About Amanda Rush
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Fans of Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill are familiar with the kind of British film Daphne is – you can’t eat popcorn to it, and someone is always stacking matches in front of an awkward man named Sebastian.
Daphne: The Secret Love Life of Daphne du Maurier is a look inside the life of the famous author of Rebecca. Told between the plagiarism trial and the writing of “The Birds”, we see Daphne meet Ellen doubleday (played by Elizabeth McGovern), the woman that du Maurier idolized romantically for many years of her life, and later meet (and proceed to have an affair with) Gertrude Lawrence (played by Janet McTeer, who was the frightening and off-kilter Dell in Terry Gilliam’s Tideland).
Du Maurier herself is played by Geraldine Somerville, most notably recognized as Lily Potter in the Harry Potter films. She plays the Garbo-esque, pants-suit wearing (yet glamorous) du Maurier very well. The film is not a movie of lesbianism, though much of the plot is centered around it. Instead, it is a film about du Maurier’s refusal to fit within the confines of the term ‘lesbian’, finding it crude and inadequate. In this film, the concept of love is wishy-washy, both sexualized and romanticized much in the way a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl would. It struggles to make a point about the many forms of love and sexuality being equal, and yet the point is made silly by the overly dramatic tone the film takes.
I assume that in making the film, the director tried to emulate the feel of Rebecca – a gothic drama, much like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights – an interesting concept, to be sure. But it fails miserably. The end product is a silly film, overly dramatic and thick with ridiculously caricaturized female characters.
Daphne is a BBC production, and entirely the kind of film that the BBC struggles to overcome in its attempt to brand itself as cool and competitive with American markets. It aired on BBC Two in England and LOGO (a gay and lesbian network created by MTV Networks, for those unfamiliar with it) in the US – not even good enough for masterpiece theater, and that says a lot.
Bonus features are limited to a short documentary made by the authoress herself called Daphne du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall. I’ll let you guess the subject matter. It looks like an educational video shown in schools, and is about as interesting. The only point of interest is in the link between the short and the filming locations of the movie.
Not as awful as some, Daphne may be a fun watch if it aired on television (or to die-hard du Maurier fans, perhaps), but as a DVD, it isn’t terribly good, either.
