Tess

Polish eye for English tale on French locations, naturally it opens and closes on roads. D'Urbervilles, the blueblood ancestry that gets the Wessex sot (John Collin) ruminating and sends his daughter (Nastassja Kinski) to "claim kin" at the manor house. A lingering feudalism, the blind doyenne (Sylvia Coleridge) cradles poultry while the scion (Leigh Lawson) seduces his quasi-relative, who returns home pregnant. The vicar (Richard Pearson) tends to bees but won't bury an unbaptized child, the self-declared freethinker (Peter Firth) hears her story on their wedding night and suddenly cannot stand her presence. "I thought you were a child of nature. But you were the last in a line of degenerate aristocrats." Thomas Hardy vu par Roman Polanski, his most painterly work. (Millais, Constable and Millet are compositional mainstays, Vermeer is brought to bear on Kinski in tremulous close-up.) Dancing maidens silhouetted at dusk, seduction over Mallarmé's "shallow rivulet," heightened impressions for the young gamine, "mighty sensitive for a village lass." Polanski's meticulousness is encapsulated in the camera's tilt to catch sunlight as the heroine crumples a note in her fist, his serene strangeness is embodied in the stag that materializes in the woods at night. "We have to take the ups with the downs, Tess." Cukor's David Copperfield, Losey's The Go-Between, Bertolucci's 1900... Modernity like a hay thresher's steamy screech, reunion at a seaside resort scored to the off-screen clipping of garden shears (cf. raked leaves at the Countess' chateau in Journal d'un Curé de Campagne). Blood stains on the ceiling evoke Repulsion, so does the chest blocking the door during the fugitives' interlude in the vacant mansion. Mounted guards at dawn in Stonehenge, the innocent is already on a sacrificial slab. "Ah, cousin, beauty has its price." Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet. With Rosemary Martin, Carolyn Pickles, Suzanna Hamilton, David Markham, Pascale de Boysson, and Arielle Dombasle.