ricardienne | (no subject)

Natalie and I saw Casanova yesterday.

I would cautiously recommend it; it's not a worthwhile movie, or a meaningful movie, or even a good movie, but it's good entertainment. Of course, that may have been because N. and I were two of about six people in the theater, so we were able to make loud fun of it. It's a movie in the mold of Pirates of the Caribbean or The Princess Bride: not overtly slapstick or comedic, but so ridiculous that it can't have been intended to be otherwise. Jeremy Irons (and whoever played the ineffectual inquisitor he was supposed to replace) really carried it with his over the top picture of Evil Inquisitorness, not to mention what looked like a black leather academic robe -- the 17th century equivalent of the black leather trench coat, I suppose. The really odd thing was that everyone kept falling over. At first it just seemed to be the character trait of the Guy Who Looked Like Orlando Bloom But Wasn't, but by the end, not a scene went by in which someone wasn't tripping in the background. Again, it wasn't slapstick, really: the camera didn't dwell on it. But it was constantly and inexplicably there.

I still can't quite believe that they've made a movie of Tristan and Isolde. In the review in the local paper this morning, they called it "the story that inspired Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." Now that isn't true at all. Tristan and Isolde fall in love, but she's supposed to marry King Mark, Tristan's overlord. The conflict is between his love and his duty. Romeo and Juliet isn't quite the same; it might ultimately come from that, but the paradigm has altered, I think. The love is still illicit, but what is absent is the betrayal. Romeo isn't hurting anyone by loving Juliet; he doesn't have to choose.

We (my dad and I) were trying to trace this a little. There are a lot of stories like Tristan and Isolde:
Lancelot and Guinevere
Pelleas and Melisande
Naoise and Deirdre
Paolo and Francesca
Antony and Cleopatra
Paris and Helen (not quite the same, but there is still that basic idea of love for a woman who is already bound elsewhere causing a big mess)

And then there's the slightly different story, where a young man elopes with the princess/daughter of an enemy, and is pursued and killed by them:

Earl Brand
The Braies of Carrow
Lochnivar (though that one ends happily, if I remember)

And then there's Romeo and Juliet, to which we couldn't find a direct folkloric parallel, though it does seem to be related to these other things.

When we were first talking about Tristan and Isolde, my dad challenged me to come with a Shakespeare play whose plot fit that model. Eventually, I came up with Antony and Cleopatra. But first I thought of Measure for Measure. Because that basic idea is there: a woman (and her sexuality) screw up a man's previously upright existence.

It isn't really a proper parallel: Angelo is the villain, not the hero, and the melodramatic villain who tries to get sex from the heroine in return for his not perpetrating whatever injustice he intends must be more general and even Pandosto and Cassandra. (Tosca springs to mind, though that post-dates M. for M.) It's a staple of hagiography, I think. Christian virgin is propositioned by pagan judge as alternative to martyrdom. Sometimes her example of faith and chastity even manages to convert him. There's a weird inversion of that in Measure for Measure, where Isabella's virtue provokes Angelo not to become better than he is, but to become worse. ~~It's a bit like curling ribbon. When it's already in ringlets and you try to curl it further, you end up just straightening it out.~~ [Well. maybe. This is the problem with live-journal: I have no reason not to stick in the wacked-out analogies I might come up with. Although, actually, the metaphor of being tightly wound up and coming undone isn't that inappropriate here.] It's important, I think, that Angelo doesn't start out as the same kind of villain that he ends up as. From the beginning of the play, he's the antagonist, the one who is screwing things up for everyone else, but he becomes despicable. He's unconflicted until Isabella shows up. It is a sort of twisted Tristan and Isolde: the entrance of the woman creates the conflict between passion and duty/honor. But twisted because it isn't Isabella's sexual attraction that seduces him, but her lack of it. Her virtue doesn't make him better, but makes him worse.

Or is the conflict already there, but previously dormant?
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception. The state, whereon I studied
Original sin and all that. You have to study to suppress it, and even then, it comes back to hit you. How Augustinian. That is why this bout of the obsession is so strong: it fits into other obsessions, feeding off of them.