Another country

A couple of weeks ago I complained in my review of The Last Hours about the all too popular tendency in many a historical fiction (books, tv, film) to provide all the sympathetic characters with values and attitudes deemed agreeable to a current day reader, and leave anything else (i.e. values, beliefs etc. sharply divergent from the present day) to the antagonists. Now, one objection people sometimes raise is that if you present a historical character sympathetic who endorses absolutism/gender hierarchy/persecution of people not sharing the same faith/insert historical attitude here/, it could come across as endorsement. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I’d like to share some historical short stories illustrating you can, in fact, write a character sympathetic (and not in a „sympathetic villain to heroic antagonist“ way) while getting across that some of her beliefs (and later acts) were horrendously harmful to a great many people. The writer who does this in a cycle of short stories, though each can be read on its own, picked Mary (I.) Tudor to do this, and I have to say, Mary is ideal for the purpose. Her youth was extremely traumatic through no fault of her own, her courage through her years of powerlessness is undeniable…and her attempt to turn England back into a Catholic realm by any means once she was crowned doomed from the start, turning her from a beloved-by-her-people figure into one loathed in a very short time. I like all the stories, but here are some special favourites:

Dare not call you father: „May-June 1536. Mary's journey from high hopes to fear to abject humiliation“ is how the author sums it up. Until Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary had the psychological out of blaming solely Anne, not her father, for all the abuse she’d undergone in the preceding years. After Anne’s death, Henry VIII. rabidly disabused Mary of that notion, as he kept insisting that his oldest daughter recognized him as head of the English church, that she recognized her own bastardy and the invalidity of her parents‘ marriage, and even stepped up the pressure, until Mary finally caved, something she never forgave herself for. The story does a great job of covering this key period in Mary’s life.

Was it God’s will?: focuses on Mary going from starting her reign full of hope and with much of the population cheering her to signing the death warrant of her cousin Jane Grey, the Nine-Day-Queen, while protests and conspiracies abound. What I find most striking in this story is Mary realising that Jane is in many ways her younger self’s mirror image: „Now she is the tyrant, holding her pen above a young woman’s death warrant, ready to condemn her for obeying her parents and clinging to the beliefs that, all her life, she has been taught to uphold.“

Hands: this one covers the entirety of Mary’s life, from birth to death, in short, poignant vignettes.

Lastly, a story from another writer and of a Yuletide past, which to my mind is a fantastic depiction of Philip II. of Spain, married to Mary for a brief while, which did her no favours, and then in a life long cold and hot war with her sister Elizabeth, which, however, may or may not have started on a very different note, if the legend of Philip confessing on his death bed that during his short time in England, he fell for Elizabeth has any veracity to it:

Todos los bienes del mundo (1598)

Call me by your name (Film Review)

I finally got around to watching Call me by your Name, which I had wanted to ever since reading scriptwriter James Ivory's delightful interview.


It is indeed a beautiful movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino, a coming of age story with Timothée Chalamet playing seventeen years old Elio, our pov character, Armie Hammer playing Oliver (whose age is never mentioned on screen; googling tells me that it's 24 in the novel the movie is based on, which makes it obvious why they never say so in the film because while Armie Hammer looks fantastic, he does look older than that), and Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio's father Samuel Perlman, a professor specializing in the Greeks and Romans whose grad student Oliver is. The Perlmans are multilingual, effortlessly switching between English, Italian and French (and Elio's mother Annella throws in German in one scene as well), affectionate with each other both verbally and physically, and the movie avoids many a cliché: no one gets subjected to homophobic rants, let alone beatings, there is no villain working against the lovers, and despite the 1983 setting, AIDS is never mentioned. (In the interview, Ivory said he'd considered including it via a discussion between Elio's parents but ultimately the scene was abandoned, as it simply didn't add anything and wasn't necessary, since no one gets sick.) Both Elio and Oliver while in the dancing around each other stage when they're still trying to deduce how the other one feels flirt and get physical with two Girls, but this doesn't come across as "I don't want to be gay!" angst, but rather as hormones, trying to make the other one jealous, and in the case of Elio and Marzia, whom he has known for years, as actual affection, just not on the same scale. ( Slightly more spoilery remark ensues )

It's a leisurely, sensual movie making the most of its Italian setting, with the camera caressing a bronze antique statue once it's fished out of Lake Garda as much as it does landscapes, food and the bodies of our heroes, of which we see a lot. (Never complete nudity, though, and I'm with Ivory regarding feeling this is a bit coy.) Speaking of Lake Garda: if it weren't set the early 80s, I'd say the fact Elio, his Father and Oliver find a spot in Sirmione where they can wander among ruins and not bump into tourists on every step is the movie's most unrealistic aspect, because I've been there, and the birthplace of Catullus is as overcrowded as the rest of the lake, Beautiful though the area is. But maybe not yet in the early 80s.


Sidenote: As I know several people who are interested in movies with Jewish main characters that aren't about said main characters being Jewish in an issue movie kind of way (i.e. Holocaust movie, movie about antisemitism, etc.), but which nonetheless don't just nod at the characters' being Jewish with one line while ignoring it for the rest of the movie: this counts as one of them. Both the Perlmans and Oliver are Jews, that they are in different ways is one of the things Oliver and Elio talk about, and the movie while otherwise set during the summer ends with a wintery Hannukha scene.


This is also one story where a change of pov might have, if not destroyed the appeal then greatly reduced it. 17 to 24 (or however old movie!Oliver is supposed to be) is not THAT much of an age gap, but it's there, and so it was important to be in Elio's pov and know that while he's still figuring things out, he's not inexperienced or seduced, and into Oliver long before Oliver does anything unmistakably flirtatious. It's also a movie which doesn't apologize for its main characters loving books, being, as mentioned, multilingual, and discussing a scene written by Marguerite de Navarre in the same passionate way that Oliver upon hearing a song on the radio dances. It's a great fictional world to spend two hours in. Highly reccommended.