The same day I watched this, I watched Prick Up Your Ears right before it. Not only are they both period biopics set in England, but they have a profound chronicle of love in common. Having watched both movies consecutively, it brings me to meditate on the lives and perspectives of creative people. There is a refreshing, Rilke-esquire way of thinking that they follow in their lives. What if everyone followed their heart, and nothing but?
Carrington is a buried treasure that depicts the relationship between painter Dora Carrington and author Lytton Strachey in WWI England, a beautiful existence of cottages and countryside. Even if platonic because of Strachey's homosexuality, the relationship was all the same a profound and complex one. When Carrington did form a more physically intimate relationship with a soldier, Strachey made do accepting him as a friend, while the soldier stayed rather edgy, not so much with Strachey's sexual orientation as with the reality that he was a conscientious objector. Yes, there is inescapable trouble linked to the bond between Carrington and Strachey. Yes, there is more pain and guilt than there are good times. But what if they had buckled to social expectations, convention, tradition? What if they didn't follow their hearts? By the end of the film, one realizes that the true heartbreak is caused by how much they wound up guarding their feelings in spite of following them, and in spite of the nature of their incompatible sexualities.
You could never find a better fit to play Dora Carrington. Emma Thompson is perfectly cast, wise and set aside and completely natural. She is natural in the way she looks and natural in the way she carries herself. When we first see her, when Strachey is first introduced to her, we misinterpret the first impression of her, a quiet, reticent tomboy. Carrington, like Thompson, is beautiful but maintains selfhood over everything else. Thompson understands that that is why Carrington refuses her body to her lover early in the film. She never quite seems to grow comfortable with sex no matter her progression in that inevitable field of her life. She in some sense is like a child in spite of her intellectual prowess and her disregard for recognition of her work as a painter. Her impatience for complicated situations causes her to ride roughshod over the feelings of those to whom she finds herself to be closest, and when she finds that in her penchant for the immediate, she learns the harsh truth that she has not been embracing her greatest moments.
Her primordial flaws come at the expense of Strachey, played by Jonathan Pryce, who seems to love the breezy theatricality of the role, a clear eccentric from his first moment, who gives the impression of being completely aloof and prissily high-maintenance. He seems not to take anything seriously, even his unwavering position as neutral in the issue of the war. He is one of those odd and nonchalantly insubordinate older men that make spectators laugh, but part of him quietly enjoys being a source of entertainment. Part of him is terribly troubled by his only minimal success as a writer. Somewhat like Carrington, he still seeks sometime companions more conducive to his most rudimentary needs, and in one instance, we see him laid bare, very unlike his cold and elitist temperament. In this moment, he and Carrington realize that no matter how often they fluctuate on each other's terms, they are each other's shoulders to cry on, and as they have felt as awkward as they've ever let themselves become around anyone else, they feel, whether consciously or not, that they can be completely themselves in each other's company.
Their leisurely lifestyle becomes intensely infectious, as is the atmosphere, which is not only wonderful because of the English countryside but because there is an indescribable feel to the contrast of the cinematography, which is not grainy nor is it clear and bright. Maybe it pertains to the same disregard for orthodoxy as Carrington and Strachey. Maybe it is that it doesn't conform to the expectation that historical England be depicted with lushness, nor does it conform to the precondition that a story full of sorrow be depicted with gloom.
Michael Nyman's moving and wonderful music score has a similar effect as Howard Shore's music in a David Cronenberg film, a suitably blending pulse of the hearts and lives of the story yet haunting and emotional. Had the film gone without Nyman's music, it might not have had the moving power behind its unaffectedly real and wise, not to mention true, story, and we might not have loved its two central characters. And maybe we love them for similar reasons why they love each other.
Carrington is a buried treasure that depicts the relationship between painter Dora Carrington and author Lytton Strachey in WWI England, a beautiful existence of cottages and countryside. Even if platonic because of Strachey's homosexuality, the relationship was all the same a profound and complex one. When Carrington did form a more physically intimate relationship with a soldier, Strachey made do accepting him as a friend, while the soldier stayed rather edgy, not so much with Strachey's sexual orientation as with the reality that he was a conscientious objector. Yes, there is inescapable trouble linked to the bond between Carrington and Strachey. Yes, there is more pain and guilt than there are good times. But what if they had buckled to social expectations, convention, tradition? What if they didn't follow their hearts? By the end of the film, one realizes that the true heartbreak is caused by how much they wound up guarding their feelings in spite of following them, and in spite of the nature of their incompatible sexualities.
You could never find a better fit to play Dora Carrington. Emma Thompson is perfectly cast, wise and set aside and completely natural. She is natural in the way she looks and natural in the way she carries herself. When we first see her, when Strachey is first introduced to her, we misinterpret the first impression of her, a quiet, reticent tomboy. Carrington, like Thompson, is beautiful but maintains selfhood over everything else. Thompson understands that that is why Carrington refuses her body to her lover early in the film. She never quite seems to grow comfortable with sex no matter her progression in that inevitable field of her life. She in some sense is like a child in spite of her intellectual prowess and her disregard for recognition of her work as a painter. Her impatience for complicated situations causes her to ride roughshod over the feelings of those to whom she finds herself to be closest, and when she finds that in her penchant for the immediate, she learns the harsh truth that she has not been embracing her greatest moments.
Her primordial flaws come at the expense of Strachey, played by Jonathan Pryce, who seems to love the breezy theatricality of the role, a clear eccentric from his first moment, who gives the impression of being completely aloof and prissily high-maintenance. He seems not to take anything seriously, even his unwavering position as neutral in the issue of the war. He is one of those odd and nonchalantly insubordinate older men that make spectators laugh, but part of him quietly enjoys being a source of entertainment. Part of him is terribly troubled by his only minimal success as a writer. Somewhat like Carrington, he still seeks sometime companions more conducive to his most rudimentary needs, and in one instance, we see him laid bare, very unlike his cold and elitist temperament. In this moment, he and Carrington realize that no matter how often they fluctuate on each other's terms, they are each other's shoulders to cry on, and as they have felt as awkward as they've ever let themselves become around anyone else, they feel, whether consciously or not, that they can be completely themselves in each other's company.
Their leisurely lifestyle becomes intensely infectious, as is the atmosphere, which is not only wonderful because of the English countryside but because there is an indescribable feel to the contrast of the cinematography, which is not grainy nor is it clear and bright. Maybe it pertains to the same disregard for orthodoxy as Carrington and Strachey. Maybe it is that it doesn't conform to the expectation that historical England be depicted with lushness, nor does it conform to the precondition that a story full of sorrow be depicted with gloom.
Michael Nyman's moving and wonderful music score has a similar effect as Howard Shore's music in a David Cronenberg film, a suitably blending pulse of the hearts and lives of the story yet haunting and emotional. Had the film gone without Nyman's music, it might not have had the moving power behind its unaffectedly real and wise, not to mention true, story, and we might not have loved its two central characters. And maybe we love them for similar reasons why they love each other.