Die verhaal van Sylvia Plath se verhouding met Ted Hughes word in hierdie film ondersoek. Gwyneth Paltrow vertolk die rol van Plath en Daniel Craig is Ted Hughes.
Paltrow is soms oortuigend as die neurotiese en ingewikkelde Plath. Van die ontmoeting by Cambridge in 1956 tot haar selfdood in 1963, word onder die loep geneem.
Die gedrewe, ambisieuse en briljante Hughes word swak vertolk deur Daniel Craig. 'n Mens kan soms nie hoor wat hy mompel nie. Sy twee gesigsuitdrukkings is eweneens irriterend. Paltrow vaar wel beter en 'n hoogtepunt is die ete wanneer sy haar man voor sy minnares, Assia uittrap oor sy liefdesverraad. Hy verlaat Plath uiteindelik vir Assia, maar keer telkens terug uit skuldgevoelens en verlange na die twee jong kinders. Hy en Sylvia kan nie versoen nie, weens Assia se swangerskap.
Die film beweeg van Cambridge, na Massachusetts, na Devon ...
Dis egter geskiet in Dunedin (Nieu Zeeland) en die Universiteit van Otago staan in vir Cambridge.
Twee aspekte kelder die film. Die musiek. Gabriel Yared, blaas sy siel, steur die donker storie. Dit is gewoon te hard. En stroperig. Dan die sekstonele waar die twee pragtige lywe in naaktheid voor ons stoei, is eweneens steurend. Dis nie hoe 'n mens dink Plath gelyk het nie.
Plath se kinders het die film indertyd as 'n geldmaak-foefie afgemaak.
Na Plath se dood, is Ariel gepubliseer, 'n uitstekende digbundel wat haar poëtiese talent bevestig. Wanneer Hughes haar verlaat, kan sy uiteindelik skryf.
Hierdie film neem my vandag terug na hul gedigte.
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” uit Collected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992).
So lees Plath self hierdie gedig.
I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.
That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.
You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.
That blue suit,
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.
Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters*
Het hy hierdie gedigte voor sy dood begin skryf of dit opgeteken deur die jare? Ek vermoed daar was notaboeke - in die aangesig van sy eie dood moes hy waarskynlik die volle verhaal vertel.
Joan Hambidge