Cousin Bette (M)

Reviewed by Peter Calder

Cast: Jessica Lange, Hugh Laurie, Elisabeth Shue, Bob Hoskins

Director: Des McAnuff


Written (and set) in 1846, La Cousine Bette was one of the apparently endless cycle of novels by Honore de Balzac which, under the generic title of La Comedie Humaine, depicted and viciously lampooned the Paris of the day - a city whose denizens de Balzac reviled as debauched and dishonest.

The intricate and sprawling novel, leavened with cynical humour, is pared down in this American-British co-production to the straightforward tale of revenge that is at the heart of the story.

Bette (Lange), a poor seamstress who works as a dresser to music-hall star Jenny Cadine (Shue) is a complicated concoction, a woman whose devoted service is ill-used by those around her and who bears betrayal with a stoic dignity which imperceptibly begins to turn into a vengefulness bordering on the unhinged.

The film's opening scene sets the tone - a blend of the farcical, melodramatic and blackly comic - that director McAnuff, a stage veteran making his screen debut, does not always sustain in the two hours that follow.

As Baroness Adeline Hulot (Geraldine Chaplin) gasps on her death bed, her philandering husband Hector (Laurie) apologises for his manifold infidelities (and, obligingly, lists them); the baroness' cousin Bette blandly denies that she once tried to drown her ("It was an accident," she intones); and the doctor, bidding his patient a fond farewell, presses his bill into her hand.

Once the baroness is entombed, Bette is offered and rejects a position as Hulot's housekeeper (she thinks at first he is clumsily proposing and relishes the prospect of marriage as a way of erasing her humble rural pedigree) and continues to live in a gloomy, backstreet hotel.

She strikes up with Wenceslas, an impoverished (but gorgeous) Polish sculptor who lives upstairs. After saving him from a fire, she attempts to take over his life, financing his career and longing for his love. But when the sculptor begins an affair with Hulot's daughter Hortense, Bette embarks on a plan of revenge that will eventually involve the entire small and incestuous circle in which she moves.

The story unfurls with a quiet intensity, perfectly matched by the eerily deadpan performance of Lange who avoids tipping over into the hysteria which might have claimed a lesser actress. Dramatic ironies drive much of the action: that the other characters are so sublimely unaware of Bette's spiteful intentions is a constant reminder of how self-absorbed they are.

But in the end, Cousin Bette is hampered by an unevenness of tone which distances us from the action in a way which de Balzac would never have tolerated. When McAnuff pans along a line of people listening to a piano piece and turns the sound to tinny treble as he passes a character with an ear trumpet, we may chuckle as we wonder why he bothered. But when he repeats it half an hour later, it feels intrusive and unnecessary.

Some might find that approach engagingly post-modern; for my money, it undermines what otherwise might have been an intriguing and bleakly funny comedy of manners.* * *
-Weekend TimeOut