For Valentine’s Day, we’re looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
There’s no one in the canon of crime fiction quite like Ruth Rendell. For chills and thrills, juicy misanthropy, and depraved pleasures, she’s simply unmatched. Rendell revolutionized the standard British detective novel with her long-running Inspector Wexford series, but her genius is distilled in her standalone books, some written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. These works are often praised for their “psychology,” but that’s too paltry a word for the intense portraits of perversity she crafts. Criminals are rendered with unsparing precision: we get acrystalline view of their fragile egos, their petty pretensions and resentments, and their inexplicable dark impulses. Her tautly constructed, twisty plots show how hasty but fateful choices and unfortunate coincidences lead to violence and tragedy. Rendell is particularly interested in the folie à deux: the dark chemistry that sparks when two damaged and demented people collide, and drive each other to commit crimes they’d never even contemplate on their own.
All this has made Rendell’s work appealing source material for filmmakers. Two standout films by famous directors, focus particularly on the folie à deux, succeeding in adapting Rendell for the screen by both underplaying and amping up her prickly material.
Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone (originally published under the Vine pseudonym) starts with a daring gambit. Its very first sentences reveal both the murderer and her motive: a housekeeper kills the entire family she works for because she cannot read. From this opening salvo, Rendell works backwards, her macabre narration creating a sense of mounting dread. Slowly, this improbable motive starts to make a certain twisted sense. The well-meaning meddling of an upper-middle class family upsets the equilibrium of an emotionally limited woman who lives in a claustrophobic world carefully built to hide her secret. The addition of a busybody, evangelical postmistress is the powder keg that sets these people, who cannot understand each other, on a path to destruction. Rendell is very socially conscious, and clearly connects the dots between the housekeeper’s illiteracy and a diminished capacity for empathy. But Rendell’s no bleeding heart; her housekeeper is clearly a nasty piece of work, and it’s an impenetrable muddle of character and circumstance that make her a killer. On the other side, she draws her caricatures of the bourgeois family with a real warmth that lends their impending deaths great poignancy.
Claude Chabrol’s 1995 adaptation, La Cérémonie, tones down Rendell’s grotesqueries, but his telling of the tale is no less chilling for that. It’s an incredibly deft film, with an almost lethal subtlety. An almost dull domestic drama slowly ratchets up to a climax of senseless violence. The family–particularly Jaqueline Bisset as the breezily glamorous mother–-are an almost laughably stereotypical portrait of a French bourgeois clan. They suck on their mussels as they earnestly yet callously debate how to best treat the help.
In Rendell’s book, the housekeeper is stout, middle aged and piggish. By contrast, Chabrol casts the young and captivating Sandrine Bonnaire, who balances chilling implacability with flashes of sensitivity. Her harsh, angular face is like an ancient mask, and she can project a cold, stony indifference to other people while sometimes showing signs of the panicked wounded animal. The viewer doesn’t learn that she cannot read until the film is well underway, and there’s a moving scene where she uses a children’s primer to desperately try and sound out the letters in a note the mother has left for her–her frustrations and limitations are made visible and treated as the tragic and traumatic conditions that they are.
In La Cérémonie, the aforementioned postmistress powder keg is played by Isabelle Huppert, and you couldn’t ask for a better actress to slowly build up into full unhinged aggression. Rendell’s version of the character is a grand guignol monster hiding under a facade of British lower-middle class propriety. Huppert’s Jeanne seems at first to be a bit loopy with a poor sense of boundaries, turning up uninvited with her weirdly girlish pigtails and childlike knit caps. But as she oozes her way into Sophie’s life, her resentment of the wealthy, happy family, and her obsession with their secrets (she’s in the habit of reading their mail) has clearly made her a chaos agent. As she gets bolder and starts swanning around the family’s house, she first seduces Sophie with class consciousness, as she rightly tells her that her employers don’t treat her well or pay her enough. Yet she also seduces Sophie simply because she is Isabelle Huppert, and her promises of tenderness, freedom and bravado make her the loose cannon that inevitably leads to cocked pistols and a very messy living room.
A second Rendell novel, Live Flesh, sets up a deliciously deranged scenario that must inevitably lead to twisted dynamics and damaged souls. When serial rapist Victor takes a hostage in a home invasion, he shoots police officer David in the back, paralyzing him. When Victor is released from prison and makes an unsolicited visit to David and his girlfriend, those two (for reasons inexplicable to themselves) decide that pursuing a friendship with Victor will be a cathartic experience for David. The three become creepily cozy (and in the case of Victor and Clare, far too cozy). Victor inevitably grows unsatisfied with the relationship and begins barreling toward his own destruction. As the reader sees most events from Victor’s point of view, a chilling yet nuanced portrait of a rapist emerges. A man with a surprising disinterest in sex, he is terminally aggrieved (going as so far as to resent the man her paralyzed because David has a pension and a book deal), full of pathetic dreams of lower-middle class respectability, and prone to terrifying rages when he doesn’t get his way
Though Rendell loves the macabre traits and grotesque impulses of the human mind, but she remains very British about it. Her deliciously dark characters are often white-knuckling through performances of middle class propriety as a way of hiding in plain sight. In the loosest of adaptations, Pedro Almodóvar’s film of Live Flesh takes the basic premise of Rendell’s novel – the pathetic, hot-headed con shooting the cop and then stalking him and his girlfriend–and explodes it into an operatic (not literal) orgy of unwise romances, erupting passions, and soft core, bumpy-grindy-breathy sex scenes.
As is often the case in Almodóvar films, the thriller narrative can easily swerve into sex farce, but a Rendellian sense of impending doom still drives the narrative, leading to tragic deaths based on unlivable passions. The many bad romances in this story have a feeling of inevitability that erupts from big feelings and grand passions, things that Rendell’s twisted Brits tend to stifle or tamp down until they corrode their whole lives. In Almodóvar’s Live Flesh, no emotion (even among the men) goes unexpressed; all the cards up Rendell’s sleeve are just laid on the table. His Victor is not a rapist, just a weedy and needy until recently–virgin who thinks women owe him the time of day. Like a Rendell character, he wraps a grandiose fantasy of exacting vengeance: he’s going to learn to become the world’s greatest lover, then sleep with the woman who rejected him (and who he threatened to shoot) only one time, thus presumably devastating her and ruining her for all other men. It’s a sad little picture of men’s view of women and how they ought to be punished, but Victor’s determination to see it through leads to both tragedy and joy.
Almodóvar’s fundamental belief in the queer family (in both senses of the word), unerringly asserts that a candy-colored happiness can still be attained even among the most perverse couplings and the most eccentric friends and relatives. In Rendell’s world, the end of the bad romance tends to lead to death for the criminal and fractured lives of quiet desperation for everyone left in the wreckage. A happy ending replete with the arrival of a baby is not Rendell’s usual style, but it also adds an extra layer of perversity that would have given the author a chuckle. Generally, she found the European adaptations of her work to be the best, saying the Brits added in too many car chases. An intense focus on the twisted mind – sad or happy, constrained or exuberant – would always retain some of her fascination with damaged psyches and her dark world view.