The Bridges of Madison County dir. Clint Eastwood (review)

Directed by Clint Eastwood and based on the bestselling 1992 novel by Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County sentimentalizes the brief four-day love affair between Francesca (Meryl Streep), a middle-aged, Italian-born farmer's wife, and Robert (Clint Eastwood), a passing-his-prime, professional photographer. Unlike the novel, however, director Eastwood exercises restraint in his interpretation of this elegiac tale of the bored housewife and the wandering philanderer. The movie captures its audience with emotional sincerity and visual simplicity, particularly in shots of the solitary, winding, rural roads of Iowa.

The film's narrative, scripted by Richard LaGravenese, reverses the original narrative of the novel by giving the authority of perspective to Francesca, rather than Robert, and by emphasizing the sacrifice that Francesca makes in choosing her family and reputation over a future with him. This film depicts an adult romance, exploring the existential nature of love that creates a third entity or possibility out of the bond between two lovers, existing outside of them and independent of physical companionship.

Throughout the film, Eastwood gives Francesca ample screen time and sets her location, context, and relationship with her husband and children in an ambling pace. Her discontent and loneliness are particularly emphasized in the silences onscreen, as well as through images—the weathered postbox, the silent dinner table—used to portray her marriage, motherhood, and role in the family. Streep gives a nuanced performance as the camera follows Francesca through a typical mundane day, her marriage, family, and domestic chores suppressing her spirit and routinizing her life. Francesca, unlike Robert, performs the roles associated with her gender even while she questions them.

As a director, Eastwood plays with the idea of gaze and overturns it in creative ways. When Francesca views Robert through the hole in the

Roseman Bridge, she is essentially paralleling what Robert is doing with the lens of his camera, setting up a language of desire in her own way. Francesca's gaze is in no way passive, instead it acts as a counter to the controlling viewing position mostly given to males on screen. It is her gaze that determines her desire.

As The Bridges of Madison County progresses, the ancient patriarchal question of dominating and categorizing 'the other' resounds. Eastwood emphasizes the idea of the woman and her sense of body and self, beyond her biological and social roles. The first time Francesca's children, Michael (Victor Slezak) and Carolyn (Annie Corley) see their mother as a woman, rather than simply as a mother, is through Robert's photographs of her. Michael is quick to dismiss his mother's jouissance. While Carolyn reads Robert and Francesca's letters, Michael is unable to imagine his mother as anything other than a mother. Though the film seems to give in to the age-old idea of motherhood surpassing all other aspects of a woman's life, by giving Francesca the essential narrative, Eastwood salvages the film and makes it a tale of a woman's choice and desire.

Francesca gains agency as the plot develops; at each stage she is shown taking bold steps in establishing a relationship with Robert, whether it be the first instance of her meeting the photographer and offering to take him to the bridge or keeping a note for him stuck on the bridge wall. The film brings into focus the female erotic gaze when Francesca peers at Robert through the cracks of the Roseman Bridge or surreptitiously watches him change his clothes in her yard. In these scenes, the audience witnesses Francesca's curiosity and desire. By successfully turning Robert Kincaid into a sex object, The Bridges of Madison County reverses the norm—explored in Laura Mulvey's classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)—of women in film operating primarily as objects of male desire.

The film does not entirely do away with the question of morality and how society reacts to individual choices of desire and freedom. By witnessing how people in their small town behave towards Lucy Redfield (Michelle Benes) because of her affair with a married man...