July's Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman: GENTLEMAN JACK, a jaunty tale of Independence

“ If you have a problem with who I am, 

your quarrel is with my creator.” 

 --Mayor Pete Buttigieg

This is the story of Anne Lister (1791-1840) of the Yorkshire Village of Halifax, dubbed ‘Gentleman Jack’ after her death, the first lesbian known to ‘marry.’ Her neighbors gossiped that “she likes the ladies” but disapproval of her mannish affect was overcome by Anne’s charisma and strength of character. This when sex between men was illegal and lesbianism not a ‘thing’ -- life circumstance led some women to have companions but absent sexual penetration it was not thought transgressive. 

Sally Wainwright (at right) of Last Tango in Halifax and Happy Valley, the HBO/ BBC1 series creator and screenwriter, grew up in Yorkshire near the Lister family seat, Shibden Hall. Wainwright told this story using Anne’s own words, because while Anne strode her world, she was also writing a massive 24-27 volume diary of 4-5 million words (accounts vary) describing in copious detail her business dealings and social views. As for her romances — she wrote about that in code. In the 1890’s her descendent, John Lister, and an antiquarian colleague of his, deciphered enough code to be wowed by its incendiary content. Lister walled up the diaries in Shibden Hall to preserve them and also protect himself (he was gay) in the era when Oscar Wilde was on trial for homosexuality. (Below, archival portrait of Anne Lister and a diary page.)

Silence descended for near a century over Anne Lister and her diaries until Helena Whitbread of Halifax came along in the 1980’s. When Whitbread discovered the Anne Lister trove she began a multi-year project to decipher the coded parts. Three books followed with a biography in the works.  Another biography accompanies the HBO/BBC1 series, written by Anne Choma with a forward by Sally Wainwright. With her prodigious screen-writing talent, Wainwright has brought this entirely entertaining and amazing tale to life at a time public opinion is welcoming. 

The series star, Suranne Jones, is a multi-credited actress (see her fine WWI series, The Crimson Field, Amazon Prime, that lacks in flash what it has in depth and deserved more chapters than it got). Jones is so arresting as Lister that Sophie Rundle as Anne’s lover has been somewhat overlooked by critics. Rundle plays a scrappy gang moll in Peaky Blinders but here she amazes as an ingenue. Her Ann Walker is close to camp, a bird and-doll-like femme whose skirts sway, cheeks go pink, and curls tremble in the presence of her idol — clever, strong Anne Lister. But Ann is mentally frail; she frets about gossip and has terrifying dreams of public torture and ridicule — she thinks she should take Mr. Ainsworth, her pushy suitor. (Ainsworth is played by Brendan Patricks, Mary Crawley’s hapless admirer, Evelyn Napier, on Downton Abbey).

The first chapter introduces us to the domestic Halifax scene of 1832. Anne has just inherited Shibden Hall from her uncle, a wise judge of her competence and the likelihood she would not marry and convey the family estate to a husband. Anne sets about bringing the Tudor family seat (built 1420, occupied by Listers since 1615) up to her standards. Much of the filming is done in and around Shibden Hall, shown below, now a public tour site and park.

Anne's helpless elderly aunt and father (who soldiered at the Battle of Lexington in 1775) and jealous younger sister, Marian, a funny, droll Gemma Whelan (GOT's Yara Grayjoy, fresh off the Iron Islands) have their doubts as Anne boldly takes charge of management, but feel relief more. (Below, l Anne, sister Marian; front, Gemma Jones as Aunt Anne Lister and Timothy West as Jeremy Lister, Anne’s father.)

We are introduced to the tribulations of her tenants, such as the good-hearted Tom Sowden (Tom Lewis, below center) who kills his savagely-violent father in despair and turns him over to the pigs. 

There’s drama in her household staff ( Shibden staffer, below, John Booth, played by Thomas Howes, Downton Abbey footman, William) and ongoing tangle with a pair of mercenary Halifax brothers, the Rawsons, who have been stealing coal from her property. Anne will sink her own well and find them out.

The tone of ‘Gentleman Jack’ is set by a jaunty tune. In fact this story does not yield to labeling — it is comedy, satire, drama, and sexy romance rolled into one rollicking delight, and just renewed for a second series.

In the main we follow Anne’s search for partnership she felt was her due, in spite of terrible disappointments (her lovers marrying men). As Ann Walker crumbles tearfully under the weight of gossip (“I would rather die than have people know what we do”), Anne Lister goes all in to make her case:

“...Between men it is illegal, a criminal act. Between women it isn’t...we can’t be hanged for it. But if it were...well then, I would have to put my neck in the noose because I love only the fairer sex...I was born like this... If I was to lie with a man, surely that would be unnatural, surely that would be against God who made us.....” (There are reports of women being put to death in the Middle Ages for sex using dildo’s, which violated the transgression against penetration.)

Anne’s faith was bound up in her sexual identity. “Why should I compromise myself to lie with another man’s wife ... I would become a liar, a cheat, and a fornicator, and that is not what I want. And that is why our present connection without a more solemn tie for me is wrong. I want you to become my wife...according to God’s holy ordinance.....”

 Many troubles unfold before Anne and Ann solemnify their secret bond, but as this story was being filmed, a plaque ringed in rainbow was affixed to the 12th century church where the two took the sacrament together, signifying their commitment.

The above post was written by our 

monthly correspondent Lee Liberman

A family of French farmers deals with World War I in Xavier Beauvois' THE GUARDIANS

Ah, a new film from Xavier Beauvois! This is the fellow who gave us both Le Petit Lieutenant and Of Gods and Men, two films that TrustMovies enjoyed very much. And yet, when I went to further research Beauvois on the IMDB, I was shocked to discover that, while I think of this man more as a filmmaker than an actor, I had actually seen much more of his work in the latter category than the former. His acting is perfectly fine, but it's as writer/director that I most remember him -- particularly for his multi-award-winning Of Gods and Men.

M. Beauvois, shown at left, is an unhurried movie-maker. He takes his sweet time and concentrates on the details -- of character, situation, location and time period. While this can make his filmmaking slow-paced as was, even to some extent, his police procedural, Le Petit Lieutenant, his work is never for a moment uninteresting. His latest entry as director and co-adapter (with Marie-Julie Maille and Frédérique Moreau) of the novel by Ernest Pérochon, is THE GUARDIANS (Les gardiennes), a story of World War I set entirely on the French home front with not a scene of war-time action to be found.

Oh, the movie begins clearly and cleverly enough with a long tracking-the-landscape shot of dead bodies, some of these wearing gas masks, so we immediately know the WWI time frame. Yet, once the film's story begins we never leave that home front -- the farm and the village in which our group of main characters live and labor.

Yes, young male characters come and go (early on, one of the sons of the family comes home for a short leave, followed by the leave of a second son and a son-in-law), only to be killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the Germans. Yet we never see any of this; we only hear about it second-hand.

This means we concentrate mostly on the womenfolk who must carry on just as before, but without the help of the stronger males. The work, if you know anything about farming (and a century ago!), is difficult, often back-breaking, and near-constant, yet these women must manage it.

The film's female leads include the mother (the usually glamorous Natalie Baye, above, looking as plain and aged as we've ever seen her),

her daughter (the lovely and, as as one character calls her, "elegant" Laura Smet, above), and a young worker the family must hire as help who has only recently left the orphanage in which she was raised (the wonderful red-haired newcomer Iris Bry, shown below and on poster, top, whom we are certain to see again soon).

What happens to all these folk, women and men, is as believable, sometimes terrible and always understated as life itself. Beauvois and his co-writers have managed to include so little coincidence into their film that when a sample of that credibility-ripping stuff suddenly happens (involving an overseen kiss), it comes as quite a shock. But I think any film deserves a single instance of this, so you'll probably be able to let this one pass. (Downton Abbey this movie definitely is not.)

Performances are everything you could want them to be --  as real as the farmhouse dirt. These people are not big on a lot of talking, so we get used to the silence and visual routine of their lives and then hang on their occasional words, as events pile up and more needs to be said.

The great strength of Beauvois and his cast and crew's work is that though some terrible things happen, some out of the characters' control, others firmly within that control, we are somehow able to understand the dreadful injustice of all this -- given, especially, the time and place. That our heroine is able to accept this and move on is difficult but salutary, and the filmmaker never underscores her achievement with the usual soaring music and feel-good stance. Instead The Guardians (ironic title, that) achieves its ends in all too ordinary but appropriate ways. This is good, strong, rooted filmmaking, and I hope you will give it a viewing.

From Music Box Films, in French with English subtitles and running 135 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, May 4, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and on the following Friday, May 11, in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Royal and Playhouse 7. In the weeks following, the film will hit another 15 or so cities. Click here and then click on THEATERS on the task bar half-way down the screen to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and venues.

Blu-ray debut for Jean Grémillon's final full-length narrative film, THE LOVE OF A WOMAN

For all his continuing love of French cinema of many kinds, TrustMovies had somehow managed to miss viewing most, if not all, of the work of a certain French filmmaker named Jean Grémillon. The Arrow Academy arm of Arrow Video has now remedied that with its release a few months back of Grémillon's final narrative film, THE LOVE OF A WOMAN (L'amour d'une femme).

Though this was one of his last movies, perhaps it's not such a bad place to begin an appreciation of both the man and his work. According to the excellent full-length documentary feature, In Search of Jean Grémillon, that is offered as a bonus feature on the disc, what we see in this film includes much that was vitally important to this unusual filmmaker.

According to so many of the actors, other filmmakers and especially the famous film historian and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois -- all of whom we see and hear during this 96-minute documentary -- M. Grémillon (pictured at left) was a fellow who genuinely cared about, loved and understood women about as well as any male filmmaker you can name. This is certainly borne out by The Love of a Woman, in which that fine actress Micheline Presle plays a doctor new to the seashore town where the quite aged physician has only just retired.

Ms Presle (still alive at 95!) is one of those minor icons of French cinema, equally adept in comedy or drama (Devil in the Flesh, Donkey Skin, The Five-Day Lover) who graced international screens for more than 70 years. Combining beauty, intelligence and a kind of bone-deep savvy, she was particularly good at playing career women, and here, as the new doctor in town, she excels once again.

Her love of her job and her great skill at it is demonstrable from the film's start and only grows more powerful as it continues. This is of course despite the typical sexism of the town's males, which, to Grémillon's credit, is never overdone. It is simply there -- even via the film's other protagonist, who doubles as the love interest of our doctor. He is played by Italian star Massimo Girotti (below, left, whose career spanned Visconti's Ossessione to Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Windows), and the actor manages to bring beautifully to life a man of very ambivalent feelings about work, women and family.

On the basis of but this single film, I'd say that Grémillon was a better director than screenwriter, because his dialog is sometimes a bit too obvious and pushed, as though he is trying to fit it all into a time frame that's simply too constrained. So he leaves it to his actors to bring that dialog fully to life -- and they do.

Style-wise, the filmmaker, who made a lot of documentaries in addition to his narrative films, graces this one with a kind of doc style that concentrates upon the life of the little island off Brittany where the film takes place. It's often a fascinating thing to see, and it adds to the core of truth the film captures. (A couple of the movie's sweetest scenes involve a pair of children and their pet lamb.)

The movie is remarkably feminist, too -- way before its time (the film was released in 1953). How the idea of a woman who loves both her work and her man, even as that man struggles to understand this duality, is brought to compelling life here. Sacrifice is inevitable, but how this occurs and by whom assures that The Love of a Woman is anything but simplistic or simple-minded.

From Arrow Video and distributed here in the USA via MVD Entertainment Group, the film is available now on Blu-ray and DVD -- for purchase (and I hope for rental, as well). Click here for further info.