Marianne : Forgive me, I'd hate to be in your place.
Héloïse : We're in the same place. Exactly the same place. Come here. Come. Step closer. Look. If you look at me, who do I look at?
This week I watched three versions of Greek myth. The first was Hadestown, a musical that took the long way around to smash success. In 2006 it was a minor stage production, then a 2010 concept album before moving from the margins to massive audiences on Broadway. If you’re unfamiliar, Hadestown is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the lovers who went to the underworld and back, and then back to the underworld again. The setting is vaguely Steinbeckian, definitely Southern, with a jazzy orchestra and class conflict without anyone using the “S” word. Hades (Patrick Page, very good) is an industrialist, king of some kind of mining or foundry company town where the workers’ very souls are dissolved by drudgery. Eurydice is an unfortunate drifter, doomed to wander from town to town until Orpheus charms her, and then accidentally gets her killed. Or gets her to sign her life away. Or something. The two settings, ancient and modern, never quite gel beyond a sort of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did that” way. There are constructive, and obstructive ambiguities littered throughout the play. For every moment where your brain neatly fills in the gap there is another where you spend a few minutes uselessly trying to figure out the logistics of the whole thing. The set design is gorgeous and the costumes are beautiful, but neither convey much meaning beyond the obvious.
The production I saw suffered from what you might call the Dear Evan Hansen Problem. Orpheus, ostensibly a naive youth, is played by a man called Reeve Carney, who is thirty eight years old. The main instruments used to bridge that credibility gap are an unsettling haircut and an infuriating tic: In trying to give the impression that his character is inexperienced, Carney does a nervous, strangled, fake-bad singing for basically the entire musical. It cannot be overstated how distracting it is to see a man about to enter early middle age, with twenty plus years of singing experience, pretend to be a little kid with big dreams.
Some of the issues with Hadestown are not necessarily their fault. It’s probably considered bad form to edit Greek myths for modern sensibilities, so they are stuck with the downer ending that is poor Eurydice getting sent back to the underworld. Hades promises that they will both be free to leave as long as Orpheus goes first, and in a display of faith, doesn’t look back to see if she’s following. At the last minute, he does.
“That’s horrible,” says Sophie in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, on hearing the same story. “Poor woman, why did he turn? He was told not to but did, for no reason.” She sits with Héloïse, the noble daughter shortly to be wed to an anonymous nobleman far away, and Marianne, the woman sent to paint her, in the flickering firelight as they debate the reasons for Orpheus’ mistake. Watching Hadestown’s ending, I admit I had the same reaction. “Perhaps he makes a choice,” Marianne suggests, “He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” Héloïse adds another few lines and wonders, “Perhaps she was the one who said, ‘turn around’” The scene is on an island in Brittany at the close of the eighteenth century. The three are living in a brief moment of joy and freedom between oceans of repressed time. Marianne and Héloïse are in love, and for a few days the Countessa is away. There is room in this film to explore the story properly. There is layer and meaning far beyond most films. Every shot is full of textural detail, literal and metaphorical. Cold ocean and sharp stone, the folds of fine silk and the rough cloth of a habit, oil paints, charcoals, soft red pencil and deep red wine. Both Hadestown and Portrait of a Lady on Fire comment on class, but the former is both overblown and curiously bloodless; the clashing demands of musical bombast and an aversion to overtly political content. In one of my favourite scenes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the three have settled into a comfortable equality that feels natural and transgressive at the same time. Sophie, the maid, attends to her needlework, fixing in art the flowers on the counter whose loveliness will not last one more week. Marianne pours them all wine as Héloïse, the highest born, chops vegetables for their dinner. Hadestown is sung through, whereas Portrait has no formal score, only a handful of moments of wildly startling music. Music is spoken of, but not heard until the women circle a bonfire, the boundaries between the world of the spoken and unspoken blur and dissolve, and the song bursts out, an overwhelming ecstasy of freedom.
It is unfair, perhaps, to compare the two. One is a massive spectacle for Broadway audiences, the other a film with a self consciously refined audience. And despite its flaws, Hadestown evokes some genuine feeling in its better moments. It’s just hard to escape the feeling that Broadway musicals in the end sound and feel roughly the same. Like prestige television or Hollywood films, there is a laundering process that dyes everything with the same ink. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is something that looks like nothing else, feels like nothing else.
Courtesy of the YouTube recommendation algorithm, I have been watching a channel called Early American, the product of a group of historical reenactors who, it seems, try to live life as if James Monroe were still president. There are painstaking food preparations (A Working Class Supper in 1820s America), clothing demonstrations (Dressing in 1790 vs. 1830) and even courting rituals (Guide to Wooing a Woman in 1820). What there is mostly however, is bad acting. An uncomfortably clad man comes into the authentic cabin and places his musket on the table. His wife stiffly greets him, “Hello my dear husband. Have you brought anything for the dinner?”
“No, wife, none of my traps sprung today.”
“That is ok, I will make some barley stew.”
It often takes on the appearance of bad reality television, floating in the nether realm between bad scripting and bad improv. The overall effect is deeply uncanny. It fails because the reenactors imagine their early 19th century counterparts to be fundamentally different to them. They are the product of earnest research, animated by the tropes of movies, television, the Oregon Trail computer game and the shadows of previous historical reenactors. The interest is ostensibly in showing how far from modern life these people were. The work! The hardship! The stiff manners and stiffer clothes.
Why do we imagine the people of the past to be so different to us? One of the great joys of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that it never indulges the viewer's hunger for period excess. The detail is exact, but restrained. The leads wear the same things for basically the whole film. The presumably sumptuous fixings of the house are mostly covered in dust sheets. The people in these rooms, in these clothes, are just people like you or I. They sit by the fire and make conversation, make jokes, make love. They fight with, and show incredible tenderness to, people they’ve known for only days. Their lives inside are full, whatever their exterior trappings. The items are beautiful, but they are unimportant. When the camera lingers, it is not on their finery, but on their faces, and the elements that are eternal: fire and ocean. Watching the film is like finding the one painting in the museum that speaks to you. The gaze of a model from hundreds of years ago that stares back and reminds you that there was once flesh and blood behind the layers of oil.
- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Penitent Magdalene, 1650-1655, National Gallery of Ireland
In the Early American videos there are very occasional glimpses of life. One video sees three women go to a shop to buy some flour, passing as they do a sign that advertises an app called something like Hungr. The simulation breaks down as they walk the aisles of a modern supermarket, and they laugh slightly, at the absurdity. Then the door closes and they begin mugging for the camera once more. The moment of breach is the most of closest truth, and it passes quickly.
The last thing I watched was Disney’s Hercules. I last saw it when it came out and I was about eight years old. They did not have the same qualms about rewriting Greek myth, and this was probably for the best. There are some crossovers that I can live without seeing. I remembered the aesthetic and mood of the film perfectly and not one single plot point correctly. That’s looking back for you.
Extras/Would Recommend
Reading: Detransition, Baby (2021) - Torrey Peters
Listening: The Foggy Dew (1965) - The Wolfe Tones
Watching: The Rickshaw Man/The Life of Matsu the Untamed (1943) - Hiroshi Inagaki