Stage Beauty
Apr. 2nd, 2005 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avreliaThe promised longish reaction on the movie Stage Beauty
I wrote it as soon as I finished watching the movie, the first enthusiastic blurb of emotions and thoughts. I wanted to comb it later, and rewrite it in a more intelligent manner, but today I feel that it is going to be too boring for anyone to read, and in honest, I’d love some of you read it, because it is a movie that should be fun to discuss and argue about.
I wanted to see it since it was in theatres – about half a year ago. I read reviews, I got curious, but it didn’t happen. So, recently it came out on DVD, and I bought it. Considering should I buy it and watch or forget about the movie and move on to something else. I read a number of reviews, and honestly, I was prepared to love it. So today I watched it – and yes, I loved it, and I am going to watch it again. An again.
And what is not to love? Sexual confusion, search for identity – gender, sexual, professional – learning to express oneself, love and loyalty, and many other thing. Plus, lots of pretty.
The movie picks up several facts out of the history of England and English theatre, and creates a fictional – slightly anachronistic, but believable – London of 1660s, when Charles II was the King, and men played women on stage.
I don’t want to retell the whole story, but the main characters are Ned Kynaston, an actor who achieved success and fame as the prettiest woman on London stage, and Maria – his dresser who also wants to play. Soon women are allowed to act, and men are forbidden to play women’s parts on stage – which turns Maria into a star, and Ned into nobody. The story follows them learning and changing and growing up, I guess.
Neither of them is particularly adorable. Ned is self-absorbed and is in love with his art and his image too much to notice anything around that has no connection to himself. He made performing as a woman a high art, but he has no idea what men and women are really like, and who he is. His theatrical performances is very artful and affected, and precise, and as far from reality as possible. As we learn, Ned was found in the gutter and taught to be a woman on stage – he also mentions that in order to achieve it his tutor not only trained him diligently to the theatre art and feminine gestures and expressions, but also has beaten all masculine ones out of him.
Maria is like a steamroller, in a way (in the good sense.) She has quite boyish appearance, in fact, Ned is way prettier than she is. Besides, she is direct, active, rough and artless – in other words displays many qualities traditionally associated with men – and she knows who she is, but she is caught into Ned’s view of women on stage, too. She can’t act – she is mimicking everything Ned does, but it is not working for her.
What this movie is not is a trustful historical report on the history of England and the theatre, it is a fantasy, where theatre and real life is entwined for the characters.
What is movie is also not is the story of a gay man being cured by a woman, as Ned attracts and is attracted to both men and women – when the story starts he had an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and through the movie we also follow his developing relationship with Maria. I agree that it is more difficult to transfer on screen though.
It is a lot of fun to follow the miscommunications and the whole relationship between Ned and Maria. Maria is in love with Ned, and Ned has a growing attraction and affection to Maria. They both share love for the theatre, but they are also mean, jealous, angry, sly, lying, plotting, helping each other. It adds that they both play Desdemona and Othello throughout the movie, but is it hard for me analyzing Shakespeare, so I won’t do it here.
Ned became brilliant as a woman, but now he is lost and has to relearn being a man – to see if he can be, if it fits. One of the very important scenes in the movie is the one where Ned and Maria are in bed- not having sex but talking, communicating, and trying on various sexual positions and roles. It started when Maria asked what do men do with each other, and Ned started explaining. The scene is playful and affectionate, but not "hot" – all nakedness and kissing notwithstanding. I believe it is because our characters are on
different pages here. Maria is fully there, and Ned is not – he is very comfortable being naked in bed with her, kissing and playing, yet he is more trying out the new role and not quite sure whether he belongs to this role: a man to Maria's woman.
This obviously leads him to saying the exactly wrong thing in the wrong time, and Maria, after saying what she thinks on the matter, is leaving Ned to his own devices.
And yes, I watched this scene three times already. Why do you ask?
Leaving Ned to think alone after everything, apparently was a good idea, because later he is ready for breakthrough - both in expressing on the stage and in life.
Prior to that, Ned's admission on why he cannot play men's roles – in theater and by proxy in life was heartbreaking, but also showed he had very vague and distorted ideas about who men and women really are.
By the end of the movie, when Maria asks Ned "who are you now?" he says "I don't know", and for him it is a huge step forward. The camera is leaving Ned and Maria kissing and laughing (and here Ned is as fully in the moment as Maria) in the middle of their journey of self discovery. Which is exactly the way I like it.
I wrote it as soon as I finished watching the movie, the first enthusiastic blurb of emotions and thoughts. I wanted to comb it later, and rewrite it in a more intelligent manner, but today I feel that it is going to be too boring for anyone to read, and in honest, I’d love some of you read it, because it is a movie that should be fun to discuss and argue about.
I wanted to see it since it was in theatres – about half a year ago. I read reviews, I got curious, but it didn’t happen. So, recently it came out on DVD, and I bought it. Considering should I buy it and watch or forget about the movie and move on to something else. I read a number of reviews, and honestly, I was prepared to love it. So today I watched it – and yes, I loved it, and I am going to watch it again. An again.
And what is not to love? Sexual confusion, search for identity – gender, sexual, professional – learning to express oneself, love and loyalty, and many other thing. Plus, lots of pretty.
The movie picks up several facts out of the history of England and English theatre, and creates a fictional – slightly anachronistic, but believable – London of 1660s, when Charles II was the King, and men played women on stage.
I don’t want to retell the whole story, but the main characters are Ned Kynaston, an actor who achieved success and fame as the prettiest woman on London stage, and Maria – his dresser who also wants to play. Soon women are allowed to act, and men are forbidden to play women’s parts on stage – which turns Maria into a star, and Ned into nobody. The story follows them learning and changing and growing up, I guess.
Neither of them is particularly adorable. Ned is self-absorbed and is in love with his art and his image too much to notice anything around that has no connection to himself. He made performing as a woman a high art, but he has no idea what men and women are really like, and who he is. His theatrical performances is very artful and affected, and precise, and as far from reality as possible. As we learn, Ned was found in the gutter and taught to be a woman on stage – he also mentions that in order to achieve it his tutor not only trained him diligently to the theatre art and feminine gestures and expressions, but also has beaten all masculine ones out of him.
Maria is like a steamroller, in a way (in the good sense.) She has quite boyish appearance, in fact, Ned is way prettier than she is. Besides, she is direct, active, rough and artless – in other words displays many qualities traditionally associated with men – and she knows who she is, but she is caught into Ned’s view of women on stage, too. She can’t act – she is mimicking everything Ned does, but it is not working for her.
What this movie is not is a trustful historical report on the history of England and the theatre, it is a fantasy, where theatre and real life is entwined for the characters.
What is movie is also not is the story of a gay man being cured by a woman, as Ned attracts and is attracted to both men and women – when the story starts he had an affair with the Duke of Buckingham, and through the movie we also follow his developing relationship with Maria. I agree that it is more difficult to transfer on screen though.
It is a lot of fun to follow the miscommunications and the whole relationship between Ned and Maria. Maria is in love with Ned, and Ned has a growing attraction and affection to Maria. They both share love for the theatre, but they are also mean, jealous, angry, sly, lying, plotting, helping each other. It adds that they both play Desdemona and Othello throughout the movie, but is it hard for me analyzing Shakespeare, so I won’t do it here.
Ned became brilliant as a woman, but now he is lost and has to relearn being a man – to see if he can be, if it fits. One of the very important scenes in the movie is the one where Ned and Maria are in bed- not having sex but talking, communicating, and trying on various sexual positions and roles. It started when Maria asked what do men do with each other, and Ned started explaining. The scene is playful and affectionate, but not "hot" – all nakedness and kissing notwithstanding. I believe it is because our characters are on
different pages here. Maria is fully there, and Ned is not – he is very comfortable being naked in bed with her, kissing and playing, yet he is more trying out the new role and not quite sure whether he belongs to this role: a man to Maria's woman.
This obviously leads him to saying the exactly wrong thing in the wrong time, and Maria, after saying what she thinks on the matter, is leaving Ned to his own devices.
And yes, I watched this scene three times already. Why do you ask?
Leaving Ned to think alone after everything, apparently was a good idea, because later he is ready for breakthrough - both in expressing on the stage and in life.
Prior to that, Ned's admission on why he cannot play men's roles – in theater and by proxy in life was heartbreaking, but also showed he had very vague and distorted ideas about who men and women really are.
By the end of the movie, when Maria asks Ned "who are you now?" he says "I don't know", and for him it is a huge step forward. The camera is leaving Ned and Maria kissing and laughing (and here Ned is as fully in the moment as Maria) in the middle of their journey of self discovery. Which is exactly the way I like it.
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Date: 2005-04-03 12:26 pm (UTC)Yes! It is a cool movie to watch. ;)
I am glad you liked my post about Chosen. I was getting annoyed with the parts of the fandom that compared Buffy to the Shadow Men and said that Buffy just stuffed the girls with the power without regard to their wishes, when I that the girls had a choice, so I tried to justified it.