Berlin Film Festival 2016 – A Quiet Passion, review

A Quiet Passion is almost very good but actually nearly intolerable, says David Sexton
A series of almost static tableaux, beautifully posed and framed: A Quiet Passion
David Sexton16 February 2016

Since his classic semi-autobiographical films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives, Terence Davies has specialised in tragic female protagonists, oppressed by men.

His most recent film, Sunset Song, with its lovely debut by Agyness Deyn as the heroine, devotedly observed the narrative structure of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's classic novel of 1932, just as The Deep Blue Sea conformed to Terence Rattigan's West End drama. A Quiet Passion, however, which, as always, Davies has written as well as directed, draws on no such dominant source. It's a stylized biopic of the great, hidden poet, almost unpublished in her life-time, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), taking her from the time she left a ladies' college at the age of 17 to her death at the age of 55, from agonising kidney disease. Dickinson spent all these years in her family home, becoming increasingly reclusive, dressing in white, writing her extraordinarily original poetry but not publishing it, instead sewing together her own tiny little manuscript books or "fasicles".

So although she interacts with her family - her patriarchal father (a whiskery and improbably Keith Carradine), her depressed mother, her loving younger sister Lavinia (vivid Jennifer Ehle) and her patronizing brother Austin (Duncan Duff) and has one lively friend, Vryling Buffam (scene-stealing Catherine Bailey) - there are no excursions from this house (Belgium standing in for Massachusetts) further than the garden. A few gentleman callers, a newspaper editor and a minister, appear and are rebuffed, Dickinson eventually refusing to come downstairs even to meet them, believing herself too ugly, saying she is best heard not seen.

So it is a chamber piece, as it might be almost a play - or not even that but, rather, a series of almost static tableaux, beautifully posed and framed, lit by gas and candle-light, reverently filmed by a little moving camera, fading in and out gently (although there is one repeated gesture, whereby from the centre of the drawing room it turns slowly right round in 360 degrees, to show all those present in their fixity and separation). At times, it feels more like a video installation than a movie.

Almost a play: the film has the feel of a chamber piece

There's a tact to this, in that it doesn't presume to show us where Dickinson's gift came from, doesn't claim to explain the writing (although a good number of the poems are quoted at least in part in voiceover). And as Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Dixon (Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City) gives a fine, sensitive performance as this genius so introverted as to be not only almost inexplicable but often frankly irritating. As her sister says to her repeatedly, "Oh Emily, why have you got to behave like this?", very much the spectator's question too. At one point, she answers: "I don't know. As soon as they get too close, I feel I am suffocating. If I cannot have equality, then I will have nothing." As this last proclamation suggests, Davies has unfortunately made this recluse (who had a daffy attitude to men whom she probably never found satisfactory enough for any contact) into an a-historical proto-feminist polemicist.

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In the film's worst moment, there's a rushed history of the American civil war through colourised photographs (doubtless all the budget allowed) and when one member of the family piously laments the men who have perished, Emily snaps: "Any argument about gender is also war, because it is about slavery".

For Terence Davies has moreover chosen to script this film in a non-stop barrage of sub-Oscar Wilde witty aphorisms that do not quite work or even make sense when investigated. Mostly, they have to be spoken by Dixon as Emily. "I am a kangaroo amongst the beauties", she pronounces. Having earlier been told at school she's a "no-hoper", she later rebuffs the idea that what she has is a life: "I have a routine - it is God's one concession to a no-hoper." But this mannerism is also widely distributed among the rest of the cast. "Oh my dear, you don't demonstrate, you reveal!" her sister gushes. "Don't resist your vices, it's your virtues you should be wary of", a potential suitor tells her. Strange and so opposed, this combination of such verbal theatricality with such visual quietude and formalism in Davies's aesthetic!

A Quiet Passion is almost very good but actually nearly intolerable, a very long two hours. Its producer, Sol Papadopoulos, says "It's extraordinary that no one else has made a film about her life". The film itself makes that fact less surprising. It is Dickinson's own poems that still speak best for her, to us and for us. For a truly tactful film about a great and reclusive writer, do seek out Percy Adlon's Celeste (1981), about the routine of Proust's bedridden life, as seen by his housekeeper Celeste Albaret. The act of writing itself perhaps can never be satisfyingly filmed.

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