De Mornay plays a woman prison inmate (wrongly sentenced, of course), who is determined to be free. She escapes, but makes the mistake of hitching a ride in the limousine of a politician (Frank Langella). Instead of turning her over to the authorities, he helps her break back into the prison. Then he supplies some helpful advice: If she can find a responsible person on the outside who will vouch for her, she can probably be paroled.
This suggestion leads to the movie’s best sequence, when De Mornay discovers a local handyman (Vincent Spano) who is making some repairs on prison property, and seduces him. Then she makes him an offer. She will give him her inheritance, $5,000, if he will marry her and help her be paroled. He agrees, and that leads to another good series of scenes, as these two incompatible people form an unlikely and apparently unworkable couple.
The whole middle stretch of And God Created Woman is good, in part because De Mornay and Spano work so effectively together, and partly because Vadim tells the story efficiently and has a good story to tell. De Mornay plays a young woman who knows her own mind, firmly and without question. Although she had sex with Spano in prison, she won’t sleep with him now: “This is business,” she explains. He’s astonished. She is, too, when she discovers Spano already has a family; he lives with a son and a kid brother. Then she makes adjustments, although Spano remains angry that she’d rather rehearse for a rock band than get a day job or keep house.
Meanwhile, she meets Langella again, and gets publicity as the deserving kid he has helped to rehabilitate. The two of them flirt, have a brief affair, and then separate after Langella’s wife (Judith Chapman) suspects something. And then—the movie has gotten pretty dumb by this point—there’s the threat that De Mornay will have to go back to jail, and then a dramatic moment at a political rally, and then, of course, the heartwarming ending.
Movies like this frustrate me because they do not have enough ambition to match their imagination. De Mornay and Spano have created two very interesting characters, in the reform-school girl and the carpenter who’s trying to be a single father. Why did this plot, and these people, need the mechanical manipulation of the plot about the politician, his wife, and the melodramatic events of the last reel? Wasn’t there a story here already?
I think so. De Mornay brings so much to this performance that it lifts off the screen and threatens to redeem the bankrupt plot. She makes the character live, and Spano is just as good, creating a whole world of hard work and pickup trucks, mortgage payments and romantic confusion. In a movie like this, people are enough. The experience of De Mornay and Spano simply learning to talk to one another is more dramatic than the whole showdown at the political rally. In fact, the characters they create are so convincing that I resented seeing them manipulated by the rigid requirements of the plot: The young woman has broken out of one prison, only to find herself in another.
Is this a movie worth seeing? Sort of. You have to put the plot on hold, and overlook the contrivances of the last half hour, and find a way to admire how De Mornay plays the big scene, even while despising the scene itself. If you can do that, you’ll find good work here—even by Vadim, who may have been as trapped by the plot as everyone else. Now that they’ve remade the title, I have an even better idea. They should remake the movie. Not the first one; this one.
Anna and the King
(Directed by Andy Tennant; starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat; 1999)
King Mongkut of Siam is one of the slimiest characters in fiction, and Anna Leonowens, the English schoolmarm who tries to civilize him, one of the smarmiest. Here is a man with twenty-three wives and forty-two concubines who allows one of his women and her lover to be put to death for exchanging a letter. And here is Anna, who spends her days in flirtation with the king, but won’t sleep with him because—well, because he isn’t white, I guess. Certainly not because he has countless other wives and is a murderer.
Why is she so attracted to the king in the first place? Henry Kissinger has helpfully explained that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Mongkut has it—in Siam, anyway. Why is he attracted to her? Because she stands up to him and even tells him off. Inside every sadist is a masochist, cringing to taste his own medicine.
The unwholesome undercurrents of the story of Anna and the King of Siam have nagged at me for years, through many ordeals of sitting through the stage and screen versions of The King and I, which is surely the most cheerless of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals. The story is not intended to be thought about. It is an exotic escapist entertainment for matinee ladies, who can fantasize about sex with that intriguing bald monster, and indulge their harem fantasies. There is no reason for any man to ever see the play.
Now here is a straight dramatic version of the material, named Anna and the King, and starring Jodie Foster opposite the Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat. It is long and mostly told in the same flat monotone, but has one enormous advantage over the musicaclass="underline" It does not contain “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” The screenplay has other wise improvements on the source material. The king, for example, says “and so on and on” only once, and “et cetera” not at all. And there is only one occasion when he tells Anna her head cannot be higher than his. Productions of the stage musical belabor this last point so painfully they should be staged in front of one of those police lineups with feet and inches marked on it.
Jodie Foster’s performance projects a strange aura. Here is an actress meant to play a woman who is in love, and she seems subtly uncomfortable with that fate. I think I know why. Foster is not only a wonderful actor but an intelligent one—one of our smartest. There are few things harder for an actor to do than play beneath their intelligence. Oh, they can play dumb people who are supposed to be dumb. But it is almost impossible to play a dumb person who is supposed to be smart, and that’s what she has to do as Anna.
She arrives in Siam, a widow with a young boy, and finds herself in the realm of this egotistical sexual monster with a palace full of women. Yes, he is charming; Hitler is said to have been charming, and so, of course, was Hannibal Lecter. She must try to educate the king’s children (sixty-eight, I think I heard) and at the same time civilize him by the British standards of the time, which were racist, imperialist, and jingoistic, but frowned on chaining women in the rain until they surrendered.
By the end of the movie, she has danced with the king a couple of times, come tantalizingly close to kissing him, and civilized him a little, although he has not sold off his concubines. She now has memories she can write in her journal for Rodgers and Hammerstein to plunder on Broadway, which never tires of romance novels set to music.
Foster, I believe, sees right through this material and out the other side, and doesn’t believe in a bit of it. At times we aren’t looking at a nineteenth-century schoolmarm, but a modern woman biting her tongue. Chow Yun-Fat is good enough as the king, and certainly less self-satisfied than Yul Brynner. There is a touching role for Bai Ling, as Tuptim, the beautiful girl who is given to the king as a bribe by her venal father, a tea merchant. She loves another, and that is fatal for them both. There is also the usual nonsense about the plot against the throne, which here causes Anna, the king, and the court to make an elaborate journey by elephant so that the king can pull off a military trick I doubt would be convincing even in a Looney Tune.