The Misadventures of Margaret
UK/France 1998
Reviewed by Liese Spencer
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Paris. Young New Yorker Margaret falls in love with English professor Edward Nathan. Seven years later, the pair are married and living in Manhattan, where Margaret is writing a novel around some eighteenth-century diary fragments. Claustrophobic in her relationship, Margaret escapes into erotic fantasies based on her fiction while dreaming of adultery. Margaret decides to travel to France to research her novel and books a room at the château where the events in the diaries took place. On arrival she discovers the château is now a convent inhabited by singing nuns. Martin, a handsome sound engineer, is there recording them and Margaret flirts with him.
Back in Manhattan Margaret suspects Edward of an affair with one of his students. She makes an embarrassing pass at her bisexual friend Lily. To Edward's annoyance, Martin arrives from France. Margaret moves out of her and Edward's apartment and goes to stay with her editor. She and Martin spend the night together but do not have sex. Margaret seduces her dentist and decides to return to the château. Edward arrives with divorce papers but the pair are reconciled.
Review
Imagine a Barbara Cartland novel written by Donna Tartt and adapted as a ten-part serial for a cheap cable channel and you begin to approach the exquisite agony of Brian Skeet's debut feature. A laboriously contrived attempt to update such classic screwball 'divorce comedies' of the 30s and 40s as The Awful Truth (1937) and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) for a contemporary audience, this Anglo-French production follows unhappily married novelist Margaret Nathan from the pretentious circles of Manhattan academia to a French nunnery in search of happiness.
Filmed with the pace but none of the wit of such vintage pictures, Margaret's superficial search for enlightenment among the two-dimensional editors, playwrights and flamboyant culture vultures who make up her Manhattan acquaintance is intercut with an equally wearisome parallel storyline set in the eighteenth century. Or rather it's the eighteenth century of Margaret's imagination - prompting anachronistic sight gags (Regency frocks worn with trainers, laptops instead of quills and so on) - where a frock-coated philosopher appears to be seducing his nubile pupil with a stream of meaningless aphorisms.
Fabulously rich, glamorous and married to the smouldering yet sensitive Jeremy Northam, Margaret seems to have little to complain about yet she frets, faints and flops around New York in a woeful parody of Katharine Hepburn's hothouse flowers. Parker Posey may have Hepburn's hungry elegance - she certainly looks good in the lean trouser suits the wardrobe department sheaths her in - but her heroine is so silly and unlikable that lacking Hepburn's highly-strung charm, she ends up appearing merely neurotic.
In the outmoded brand of feminism that Skeet peddles, freedom is equated with sexual adventure. Margaret's journey towards self-discovery, therefore, swings between fantasies about her dentist, teams of baseball players running around a park naked, and embarrassing, softcore erotica in which Margaret is ravished by The Philosopher. Rather than, say, 1938's Bringing Up Baby's oblique take on sexual comedy, Skeet's approach is full frontal. In place of innuendo or sublimation we have Margaret walking around the château-turned-nunnery's grounds pulling the drapes off male nude statues or Margaret falling on top of her best friend Lily in an awkward attempt to get in touch with her sapphic side. Equally clumsy are Skeet's insistent references to his various sources. When Margaret first meets Edward, for instance, he tells her to think of him as Cary Grant; later, their flat is decorated with posters for I Married a Witch and My Man Godfrey. Skeet is not the first to be seduced by screwball's champagne sophistication, but this brassy film has all the bubble and levity of a pantomime.
Credits
- Producer
- Ian Benson
- Screenplay
- Brian Skeet
- Based on the novel Rameau's Niece by
- Cathleen Schine
- Director of Photography
- Romain Winding
- Editor
- Clare Douglas
- Production Designer
- Martin Childs
- Music
- James Shearman
- ©Mandarin/TF1 Films Production/Lunatics & Lovers
- Production Companies
- TF1 International and Granada present with the participation of the European Co-production Fund (UK) a Lunatics & Lovers/Granada Film production in co-production with Mandarin and TF1 Films Production with the participation of Canal+ in association with Film 50
- Executive Producers
- Andy Harries
- Pippa Cross
- Dominique Green
- Co-producers
- Nicolas Altmayer
- Éric Altmayer
- Line Producers
- Mark Cooper
- French Crew:
- Edith Colnel
- Associate Producers
- Michael Wilson
- Andrew Holmes
- Production Supervisor
- US Crew:
- Roger Davies
- Production Co-ordinators
- Fiona Weir
- French Crew:
- Marie Kerhoas
- Production Office
Co-ordinator - US Crew:
- Robyn J. Davis
- Production Managers
- US Crew:
- Liz Gaffney
- Eddy Collyns
- Unit Manager
- Harriet Lawrence
- Location Managers
- Roland Caine
- French Crew:
- Isabelle Arnal
- US Crew:
- Andrew Saxe
- Assistant Directors
- Simon Moseley
- Sallie Hard
- Ben Burt
- French Crew:
- Dominique Delany
- Christophe Barbier
- Sandra Dalle
- David Lueza
- US Crew:
- Jude Gorjanc
- Cindy Craig
- Sarah Brandston
- Script Supervisor
- Caroline Sax
- Additional Continuity
- French Crew:
- Solange Marquis
- Casting Directors
- Vanessa Pereira
- Simone Ireland
- US Crew Casting:
- The Casting Company,
Los Angeles - Script Editor
- Christine Langan
- 2nd Unit Lighting Cameraman
- French Unit:
- Pierre Bec
- Associate Editor
- Tariq Anwar
- Art Directors
- Charlotte Watts
- French Crew:
- Didier Naert
- US Crew:
- John McFarlane
- Set Decorator
- US Crew:
- Jennifer Halpern
- Sculptor
- Mary-Pat Sheahan
- Costume Designer
- Edi Giguére
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Sue Honeyborne
- Wardrobe Mistress
- Anna Kot
- Make-up/Hair
- Design:
- Jan Sewell
- Artists:
- Darren Phillips
- Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou
- Main Titles Design
- Simon Giles
- Opticals/Credits Supervisor
- Alan Church
- Opticals/Titles
- The Film Factory
- GSE, London
- Original Music Writer/Producer
- St. Etienne
- Arranger
- Gerard Johnson
- Music Supervisors
- Jackie Lingard
- Maggie Rodford
- Becky Bentham
- Air Edel Associates Ltd
- Soundtrack
- "Find Me a Boy" by Françoise Hardy, R. Samyn, performed by (1) Françoise Hardy, (2) St. Etienne; "Still Alive" by Idha Ovelius Bell, performed by Idha; "The More I See You" by Mack Gordon, Harry Warren, performed by Chris Montez; "New York Girls' Club" by/performed by Rebecca Pidgeon; "Something to Do with Spring" by/performed by Noël Coward; "Nun's Chorus" composed/arranged by Glenn Keiles, performed by City of London Choir, soloist: Clare Bailey, conducted by Liam Bates; "Breathe" by Rob D, Rollo, Kristine W, performed by Kristine W; "Jack Lemmon" by Lee Wilson-Wolfe, Ged Adamson, Martin Kelly, Sarah Cracknell, performed by Coloursound featuring Sarah Cracknell; "Writing Notes" by Jennifer Trynin, performed by Jen Trynin; "Sand" by Lee Hazlewood, performed by OP8; "Forgive Me" by/performed by Patti Rothberg
- Poem Extracts
- "Sunday Morning" from "Becoming Light" by Erica Jong; "Under Which Lyre" by W.H. Auden; "The Elizabethans Called It Dying" from "Selected Poems" by James Schuyler
- Sound Recordist
- Peter Glossop
- Re-recording Mixers
- Mike Dowson
- Mark Taylor
- Dean Humphreys
- Craig Irving
- Supervising Sound Editors
- Mark Auguste
- Mike Wood
- Nigel Mills
- Dialogue Editor
- Tim Hands
- ADR
- Editor:
- Tim Hands
- Foley
- Editor:
- Mike Feinberg
- Cast
- Parker Posey
- Margaret Nathan
- Jeremy Northam
- Edward Nathan
- Craig Chester
- Richard Lanne
- Elizabeth McGovern
- Till Turner
- Brooke Shields
- Lily
- Corbin Bernsen
- Art Turner
- Justine Waddell
- young girl
- Patrick Bruel
- Martin
- Stéphane Freiss
- the philosopher
- Alexis Denisof
- Doctor Lipi
- Amy Phillips
- Sarah from Brighton
- Sylvie Testud
- young nun
- Al MacKenzie
- Richard's boyfriend
- Kerry Shale
- librarian
- Jeff Harding
- man at party
- Jacey Salles
- Teresa Gallagher
- Melanie Claus
- astronauts
- Danusio Salememoreira
- French gardener
- Charlie Waterman
- waitress/18th century lesbian
- Oni Faida Lampley
- barwoman
- Lawrence Davidson
- young girl's uncle
- Chris Rice
- Lily's hunk
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- The Feature Film Company
- 8,317 feet
- 92 minutes 25 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Prints by
- DeLuxe, London