Carrington (1995)

I once saw a man in a t-shirt that said "A MISOGYNIST IS A MAN WHO HATES WOMEN AS MUCH AS WOMEN HATE EACH OTHER," and I had to ask him where he got it. I didn't end up buying one, though, because I realized after thinking about it that the proper formulation is "as much as women hate themselves." I mention this because I watched Carrington today.

Bloomsbury painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932) hated women, both being one and being around them: she cut her hair like a boy's and only ever went by "Carrington"; her letters are full of griping about menstruation, which she thought afflicted her much more intensely than other women; she liked men but hated sex with them, because it made her feel too womanly. (Patricia Highsmith had similar feelings on the subject.) She had a few lesbian affairs but was tragically straight, so Carrington did the only thing a gender-queer misogynist with a bohemian sex drive could do: she fell in love with a gay man.

Carrington is one of those movies that's so close to my heart that it's no good trying to review it. It's also no good trying to review it because there is simply no film like it. An unconsummated love story between a straight woman and a gay man? One that's meant to be uplifting? This is a movie I don't quite know how to deal with.

It's a period piece, almost Merchant-Ivory, but when it's not about popcorn it's a sweet love story with a moral. A man in love with Carrington asks how she can stand living with a desiccated and diseased old bugger (his words) like Strachey. "Well," she says, "you always have to put up with something." Watch this movie if you've landed in an impossible love, because the moral is that, apart from the unrequited kind, there is no impossible love--you always have to put up with something--but the end result might not look like you planned. Not that anyone in love has ever cared that it didn't.

Sorry for the Pollyanna moment; Jonathan Pryce makes me idealistic.