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A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
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When all
else fails, there is one posture that can be struck during film discussions
which rarely fails to win collective assent. When the conversation gets around
to the dreaded territory of middlebrow, comfortable, good looking period films
– usually based on acclaimed novels – start sneering as you spit out the
company name Merchant Ivory.
Pundits
tend to forget not only that there are two talented people behind that label –
director James Ivory and writer Ismail Merchant – but that their work
encompasses several kinds of cinema before and after the middlebrow watershed
of Heat and Dust (1983).
Certainly,
there are some dreary, overly respectable films in their canon, and they have
never quite reached the heights of say, Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) or
Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth (2000). But A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is a beautifully crafted and
deeply affecting piece.
It would be
easy to damage the delicate, complex weave of this picture with a misleading or
reductive synopsis. Ivory and Merchant, tackling the different genre of the
family chronicle, bravely flaunt the absence of a central character or story
thread. Instead, the movie is constructed like a ripple effect.
But where
does this ripple start? With the father and daughter of the title, celebrated
novelist Bill (Kris Kristofferson) and Channe (Leelee Sobieski)? Or with the
French girl (Virginie Ledoyen) who, once upon a time, gave up a love-child for
adoption, a boy who found himself transformed from Benoit to Billy once taken
into this American family?
There are
other key characters who float through this chronicle and make a profound
impression on the family members and on us – in particular, the flamboyant,
opera loving Francis Fortescue (Anthony Roth Costanzo) who befriends Channe at
school. But the film is constructed not only around characters but places – and
specifically on the contrast between
France
and
America.
The
domestic dwellings and social mores of both countries are superbly captured,
and the interrelation between French and American personalities is rendered
with a finesse worthy of Henry James.
This is a
remarkably restrained film, which avoids clichés at every turn. Although Bill
(based on James Jones, via his daughter Kaylie's book) is a roughly
Hemingway-esque figure – a bit gruff, a hard drinker, somewhat macho – the film
invests him with a profound tenderness and capacity for empathy.
Bill’s
stoic disinclination to engage in flagrant or sentimental emotional displays
(hence the title) is, on many levels, adopted by the film itself, which never
pokes too rudely into the intimacies of its subjects. Ivory's direction – too
easily mistaken for canned theatre – is always clipped, precise and revealing.
Some
viewers may find this to be like many recent literary adaptations for the
screen – aimless, meandering, a mere potpourri of life's varied experiences strung out across a too-large mosaic. But Ivory – whose
style here reflects the influence of Andre Téchiné rather than David Lean, for
a change – knows how to subtly give his chronicle an illuminating and
heartbreaking form.
Not since
the Taviani brothers' Kaos (1984)
have I seen a film which so poignantly reflects on the continuum that
mystically joins the pains of youth with the lessons of age – situating that
continuum within the fraught but transcendent bonds of family love. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is an
essential movie.
MORE Merchant Ivory: Cotton Mary, Le Divorce, The Golden Bowl, Jefferson in Paris, The Remains of the Day, Lumière and Company, Feast of July © Adrian Martin January 1999 |
