Nora is a portrait of a strong women with a natural sexual self-confidence dealing with a man whose sexuality is convoluted and self-torturing. This is a fascinating theme, and in the hands of a director brave enough to tackle it head on it might have made a fascinating film.
Unfortunately Nora pulls all the important punches.
It ends, for one thing, with the completion of Dubliners, long before the completion of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. It is in Ulysses more than any other of his works that Joyce portrays Nora's frank and unashamed sexuality through the soliloquy of Molly Bloom that provides its unforgettably affirmative coda:
"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Much of the film is repetitious; there would have been ample space to deal with the composition of Ulysses. Leaving it out points up the film's essential timidity in the face of the historical and literary record.
The film's most daring scene -- and biggest cop-out -- involves the exchange of sexually explicit letters when the pair are in different counties, an exchange deliberately initiated by Joyce for the purpose of sexual relief. Joyce's side of the correspondence can be found in the Collected Letters. Joyce yearned to be accepted sexually for himself, with all his kinks and erotic hang-ups. Nora permitted him to confront those sides of his sexuality both in his life and in his work, and that more than any thing else is the reason they stayed together. The film too needed to confront those issues. Instead his words, spoken in voice-over against an image of Nora discreetly masturbating, consist of a few tame references to 'licking'. All the four-letter words, the masochism and the anal fantasies have been left out. A viewer unfamiliar with Joyce's work would be left with the impression that his sexual preferences were by modern standards pretty ordinary.
Other issues not dealt with are the psychological problems of Lucia Joyce, their daughter, who began to show signs of mental illness in 1930, and was treated for a time by Carl Jung. The image of Lucia in the film makes an oblique reference to Lucia's problems, showing her standing forlornly in the doorway or looking out on the world through iron railings, but a reader unacquainted with her story is unlikely to understand the significance of these images. Here as everywhere else the film turns its eye away from the darkest corner. It closes with Joyce and Nora, soon after the completion of Dubliners, walking arm in arm towards the end of a jetty as the sun sets. This anodyne image is presented to us as the final truth about Joyce and Nora. A film which consistently avoids its subject; an opportunity missed.
Unfortunately Nora pulls all the important punches.
It ends, for one thing, with the completion of Dubliners, long before the completion of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. It is in Ulysses more than any other of his works that Joyce portrays Nora's frank and unashamed sexuality through the soliloquy of Molly Bloom that provides its unforgettably affirmative coda:
"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Much of the film is repetitious; there would have been ample space to deal with the composition of Ulysses. Leaving it out points up the film's essential timidity in the face of the historical and literary record.
The film's most daring scene -- and biggest cop-out -- involves the exchange of sexually explicit letters when the pair are in different counties, an exchange deliberately initiated by Joyce for the purpose of sexual relief. Joyce's side of the correspondence can be found in the Collected Letters. Joyce yearned to be accepted sexually for himself, with all his kinks and erotic hang-ups. Nora permitted him to confront those sides of his sexuality both in his life and in his work, and that more than any thing else is the reason they stayed together. The film too needed to confront those issues. Instead his words, spoken in voice-over against an image of Nora discreetly masturbating, consist of a few tame references to 'licking'. All the four-letter words, the masochism and the anal fantasies have been left out. A viewer unfamiliar with Joyce's work would be left with the impression that his sexual preferences were by modern standards pretty ordinary.
Other issues not dealt with are the psychological problems of Lucia Joyce, their daughter, who began to show signs of mental illness in 1930, and was treated for a time by Carl Jung. The image of Lucia in the film makes an oblique reference to Lucia's problems, showing her standing forlornly in the doorway or looking out on the world through iron railings, but a reader unacquainted with her story is unlikely to understand the significance of these images. Here as everywhere else the film turns its eye away from the darkest corner. It closes with Joyce and Nora, soon after the completion of Dubliners, walking arm in arm towards the end of a jetty as the sun sets. This anodyne image is presented to us as the final truth about Joyce and Nora. A film which consistently avoids its subject; an opportunity missed.