THE PROMISE OF A NEW DRESS

The Cazalet Chronicles, a trilogy of novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard, follows a wealthy English family during World War II. Three generations of the family, along with their servants, lovers, nurses, school friends, and a governess, retreat to a country estate in Sussex to brave out the war. The daily life here is richly described. Howard has a gift in offering seemingly mundane details (what’s served for dinner, what’s blooming in the garden, what’s being worn) that also, somehow, work to reveal the inner life of each character. There’s a precision and ease about the writing that makes the harried, melodramatic storytelling on Downton Abbey, which covers similar territory, seem downright amateurish.

During the war clothing can only be purchased with ration coupons, so the Cazalet women continually mend existing garments and fashion new ones from scraps. But every so often they take the train into London and visit a dress shop run by the socialite Hermoine Monkworth. They typically visit as they are about to embark on a new romantic drama, and Hermoine outfits them properly for it while also offering words of encouragement. For these ladies a new dress is more than a new dress. It’s a treasure, a talisman for romance, glamor and sex in a world whose foundations seem to be crumbling about them.

Juliettte Longuet’s silk Olympe dress is that kind of dress. It’s both modern and modest, cut slim, skimming the body, without any fuss. Villy could wear it to to rendezvous with her composer heartthrob, Angela to go dancing at a club, or Zoe to meet her soldier paramour. It’s a warm, deep shade of peacock blue that would draw attention in the dark wood-paneled lounge of a private club, or a first class train compartment. The silk has a lustrous skin, and is embellished with tiny pintucks and bias inserts. The dress has been crafted like jewelry, and would feel just as precious for the woman wearing it.

Image courtesy of Juliette Longuet.

February 01, 2015 by Nalina Moses

A MORE PERFECT UNION

Surupa Sen and Biyajini Satpathy, principal dancers from the troupe Nrityagam, performed at the Temple of Dendur at the Met last Saturday at dusk. It was a romantic setting for a romantic dance form, Odissi. All five short pieces they performed showcased its signature baroque postures, that bend the body into dramatic, shifting “S” curves that ripple from the face through the torso to the fingers and feet. In the first dances the two women performed standing side by side, about six feet part, in unison but independently. They were majestic but formal.

The three other dances, when the dancers performed as characters who danced “at” one another, were electrifying, charged physically and mythologically. In the first of these they depicted male and female lovers who came together playfully, broke apart agonizingly, and then fell together again, finally, gingerly. The extraordinary final dance described a divided male-female spirit, with Surupa acting the masculine principle and Satpathy the feminine. Sometimes one woman danced standing close behind the other, spinning limbs in mirrored formation. Sometimes one woman squatted and turned to the side while the other hovered above her, balanced on one foot, turned in the opposite direction. Finally, standing side by side, elbows and knees bent, the two shuffled off the stage like a single eight-limbed two-faced creature.

At these moments the dancers seemed blissfully conjoined. Yet they performed throughout without touching; while twisted together they mantained a long, fingers-wide sliver of space between them. More than the Temple or the costumes, this was the afternoon’s outstanding spectacle: two bodies moving in passionate duet.

Photograph courtesy of Nrityagam.

January 21, 2015 by Nalina Moses

MOVING IMAGES

Is being too beautiful a problem? There are times, certainly, when it gets in the way. The well-reviewed movie Ida, the story of a young novitiate in 1950’s Poland who learns that her family is Jewish, is a good example. It’s photographed in stunning black and white and unfolds in mis-en-scene, slowly, cryptically, with little dialogue and explanation. It’s less a full-length movie than an array of dazzling shots, each one lit in a dreamy silver haze and composed with an angel’s eye, with all of its lonely characters, austere interiors, shadowy landscapes immaculately framed and rendered.

The visual schema is the movie’s chief virtue and also its chief problem. Because the stories it tells – about the hatred of Jews, about the complexities of identity, about the ravages of memory, about base self-preservation – are underdone by the superficial beauty of the images. We watch, enraptured by the string of lights at the hotel bar where the heroine has a sexual awakening, by the stray electrical cord cutting across the hospital corridor where an old man is dying, by the velvety texture of the soil tumbling into a child’s grave. Yet these moments of astonishing beauty all remain static. The movie, and its characters, never break outside the frame or outside our expectations; they stay rooted in the composition. This movie doesn’t really move.

Because of its serious look and story Ida has been compared to European art films from the 50’s and 60’s. But its look reminded me more of 80’s Jim Jarmusch, like Stranger than Paradise. And when Ida and her brassy, hard-drinking, chain-smoking aunt drive to the country to find her parents’ grave, the movie begins to feel like a Jim Jarmusch movie too: and odd couple fish-out-of-water road movie. But Ida is so tasteful and so humorless that it lacks the simple pleasures of that kind of entertainment. Its arch elegance and elliptical storytelling gloss over the ugly uncertainties, and potential explosiveness, of human emotions, of which there would be plenty here, if only they had been expressed directly. There is one death depicted in the movie, and it plays out so handsomely and so seamlessly that it doesn’t even sting.

Image courtesy of Ida.

January 19, 2015 by Nalina Moses

FEELING BLUE

Diana Vreeland said that fuchsia was the navy blue of India, but Tom Stoppard thinks differently. The current New York production of his decade-old play Indian Ink is blue. The small off-Broadway stage where it is performed, that’s tucked three stories below street level, has a high backdrop that sets the scene in both 1930’s India and 1980’s London. And it is painted blue, a cool, clear, synthetic blue that evokes, more than the subcontinent or England, the sky of a children’s story book.

Throughout the production color is used symbolically rather than descriptively. When the heroine, an English poetess, arrives in India, she wears white, and then, as she takes to the climate and culture (and natives), she wears buttercup yellow, pink-and-green paisley, and screaming red. The hero, a Indian painter, wears white throughout, and behaves with more propriety and restraint than the English men and women around him. Fuchsia does appear, briefly, on a local maharajah’s brilliant jewelled waistcoat. The color stands, very obviously, for India, but for an India (dynastic, fedudal, opulent) that is about to be lost.

Like other Stoppard plays, the drama moves swiftly and seductively between different times. But the production seems curiously placeless, and evokes neither India or in England strongly. Instead it seems to unfold in a fictional space that could be either, or anywhere, really. In that case, why use a backdrop at all?

Photograph by Joan Marcus.

January 11, 2015 by Nalina Moses