When Love Grows Old, Love Grows Cold- With Roman Polanski’s Film Adaptation Of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles In Mind  

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Tess, starring Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, directed by Roman Polanski, 1979

No question, Thomas Hardy, the old 19^th century pro-“the sun never sets on the British Empire” devotee and despite the killing off of the flower of British youth in the slaughter the fervent partisan of British entry in World War I had a feel for the literary pulse of the rural back country of England in the late 19^th century well after it had become the premier industrial capitalist power in the world. In such master works of the genre as The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Jude The Obscure and the novel from which this Roman Polanski 1979 film adaptation, Tess, was taken Tess of the D’Urbervilles Hardy painted a sober picture of the lives of those who were becoming marginalized in the great movement toward industrialization and urbanization. Painted too in the heyday of the Gothic Victorian novel the many intricate relationships, romantic or otherwise, which reflected the fading ethos of a long past period of idyllic rural life (as opposed to the squalor of urban life with its cramped spaces, its stinking swill and garbage, its devilish diversions and its acceleration of what the old 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a “short, nasty, brutish life”).

Of course the virtue of modern cinematography, of modern film is to take an essentially dreary and monotonous rural backdrop to the story of the downfall of the last strand of the D’Urberville family tree, especially of Tess and to make what Hardy described in words come alive in scene like the opening one with the Saturday after work in the fields dance with the young village girls in their finery and their wedded bliss desires, the scene of rural work like milking cows and threshing hay and the like. Tess, played by the then drop-dead beautiful Nastassja Kinski (maybe now too although I have not heard anything about her lately) who was so photogenic that for Chrissakes even when she was down on her luck as a rum-dum field hand threshing hay every guy in the audience who had a pulse, maybe a few gals too, wanted to take her away from such drudgery never mind every ne’er-do-well guy on screen who did a double-take as she seemingly walked her way across England bags in hand. And in the process told  us about the perfidy of men, the “idiocy of rural life, British version” as Karl Marx once said, and the wicked ways of the world that a beautiful if naïve young country girl faced as she tried to make her way in a world where name, position and class mattered (and still do).

Here is how beautiful Tess’s downfall played out and you can judge for yourself the temptations that befell her. The sturdy yeoman farmer, well maybe not so sturdy, John D’Urberville found out that he was the descendent of a great family tree (we will use that D’Urberville moniker here anyway although he used an Anglicized version). In order to profit from that lineage link-up he sent Tess out into the world of the rural gentry looking for help from more fortunate members of the family tree (mistakenly looking for members as it turned out since the great lines had long since given up the ghost).

Mistake number one for Tess was to wind up with a “cousin” Alex (played by Leigh Lawson) who was nothing but a cad and who deflowered the then innocent Tess. Innocent but nevertheless the one who had to pay for old Alex’s wicked ways since she became pregnant by him and bore a child who died soon after birth.

Mistake number two, and I do believe it was a mistake on her part after Alex’s churlish ways and after she tried to start anew by working in the dairy business was to fall head over heels in love with the younger son of a parson, Angel (played by Peter Firth). Fell in love but nevertheless got married to him without as it turned out telling him about Alex and the baby before the marriage. Angel turned out to be a proper parson’s son and refused to forgive her that youthful indiscretion and thereafter left for parts unknown leaving Tess stranded to fall on her own resources (and grit). Until it was too late. Mistake number three for Tess (after giving up the hope of any reconciliation with Angel) was going back with Alex who turned out to be not only a persuasive cad but a classic bore of an English gentleman.

Naturally the chastised Angel showed up to express his love and his sorrow but it was too late. Well at one level it was too late since Tess tried to send him away but then she murdered Alex and ran away with Angel. Obviously even boring caddish English have a right not to be murdered and so after a short reunion tryst the coppers catch up with the doomed couple. And the doomed Tess, doomed by her innocence, doomed by her upbringing and class position, hell, doomed by her utter beauty wound up being hung by that pretty little neck of hers. Damn.