Carrington

Rating:
Summary: No, she accepted. It was ghastly.
Review: I would like to go back for a moment and dig deeper into the idea of full circle. I caught this idea as I was watching this film, and I thought it was amazing the way the director showed this transition. The first person, outside of Lytton, that Carrington falls for is a man who is only interested in a physical relationship. Although she claims she is not interested in him sexually, it is at this time in Carrington's life, she is interested in a man's mind, not what is under his pants. She breaks off this relationship to live with Lytton, a man who can give her the intellect that she desires. As Carrington grows older, she finds comfort in physical relationships. In fact, the majority of this film is about physical relationships. Carrington is never hesitant to jump into the arms of another man. A part of me thinks that she is constantly trying to find another Lytton out there, but there is another part of me that says that she was just trying to get the physical from men, because she had the perfect man at home (Lytton of course). So after being with a man that only wants to have a physical relationship, she jumps into the arms of a soldier. One that is great with the physical, amazing towards Lytton, and perfect for Carrington. As this comes to a surprising end, we see her jump into a relationship that was purely sexual. There was no interaction between the two except for when they were on his boat having sex.

Carrington experiences the best sex of her life with this man, but it again ... much like the others ... comes to a complete halt when he tells her that he is not really interested in her sexually. Odd, isn't how this films started with Carrington and her first boyfriend. We have come full circle.

If we were to look at this film in a symmetrical angle, we would notice a circle outside with Lytton in the direct center of this circle. The circle would represent Carrington's life. All around the circle would be the men that she has been with, while Lytton would be her stability point. All throughout her encounters with other men she always is able to find comfort with her center figure ... Lytton. If you watch this film closely, you will notice that there is only one point in the movie where Carrington goes outside the circle. It is when she is having a party at her house. Carrington goes outside only to sit down on a stump that happens to be facing the house. She is able to see all the windows in the house, and all of her past lovers with their new ones. Even Lytton with his new boyfriend. This is the moment that we see Carrington thinking about her life. Seeing what she has been a part of, and watching it somewhat crumble down. This is her only moment outside of the circle that she has built. Lytton is the foundation to this circle, and it is obvious that without Lytton everything around Carrington must crumble as well.

That my friends, is how you build a love story.

Grade: *** out of *****

Rating:
Summary: Definitely a Contender
Review: I'm not sure if the last reviewer (Lawrence) was aware, but Virginia Wolfe was not part of this film. The lady who pointed out to Lytton that Carrington was a girl was Vanessa Bell. Virginia Wolfe never had children.
I had to view this film more than once to appreciate it. After all, I felt it should be called 'Lytton' instead of 'Carrington.' This is probably because this film was based on Lytton's biography and not Carrington's.
In fact, Carrington had many affairs according to an interview with Emma Thompson and some were with women but of course, there wasn't time to put all that on film.
Lytton and Carrington were definitely an odd couple and this is an odd but very interesting film!

Rating:
Summary: Great Film
Review: I'm not sure if the last reviewer (Lawrence) was aware, but Virginia Wolfe was not part of this film. The lady who pointed out to Lytton that Carrington was a girl was Vanessa Bell. Virginia Wolfe never had children.
I had to view this film more than once to appreciate it. After all, I felt it should be called 'Lytton' instead of 'Carrington.' This is probably because this film was based on Lytton's biography and not Carrington's.
In fact, Carrington had many affairs according to an interview with Emma Thompson and some were with women but of course, there wasn't time to put all that on film.
Lytton and Carrington were definitely an odd couple and this is an odd but very interesting film!

Rating:
Summary: Jonathan Pryce - never better
Review: If you care at all about great acting, you must see this film. The story of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, two characters you will never forget, will stand as one of the great love affairs of the last century. That their's was not a sexual affair, only serves to expand our understanding of what love is and can be. Emma Thompson equals or betters all of her previous film work, while Jonathan Pryce is a revelation as the openly gay Strachey. If you are a fan of Merchant/Ivory, or Terence Davies, or Marleen Gorris, you will love this handsomely crafted film biography.

Rating:
Summary: Who was Carrington?
Review: No one, it is fairly certain, would have been more dismayed by the present hoopla about Dora Carrington than Carrington herself. She was an extremely reclusive artist, described by a friend as being "as self-deprecating as a domestic pussy cat, almost incapable of self-praise." Yet here she is, the subject of a major film. What kind of artist was she? And, ultimately, how good? The first point to emerge is that, except socially and amorously, she had very little to do with "Bloomsbury."

In art Bloomsbury was a Matissy outpost of Paris represented by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Carrington, on the other hand, was part of a distinguished generation at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, who graduated just before the First World War. Her contemporaries included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler-whose long and painful affair with Carrington is reduced to knockabout farce in the film-and C R W Nevinson. The Nash brothers, Paul and John, were also associates. It is with these more independent and, for the most part, more romantically English painters that she belongs.

In sheer raw talent, Carrington was probably as well endowed as any of them. Her celebrated portrait of Lytton Strachey from 1916 is a wonderful picture-vivacious and subtle at the same time. It makes an interesting comparison with Gertler's (even stronger) portrait of Carrington herself. In both cases, of course, the painter was amorously obsessed with the sitter.

The pictures she executed at Hurstbourne Tarrant in 1916 have that sense of a mysterious revelation in landscape that goes back to Samuel Palmer. The sharp contours of her masterpiece, Tidmarsh Mill (1918), remind one of John Nash and Stanley Spencer. This does not mean Carrington was a derivative artist, just that they were all working on parallel lines. The difference between her and the others is that she didn't sustain her promise. The later paintings tail off and some-for example the portrait of Julia Strachey from 1925 -- are decidedly weak.

In the final years before her suicide in 1932, she seems almost to have given up painting-although it is a little hard to tell, as one of the many sad things about Carrington's life is that so much of her work has disappeared. Clearly she was a little lost in the world. Perhaps she lacked the necessary confidence and drive to push forward as an artist. Perhaps the difficulties of being a woman painter in those days and the complication of her private life wore her down. Maybe she suffered from a combination of all these factors. It is not in any case unusual for a talented artist to founder like this. To succeed needs character and luck as well as talent.

A 'Triangular Trinity of Happiness' was the way Dora Carrington described her early life with her husband Ralph Partridge and the writer Lytton Strachey. But, as Virginia Woolf foretold, Carrington's marriage was riskier than most, the boundaries of the menage shifted, like ice floes, to accommodate lovers who came and went, but the pivotal focus of Carrington's life remained her all-abiding passion for Lytton. The tale of their lives together is one of the most fantastic and poignant love stories this century.

Against all odds 'Carrington' (as she preferred to be known) and Lytton formed a platonic allegiance which weathered intensifying complications and became a 'marriage' for life. Each had an aura about them and each helped shape the age in which they lived. When they met in 1915, Lytton was thirty-five and physically frail; Cambridge-educated and one of the group of friends that came to be known as old Bloomsbury. He was a writer, but yet to publish 'Eminent Victorians' - an iconoclastic set of satirical biographical essays which would make his name; and his friends considered him the most brilliant of them all. He was also homosexual.

Carrington had been a prize-winner, and one of the most popular and conspicuous students, at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was twenty-two, in rude health, and the first woman in London to crop her corn- coloured hair short enough to reveal the furrow in the nape of her neck. She was also involved in a volatile relationship with the painter Mark Gertler; their reputations went before them and art students of the time considered them a God and a Goddess. But in loving Gertler there was an innate menace to Carrington's freedom and it became the first of her troublesome relationships.

Lytton first met Carrington at Asheham House, the Sussex country home of Virginia Woolf, and was instantly attracted by her androgynous appearance. Asheham was sunk in its own mysterious, little hollow in the Downs and was an oddly beautiful house with tall Gothic windows. It was here that the start of their mutual fascination began.

They discussed physical relations, even gave them a try, but Carrington could never really resemble a well-nourished youth of sixteen; Though she was petite, several heads shorter than Lytton and had a quirky way of dressing. Lytton was bohemian-looking and emaciated. They were stared at in the street, whether together or apart.

Carrington's short hair excited hostile yells and Lytton's unfashionable beard provoked 'goat' bleatings. They were undoubtedly a curious looking couple but as Lytton described, their relationship testified to the fact that there are "A great deal of a great many kinds of love" and that they had found a kind that suited them. That they formed a loving relationship astonished even their non-conformist friends. Virginia would later joke to her sister Vanessa about one evening at Tidmarsh Mill (where Carrington and Lytton set up their first home together in 1917) when they quietly withdrew, "ostensibly to copulate," but were found to be reading aloud from Macaulay.

These friends, most of whom had known each other from university days at Cambridge, became known as the Bloomsbury Group-comprising among other-Keynes, E M Forster, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant: economists, philosophers, writers and artists. They continued to meet in Thoby Stephen's house in Bloomsbury's Gordon Square and came to include Thoby's sisters, Vanessa and Virginia. Many years later, Carrington puzzled over the "quintessence" of Bloomsbury and concluded: "It was a marvelous combination of the highest intelligence, and appreciation of literature combined with a lean humour and tremendous affection. They gave it backwards and forwards to each other like shuttlecocks, only shuttlecocks multiplied as they flew in the air." She might have added that their code for life depended upon pacifism, personal relationships and aesthetic sensibilities; life based on freedom, idiosyncrasy and sexual libertinism.

Carrington's ability for "plural affections" came to include the writer Gerald Brenan, with whom she began an intimate correspondence when he moved to Spain. Brenan was her husband Ralph's best friend; he also later became her lover. Carrington told Brenan that she was in love with the romantic life of Shelley. Within six months of demobilization Brenan had found himself a peasant house in the Andalucian mountains where he could eke out his war bonus and work his way through the 2000 books he had shipped in tea chests and so, for Carrington, Shelley lived on in Gerald.

But although Brenan's philosophy was that love shared needn't mean love divided, he came to want Carrington conclusively and he, like Gertler, was capable of aping Othello. Forced to choose, Carrington chose Lytton and looked to satisfy her Shelley-like cravings for adventure elsewhere, experiencing some of the most perfect pleasure she had known with the seafaring Beacus Penrose on his Brixham trawler, the 'Sans Pareil'.

In Lytton, Carrington had found a light of mind she reverenced but, more importantly, he was the only person with whom she need never be anything other than herself. In the winter of 1932, after months of anxiety, Lytton died of an inoperable stomach cancer. Lytton had always been Carrington's 'moon' and with his death, Carrington's own light went out. For some years Carrington had spiritually existed in a maelstrom.

CARRINGTON: The Actors and Their Roles

"Carrington loved painting people...and there were as many ways of painting portraits as there were faces." - Jane Hill, "The Art of Dora Carrington."

The art of casting CARRINGTON was to capture the essence of the people in Dora's world: as the painter herself took liberties, transforming the spirit of her subjects from one artist's medium to the next, so the film makers were able to take theirs. But first, of course, came the casting of the mercurial Dora Carrington herself. And only one actress, Emma Thompson, was seriously considered for the role. Christopher Hampton calls it "a completely logical choice," having wanted her from the very first time the project was mooted with Mike Newell at the helm.

"I think Emma has a sort of candour and openness which is not distant from Dora's character but aside from that it is also something completely different for her," he says. "I was just so happy

Rating:
Summary: "BEARING THAT THING CALLED LOVE......"
Review: NOW, you don't need to know anything about the infamous [?] Bloomsbury Group of 'Intelligentsia' in orde to enjoy this somewhat obscure film. Granted they are not prime eye candy either, except perhaps for the hunky lover or two - shared [?] by Dora and Lytton. If you are quite absurb and look at them as perhaps 'vampires' then the relationship makes sense, but thats the Gothic POV - their love is spiritual - carnality is left to the odd mortal who drifts into their lives.......SO DOES does true love mean physical and spiritual connection? After all Lytton was gay, Dora - who knows, perhaps bi - perhaps not. I think the point of this movie [disregard the historical truth] is that a truer bond can exist without the physical [St. Francis for example].

Back to our story though - she loves him, he physically is incapable of loving her, but they are bound, totally bound, not that attractive a couple, yet they do enhance each other's lives and THAT's what it's all about.

One of the most understated of Emma Thompson's performances, same goes for Mr. Pryce, who is ever-versatile! AND the supporting cast? Impeccable.

In 'Women In Love' D.H. Lawrence somewhat pokes a great deal of fun at the 'Bloomsbury Set' - also depicted in the Russell movie, although he was never officially part of this rather odd group of pre flower-children Children. [The ever-controversial 'Women In Love' seems to focus on the other side though - 'men in love' - an interesting counterpart to this movie].

AND the 'bed-hopping'? Causes a positive draft!

Rating:
Summary: Pryce and Thompson in a true tale of a great platonic love
Review: There is probably some profoundly deep irony to the idea that the writer Lytton Strachey was informed by Virginia Woolf that the ravishing young boy he had his eye on was really a woman, the painter Dora Carrington, but it remains outside of my grasp at this point. However, I am not surprised that this story of a profound platonic love between two people is taken from the pages of history, because Hollywood is rarely inclined of the consummations it routinely wishes (remember, the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac comes from a play and was not written directly for the screen).

Strachey, Carrington, Woolf and most of the other characters in this 1995 film were members of the Bloomsbury Group, all of whom were eccentric British geniuses who explored the dynamics of human relationships in strange ways when they were not busy exorcising their artistic impulses. In a masterful understated performance Jonathan Pryce plays Lytton, who was a quiet, dry witted, reserved homosexual in his thirties when he met Carrington, played by Emma Thompson, who was 15 years younger and still a virgin. Their first meetings and the strange attraction that would bind them for the rest of their lives are sketched out in the first several scenes. The explanation for why they would live together while loving others is developed throughout the rest of the film. What becomes clear is that no matter who Lytton and Carrington took into their respective beds, or shared between them for that matter, no one mattered more to them. Ultimately, the tragedy of their relationship is not the absence of the physical dimension, but, as is often the case with most relationships, the failure of both to articulate the depth of their feelings to the other until fate cruelly rectifies that error.

Thompson's character is on a par with the other victims of unrequited love she has played with great success in "Howard's End" and "The Remains of the Day." Writer-Director Christopher Hampton, working from Michael Holroyd's book on Lytton Strachey, expands her character through Carrington's art: she must have painted every corner of Ham Spray House, where they lived in Berkshire. She is the film's title character, not only because she survives Lytton, but because after they met and became friends (pure understatement, I assure you) she continued to pursue other interests and people while he was remarkably contempt to enjoy those she brought into their small circle.

Still, it is Pryce's Lytton who is the captivating character. Like most British eccentrics he was a natural epigramist, but with a great sense of restraint, picking his moment for his one rapier thrust (even if it is on his own death bed). Carrington is the one who actively engages in the acts of intimacy between them while we have to remind our selves that Lytton's passive acceptance of it is out of a sense of propriety and not a lack of deep feelings. I have always had a strong affection for love stories that never enter the realm of the physical (is there a sexier scene in movies that the dance in "The King and I"?), and "Carrington" is a film in that tradition, especially for those with an affection for British period dramas.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely a Contender
Review: This film is definitely a contender for the worst film of all time. At the very least its in the top ten. Emma Thompson is a fine actress, perhaps one of the best of her generation, but even she can't make Dora Carrington interesting. Similarly to the much under-rated Jennifer Jason Leigh failed to ignite Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle, Thompson just can't make this film take off. Ultimately it is a film about the private lives of two boring, self-absorbed artists. There isn't much for the audience here and even a patient viewer won't be rewarded by the acting. Fine acting without a story is a bit like wine without a bottle. Ultimately just a waste. I gave it one star, and I think that's fair, after all it did have one star: Emma Thompson. Pity she wasn't given any real dramatic material to shine with.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing but ultimately frustrating
Review: This movie is about Dora Carrington's love life, and is effective in exploring it. Hoever, for those of us who knew of her as an artist and wanted to know more, it is disappointing. Her paintings don't even make it into the film until the final credits, where they seem to beckon one into a fascinating story that the film never told. Why did Carrington paint? What was in her heart and mind? How could a movie about an artist completely neglect her art? It doesn't tell the whole story at all. I was upset and annoyed at this. It's a pattern I've seen all too often, when the people making the movie seem more interested in who an artist or writer slept with than why and how they became great artists in the first place.

Emma Thompson gives the best performance I think anyone could have under the circumstances, but she (and Carrington) deserved a better script. I never felt as if I knew Carrington, because the art that meant so much to her was not part of the film.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful!
Review: This movie proves again that love is more than a chemical reaction. It does not spell very much out for you. Sometimes it even seems to be just a string of single events. Yet the one thing that becomes clear in the end is that love exists in many different forms.
My only problem was the desciption written on the back of my video tape (not the one pictured above). The person who wrote that can not have understood the movie very well. They made Lytton Strachey look like a cruel man and Carrington like a ... It actually put me off watching it the first time I read it.