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Lolita article in Los Angeles Times (fwd)
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From: Thomas Braun <cawriter@sprynet.com>
The following article appeared in the Jan. 20, 1998 edition of the Los
Angeles Times. After the article is a letter I wrote to the Times in
reply.
Thomas E. Braun
cawriter@sprynet.com
============================
Tuesday, January 20, 1998
'Lolita' Makes the European Rounds
Remake based on Nabokov novel opens in France but
still has no U.S. distributor.
By RICHARD COVINGTON, Special to The Times
PARIS--After a year full of brutal revelations about cases
of pedophilia in Belgium, France and elsewhere, the
world's most controversial nymphet has landed in northern
Europe. Still begging for U.S. distribution, Adrian Lyne's
"Lolita" opened last week in France, Belgium and Switzerland
and earlier this month in Germany.
Foundering in the wake of the mighty "Titanic," "Lolita"
has had disappointing European box-office results. In Italy,
however, where it opened last fall, its surprise success
drove Vladimir Nabokov's 43-year-old novel to the top of the
bestseller list. The film is scheduled to open in May in
Britain and midyear in Japan.
Although reviews in both France and Germany were less
than kind, and some German cinemas were picketed, the film
has hardly reaped the whirlwind of calumny some feared.
For good reason. The last thing this "Lolita" does is
condone pedophilia.
"No one comes well out of it. They all die, for
chrissake," fumes the director, exasperated at the morass of
misunderstanding surrounding the star-crossed film. "Humbert
Humbert is a pedophile, and it's hideous what he does to her.
But Nabokov makes you feel sorry for the man and laugh with
the man. Ultimately, it's a love story. When he sees her at
the end of the movie pregnant and, as he says, polluted by
another man's child and no longer a nymphet, he still loves
her. There's a certain redemption."
Lyne and Pathe, the French film company that bankrolled
the $60-million film, are desperately hoping that a strong
showing in Europe will persuade wary studios to distribute
the film in the U.S.
The director is still bewildered and somewhat embittered
by the stupefying silence from his peers. Says Lyne: "I've
got a pile of letters from presidents of studios saying they
think it's my best work, that they were overwhelmed by the
film. But suddenly conversations stopped. No one wants to run
the risk of being accused as the poor fool who supports
pedophilia."
Lyne's "Lolita" is a sensitively rendered piece of work,
shot through with the comedy, tragedy, anguish and longing of
Nabokov's novel. Like the book, the film is more concerned
with the doomed search for lost innocence and the lineaments
of obsessions than with incest and pedophilia.
Acutely self-aware, even as he descends into paranoia
and murderous jealousy, not to mention careless grooming,
Jeremy Irons' Humbert is besotted and prudish, venal and
noble at the same time. He's completely smitten with and
repulsed by the bubble-gum superficiality of postwar America,
the world's adolescent. As much as Dominique Swain's Lolita
is overmastered by this father-mother-lover, she's certainly
no slouch at manipulation, cruelty and deceit.
Compared to Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, bled of all
prurience by Hays Code restrictions that denied even the most
innocent kiss between a predatory James Mason and a
submissive Sue Lyon, Lyne's version is erotic, but it's
hardly scandalous.
Although the director used body doubles for sex
sequences, virtually all the explicit scenes were cut to
conform with the United States' Child Pornography Act of
1996. The legislation categorically rules out segments that
purport to portray sex with minors--adult body double or no
body double.
Despite these cuts, which Lyne insists hardly affect the
final version, the latest film is a great deal truer to the
original book than Kubrick's footloose interpretation. It may
not be a masterpiece, but it is a well-wrought translation of
Nabokov's masterpiece.
Lyne and Dmitri Nabokov, the Russian-born, Americanized
novelist's only child and literary executor, were in the
French capital last week battling mightily against the notion
that the book and film somehow give perversion a good name.
The 62-year-old Nabokov acted as an unpaid consultant to the
film and has no direct interest in it.
In France at least, the critics seemed less worried
about morality than about the quixotic attempt to revisit
hallowed cinematic terrain staked out by Kubrick. They are
delighted to criticize a hypocritical America so constrained
by political correctness that this new "Lolita" has sent
distributors scurrying for cover.
If French critics were nearly unanimous in their praise
for Irons as a marvelously anguished Humbert coming apart at
the psychological seams and Swain as a maddeningly erratic,
erotic Lolita, the idea of Lyne daring to scale Mt. Stanley
took their breath away.
For all the misguided criticisms leveled against Lyne's
"9 1/2 Weeks," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Exposure,"
with their earnestly heated sexual provocations, an excess of
subtlety, the sort Nabokov's novel requires, was never one of
them.
Yet except for the bloody ending, which was lambasted
for diving into Grand Guignol effects, Lyne's "Lolita"
achieves a subtlety the Kubrick film glaringly lacks.
Although Vladimir Nabokov received script-writing credit for
the earlier film, he ominously complained that he felt like a
patient in an ambulance watching helplessly out the window as
the film reeled by, far out of his reach and control.
"Kubrick did not see character in the same way as my
father did," the novelist's son explains. "The best parts of
the film are where James Mason reads my father's words.
"Adrian, by contrast, has found a cinematic language
that is the equivalent of father's literary language."
Some French reviewers went overboard to blast Lyne's
film for being too soft on America. "Adrian Lyne doesn't seem
to understand that 'Lolita,' according to Nabokov, functions
like an extremely sophisticated and sardonic war machine
against an America that is as Puritan as it is consumerist,"
railed Didier Peron in the Parisian daily "Liberation."
Counters Dmitri Nabokov, who accompanied his father on
numerous cross-country trips through the U.S.: "Some people
have attributed a hatred and disdain of America in the book.
That's not at all what he felt. He had a great tenderness for
the country, particularly Southern California and the West."
The Kubrick comparison weighs heavily on Lyne. "Kubrick
takes refuge in irony because he really doesn't come to grips
with the story," the director argues.
One critical difference is that the current film
reinstates Humbert's childhood romance with a 13-year-old
girl who died of typhus, thus giving him a believable,
poignant motivation missing in the earlier film. His
obsession with Lolita is partially an attempt to recapture
that dead love.
If the European critics praised this explanatory
flashback, they were largely puzzled over the diminished role
of Clare Quilty, Humbert's diabolic doppelganger. Where Peter
Sellers turned Quilty into a debonair, fast-talking comic,
Frank Langella is "properly phantom-like," says Dmitri
Nabokov, that is until the end, when he stumbles, first hung
over then mortally wounded, from hallway to piano to bed,
where his last gasp is a bubble of blood.
This penultimate four-minute scene has been universally
deplored, despite the fact that the book spins out a much
lengthier tour de force of gore.
"If you read the book, he loses a quarter of his head
and still won't die. It is Grand Guignol," says Lyne
defensively. "Peter Sellers did the scene wearing a sheet as
a toga, playing pingpong with Humbert. If this is any less
insane than what I did, explain it to me."
Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar
stories. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to
retrieve one.
Copyright Los Angeles Times
--------------------------------------------------------------
Jan. 20, 1998
to The Editor:
It seems we have lost our minds in this country. Director Adrian Lyne
cannot get a U.S. distributor for his film "Lolita" because it features
Jeremy Irons portraying a pedophile (which finally destroys him, by the
way). Yet we have mega-blockbusters featuring the same Mr. Irons blowing
up half of New York with alacrity ("Die Hard With a Vengeance"). We now
know which activity is the more reprehensible.
U.S. distributors, listen up: put "Lolita" into every theater you can;
let the government yahoos try to ban it (as they once tried to ban the
book); the resulting front-page publicity will induce everyone to go see
it; you'll both win on constitutional grounds and end up making far more
money than "Lolita" 's author Vladimir Nabokov was forced to abandon
when his wealthy family fled revolutionary Russia in 1919.
Thomas E. Braun
Littlerock, CA USA
cawriter@sprynet.com
The following article appeared in the Jan. 20, 1998 edition of the Los
Angeles Times. After the article is a letter I wrote to the Times in
reply.
Thomas E. Braun
cawriter@sprynet.com
============================
Tuesday, January 20, 1998
'Lolita' Makes the European Rounds
Remake based on Nabokov novel opens in France but
still has no U.S. distributor.
By RICHARD COVINGTON, Special to The Times
PARIS--After a year full of brutal revelations about cases
of pedophilia in Belgium, France and elsewhere, the
world's most controversial nymphet has landed in northern
Europe. Still begging for U.S. distribution, Adrian Lyne's
"Lolita" opened last week in France, Belgium and Switzerland
and earlier this month in Germany.
Foundering in the wake of the mighty "Titanic," "Lolita"
has had disappointing European box-office results. In Italy,
however, where it opened last fall, its surprise success
drove Vladimir Nabokov's 43-year-old novel to the top of the
bestseller list. The film is scheduled to open in May in
Britain and midyear in Japan.
Although reviews in both France and Germany were less
than kind, and some German cinemas were picketed, the film
has hardly reaped the whirlwind of calumny some feared.
For good reason. The last thing this "Lolita" does is
condone pedophilia.
"No one comes well out of it. They all die, for
chrissake," fumes the director, exasperated at the morass of
misunderstanding surrounding the star-crossed film. "Humbert
Humbert is a pedophile, and it's hideous what he does to her.
But Nabokov makes you feel sorry for the man and laugh with
the man. Ultimately, it's a love story. When he sees her at
the end of the movie pregnant and, as he says, polluted by
another man's child and no longer a nymphet, he still loves
her. There's a certain redemption."
Lyne and Pathe, the French film company that bankrolled
the $60-million film, are desperately hoping that a strong
showing in Europe will persuade wary studios to distribute
the film in the U.S.
The director is still bewildered and somewhat embittered
by the stupefying silence from his peers. Says Lyne: "I've
got a pile of letters from presidents of studios saying they
think it's my best work, that they were overwhelmed by the
film. But suddenly conversations stopped. No one wants to run
the risk of being accused as the poor fool who supports
pedophilia."
Lyne's "Lolita" is a sensitively rendered piece of work,
shot through with the comedy, tragedy, anguish and longing of
Nabokov's novel. Like the book, the film is more concerned
with the doomed search for lost innocence and the lineaments
of obsessions than with incest and pedophilia.
Acutely self-aware, even as he descends into paranoia
and murderous jealousy, not to mention careless grooming,
Jeremy Irons' Humbert is besotted and prudish, venal and
noble at the same time. He's completely smitten with and
repulsed by the bubble-gum superficiality of postwar America,
the world's adolescent. As much as Dominique Swain's Lolita
is overmastered by this father-mother-lover, she's certainly
no slouch at manipulation, cruelty and deceit.
Compared to Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, bled of all
prurience by Hays Code restrictions that denied even the most
innocent kiss between a predatory James Mason and a
submissive Sue Lyon, Lyne's version is erotic, but it's
hardly scandalous.
Although the director used body doubles for sex
sequences, virtually all the explicit scenes were cut to
conform with the United States' Child Pornography Act of
1996. The legislation categorically rules out segments that
purport to portray sex with minors--adult body double or no
body double.
Despite these cuts, which Lyne insists hardly affect the
final version, the latest film is a great deal truer to the
original book than Kubrick's footloose interpretation. It may
not be a masterpiece, but it is a well-wrought translation of
Nabokov's masterpiece.
Lyne and Dmitri Nabokov, the Russian-born, Americanized
novelist's only child and literary executor, were in the
French capital last week battling mightily against the notion
that the book and film somehow give perversion a good name.
The 62-year-old Nabokov acted as an unpaid consultant to the
film and has no direct interest in it.
In France at least, the critics seemed less worried
about morality than about the quixotic attempt to revisit
hallowed cinematic terrain staked out by Kubrick. They are
delighted to criticize a hypocritical America so constrained
by political correctness that this new "Lolita" has sent
distributors scurrying for cover.
If French critics were nearly unanimous in their praise
for Irons as a marvelously anguished Humbert coming apart at
the psychological seams and Swain as a maddeningly erratic,
erotic Lolita, the idea of Lyne daring to scale Mt. Stanley
took their breath away.
For all the misguided criticisms leveled against Lyne's
"9 1/2 Weeks," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Exposure,"
with their earnestly heated sexual provocations, an excess of
subtlety, the sort Nabokov's novel requires, was never one of
them.
Yet except for the bloody ending, which was lambasted
for diving into Grand Guignol effects, Lyne's "Lolita"
achieves a subtlety the Kubrick film glaringly lacks.
Although Vladimir Nabokov received script-writing credit for
the earlier film, he ominously complained that he felt like a
patient in an ambulance watching helplessly out the window as
the film reeled by, far out of his reach and control.
"Kubrick did not see character in the same way as my
father did," the novelist's son explains. "The best parts of
the film are where James Mason reads my father's words.
"Adrian, by contrast, has found a cinematic language
that is the equivalent of father's literary language."
Some French reviewers went overboard to blast Lyne's
film for being too soft on America. "Adrian Lyne doesn't seem
to understand that 'Lolita,' according to Nabokov, functions
like an extremely sophisticated and sardonic war machine
against an America that is as Puritan as it is consumerist,"
railed Didier Peron in the Parisian daily "Liberation."
Counters Dmitri Nabokov, who accompanied his father on
numerous cross-country trips through the U.S.: "Some people
have attributed a hatred and disdain of America in the book.
That's not at all what he felt. He had a great tenderness for
the country, particularly Southern California and the West."
The Kubrick comparison weighs heavily on Lyne. "Kubrick
takes refuge in irony because he really doesn't come to grips
with the story," the director argues.
One critical difference is that the current film
reinstates Humbert's childhood romance with a 13-year-old
girl who died of typhus, thus giving him a believable,
poignant motivation missing in the earlier film. His
obsession with Lolita is partially an attempt to recapture
that dead love.
If the European critics praised this explanatory
flashback, they were largely puzzled over the diminished role
of Clare Quilty, Humbert's diabolic doppelganger. Where Peter
Sellers turned Quilty into a debonair, fast-talking comic,
Frank Langella is "properly phantom-like," says Dmitri
Nabokov, that is until the end, when he stumbles, first hung
over then mortally wounded, from hallway to piano to bed,
where his last gasp is a bubble of blood.
This penultimate four-minute scene has been universally
deplored, despite the fact that the book spins out a much
lengthier tour de force of gore.
"If you read the book, he loses a quarter of his head
and still won't die. It is Grand Guignol," says Lyne
defensively. "Peter Sellers did the scene wearing a sheet as
a toga, playing pingpong with Humbert. If this is any less
insane than what I did, explain it to me."
Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar
stories. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to
retrieve one.
Copyright Los Angeles Times
--------------------------------------------------------------
Jan. 20, 1998
to The Editor:
It seems we have lost our minds in this country. Director Adrian Lyne
cannot get a U.S. distributor for his film "Lolita" because it features
Jeremy Irons portraying a pedophile (which finally destroys him, by the
way). Yet we have mega-blockbusters featuring the same Mr. Irons blowing
up half of New York with alacrity ("Die Hard With a Vengeance"). We now
know which activity is the more reprehensible.
U.S. distributors, listen up: put "Lolita" into every theater you can;
let the government yahoos try to ban it (as they once tried to ban the
book); the resulting front-page publicity will induce everyone to go see
it; you'll both win on constitutional grounds and end up making far more
money than "Lolita" 's author Vladimir Nabokov was forced to abandon
when his wealthy family fled revolutionary Russia in 1919.
Thomas E. Braun
Littlerock, CA USA
cawriter@sprynet.com