy coincidence; and some thirty seconds of Enya during a scene of hundreds of men hanging on to their bowler hats in the driving wind was a laughable misfit at best.<br /><br />The result is more than 150 minutes of tedious inconsequentiality: late nineteenth century wealthy upper-crust goings-on in their own conceived quagmire of supposed respectability and lushly veneered egocentric hypocracy, is out of touch with more genuine humanity.<br /><br />Edith Wharton is dead and buried: I hope she will now remain that way. |