Charlie Stratton (2013)
Emile Zola is regarded as a pioneer of ‘naturalism’: in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin he claimed that he ‘set out to study temperament, not character’. The novel is, nevertheless, essentially a psychological melodrama. Zola was anxious to stress the modernity of his approach but, in the pre-Freudian age in which Thérèse Raquin was written, ‘temperament’ derived from the medieval concept of humours – so Thérèse herself is ‘melancholic’, her lover Laurent, with whom she murders her husband (and cousin) Camille, is ‘sanguine’, and so on. Fortunately for Zola as a storyteller, contemporary medical knowledge also regarded such temperament as potentially changeable. What he does in Thérèse Raquin is, in effect, manipulate character – he says that he’s dealing with ‘temperament’ rather than ‘character’ in order to increase the ‘scientific’ credentials of the novel. As the late Robin Buss noted in his 2004 translation and edition of Thérèse Raquin for the Penguin Classics series:
‘The use of … medical vocabulary shows Zola trying to back up his study of character [sic] with the latest scientific understanding of human psychology. … after the shock of Camille’s murder, Laurent’s sanguine nature is becoming more nervous, like Thérèse’s, while she is moving into a state of hysterical hyper-nervousness. …’
In fact, the shifts that Buss describes are only one stage in the torturous aftermath to the drowning of Camille: Zola seems determined to adjust the personalities of Thérèse and Laurent as often as he can, in order to wring out every possible drop of melodramatic misery for the homicidal couple. Thérèse Raquin is an increasingly wearisome read (although it’s short – under 200 pages in the Penguin Classics edition) but it’s often been adapted for the theatre and the screen. (The core of the story – frustrated wife and hot lover get rid of her dreary husband then pay the guilty price – forms the basis of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself the source material not only for American film adaptations of Cain’s novel but also for that landmark of Italian neorealist cinema, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione.) Charlie Stratton’s screenplay for In Secret, the latest film version of Zola’s novel, is adapted from a stage version by Neal Bell (that Stratton directed in the theatre). The director isn’t completely faithful to Zola. That’s not necessarily a fault, of course, but his choices as to when to depart from the original are curious, and he fails entirely to co-ordinate the ‘natural’ and melodramatic aspects of Thérèse Raquin.
Stratton flattens out the emotional shifts of the story – in relation to both the settings and the protagonist. The interiors are generally underlit: this is fine for Mme Raquin’s symbolically dingy haberdasher’s shop but it’s just as gloomy upstairs, where Thérèse and Laurent make passionate love on the sly. Zola frequently describes his characters as ‘like animals’ but Stratton presents Thérèse’s carnal desire as animal passion in the wrong way: she’s so indiscriminately anxious for sex – from the word go – that the film loses any sense of Laurent arousing something unsuspected in her. While the Raquins are still living in rural Vernon, Thérèse practically has an orgasm just watching a strapping labourer at work on the river bank. Shortly after her arrival in Paris, Stratton frames her in the shop window as if she were behind bars yet he also shows Thérèse as willing to have sex with Camille – the problem, it seems, is not that her husband disgusts her but that he’s libido-less. In the novel, the orphaned Thérèse shares a bed with her sickly male cousin when they’re children: Stratton, unlike Zola, suggests that this continues through to young adulthood (but has stopped before Thérèse and Camille are married). Elizabeth Olsen, who plays Thérèse, takes her melancholic temperament too literally: Olsen always seems miserable, even in the first flush of the love affair with Laurent. (Lily Laight, seen briefly as the child Thérèse, who’s deposited by her recently widowed father with Mme Raquin, his sister-in-law, anticipates only too well the young woman that Olsen’s Thérèse becomes.) Olsen has a good moment with her instant, unequivocal answer to Laurent’s question as to whether he owns her (‘Entirely!’) but she doesn’t seem frustrated enough that she can’t, while her husband is alive, be with her lover all the time.
Charlie Stratton may be trying to tone down the melodrama but he can’t do without it and the effect of the toning down is to make the story dull (in any case, Gabriel Yared’s score keeps telling you you’re watching a melodrama). Stratton gives little idea of what things are like for and between Thérèse and Laurent in the immediate aftermath of Camille’s drowning. In the novel, Laurent is drawn repeatedly and ineluctably back to the morgue where Camille’s corpse lies; in this film, he appears there only once, it seems to identify the body. The portrait that Laurent paints of Camille is on the bedroom wall on Laurent and Thérèse’s wedding night and Thérèse has a nightmare imagining Camille in bed beside her. You never get a sense, though, that the dead man is haunting the couple continuously and, by doing so, eroding their relationship. There are bewildering moments in the film – as when Camille tells Thérèse that they and his mother will move back from Paris to Vernon for the sake of his health. He’s only coughed a couple of times since they’ve been in Paris, much less than he did when he was breathing the clear air of Vernon. And one of those two coughs seems to be faked in order to get out of having sex with Thérèse.
The faults in plotting and the weakness of the central performance do for In Secret but there’s some good acting in other parts. As Camille, Tom Felton is made up to look so greenish in life that his posthumous appearances are anti-climactic but Felton gives the character a pedantic self-satisfaction that credibly grates on Thérèse’s nerves. Oscar Isaac makes a fine entrance as Laurent when Camille brings him home for the first time during one of Mme Raquin’s weekly domino sessions – he lights up the tenebrous parlour. Isaac’s very good at showing how Laurent gets on the right side of Mme Raquin: he does what he needs to flatter her – and she’s almost flirtatious in return – but you sense his contempt for her. Isaac also fuses interestingly Laurent’s sexual self-confidence and appetite, his manipulativeness, his essential weakness and his increasing desperation. The film has been poorly received and opened in London very quietly – I discovered only by chance that it had been released the same week as another film featuring Oscar Isaac, The Two Faces of January. What little praise there’s been for In Secret has been reserved for Jessica Lange as Mme Raquin. Lange’s variety certainly exposes Elizabeth Olsen’s lack of the same; the passion of the mother’s grief at the loss of her son strengthens retrospectively her smothering and fussing over him in the early scenes; but the screenplay makes Mme Raquin too unkind to the child Thérèse and, later on, cool towards her niece and daughter-in-law to the point of antipathy. This weakens the impact of Mme Raquin’s eventual discovery of Laurent and Thérèse’s crime. Among the domino players, John Kavanagh is fine and Shirley Henderson’s natural eccentricity serves her well but Matt Lucas, though he looks good, is a shade effortful. It’s a shame as well as a disappointment, given the quality of Lucas’s characterisations in Little Britain, that he seems constrained in the company of ‘proper’ actors – especially when the domino players also include Mackenzie Crook from The Office, who’s more at ease than Lucas here.
21 May 2014
