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Reviews
Mansfield Park (1983)
Better than the film
Low budget films and television productions have to be accepted for what they are. That being said, the 1983 Mansfield Park still has a distinctive on-location look and the cast is uniformly strong - Sylvestra Le Touzel has just the right mix of prettiness and austerity and Nicholas Farrell is excellent as Edmund.
Where the 1999 film sacrificed the book's moral subtlety for pretty obvious ends (Fanny becomes a sort of pseudo-feminist icon, but of course back in the eighteenth century, before it was cool) the 1983 film contains all the troubled morality of the book - its characters, many of whom are failures in way or another, are presented with sympathy and irony, and the faithfulness of the screenplay is infinitely to be preferred to the 1999 film's racy, but ultimately pedestrian value system.
Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)
Captures the complexity of Tchekhov's masterpiece
Malle's adaptation handles Tchekhov's notoriously difficult shifts in mood and context excellently, investing every scene and almost every word with an edge of ambivalence and frustration, and the performances are all first-rate. Moore in particular, from her first appearance in the film (which is without dialogue) to the final scene constructs a really intelligent performance as Yeliena, I feel, and she seems to cover the whole gamut of Yeliena's character from the giggly and superficial to the introspective.
With all due respect to the American school this film could have descended easily into overwrought Tennessee Williams-esque Naturalism with lots of method-style spitting and uncomfortable truth. Instead the intellectual, spiritual dimensions of Tchekhov's play are always brought to the fore, in addition of course to Tchekhov's dark brand of humour, where the actors (particularly Julianne Moore) laugh through their tears and visa versa. Avoiding the common temptation of drawing out the play's anguished characters at a snail's pace, Malle also paces the film well, with an emphasis on lightness and subtlety of delivery - the result is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying.