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Hotel Sorrento
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Hotel Sorrento is a
troublesome object. I wanted to like it; it has a few things going for it. Adapted
from a respected 1990 play by Hannie Rayson, tt features several fine performances
from actors including Caroline Gillmer, Ray Barrett and Tara Morice. And it’s
directed by Richard Franklin [1948-2007], who is something of an Australian
legend – and a fighting underdog in both film-industry and film-culture terms.
When
Australian cinema was fixed on making stately costume pictures in the 1970s and
‘80s, Franklin was unpopular in some quarters for his affinity for and skill
with several popular genres. He strove to make USA-inspired movies of the
horror or thriller variety including Patrick (1978) and Road Games (1981). And he
followed that path straight out of Australia, directing intriguing, at times
terrific work: Psycho II (1983), Cloak and Dagger (1984) and Link (1986).
Once
Franklin returned home, he took another U-turn – maybe not such a wise move,
and definitely an untimely one. As the culture at large shifted to the
taste-scale of, variously, the genre-games of Quentin
Tarantino and the arthouse melodrama of Pedro Almodóvar, Franklin
decided to take the “bourgeois drama” route. He landed at the spot from where (as
he reasoned) Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi or Bruce Beresford launched the best
part of their careers: from the position of respectability. He gathered a
number of literary and theatrical properties that he believed would reorient his
trajectory appropriately.
The
result? From almost its first moments, Hotel
Sorrento gave me the heebie-jeebies.
But
is this particular property really so anachronistic? Rayson’s play, after all,
did seem to strike a chord with its (largely middle-class) audiences in the
first half of the ‘90s; the film sticks fairly closely to it. The story centres
on Meg (Caroline Goodall), an expatriate novelist based in England. She has
written a harsh, patently autobiographical book called (ahem) Melancholy. Back in humble Sorrento, her
sisters Hilary (Gillmer) and Pippa (Morice) spend time with their grouchy
father (Barrett), and do their best to evade the uncomfortable issues raised by
Meg’s novel. Then the announcement comes that this black sheep is returning to
visit the family home – the site known affectionately as Hotel Sorrento. If
that’s not enough of a catalyst to stir up the old skeletons in the family
closet, there’s also a prying pair of locals, Marge (Joan Plowright) and Dick
(John Hargreaves), who have their own, heartfelt responses to Melancholy. Then further family tragedy
occurs.
This
description serves to indicate that Hotel
Sorrento starts out as a low-key family melodrama – like so many films these
days (especially in the Sundance mode of humanism). A tale of sibling rivalry,
blood ties, and unfinished emotional business, all packed into a handy,
seasonal get-together. A tale of loss, mourning, and the difficult, ambivalent
process of coming to terms with a shared
past. But the more it goes on, it seems to be less and less about such staple
ingredients of that bumpy but ultimately feel-good genre. The personal story
holds its integrity (mainly thanks to the actors), but it’s essentially a
platform to address wider, collective issues.
So
what is Hotel Sorrento really about?
This question is trickier to answer than you might first imagine. Essentially,
it tackles the problem of origins,
understood in the widest possible sense. Not just the origin of an individual,
a family unit or a small community, but of the nation itself! It therefore is –
or has pretensions to be – an allegory,
posing and exploring the relations that modern-day Australians (and especially
women) could and should have to the sometimes ugly legacies of Australian
history, behaviour, culture.
For
the purposes of the drama, all these big issues boil down to a question
concerning the place where the characters have grown up. To wit, what should an
Aussie woman of Today, who has tasted all that the Big Wide World has to offer
her, make of dear old Sorrento (a coastal town in Victoria)?
The
film, like the play, explores ambivalent states and responses. Can one cleanly
reject (biological) Father (i.e., patriarchy personified) and Fatherland, or
must one struggle to somehow reconcile past and present? How important is it to
claim one’s Australianness, even in a radically modified form?
Rayson
and Franklin alike come down on the side of a cautious but ultimately
redemptive nationalism – they seek to express the “spirit of the land” (starting
with the soil, the mountain ranges, the beach, the light …), but in a
contemporary, all-inclusive, non-jingoistic way. National pride can be
renegotiated and reignited … with all due respect paid by a settler
civilisation to the nation’s indigenous people, of course! How anybody derives
a Spirit of the Land from that (often tragic) tangle, I’m still not sure.
There’s
a lot of Zeitgeist Art going around in the ‘90s. The moment I encounter any of
it – whether the painter who presumes to capture the Soul of Modern Europe on
canvas, the novelist who takes the Pulse of America, or the composer who seizes
a Timeless Yet Changing Asia in a sweeping symphony – I tend to develop a
massive seizure and shut down all my receptors. Filmmakers including Wim Wenders
have effectively derailed their careers by getting on that bandwagon, and even
Krzysztof Kieślowski may
be going there with his Three Colours project. Hotel Sorrento, too, suffers
from its grandiose, allegorical aspiration.
Rayson
is a playwright who works in an identifiably Australian dramatic tradition that
runs from David Williamson through to Michael Gurr (Sex Diary of an Infidel, 1991) and Tobsha Learner (The Glass Mermaid, 1994). All these
writers conjure situations spotted with emblematic characters: people who stand
for a particular way of life, ideology or social stratum. Dialogue exchanges
provide opportunities for comparing and contrasting these various, emblematic
positions.
The
themes of Hotel Sorrento thus form a speckled
pattern on the film’s surface. Lines are spoken as if they were wise aphorisms
or dinner-party bon mots. Women talk
of “small details” and men of the “big picture”. Expatriates rail against the
emptiness of the country whilst locals extol its soulfulness. There’s some
vague blather about the acutely symbolic differences between melancholy,
depression and longing, and about how all these feelings derive from the Aussie
Zeitgeist … o tempora, o mores! Old-style
Aussies mouth racist epithets, but a new breed looks to a bright, multicultural
future …
None
of this is deeply developed. What’s worse, such emblematic drama works far less
well on screen than on stage. Hotel
Sorrento has a theatrical manner that does not transfer smoothly. I do not
mean that it is “stagey” (a meaningless critical epithet), or that movies
should never feature people sitting around tables chatting at length with each
other. On the contrary: I adore a brave, theatrically-inspired cinema when it’s
in the hands of Éric Rohmer, Louis Malle or Manoel de Oliveira. And Franklin,
while not in that class, sure knows how to stage Rayson’s material with fludity,
economy and grace. The real problem is the allegorical mode itself. Even on the
stage, I find this form of drama tends to the stiff and the schematic; when
it’s transferred to film, it just never breathes or moves in any natural way.
Most
of the full-blooded action and catharsis in this story happens off-screen, or
in the past. Instead, we follow in excruciating detail the saga of Meg’s
chances of winning the Booker Prize (!) as she fights a charge of plagiarism
(alas, events do not turn into a rerun of R.W. Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew [1976]). This may be a thematically
crucial matter, but it’s a bloody bore to watch.
I’m
coming down pretty hard on Hotel Sorrento,
I know. There are some things that function OK in it. Franklin is adept at
evoking a particular type of fond Australiana: a newspaper boy on his daily
delivery, a house cat in Dad’s favourite chair, the incessant sound of a spring
door. I have to say, though, that he’s better with that genre of detail than he
is with the inner lives of his central women characters. If only Hotel Sorrento could show them, and
their domestic environment, with even a fraction of the tenderness and intimate
insight that Gillian Armstrong brought to her version of Little Women (1994).
Whether
or not Big Picture Fixation is a male trait (as Rayson appears to believe), the
temptation to allegory has led writer and director alike to ignore what might
have led this story to some concrete, sensual, dramatic truth.
MORE Franklin: Visitors © Adrian Martin April 1995 |
