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He is born "like a fiend hid in a cloud," fruit of trampled lady and lumbering jumbo. (Her screaming face in slow-mo suggests Edvard Munch smudged.) London on the eve of the twentieth-century is still the land of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to David Lynch, the split of elegant parlors and grimy sweatshops, of a charred torso in the antiseptic surgery room. The physician (Anthony Hopkins) evinces a polite but unmistakable hunger for forbidden spectacle, his trip to the carnival leads him to "the greatest freak in the world." Grievously deformed John Merrick, the gentle soul in the misshapen husk, John Hurt's breathtaking emotional delicacy beneath layers of bulbous makeup. The move from sideshow to hospital may change the audience but perhaps not the exploitation, the fear is that "he's only being stared at all over again." (The possibility of voyeurism masked as scientific interest, that he's the upper-crust doppelgänger of Freddie Jones' sadistic carny, keeps the doctor up at night.) The patient blooms tentatively, beside himself at the gift of a dressing case and gravely at work on a miniature cathedral. "I have to rely on my imagination for what I cannot actually see." Not Herzog's Frankenstein creature (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) but Quasimodo in Victorian society, an outsider to match the underground eccentric suddenly directing John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller for a prestige studio project. Lynch works his fixations under the mainstream skin, his Industrial Revolution is a snarl of chugging engines and hissing pipes, the professed enlightenment of aristocratic gawkers can't compare to the empathetic solidarity of fellow abnormalities. (The escape from the circus cage accents the kinship with Browning, the visit to the theater is filmed under the magical aegis of Méliès.) "My life is full because I know that I am loved." The astral ascent at the close adduces a grain of Marker's La Jetée. Cinematography by Freddie Francis. With Anne Bancroft, Frederick Treves, Michael Elphick, Lesley Dunlop, Hannah Gordon, Phoebe Nicholls, and Dexter Fletcher. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |