![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Le comte de Monte-Cristo (ii)
I watched the second half of the new 'Monte Cristo' (or, to be more precise, Parts 3 and 4 being run as a double-bill), and ended up with the same verdict: sort of mildly interested, but not enough to actually recommend it with any great enthusiasm...
As I guessed, they simply cut out the entire plot involving Noirtier and the rest of Villefort's family (and therefore Maximilien Morrel as well, which makes one wonder why they bothered to introduce the Morrel family for a single scene in Part 1; this seems to be the perpetual problem with adaptations of this novel, where sub-plots get cut for length but the characters in them are still there earlier in the story).
Danglars runs slave-ships, because Evil. (Also, he supposedly 'stole' Morrel's whole fleet, presumably including their entire crews, who might have been expected to have views on the matter; I'm not sure it works like that.)
Andrea offers Danglars' daughter a lavender marriage, because Virtuous to the Gays -- not entirely implausible (and it creates a nice relationship between them), but with hindsight I'm not sure what the point of it was, since Monte-Cristo's plans for Danglars in this version don't revolve around his daughter at all. He doesn't even attempt to blackmail or embarrass him with this secret knowledge.
(N.B. I don't remember anybody -- including Dumas -- previously pointing out that, if Andrea is the illegitimate son of Madame Danglars, then he is in fact Eugenie's half-brother and far more unsuitable as a husband than simply being a murdering bandit...!)
The plotline whereby Haydee attempts to entice the naive Albert and ends up returning his affections against her will continues, and is well executed. Her conflicted feelings are made clear without ever being explicitly mentioned, and it would be hard *not* to fall in love with Albert, who is beautifully cast ;-)
There is likewise a very effective scene where Monte-Cristo stages a fake 'opening' of the casket with the supposed body of the baby in it while forcing both parents to participate. It's so sadistic that I was willing them not to break and give him what he wanted; they just about manage it.
I forgot to mention the very silly perfect mask-disguises from last week, which Monte-Cristo can apparently peel on and off his face in order to pass undetectably as other people; I suppose it was felt that having him simply disguise himself normally by using making-up and fake hairpieces and keeping out of bright light would have made the other characters seem too stupid for not detecting his identity (in the book, he is mainly fooling people who haven't seen him for years and have no reason to expect him), but the technology is just not credible for this period. I'm not sure it's credible as yet for the modern-day era, but certainly not for the 1830s, or whenever this story is set -- Gaston Leroux has his Phantom resort to a wonderful mask that can make him appear almost human when he ventures out of hiding, but that is at the end of the 19th century, and the author is explicit that the result is still ghastly, just not obviously hideously deformed. It fills in the missing bits, but still makes his appearance unnatural and offputting. In this film, the protagonist just peels off different faces like some kind of futuristic master-spy.
And the reason, I think, why they need to do this is that they have had to substitute a completely different plot for the missing Danglars wedding/de Villefort poisoning plots, which involves Monte-Cristo creating an arch-enemy for himself in order to fool people into trusting him -- and, of course, playing both characters for a prolonged period in broad daylight. I was actually pleased and amused to spot what appeared to be a homage to the telegraph-signal stockmarket plot in the book, which normally gets cut entirely (possibly since it would require far too much explanation of the workings of extinct communications technology, although Terry Pratchett did a lot to revive that knowledge with 'the clacks'). However, rather than having a neat compression of that part of the original plot, we then get a lengthy digression into this entirely new character and plot mechanic, culminating in setting up a completely new rationale (since all the murders, including that of Caderousse by Benedetto-alias-Andrea, since he is no longer a 'bad to the bone' ungrateful ex-bandit but an injured innocent, have now been removed) for a trial in which Andrea and de Villefort can confront one another. He detonates his identity-bomb as per canon, although since the court doesn't seem to be buying his story and Villefort flatly denies it I didn't find the sudden capitulation of the latter all that convincing, and then proceeds to stab his father to death in the confusion, 'for the sake of Angèle', despite the fact that so far as we know he has presumably never set eyes on her, having been raised since infancy as an orphan in an institution far away from her brothel-imprisonment, and certainly doesn't have a close relationship with his aunt...
He is then shot to death while trying to escape, which is an unsurprising result of committing open murder in a highly public location, and Haydee reacts so dramatically that the film appears to be trying to suggest that the two of *them* were in love with one another. They may well have formed a bond of sorts as a surrogate family under Monte-Cristo's protection, but I hadn't got a sense of that previously, let alone of the sort of devastated bereavement being shown here. (I think the implication is *probably* supposed to be, from what follows, that Haydee is feeling her own sense of betrayal at Monte-Cristo's hands -- did he plan this all along? Is she, too, just another pawn due to be sacrificed in the furtherance of his schemes? -- but I'm afraid that is far from obvious, and the scene was weird and off-balance.)
Meanwhile she and Albert acknowledge their feelings for one another and plan to elope together, and Monte-Cristo steps in to foil her escape plans and torpedo the match by forcing her to admit her true identity as a victim of Fernand who was plotting vengeance against him. Albert then challenges him to a duel on the spot, which is what Monte-Cristo has been angling for -- but with Haydee as the only witness, it's hardly the public exposure and humiliation of Fernand achieved in the novel, and the duel is hardly socially unavoidable (Albert's second still talks about an insult delivered "in public", but -- unlike in the novel, where the cause of the quarrel is in all the newspapers, and Albert deliberately makes sure that he has as wide an audience for the confrontation as possible -- it wasn't!)
We then have the resulting confrontation with Mercedes (though we don't see how she finds out!) which is well handled, but the results are distinctly unsatisfactory. It's not made at all explicit in this interview, as in the original, that the cost of Albert's survival will be Monte-Cristo losing the duel instead -- that she has to choose between her two loves -- but the film then subsequently elects to 'tease' the viewer by attempting a prolonged milking of suspense over who dies in the duel, which just felt like cheating. Not least as there really isn't any question about it unless you elect to kill off the title character uncanonically before the end of the film... although in a good film, the viewer should be sufficiently engaged in the moment that this sort of reflection has no opportunity to occur :-(
(And in the name of milking the suspense in this fashion, Mercedes is robbed of her intelligent intervention, which is what defuses the duel in the book...)
Then Fernand turns up in person and they stage a final fight between him and Monte-Cristo, as various other adaptations have done from a feeling that the film format requires an action climax between rivals rather than an off-screen demise. We have here the twist that he blames all his subsequent dishonourable actions on Dantès' original 'betrayal' of their friendship by stealing his intended bride, which is an interesting take on this version of the characters -- I do feel that there was a lot of potential to the revised Dantès/Fernand axis that was not really used here.
And they fight a thoroughly dirty duel, which is presumably intended to convey the fact that these are two men genuinely out to kill one another by any means possible rather than rivals conducting an affair of honour. Monte-Cristo manages to break his opponent's sword despite having been thrown over the balcony and apparently being seriously winded and receiving rib injuries, but Fernand succeeds in impaling him on the broken blade, and he staggers away and falls with the sword right through his body. At which point I thought they were actually going to do something original by having him *lose* the final duel, since Haydee has (with his blessing) now run off with Albert and he has already said that he has nothing left to live for; I'm not sure what it says about the pretty dark depiction of the character in this film that I found myself actively looking forward to the idea! It would have been a bleak ending, but an effective one -- especially as they choose *not* to have him kill Fernand, on the grounds that death is too good for him and he will suffer more from having been spared.
Instead the film has him reappear, apparently fully recovered from his mortal wound, and sail off (alone) into the sunset, leaving a message for Mercedes -- who is presumably still legally married to Fernand in this version, but has gone off as in canon to live a life of poverty -- saying that their children have found the happy ending together that they could not. And strongly hinting, I got the impression, that he is going to come back for her at some point, which struck me as trying to have your cake and eat it in terms of canon-compliance...
I can see that the film was *trying* to do something new with the material (like the new French "Three Musketeers") in addition to the normal problems of plot compression in any adaptation of the book, and some of it did work. The Haydee/Albert plot was probably the best-handled strand, in my opinion, and that was entirely invented for the purposes of this telling of the story; having Monte-Cristo be a much darker character than is usual for film depictions is not a bad idea, since many of his actions in the book are extremely cold-blooded. But he has compensatory features there (his kindness to Maximilien and his family, for example) which we don't see here, where he is explicitly set up as a self-appointed avenging angel who rejects God and seeks to take his place. I suspect most of his better qualities have been displaced into rehabilitating Andrea...
Mercedes is very well played, as well, but robbing her of all her agency at the end of the film (we don't see her learn of the duel, or dislose the truth to Albert, or elect to leave her husband, or meet Dantès in Marseilles) rather undermines the character.
And, all in all, the film failed on the level of making me *care* about the characters; it says something that I actively wanted Monte-Cristo to die as a fitting twist to the ending!
Now, of course, I'm curious about The prisoner of the Chateau d'If all over again in contrast -- I did, more or less by accident, try rewatching the first hour of The Return of the Musketeers, and was heartened by discovering that, a year later, I did actually understand a good deal more of the dialogue than I had in my bewildered first attempts :-)
"If I repeated this sort of intensity of immersion on a daily basis for months I might actually improve my comprehension (but I draw the line at repeatedly watching bad films over and over again for months at a time!)" -- well, I did, I have, and I found a plethora of other related (and unrelated) material to watch instead :-D
I'm afraid I'm not sure I'm sufficiently curious to embark upon a repeat of a four-hour epic, though when I'm still in the middle of more rewarding material...
I really need to go and harvest some elderflowers; it is two weeks since I noticed that they were almost ripe enough, and I got the most terrific waft of scent (from some blossoms that were quite out of reach) while walking home tonight.
As I guessed, they simply cut out the entire plot involving Noirtier and the rest of Villefort's family (and therefore Maximilien Morrel as well, which makes one wonder why they bothered to introduce the Morrel family for a single scene in Part 1; this seems to be the perpetual problem with adaptations of this novel, where sub-plots get cut for length but the characters in them are still there earlier in the story).
Danglars runs slave-ships, because Evil. (Also, he supposedly 'stole' Morrel's whole fleet, presumably including their entire crews, who might have been expected to have views on the matter; I'm not sure it works like that.)
Andrea offers Danglars' daughter a lavender marriage, because Virtuous to the Gays -- not entirely implausible (and it creates a nice relationship between them), but with hindsight I'm not sure what the point of it was, since Monte-Cristo's plans for Danglars in this version don't revolve around his daughter at all. He doesn't even attempt to blackmail or embarrass him with this secret knowledge.
(N.B. I don't remember anybody -- including Dumas -- previously pointing out that, if Andrea is the illegitimate son of Madame Danglars, then he is in fact Eugenie's half-brother and far more unsuitable as a husband than simply being a murdering bandit...!)
The plotline whereby Haydee attempts to entice the naive Albert and ends up returning his affections against her will continues, and is well executed. Her conflicted feelings are made clear without ever being explicitly mentioned, and it would be hard *not* to fall in love with Albert, who is beautifully cast ;-)
There is likewise a very effective scene where Monte-Cristo stages a fake 'opening' of the casket with the supposed body of the baby in it while forcing both parents to participate. It's so sadistic that I was willing them not to break and give him what he wanted; they just about manage it.
I forgot to mention the very silly perfect mask-disguises from last week, which Monte-Cristo can apparently peel on and off his face in order to pass undetectably as other people; I suppose it was felt that having him simply disguise himself normally by using making-up and fake hairpieces and keeping out of bright light would have made the other characters seem too stupid for not detecting his identity (in the book, he is mainly fooling people who haven't seen him for years and have no reason to expect him), but the technology is just not credible for this period. I'm not sure it's credible as yet for the modern-day era, but certainly not for the 1830s, or whenever this story is set -- Gaston Leroux has his Phantom resort to a wonderful mask that can make him appear almost human when he ventures out of hiding, but that is at the end of the 19th century, and the author is explicit that the result is still ghastly, just not obviously hideously deformed. It fills in the missing bits, but still makes his appearance unnatural and offputting. In this film, the protagonist just peels off different faces like some kind of futuristic master-spy.
And the reason, I think, why they need to do this is that they have had to substitute a completely different plot for the missing Danglars wedding/de Villefort poisoning plots, which involves Monte-Cristo creating an arch-enemy for himself in order to fool people into trusting him -- and, of course, playing both characters for a prolonged period in broad daylight. I was actually pleased and amused to spot what appeared to be a homage to the telegraph-signal stockmarket plot in the book, which normally gets cut entirely (possibly since it would require far too much explanation of the workings of extinct communications technology, although Terry Pratchett did a lot to revive that knowledge with 'the clacks'). However, rather than having a neat compression of that part of the original plot, we then get a lengthy digression into this entirely new character and plot mechanic, culminating in setting up a completely new rationale (since all the murders, including that of Caderousse by Benedetto-alias-Andrea, since he is no longer a 'bad to the bone' ungrateful ex-bandit but an injured innocent, have now been removed) for a trial in which Andrea and de Villefort can confront one another. He detonates his identity-bomb as per canon, although since the court doesn't seem to be buying his story and Villefort flatly denies it I didn't find the sudden capitulation of the latter all that convincing, and then proceeds to stab his father to death in the confusion, 'for the sake of Angèle', despite the fact that so far as we know he has presumably never set eyes on her, having been raised since infancy as an orphan in an institution far away from her brothel-imprisonment, and certainly doesn't have a close relationship with his aunt...
He is then shot to death while trying to escape, which is an unsurprising result of committing open murder in a highly public location, and Haydee reacts so dramatically that the film appears to be trying to suggest that the two of *them* were in love with one another. They may well have formed a bond of sorts as a surrogate family under Monte-Cristo's protection, but I hadn't got a sense of that previously, let alone of the sort of devastated bereavement being shown here. (I think the implication is *probably* supposed to be, from what follows, that Haydee is feeling her own sense of betrayal at Monte-Cristo's hands -- did he plan this all along? Is she, too, just another pawn due to be sacrificed in the furtherance of his schemes? -- but I'm afraid that is far from obvious, and the scene was weird and off-balance.)
Meanwhile she and Albert acknowledge their feelings for one another and plan to elope together, and Monte-Cristo steps in to foil her escape plans and torpedo the match by forcing her to admit her true identity as a victim of Fernand who was plotting vengeance against him. Albert then challenges him to a duel on the spot, which is what Monte-Cristo has been angling for -- but with Haydee as the only witness, it's hardly the public exposure and humiliation of Fernand achieved in the novel, and the duel is hardly socially unavoidable (Albert's second still talks about an insult delivered "in public", but -- unlike in the novel, where the cause of the quarrel is in all the newspapers, and Albert deliberately makes sure that he has as wide an audience for the confrontation as possible -- it wasn't!)
We then have the resulting confrontation with Mercedes (though we don't see how she finds out!) which is well handled, but the results are distinctly unsatisfactory. It's not made at all explicit in this interview, as in the original, that the cost of Albert's survival will be Monte-Cristo losing the duel instead -- that she has to choose between her two loves -- but the film then subsequently elects to 'tease' the viewer by attempting a prolonged milking of suspense over who dies in the duel, which just felt like cheating. Not least as there really isn't any question about it unless you elect to kill off the title character uncanonically before the end of the film... although in a good film, the viewer should be sufficiently engaged in the moment that this sort of reflection has no opportunity to occur :-(
(And in the name of milking the suspense in this fashion, Mercedes is robbed of her intelligent intervention, which is what defuses the duel in the book...)
Then Fernand turns up in person and they stage a final fight between him and Monte-Cristo, as various other adaptations have done from a feeling that the film format requires an action climax between rivals rather than an off-screen demise. We have here the twist that he blames all his subsequent dishonourable actions on Dantès' original 'betrayal' of their friendship by stealing his intended bride, which is an interesting take on this version of the characters -- I do feel that there was a lot of potential to the revised Dantès/Fernand axis that was not really used here.
And they fight a thoroughly dirty duel, which is presumably intended to convey the fact that these are two men genuinely out to kill one another by any means possible rather than rivals conducting an affair of honour. Monte-Cristo manages to break his opponent's sword despite having been thrown over the balcony and apparently being seriously winded and receiving rib injuries, but Fernand succeeds in impaling him on the broken blade, and he staggers away and falls with the sword right through his body. At which point I thought they were actually going to do something original by having him *lose* the final duel, since Haydee has (with his blessing) now run off with Albert and he has already said that he has nothing left to live for; I'm not sure what it says about the pretty dark depiction of the character in this film that I found myself actively looking forward to the idea! It would have been a bleak ending, but an effective one -- especially as they choose *not* to have him kill Fernand, on the grounds that death is too good for him and he will suffer more from having been spared.
Instead the film has him reappear, apparently fully recovered from his mortal wound, and sail off (alone) into the sunset, leaving a message for Mercedes -- who is presumably still legally married to Fernand in this version, but has gone off as in canon to live a life of poverty -- saying that their children have found the happy ending together that they could not. And strongly hinting, I got the impression, that he is going to come back for her at some point, which struck me as trying to have your cake and eat it in terms of canon-compliance...
I can see that the film was *trying* to do something new with the material (like the new French "Three Musketeers") in addition to the normal problems of plot compression in any adaptation of the book, and some of it did work. The Haydee/Albert plot was probably the best-handled strand, in my opinion, and that was entirely invented for the purposes of this telling of the story; having Monte-Cristo be a much darker character than is usual for film depictions is not a bad idea, since many of his actions in the book are extremely cold-blooded. But he has compensatory features there (his kindness to Maximilien and his family, for example) which we don't see here, where he is explicitly set up as a self-appointed avenging angel who rejects God and seeks to take his place. I suspect most of his better qualities have been displaced into rehabilitating Andrea...
Mercedes is very well played, as well, but robbing her of all her agency at the end of the film (we don't see her learn of the duel, or dislose the truth to Albert, or elect to leave her husband, or meet Dantès in Marseilles) rather undermines the character.
And, all in all, the film failed on the level of making me *care* about the characters; it says something that I actively wanted Monte-Cristo to die as a fitting twist to the ending!
Now, of course, I'm curious about The prisoner of the Chateau d'If all over again in contrast -- I did, more or less by accident, try rewatching the first hour of The Return of the Musketeers, and was heartened by discovering that, a year later, I did actually understand a good deal more of the dialogue than I had in my bewildered first attempts :-)
"If I repeated this sort of intensity of immersion on a daily basis for months I might actually improve my comprehension (but I draw the line at repeatedly watching bad films over and over again for months at a time!)" -- well, I did, I have, and I found a plethora of other related (and unrelated) material to watch instead :-D
I'm afraid I'm not sure I'm sufficiently curious to embark upon a repeat of a four-hour epic, though when I'm still in the middle of more rewarding material...
I really need to go and harvest some elderflowers; it is two weeks since I noticed that they were almost ripe enough, and I got the most terrific waft of scent (from some blossoms that were quite out of reach) while walking home tonight.