Cinema
Chocolate box-office
Hilary Mantel
When Ivan Turgenev was 15 years old, his father wrote to him, 'Fear the love of women, fear this happiness, this poison.' After writing the letter, his father suffered a fatal stroke, a circumstance which must have impressed his advice on the boy's mind. But though Turgenev did fear love, and frequently spoke of it as a disease, he did not avoid it. When he was 25 and 'a young Russian landowner, a good shot, an agreeable companion and a writer of bad verses', he met an opera singer called Pauline Viardot. He fell into a hopeless and self-destructive passion, and for many years trailed about Europe in the wake of Pauline's husband and children.
In the short novel Spring Torrents he told something of his own story. The book's recent translator, Leonard Scha- piro, calls the main character `Turgenev caricatured by Turgenev'. It is a slight, trite tale, flowery and conventional in its depic- tion of first love; but it also has some telling details and moments of piercing emotional truth. These are absent from Jerzy Skolimowski's Franco-Italian co- production, a sumptuous, exquisite and wretchedly dubbed costume drama. As Skolimowski presents the novel to us, it might have been scribbled with pink crayon inside the lid of a chocolate box.
The main action is set in 1840, though framed as a reminiscence by the protagon- ist, 20 years older and wallowing in thoughts of what might have been. Dimitri Sanin has been travelling in Europe and is on his way back to his ancestral land and serfs. He stops briefly in Mainz, where he falls in love with a lisping virgin whose family, of Italian extraction, runs a confec- tionery business. Within days he is plan- ning to marry Gemma, and to finance the enterprise by selling his estate to Maria, another Russian who is also staying in the district and is the rich wife of an old schoolfriend. Maria is predatory and capri- cious, Sanin is weak, Maria seduces him and wrecks his life. Timothy Hutton's Sanin is debonair and perhaps too assured. Valeria Golino tries hard to flesh out the odious Gemma. Nastassja Kinski, as Maria, pursues her business and pleasure with a convincing expression of slack- jawed lust, and appears to change her clothes every time you blink. Each frame is carefully composed; the pace is stately.
In the novel, Sanin's sexual encounter with Maria takes place in a woodcutter's shack, and is followed by self-disgust so great that he never sees Gemma again. The film supplies a ruined mansion for the seduction, which is followed by a top-of- the-range sunset; then it contrives a pro- tracted and painful meeting between the two women, and allows Maria an emotion- al gala performance afterwards. The end comes in Venice. When film-makers work up to gratuitous carnival scenes (we have already had an unnecessary gipsy wedding) we may suspect them of showing off; also, we suspect that sinister masks and grotes- que costumes are meant to indicate pro- fundity while covering a certain clueless- ness about how to wind the story up. In the book, Sanin departs for Paris in the entour- age of Maria and her husband. Turgenev offers us an image of the besotted, humili- ated young man perched on the cramped front seat of the coach, peeling a pear for his mistress's husband, who lolls in the back. It is the pear which is the book's unbearable detail. It leaves the taste of degradation on the tongue — a taste too subtle for this adaptation to capture.
However, there's no point in being too cross about Torrents of Spring. For most of its length it is a straightforward, over- dressed but reasonably faithful account of a book likely to be read only by clever- clogs film critics; we simply have to pray that the director never lays his emollient hands on Thomas Hardy. It is almost certainly the prettiest picture we will see this year, and just the thing if you feel you cannot take one more grainy drama set in a high-rise block in eastern Europe. Away with spiritual agony and pitted concrete; summer is here, so let us have simpering and old lace.
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