Films: 1980s
(1985) The Bride
Sunday, February 11, 2007
The Bride
Director: Franc Roddam
Release: 1985
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein" receive significant corrective surgery in director Franc Roddam's "The Bride."
Not so much a remake of either, but a re-visioning, "The Bride" opens in media res, with Dr. Charles Frankenstein (Sting) infusing his second creation (Jennifer Beals as the Bride) with electrical energy.
The experiment is a success, but the woman he has created with the help of Dr. Zalhus (Quentin Crisp) wants nothing to do with anyone - not to mention Clancy' Brown's enormous and sad-eyed Monster.
In the ensuing chaos of rejection and anger, Frankenstein and the Monster set the laboratory ablaze. The doctor saves the bride, while his assistants perish in the flames. The Monster bolts into the darkness of the surrounding woods.
What follows is a dual storyline, one thread concerning the Bride and Frankenstein, one revolving around the Monster and his found companion Renaldo (David Rappaport).
Frankenstein names the Bride Eva, and she is as unformed and without shame as her Biblical namesake. He raises her to be fearless, educated and independent. At the same time, he denies himself an emotional or physical attachment to the beautiful and pliable woman he has built. He constructs for her an amnesiac's history and seeks to shelter her from sexual awakening, despite friend Clerval's (Anthony Higgins) warnings.
The Monster also receives a name, Viktor. Renaldo teaches him to share, to value dreams, to integrate with the world around them - but to stand up against would-be tormentors. Viktor remembers his intended bride, and mourns the idea that she hated him. Renaldo and Viktor join the circus. They become a formidable duo.
As Eva approaches a first sexual encounter with suitor Captain Josef Schoeden (Cary Elwes), Frankenstein inflicts a jealous psychological prison upon her - finally revealing her true biography and attempting rape.
Meanwhile, Renaldo's financial shrewdness makes enemies of circus owner Magar (Alexei Sayle) and henchman Bela (Phil Daniels). When Bela cuts Renaldo's trapeze harness and he then dies in Viktor's arms, the Monster returns and sets out to avenge Renaldo and follow his dream back to Castle Frankenstein.
What is chiefly surprising about "The Bride" is how deliberately and lengthily it avoids easy routes to a conclusion in the third act. While Eva matures and comes to despise her possessive and increasingly cruel master, Viktor likewise matures and becomes more and more patient with the world that seeks to constrain and ruin his hoped-for love.
He encounters Eva several times upon return, but never resorts to the rage and man-child impulse to destroy. Instead, he grapples with doubt, fear, the urge to rescue Eva and finally a sort of universal permission to experience righteous anger towards Frankenstein.
While there is a certain amount of post-feminist sloganeering in Lloyd Fonvielle' script, "The Bride" is a film about manhood. It explores the potential of a perverse and repressed fraternal love towards women. Eva is very much waiting for and completed only by male companionship. She is wrought by men's hands, raised under their roof, escapes into their rivals' arms and finally is liberated by the new, sensitive male - Viktor.
It is the nature of masculine virtue that Roddam and Fonvielle unpack. Renaldo defines Viktor as a man of virtue, and the nature of intense male friendship is defined by their physical and emotional intimacy. Never a homoerotic love, but a true fraternal love, it serves as a direct counterpoint to the sanctimonious demonstrations of Frankenstein towards Eva.
Frankenstein embodies the disingenuous version of idyllic chaste love, codified by Italian Renaissance writers such as Baldesar Castiglione. Frankenstein is a virtual representation of Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, writ in vulgar physical terms.
Given Frankenstein author Mary Shelley's Gothic environs, and Roddam's extraordinarily phallic castle sets (Eva and Frankenstein move through chambers lined with bulging marble-roped columns), Roddam's Charles Frankenstein lives at the center of a thought-war, gentlemanly virtue versus raw human sexuality. His friends and society are repulsed by the ambiguity and impossibility of his alien relationship with the woman he calls "his ward." As a result, Frankenstein's submerged incestuous desire for Eva blows the top from their relationship in a psychological mirror of the destruction of the tower (phallus) from which Eva was created - now walled and for which Frankenstein insists he "has no use."
The film is overwrought in every way. From sets to dialogue, Roddam and Fonvielle have transferred Shelley's proto-Gothic characters in the full-on opera of subsequent Gothic storytelling, a la Emily Bronte.
Over this they layer shots of Eva framed in fire, resting her head on the lap of the sexually self-shackled Frankenstein. He reaches for her hair, he withdraws as if burned. There is no subtlety, but a kind of lush opium-dream detail.
This is transferred from sets to costumes to makeup, as Brown's Monster's face begins ciphered with crawling pink scars, then gradually smoothes and warms until it is a mask, not of monstrosity, but of compassion and weary faith in the dreams that Renaldo tells him are "the key to everything."
What is radical and liberating about "The Bride" is not Roddam and Fonvielle's exploration of male fantasies regarding the feral daughter raised to aggressive and desirable womanhood, but the purity of emotion Viktor represents and that he is ultimately the water that quenches Eva's thirst. There is more sexual energy in their initial brief touch in the forest, when he gives to her a token of dead Renaldo (a coin from Venice - to which Renaldo sought to retire), than when Schoeden pulls at her bodice and gropes for her thigh in a moment of passion.
Roddam and Fonvielle seem to propose a complete overturning of the Italian Renaissance concept of male-female relations and thrust into the post-Gothic text of "The Bride" a new and primal manhood. All of the musty books, duplicitous courtiers and cynical elite leave Eva only alone and without real identity. When the Monster returns to set her free, she is breathless.
"It's such a big world," she gasps. They escape the castles for the canals and the credits roll over the two of them in Venice. They have traveled back to the edges of the Renaissance passion for learning and experience - for doing - but with a new mandate - not to repress and construct each other's sexuality out of some societal ideal, but to live with each other unbridled and openly - intellects and bodies being what they are.
Eva and Viktor are joined by the electrical nature of their birth. They share emotions even while apart during the "The Bride," and so their coming together is a reunion in more ways than one. The heart and the brain forge a new being, refusing to separate lust from love or body from spirit.
In the shell of the scientific world, Frankenstein lays dead and broken outside his castle and the discoveries he made escape into the Old World, which they will make new - a new kind of human life, this time unbound from history.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Bride, 1985
Brown's Monster's face begins ciphered with crawling pink scars, then gradually smoothes and warms until it is a mask, not of monstrosity, but of compassion and weary faith in the dreams that Renaldo tells him are "the key to everything."
