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Daphne - BBC2 Saturday 12th May 2007; Lesbian content drama with Janet McTeer
Topic Started: May 12 2007, 10:09 AM (2,283 Views)
abzug
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I saw something somewhere which indicated that the movie was going to be shown "with limited commercial interruption" so that's hopeful that they'll give it a full 2 hours and not edit the film.

Can anyone think of a case where Logo has been the network to broadcast the American premiere of a film? I can't, and arguably in these cases (where they are broadcasting the premiere) it would make sense for them to show the complete version of the film.
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Jeanna
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Thanks for posting those articles. Fascinating. I never knew about DDM, or Gertie Lawrence for that matter. And I'm usually up to date on that sort of thing. <G> Really want to see this movie tho. I fondly remember Somerville as the feisty copper Jane Penhaligon on "Cracker."

And of course I've read "Rebecca," etc. and seen all the films and adaptations of DDM's work many times. Even as a kid I got the lesbian inferences re Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson in Hitch's 1940 Best Picture Oscar winner) and Anna Massey and Diana Rigg both played the character with a lot of suppressed passion in the tv adaptations.

There's that moment that plays kinda kinky and erotic even in an old b/w H'wood movie where Danvers rubs her face against one of Rebecca's furs hanging in the closet and invites 'the second Mrs. DeWinter' to do the same. "Feel this." (Not to mention the holy relic status visited upon her former mistress's underwear. Just a little obsessive.)

Just got the brainrush to look it up and see if it could possibly be on YouTube...and sure enuf...isn't everything?:

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Rebecca Scene on You Tube
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solitasolano
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abzug
Jul 12 2007, 10:04 AM
a full 2 hours

Got scared there for a moment...LOGO has a hour and a half time slot showing for the fim, so I thought WIF, how much are they going to take out. But then just now I tracked down the bbc description of the film and it's 90 mins...
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abzug
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That kind of sucks, actually, because it means they are editing it, if they're showing it with commercials over 90 minutes. Is nothing sacred to them? I mean, seriously. I don't understand why they can't give it a 2 hour slot....
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poedgie
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abzug
Jul 12 2007, 10:04 AM

Can anyone think of a case where Logo has been the network to broadcast the American premiere of a film?  I can't, and arguably in these cases (where they are broadcasting the premiere) it would make sense for them to show the complete version of the film.

I think that Logo was the first (and I believe only) to air both Fingersmith & Tipping the Velvet. Both are edited to bits.

I read Jamaica Inn when I was in High School. I can't remember much about it now except that I liked it and it was kinda creepy.
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solitasolano
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poedgie
Jul 12 2007, 02:20 PM
Both are edited to bits.

Yep, not hopeful Daphne either...
I was fortunate enough to have someone send me a Tipping dvd....when I saw the same on Logo I hardly recognized it.
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solitasolano
Jul 12 2007, 03:46 PM

I was fortunate enough to have someone send me a Tipping dvd....when I saw the same on Logo I hardly recognized it.

Ain't that the truth!
That's what region free DVD players and Amazon UK are for.
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Jeanna
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"Tipping" was also badly edited by BBC-A where I first saw it on a tape someone made for me, I enjoyed it much more on dvd. And, btw, there is a rumor that Sophia Coppola is putting "Tipping" into pre-production for 2009 and is "in talks" with Beyonce and Eva Langoria at the moment.
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abzug
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We discussed that rumor on this board somewhere like six months ago, and it was refuted by all involved. Or has it resurfaced? I'd love to see them do a remake of Tipping, because I thought the BBC version was not ideal, but with a GOOD cast.
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Jeanna
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I was just told it by my source formerly of FX, now at HBO, it has resurfaced because it's listed as in pre-production for 2009 on the IMDB.
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abzug
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I can see Eva L. as Kitty, but Beyonce as Nan? Impossible to fathom.

I just watched "Daphne" again (anything to avoid packing my apartment; I went and got a manicure too, perhaps inspired by Janet McTeer's luscious nails in this film) and I was even more impressed the second time through. Really the whole film is about a woman's struggle with her own repression. It's not the love triangle which it might first appear to be. It's about whether Daphne will allow herself to have what she wants (love with a woman), whether she'll truly give in to her desires. The ways she constantly allowed Ellen to intrude on the tiniest bit of space she had allowed for herself and Gertrude--it was so frustrating! But very well done from a filmmaking perspective, because they captured this dynamic in the plot, in the visuals etc. I mean, she's finally living it up with Gertrude in Florida, and one phone call from Ellen and Gertrude fades to the background, literally, of the shot, becoming all blurry. So sad. Also brilliant the way Ellen and Gertrude sort of blended together in the story as they did in Daphne's mind. Is the final letter about Ellen? About Gertrude? Is it even possible to separate the two?

I was also thinking about why I didn't find the depressing ending to be a betrayal of any kind. I mean, in this day and age, to have a lesbian story with a sad ending gets kind of annoying. Haven't we moved beyond that? For those who watched "Strictly Confidential" back last year (with Eva Pope and Suranne Jones), that lesbian-turns-out-to-be-the-murderer ploy felt so archaic, and really infuriated me. But in this case, the ending manages to be sad for all the right reasons, because the tragedy is due to Daphne's emotional/sexual repression. We're meant to think she should have been with Gertrude, and her ending up alone (well, alone with her husband ;) ) is the tragedy. So unlike something like Strictly Confidential, or The Children's Hour, etc etc, this film doesn't seem to reinforce heterosexual hegemony (sorry to use that horrible word, but I'm not sure what other to use in this case).

There's a review of this film on AfterEllen.com, and the reviewer acknowledges that we don't really know the truth of Du Maurier's life or loves, but that given the huge number of depictions which have erased any trace of lesbianism from Du Maurier's life (and others of that era who may not have been as straight as they were made to appear), that it's nice to have a film which pushes the lesbian stuff to the center, even if it's exaggerating that stuff, because it perhaps partially compensates for the way our culture tends to tilt everything in the other direction. Because the erasing of the bits of lesbianism in peoples' past implies that whatever lesbian dalliances may have occurred weren't significant, not relative to the heterosexual relationships, marriages, families etc. In contrast, in this film the male characters fade to the background, as does Du Maurier's family. Whether that's truthful is impossible to know, but how lovely to have a film which considers Du Maurier's "Venetian tendencies" to be the most interesting and dramatic aspect of her life.
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Jeanna
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I simply must see this film.

Quote:
 
that lesbian-turns-out-to-be-the-murderer ploy felt so archaic, and really infuriated me


Not to mention the old-hat suicide.

Re Tipping... Does american music hall theater (i.e. Vaudeville) have anything at all comparable to the drag acts with women presented in Waters' novel?
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abzug
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Jeanna
Jul 15 2007, 04:59 PM
I simply must see this film.

Yes, you must. :)

Here's a few more articles/reviews:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/stor...2078186,00.html

Kathryn Flett
Sunday May 13, 2007
The Observer

What she watched:

Daphne BBC2

The Seven Sins of England C4

Britain's Rudest Comedian: Roy Chubby Brown C4

The World's Most Offensive Joke C4

From the first drizzle-soused English exterior to the last gasp of the big fat portentous strings, I was weak with lust for both BBC2's Daphne and Geraldine Somerville's performance. As a biopic focusing on du Maurier's life post-Rebecca and up to the arrival of My Cousin Rachel, it not only made me want to re-read both books immediately but had me longing, with a pash, to wear Dior's New Look, smear some matte red Max Factor on my lips, grasp a martini glass and a cigarette and seek out an opportunity to make brittle small-talk with Noel round a piano while wearing a bright gay smile. Indeed, I wish there were more - more? any! - opportunities in life to come out with:

'I orrrften get letters, you know, full of gush, from fans.'

Or:

'You looked lovelier every day. It just defeated me.'

And, extra-specially:

'Ever since the Mademoiselle at finishing school, I've known I had "Venetian" tendencies.'

Amy Jenkins's script was, even if drawn from the source of du Maurier's own letters, pastiche-y in all the right ways, oozing the repressed sexuality and pretzel logic of upper-class post-war British mores - perfectly at ease within a production that looked just as good as it sounded.

Concentrating on an epic, glamorous transatlantic love triangle - the married du Maurier's unrequited love for her American publisher's wife, Ellen Doubleday (Elizabeth McGovern), and her consolation prize relationship with Ellen's friend Gertrude Lawrence (Janet McTeer) - it was only about halfway through that I realised I hadn't seen three such divine ladies d'un certain age at the epicentre of the action since, ooh ... how about ever?

Though I still see McGovern as both smouldering temptress and awkward child-woman in Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in America, in which she was accessorised by the most memorable screen eyebrows since those of Brooke Shields, I read recently that she lives in Chiswick, west London, and does the school run. Shocking. These days the eyebrows are a pair of neatly groomed circumflexes, but even for those without the faintest Venetian orientation it was possible to see why Daphne was devastated when Ellen declared, sweetly, tenderly, immovably: 'I can't love you in that way.'

As Gertrude Lawrence (was there ever a sexier, less bovine Gertrude?), Janet McTeer was both haughty and naughty by turns, while Daphne and Gertie's relationship appeared to be equal parts Angela Brazil and Anais Nin. When the pair took off for Florida on a holiday, during which they lay about in a Modern hotel room wearing pastel silk wraps and painting each other's toes, I was all but ready to move to Venice. One fleeting scene of Daphne and Gertie lying in bed together, post-coitally, with perfect hair and lipstick and slender arms flung back against crisp white linen, just so, looked like it had been art-directed by Avedon. There were delightful visual jokes too - particularly the deliberately lo-tech Hitchcockian back-projection, as Daph and Gertie 'drove' through 'Florida'.

I personally can't think of a better way to fritter away a Saturday night than with 90 minutes of literary love-in, replete with windswept beaches and manual typewriters, and this was just about as good and gorgeous as it gets. Meanwhile, I'm not sure there's an actress currently working who can milk a pregnant pause or emit a silent sigh of longing with more finesse than Geraldine Somerville.


http://www.thecustard.tv/thecrumble/thecrumble_94.html

Daphne, BBC2, Saturday 12 May 2007
Did we like it?
Perhaps overlong to illustrate the unhappiness of Daphne Du Maurier’s futile efforts to find fulfilment after the success of Rebecca, Geraldine Somerville in the title role drove the drama on with a controlled performance of despondency, envy and frustration.

What was good about it?
• Geraldine Somerville as Daphne captured the author’s anguish at her vacuous domesticity, which was spent caring for her three children while her emotionally impotent husband was fighting in World War Two. Her hopes that her love for her husband would be rekindled after was demobbed were dashed as it quickly became apparent that they had grown so far apart that they never slept in the same room again.
• Much of it was set just after Daphne had garnered fame and fortune through Rebecca, but was now struggling to dream up anything to match it. Her creativity wasn’t helped by the distraction of a plagiarism case in America after a thriller writer accused her of lifting elements from their crime novel. However, Daphne was eloquently able to prove otherwise by proclaiming Rebecca as altogether more complex and profound yet in doing so she was forced to expose the fundamental truths buried in Rebecca about the unpleasantries of an unhappy marriage.
• It was on her way to and during her stay in America that she met the two women who were to become her lovers – Ellen Doubleday (Elizabeth McGovern) and Gertrude Lawrence (Janet McTeer) – and it was they who snapped Daphne out her atrophying ennui. Gertrude, marvellously played by McTerr, especially encouraged Daphne to embrace her true sexuality and did so in a blaze of debauched hedonism.
• The effect when Daphne and Gertrude were driving in their car with an unrealistic background initially looked like abysmal production, but the fact that it was to abysmal led us to think that it was a sardonic homage to the similarly awful effects (though admittedly the best possible at the time) of the 1940s.

What was bad about it?
• The relentless austerity of Daphne’s life. Nothing seemed to make her smile – not her children, not her lovers, and certainly not her husband. All of this made Daphne’s life a trek similar to wading waist deep through the gushing waves on the windswept beaches Daphne was so fond of frequenting.
• A problem not just with this programme but with any that attempts the feat of replicating the grainy black and white newsreel from the 30s and 40s is that it always looks far too polished. There is a polish to the modern footage that even special effects that can create a rampaging giant gorilla from the hard drive of a PC cannot dispel. Even the flickering faults seem to contrived, too well-placed to mimic the random graininess of the genuine film.

This review here is a terrible one, so I won't paste it in, but for those interested, here's the link:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200705210036
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abzug
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The article here is really long, but a good read for those who are interested in the counterargument. This author states quite certainly that Daphne Du Maurier was NOT a lesbian, and did not have an affair with Gertrude Lawrence:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article...cret/article.do
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solitasolano
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Half an hour to go...don't know if I'll get to the articles before the show...hope LOGO leaves it with some integrity. Abzug, I like what you wrote a couple posts back, basically about lesbian visibility and significance...totally agree....this part in particular.
[QUOTE[ that it's nice to have a film which pushes the lesbian stuff to the center, even if it's exaggerating that stuff, because it perhaps partially compensates for the way our culture tends to tilt everything in the other direction. Because the erasing of the bits of lesbianism in peoples' past implies that whatever lesbian dalliances may have occurred weren't significant, not relative to the heterosexual relationships, marriages, families etc[/QUOTE]

While I await with anticipation, here's some Daphne shots to absorb.
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