2 hours ago
5
Nia DaCosta, known for her satirical horror Candyman from 2021, has now created an exotic melodrama; it is ridiculous, intense, despairingly sexual, inspired by Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Chekhov’s dictum about the gun produced in act one. It’s a feverish variation on a theme, with twists on gender and racial difference.
The action is transplanted from Ibsen’s Norway to a country estate in 1950s England, which makes for some suitably bizarre cod-British voice work – although the excellent Kathryn Hunter has one resoundingly authentic speech as Bertie, a punk Mrs Patmore figure below stairs, cheerfully pouring scorn on her employers in the vast Downtonesque establishment.
Hedda is played by Tessa Thompson as a sensual free spirit with a manipulative streak; she has just cynically settled for marriage to well-born milquetoast academic George Tesman (Tom Bateman) because it will allow her to live in luxury in this huge house in which they are throwing a colossally decadent party. But the awful truth is that George has mortgaged himself up to the eyeballs for this place – so he simply must get a lucrative, newly vacant professorship to pay the debt.
Then an unexpected party guest shows up, played by Nina Hoss. This is Hedda’s beautiful ex-lover, Eileen Lövborg (a surname immortalised by Woody Allen’s Ibsenesque character Jorgen Lovborg, who had the umlaut removed and placed over his eyebrows). Eileen is a brilliant classicist who is also applying for the professorship. With ambiguous mischief, Hedda encourages her to get drunk and disport herself. Does she want Eileen to get into an embarrassing state in public and lose all hope of that job? Or does part of her want to unlock Eileen’s glorious sexuality, which boring old George is not supplying? And so the Dionysian bacchanal of jaded pleasure and semi-intentional violence kicks off.
This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged, and there’s a great deal of slightly baffling business about the manuscript of Eileen’s forthcoming dazzling magnum opus whose title and contents aren’t specified. It unfolds in a counter-historical context of ethnic diversity, though unlike TV’s Bridgerton the fact of racial difference and racial prejudice is explicitly remarked on. Hedda discloses a crazy world of hedonism and gossip; more Hedda Hopper than Gabler.
