Jane Campion's Symbolic Portrait

From the first scenes, we are struck with Campion’s obvious refusal to play James as realism; instead, she gives us a highly symbolic version of the novel and her interpretation of its emphasis on sexual repression. But what would James’s novel look like on screen had Merchant-Ivory produced it? First, the movie would have been brighter, less ominously dark, than Campion shot it. I can easily imagine Helena Bonham Carter as Isabel, Helen Mirren or Anjelica Huston as Madame Merle, maybe even Ralph Fiennes as Osmond, or Daniel Day-Lewis as Ralph. I suspect that Merchant-Ivory would have made a version of the movie as a tragedy of manners hinging on psychological realism. Campion refuses to reproduce James literally and, instead, substitutes her own project—figuring women’s depression and silence—in the film. Campion’s version causes us to speculate about the nature of translating realist fiction into film productions.

One of the most compelling scenes in Campion’s Portrait struck me as doing justice to a generally unremarked but poignant event in James’s novel: Isabel’s grief over the death of her infant son. Campion has Nicole Kidman fondle a casting of a baby’s hand, in a dimly-lit room, as much of the film is lit when the scene shifts to Osmond’s quarters in Florence, then Rome. Like everything else in Osmond’s world, the baby too is copied, reproduced in something less ephemeral than human flesh. Given Osmond’s penchant for copying, we can only guess that he had the plaster cast made in the first place. (Or did Isabel order the cast, adopting early in their marriage his habits and avocation?) Another hand—a much larger casting or sculpture—plays in a later scene: when Madame Merle and Isabel are wandering through a sculpture garden. Behind them is one oversized hand, beside it an oversized foot; one of the fingers is pointed upward. There is something here, too, about the dead male child, metonymically reproduced and repeated, albeit much larger in these statues. These larger pieces overshadow the small plaster hand Isabel had caressed; they seem to represent the “feel” of Osmond’s misogynistic threat, his control, his crushing of her “too many ideas.” There is visual tension between the small hand she can touch and grieve over and the larger fragments, copies, reproductions which seem all rather portentously to be symbolic of Osmond’s menace.

Curiously, James devotes but two sentences to the death of Isabel’s son: “She had lost her child; that was a sorrow, but it was a sorrow she scarcely spoke of; there was more to say about it than she could say to Ralph. It belonged to the past, moreover; it had occurred six months before, and she had already laid aside the tokens of mourning” (330). More curiously still, Campion connects the visual image of Isabel’s private moment of mourning to the exchange when Merle hints to Isabel of her connection to Osmond. The image of the hand figures in less subtle ways, too: the male hands running over Isabel’s chest in the erotic fantasy sequence; Goodwood’s fingers which caress Isabel’s face; her own which later trace his caress and which prefigure the erotic fantasy on her bed. Why is the hand, the touch, such a powerful symbol in Campion’s film (besides the fact that it takes a little too literally the Touchetts’ influence upon Isabel’s life)? In running away from Goodwood’s touch, as she does in the last scene in the film, Isabel reminds us that she associates touch with despair and grief. Of course, Osmond is everywhere associated with hands and touch, but of the more malicious kind. Campion’s camera lingers on Osmond’s hand as it is wrapped around Pansy’s waist, almost touching his young daughter’s breast. Campion hints at veiled incest here, and Osmond’s insistence on his daughter’s absolute obedience gives credence to Campion’s presentation of Osmond’s utter malevolence. (For me, this is one of the problems of the film: there...