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Plenty
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A World War II story according to playwright-filmmaker David Hare: Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep), a courier behind enemy lines, encounters a parachuted fellow agent, Lazar (Sam Neill). Sex ensues, but a message instructs him to “move on” – it’s a case of furtive relationships marching to the beat of History. And the complications just keep on unfolding, beyond the War, with other guys such as Ambassador Brock (Charles Dance), and other events of Big History such as the Suez Crisis of ’56. Various places whizz by in a haze of alienated disconnection: rural France, London, Jordan … Hare is an odd and arresting artist. Often he creates (as in the tele-drama Dreams of Leaving [1980]), with what initially appears to be sympathy and intelligent insight, proverbial ‘strong female characters’ who grapple with the turbulent contradictions of personal/political life. Strong Female Character = independent woman before her time, ‘woman without a man’, going it alone and suffering a great deal. One can easily suspect that these figures are, in their troubled magnificence, virtual projections of Hare’s own psyche or ego – an intriguing creative mechanism across the gender line that sometimes goes under the name of narcissistic duplication. As Bérénice Reynaud [died 2023] has put it: what happens when a woman embodies, in a male projection, the question what is desire? Intriguing, but also treacherous. Because, slowly but surely, Hare’s fictions turn against their own elevated Goddesses (here, incarnated powerfully by La Streep) and begin incriminating them, accusing them of all the world’s ills – and, ultimately, banishing them into the limbo of growing insanity or looming death (the Betty Blue Syndrome). Turns out it’s her, not the world, that’s alienated! What a cop-out. Suzanne Moore of New Statesman said it well in relation to another Hare-piece, the weird ‘thriller’ Paris By Night (1988): Woman is criticised for insufficient humanity, when she is, from the outset, the projection of an unresolved turbulence within men and patriarchy. That’s narcissistic duplication with a (male) vengeance. And yet – this is par for the course in Hare – the script of Plenty makes a surface show of criticising the stiff, repressive rationality of patriarchal society, privilege and order. It’s a neat trick, especially when the plot starts turning furious pirouettes of vacillation around the matter of Susan’s ‘madness’ and general neuroses. Under the direction of Fred Schepisi – it is among his most accomplished films – Plenty is sensitive to all that is good as well as bad in Hare’s frightfully coherent vision of the sexes. Good: qualities of moodiness and dramatic complexity. Bad: an over-literary archness, coupled with a hypocritical serve of misogyny. It is fascinating and maddening all at once. MORE Schepisi: Last Orders, Barbarosa, Six Degrees of Separation © Adrian Martin August 1990 |
