One of Australia’s finest young talents with a knack for choosing the path more quirky, Mia Wasikowska’s major breakthrough was as the titular heroine of , Tim Burton’s return hop down Lewis Carroll’s treasured rabbit hole.
Seemingly at home with the stiff upper lip and rustling corsets of the bonnet-wearing world, Wasikowska followed Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter’s tea party with a starring turn Cary Fukunaga’s austere take on Charlotte Brontë’s , alongside Michael Fassbender’s brooding Rochester and Jamie Bell’s pining St John.
Wasikowska’s at it again next month (July 9), this time frocking up as Gustave Flaubert’s infamously doomed housewife with ambitions beyond the strict confines of her times in writer-director Sophie Barthes’ tragic Madame Bovary.
This week, Carey Mulligan will have her choice between ’s Matthias Schoenaerts (fresh from playing buttoned-up landscape architect to Kate Winslet’s daringly modern mucker in period puff A Little Chaos), Tom Sturridge and Michael Sheen’s suitors in Thomas Vinterberg’s latest adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s .
She’s got form too, having portrayed Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, Ada Clare in Bleak House, Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey and the flighty Daisy Buchanan in .
With all this literary frolicking, we dusted down the SBS Movies On Demand archives for a canter round our favourite costume dramas.
Lady Chatterley
(2006)
Few books have caused quite such a stir as DH Lawrence’s infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover, which saw publisher Penguin in the docks thirty years after the author’s death, falling foul of Britain’s freshly minted 1959 Obscene Publications Act.
Source: SBS Movies
The then-shocking tale of a young, sexually frustrated upper class woman’s affair with the groundskeeper caused an almighty stir both with its loose morals and liberally sprinkled anatomical words, provoking the wrath of the censors’ garden sheers. It wasn’t Lawrence’s first scandal either, with police previously seizing and destroying all copies of his racy The Rainbow.
Supposedly tasked with preventing the proliferation of pornography while protecting works of true literary merit, the act and subsequent court case riled readers across the UK and had authors lining up to defend the book. It was a media circus, and altered the course of British law, as people power and common indecency won out.
It’s hardly surprising then that the book’s inspired several big screen adaptations, with the first being Marc Allégret’s fruity French-language L'Amant de Lady Chatterley in 1955, starring Danielle Darrieux as Constance and Erno Crisa as her mucky lover.
SBS On Demand has Pascale Ferran's mesmerising also French-language take form 2006, Lady Chatterley, which scored five César awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for the sublime Marina Han as Constance. The flourishing passion between her and Jean-Louis Coulloc'h’s green-fingered Parkin is understated but nonetheless transfixing, with an aching melancholy rooted just below the surface.
Wuthering Heights
(2011)
Source: SBS Movies
Lady Chatterley’s hubby was indisposed in the bedroom department, due to unfortunate wartime accident, so he never stood much chance in the three-way stakes, but falling for the gardener has become a fairly standard tradition these days, including Charlotte’s rosy romp in Sex and the City.
Whereas that indiscretion was largely healthy, not so in Emily Brontë's only novel, Wuthering Heights, a heath-blasted gothic rom-horror of undying and intergenerational love. Another gripping yarn that’s inspired multiple dramatic costume renditions, writer/director Andrea Arnolds’ 2011 take is about as agonisingly bleak as it’s possible to be, getting to the bleeding heart of the novel.
Forget the classic composure of Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff and Merle Oberon’s Cathy in the seminal 1939 adaptation; here we have the daring rawness of non-professional actors Solomon Glave as a the abandoned young Heathcliff and James Howson as the brooding adult in a thoroughly plausible take that brings race into play, exacerbating the ‘dangerous’ stranger angle in an already inhospitable, unforgiving land.
Shannon Beer is also great as the young Cathy to Kaya Scodelario’s haunted older spirit, stuck in a loveless marriage.
An impressionistic roar of a movie, full of dirty, howling, creeping crawling things, Arnold’s impressionistic film is more akin to Kate Bush’s than a laced-up Merchant Ivory piece.
Source: SBS Movies
Les Miserables
(2000)
Source: SBS Movies
If you find yourself increasingly agitated by two-hour plus movies, then French-Algerian director Josée Dayan’s four-part spin on Victor Hugo’s epic French Restoration novel Les Misérables comes delivered in manageably bite-sized, 90-minute instalments.
Originally airing as a TV mini-series, the cracking cast includes Gérard Depardieu as Jean Valjean, John Malkovich as Javert, Virginie Ledoyen’s Cosette and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Fantine.
Shot in Prague with lavish production values, this is the French-speaking version – hilariously, they also shot it in English for the apparently unable to read US market. If you’ve had enough sing-along fun post-Eurovision Song Contest, you’ll be pleased to know that this attempt is free from the aural assault of the musical numbers favoured in Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe’s later rendition.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
(2006)
While many period pieces would have us believe petticoats were always pristine and all smelled of roses, German author Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (Das Parfum), set in 18th century France, immediately dispelled such silly myths with a pungent reek that practically wafts noxious-like from the page.
Source: SBS Movies
He wasn’t so sure a film could pull off this visual pong, but we think director Tom Twyker delivers the grotty filth of old Parisian streets and the accompanying stinkiness convincingly, without resorting to gimmicky Smell-O-Vision.
We first spy the super-sensitive snoz of our villainous anti-hero, Ben Wishaw’s Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, in the half-light of a dank and filthy prison cell. A man born curiously with no scent of his own, he survives a graphically rank abandonment amidst a fish stall’s slop at birth, a brutal spell in an orphanage and essentially slavery in a tannery.
Grenouille’s obsessive nasal quest eventually leads him to a dark obsession a redheaded street hawker, setting in motion a violent course that ultimately results in him becoming a successful perfumer, but the ugly whiff of his misdeeds cannot be concealed for long.
With narration by John Hurt and an appearance by Dustin Hoffman, this is darkly enticing stuff that may be a little on the nose for some, but will intoxicate others.
Source: SBS Movies
Colonel Chabert
(1994)
Gérard Depardieu takes on another French literary classic in writer/director Yves Angelo’s feature debut, an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Le Colonel Chabert. Stepping out from behind the camera, former cinematographer Angelo has crafted a razor sharp legal drama set in the same tumultuous period of social upheaval as Hugo’s Les Miserables.
Source: SBS Movies
Depardieu stars as the cavalry officer in question, left for dead in the dirt of a bitterly fought and bloody battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars. Nursed back to health, he returns to Paris ten years later to find his wife, played by the magnificent Fanny Ardant, presuming herself a widow and now shacked up with money-hungry hubby Count Ferraud (André Dussollier), merrily ploughing through their life savings.
Not best pleased, the lawyers are summoned quick smart, with the fabulous Fabrice Luchini playing Derville, taking on the case at his own financial risk out of sheer fascination for its complexities and representing all three parties. The Count’s looking for a way out, with wealth gained under Napoleon less than fashionable, and his Countess is determined not to be thrown by the wayside. Riveting.
