Hendrick Ibsen‘s play The Lady from the Sea is about alienation from the self—in a woman named Ellida.  Her own mind is resisting her marriage to her husband, Dr. Wangel, because she did not have “free will” upon accepting his years-ago proposal.  But Wangel is a good man, and the home he has built for Ellida can be considered a home of love.

Alas, this may not be the kind of home in which Arnholm and Bolette, Ellida’s stepdaughter, live after they get married, for Bolette glorifies, to the exclusion of everything else, experiencing the world.  Certainly she does not glorify Arnhom (her former teacher) because she does not yet love him.  But in the future . . .?  Ibsen’s play is heartening without being wholly happy.  It is a small-scale work filmed, with impeccable acting, by the BBC in 1974.  I greatly appreciate the production.

These days the plot of The Lady from the Sea is rather stale.  Still, the play is interesting and probing.  Eileen Atkins is histrionically authoritative, and beautifully sensitive, as Ellida.  Denholm Elliott always knew how to enact a good man; he is masterly and never boring.  Never false is the way to describe Michael Feast as an enthusiastic would-be artist.  Carole Nimmons is a strikingly authentic Bolette.  All the actors are great in this respectable TV mounting.

A British comedian and an atheist, Ricky Gervais remarked to a TV talk show host that if all the sacred books such as the Bible were to disappear, to perish, they would never be written again.  By contrast, if all the science books that have been penned were to disappear, they would be written again since the facts contained in them would be re-discovered and re-established.  But Mr. Gervais is wrong.  He’s right about the Book of Mormon, wrong about the Bible.  Biblical doctrine would emerge again because God would still be doing His salvific work.  People would still find out about the Atonement and justification by faith, etc.—palpably they would find out—and the news would be rapidly written down, as it was in Paul’s epistles.  Revelation would still exist.  It would not be withheld.

“We locked eyes for a moment and felt the bond of sisterhood between two Christians who had hopes and dreams that seemed to have stalled right over the Bermuda Triangle.”

Not a bad descriptive sentence, this, from a born-again—and also talented—writer, Sandra Byrd, author of Don’t Kiss Him Good-bye (2010), the source of the sentence.  The hopes and dreams are those of the narrator, Savvy Smith, an American high school exchange student living in London.  They are the usual hopes and dreams, even for a Christian: the “him” in the novel’s title is a British crush called Tommy, a non-boyfriend for Savvy but not a non-Christian.  Tommy, however, is involved with Chloe.  Will Savvy even be able to attend the May Day Ball as something other a photojournalist for the school paper, London Confidential?

Er, when I picked Good-bye up, I thought it was the first book in Byrd’s series for young people, also called London Confidential; but it’s the third.  Oh, well.  At least the item enables me to see, when the subject of being “unequally yoked” with an unbeliever comes up, how nicely subtle a writer Byrd can be.  And its being #3 in the series hardly left me lost.

Monsieur Hire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A reclusive man (Michel Blanc) who constantly spies on his neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire), in the French film Monsieur Hire (1989), may have murdered a young woman.  A police detective suspects he has.  What we learn, however, is that he has fallen in love—an un-eccentric act.  Is it eccentric, or abnormal, that the Bonnaire character, Alice, might be falling in love with him?

Directed by Patrice Leconte, Hire reminds us that we can never predict what other people will do, except when we can.  I haven’t read the Georges Simenon novel from which the film is adapted, but without a doubt, in my head, the film is worth seeing—and worthy.  It isn’t dated and its cast fills the bill agreeably.  In ’89 it proved French movies could still be respectable.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Loulou

In the 1980 French picture, Loulou, by Maurice Pialat, people drift (rather quickly) into intimacy and betrayal and pain as they lead dismayingly unconventional sex lives.  Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) resists her unimaginative husband (Guy Marchand) and finds, or think she finds, both sex and love with jobless ex-convict Loulou (Gerard Depardieu).  Loulou is a thoroughgoing catalyst, gaining male enemies, prompting a female acquaintance to voluntarily stand topless before him.  He can turn anything on its head.  Depardieu is right for the role but offers a little too much facial play, whereas Huppert’s facial play is proper.

Huppert is superb, making Nelly as ordinary as she is combative, as stubborn as she is weary.  Marchand is marvelously true and subtle.  Pialat’s direction never goes clunky or flat, and with Yann Dedet’s editing the film’s pace is good.  I might add that Loulou also makes you feel like a bit of a snoop.

(In French with English subtitles)