(by Katherine Lim - The College Hill Independent 1996.)
Imagine yourself in the grand ballroom of a lavish Gothic mansion. Dancers edecked in shimmering satin and rich velvet whirl around you, blinding you with a dumptuous display of colors--green-and-yellow, aquamarine, hectic red. As a naturalist proud of your powers of keen observation, you cannot help equating the flitting dancers with rare butterflies in their nuptial rituals. But somehow you feel out of place in this curiously mannered society. Squirming in your borrowed suit, you stare at the vaulted ceiling and study its intricate patterns when you hear a voice.
"You must dance, Mr. Adamson."
You turn and face the inscrutable Lady Alabaster, the family matriarch. Sitting by her is a pale trembling creature--her eldest daughter, Eugenia. The next dance finds you holding Eugenia's slim waist as her faintly warm gloved hand gently presses on your shoulder. As you behold her delicate features, a glow of happiness suffuses your entire body. Suddenly you do not feel so alien anymore...
Alabaster afternoons
Angels and Insects, a film based on A.S. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia, presents a rigidly stratified 19th-century world as seen through an entomologist's slightly distorted magnifying glass. Set in the 1860's--a turbulent decade ushered in by the publication of On the Origin of the Species --the film chronicles the turmoil engendered by the Darwinian revolution, which threatened the stability of the Church of England and possessed the power to rend English society.
When William (Mark Rylance) gets an invitation as an indefinite guest in the Reverend Harald Alabaster's (Jeremy Kemp) household, he believes himself to be in a paradise of afternoon tea, of bread and butter, and of soft English beds. Soon, however, he realizes he is more of a stranger in his own land than in the Amazon, where he spent ten years researching the habits of ants and butterflies only to end up losing the majority of his specimen in a shipwreck.
Although Reverend Alabaster treats him with dignity and respect, employing the entomologist as a tutor to his young daughters, William feels inadequate. His feelings are compounded by a taunt by Alabaster's son, Edgar (Douglas Henshall), "You're not one of us." In an effort to conquer this inferiority complex, he throws himself into his work and meets governess Matty Crompton (Kristin Scott-Thomas).
William engages in philosophical and scientific discussions with this brilliant woman, rendered sexless by her status as dependent relative. Beneath Matty's austere demeanor, however, is a heart as passionate and a mind as introspective as that of Jane Eyre. When William reveals his wonder at her prodigious intellectual capabilities, Matty stops him with her mordant wit akin to Jane's rebuffing of Rochester: "It's my great amusement, thinking."
Colored air
Our insect-happy hero falls for the ethereal heiress Eugenia (Patsy Kensit) and marries her after an elaborate and mystifying courtship. In the film's most fantastical--and most poignantly beautiful--scene, William wins his beloved's heart by releasing a cloud of butterflies to flit about the conservatory in a brilliant rainbow of colors. "They are like colored air," says Eugenia. "You are a miracle worker." Rylance's subdued decorum as William woos her with soft words; his unique acts indeed work miracles.
If this were a Jane Austen film adaptation, the end credits would have rolled after the fairy-tale wedding. But dark secrets lurk in the shadows of the ivy-covered Gothic walls--and if you're looking for nostalgic costume drama ý la Merchant-Ivory, you won't find it here. Angels and Insects weaves a tangled web of deceit and seduction.
To achieve this, the film stays remarkably close to the novel's comparison of human society to insect colonies. While capricious butterfly Eugenia flits in and out of William's life, providing heated nights--culminating with William's unfettering her daisy-chain as she seductively wraps her arms around him--Lady Alabaster stuffs herself on macaroons like a gigantic queen bee, servant-drones walk through dark pathways built like those of an ant dwelling, and the Alabaster girls scuttle about aphid-like on the lawn.
Keeping with Byatt's concept of humans-as-insects, director Philip Haas deftly translates the complex extended metaphors in Morpho Eugenia into effective on-screen images. A clever birds-eye view shot of Lady Alabaster's funeral cortËge transforms the procession into a marching troop of black ants, and Eugenia's marriage bed calls up images of gossamer and silk.
Insect wrangler
At the same time, it likens this Bower of Bliss to a spider's web that William finds easy to enter but unbelievably difficult to extricate himself from. Haas' previous work as a documentarist also comes in handy for the live-action footage of a Great Insect Invasion, when the red ants that William examines for his book, The Swarming City, invade the dwellings of their black ant enemies. The insects, whose frenzied scuttling motions are magnified 10,000 times on screen, play out an epic drama in an unnerving parallel to their human counterparts.
Getting the insects to "cooperate," however, was no easy matter. Chris O'Toole, whom Byatt calls the "insect wrangler" (Architectural Digest, April `96) admits that the synchronized butterfly cloud gave him a massive headache. Similarly, when William shows Eugenia his newly-hatched moths, Patsy Kensit had to be sprayed with pheromones (female hormones) for the insects to perform the nuptial dance on her dress. But Haas and his team's unflagging commitment to "getting it right" pays off in the end. William and Eugenia's scenes in the conservatory--crucial points in both the book and film--are arguably the most magical moments in Angels and Insects.
Given the mesmerizingly complex imagery and language, the actors transform themselves into inhabitants of an equally complicated Victorian world. Rylance's understanding of William's talented but self-deprecating character allows him to become the frustrated gentleman scientist, while Kensit convinces us that she seems sexually repressed but is actually wild in bed. As Edgar, Douglas Henshall exudes a reeking horse-like masculinity.
Angels and Insects is so lifelike, so real in spite of the obvious metaphors, that when the lights come up, we're still lingering over the hypnotic musical score while images play out in our minds. Indeed, the film has a curiously gossamer quality--not unlike the gentle touch of Eugenia's gloved hand.