Rating: 3/5
Guy Fawkes Night, 1892, London
As people run the street with fireworks and sparklers, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas take a horse-drawn carriage to Alfred Taylor’s lavish brothel in Westminster. While Douglas (Bosie, as Wilde calls him) heads downstairs to see what mischief he can find, Wilde goes upstairs to find a stage set and a couch made. On the couch is a book containing Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the first English edition of Wilde’s play, Solome.
When Taylor greets Wilde, they play a guessing game before Taylor reveals that he, the clients, and the courtesans will be staging Wilde’s play, Salome. Lord Chamberlain banned the play from public performance, so Taylor wished to gift Wilde the opportunity to see it staged. The curtains pull back, and Bosie is in a cage, tortured by topless guards. The play has begun.
This film falls into a similar vein as Gothic, where it takes real people and sets up a fantasy around one night of their lives. Here, we have Wilde’s play performed near verbatim, with the slight framing device as mentioned above.
Ken Russell shot the film for just over $1 million, and its small budget shows. The camera mostly observes the play with little of Russell’s usual playfulness. All this is because Russell took a bet that he couldn’t make a movie under $1 million.
The play in the movie has long bouts of tedium because we know where it’s going. But Oscar Wilde’s gotta do his wordplay thing.
The costumes and staging are entertaining. The pinnacle of the movie is the Dance of the Seven Veils, which amusingly plays with gender.
I softened on the movie as it went along, but something this gay and sacrilegious shouldn’t be boring!