Cinema
Puppets in love
Christopher Hudson
Ken Russell has made another film about a dynamically creative man who rebels against the conventions of his day, leads a passionate and distorted sex life and dies violently in the full flower of his manhood. It might have been Byron, it might have been Chatterton, but in fact it is Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a precociously talented French sculptor who was killed in the first world war at the age of twenty-three. After working in Nuremburg and Munich, Gaudier came to Paris where he met Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman twenty years his senior. Together they travelled to London, where Gaudier completed most of his sculptures and associated with a circle which included Epstein, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound who wrote a posthumous memoir of him.
In The Savage Messiah (' X ' ABC 2) Russell chooses to present his subject as the story of an unconsummated love affair. Henri meets Sophie in the St Genevieve library in Paris, where she is writing Truth, a novel. He wastes no time in declaiming his love for her in the ex travagant fashion beloved of Russell heroes. He climbs a neo-classical statue and harangues the crowd; he perches on top of a giant carved head in the Louvre and throws pamphlets down, until chased out by Gilbert-and-Sullivan attendants; he pursues Sophie to her home where he listens in comparative silence while she shreds carrots ferociously and orates about floating upon the oily waters of sleep (the script is by Christopher Logue). Removed to London, they live in uproar shattered by sudden outbursts of tranquillity. A good fairy prances on, in the shape of an art dealer, 'Porky.' He provides Henri with materials and introduces him to equally epicene acquaintances who frequent a futuristic milkbar called 'The Vortex.'
Sophie suddenly decides she can stand it no longer, and goes off to be a governess in Dorset. Returning unexpectedly, she finds Henri in the studio with one of his models, a girl with the all-too-likely name of Gosh Smith-Boyle. This scene provides further confirmation that Russell's palace of wisdom can only be reached along the road of excess. Sophie, vigorously humiliating herself, gets on her knees to scrub the floor, exchanging noisy insults with Gosh as she does so. Gosh leaps on top of Henri, just to show her. Sophie, shouting at them, puts up a screen, which gets kicked down. Bellowing out a Polish folk-song, she goes on scrubbing the floor. Gosh, screaming insults over Sophie's tuneless uproar, kneels on Henri's legs and starts pulling his shirt off him, Henri laughing maniacally the while. Eventually the 'cacophony becomes too much for Gosh. She marches out of elle studio. Sophie flicks water after her, and bangs the door. " Ah, mamoushka," sighs Henri affectionately, "you are just the same."
A succession of scenes like this makes one aware that Russell has developed the unhappy knack of caricaturing everything he touches. The minor characters are intentionally distorted, to 'highlight the Gau dier-Brzeskas, but the Gaudier-Brzeskas themselves are turned into puppets, galvanised by an inhuman nervous energy into travesties of real people. Actors and actresses are helpless under such direction. 'Dorothy Tutin as Sophie is turned into another Glenda Jackson, undergoing bravura agonies which never relent to allow her the nuances and subtleties of character-playing, for which, on the stage, she is justly celebrated. In the role of Henri Gaudier, Scott Antony is a newcomer and so not obviously strained; but Helen Mirren as Gosh will never again, one hopes, have to take a part so unsympathetic and unsuited to her talents.
If a note of sadness is struck, it is because Ken Russell has prodigious gifts, and the strength of mind to turn them upon subjects most directors will fight shy of. Something will have been gained if Savage Messiah persuades a few people to go and see Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture, examples of which can be found at the Tate Gallery and in the Kettle's Yard collection at Cambridge. Looking at them, they may arrive at a true portrait of the artist. The savage messiah of the film will start to recede, and begin to look, confusedly — who knows? — a bit like Ken Russell himself.
Previous page
