With 'The House of Mirth' Terence Davies abandons Liverpool for New York high society. Philip Horne thinks it's a Wharton adaptation that rivals Scorsese's

BEAUTY'S SLOW FADE

With Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), his wonderfully moving, fragmented chronicle of his family history in the years after World War II, Terence Davies became noted as Britain's most exquisitely gifted film-maker. But ever since that follow-up to his equally autobiographically based debut - the three films that became known as The Terence Davies Trilogy (1976-84) - even sympathetic critics have been drumming their fingers in impatience for something different. They drummed more fiercely through The Long Day Closes (1992), which occupied the same territory of sensitive Catholic working-class youth in Liverpool - a little later, a little less grimly and a little more primly, though the film returned more overtly to the homosexual theme of the Trilogy. In 1998 Davies had warned there would be one "last bit of autobiography...And God knows what I'll do after that."

An answer seemed to have come in 1995 with his adaptation of The Neon Bible, a novel written at age 16 by John Kennedy Toole, the tragically shortlived US author best known for A Confederacy of Dunces, a Rabelaisian comic novel set in New Orleans. The Neon Bible took Davies to the Bible Belt of Southern America where there wasn't a Catholic in sight, the young hero David kisses a girl with feeling, a gun is fired and someone is killed. But as Jonathan Coe said in these pages, "Those of us who were on the whole relieved to hear that Davies had finally got his family history out of his system might, it seems, have been jumping the gun: actually The Neon Bible could almost be another slice of Davies' autobiography, relocated to America's Deep South and provided with a tragic denouement."

The Neon Bible may have been another working-class domestic drama about a lonely, passive young boy with an abusive father who grows up in a world dominated by women, religion and popular songs, but there were significant differences: 30s and 40s small-town America was lovingly recreated with a deep consciousness of the traditions of American art; the protecting female presence is mostly that of David's Bohemian, "artistic" Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands) rather than his unstable but socially conventional mother (Diana Scarwid); the tough, unnostalgic ending has the young David selfishly betrayed by his hitherto attractively easy-going aunt. There's also a fuller account of the deforming effects on people's thought of life in a small-town community: David's mother tells Aunt Mae when she arrives, "You don't know what it's like to live in a small town like this"; David's voiceover says later, "You had to think what your father thought all his life." And stylistically The Neon Bible represented a shift towards more accepted forms of dramatic narrative - confrontation, intrigue, dialogue, event - and a move from studio towards open air. But Davies was still altogether himself, choreographing light and shadow and setting and figure against ritualised camera movement and often arrestingly overt music in scenes Positif called "dedramatised". The film's breathless, glorious last long shot - shorter than that of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees (1994) but without the teasing interpersonal suspense - was actually booed by the press at Cannes. What could Davies do next?

REFUSING THE RULES

The question finds an answer in The House of Mirth, and a surprising one in several ways. Despite Davies' interest in pre-rock popular culture, The X-Files, Pulp Fiction and The Blues Brothers, seem quite off his map. Also, though he has specialised in painstaking period recreations, his innocent, proletarian, mostly taciturn subjects have seemed miles away from the complexly conspiratorial exchanges of turn-of-the-last-century American high society as dissected by Edith Wharton. If the other great Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence, looked before we saw it (in its lacks of Italians, crime, popular music or violent movement) as if it might be too much of a stretch for the energetic and versatile Scorsese, The House of Mirth could have appeared equally out of bounds for the much less robustly experienced Davies. But the film is a fence he has taken triumphantly, a major extension of his terrain, an unpredictable, unformulaic success.

Here then is Gillian Anderson of The X-Files as Wharton's penniless, ambitious but ambivalent society beauty Lily Bart, flanked by Eric Stoltz (from the cool world of American independents suchs as Pulp Fiction and Sleep With Me) as her wavering admirer Lawrence Selden and Dan Aykroyd (from the worlds of Saturday Night Live and The Blues Brothers) as Gus Trenor, the lecherous banker husband of a friend, who manoeuvres her into a compromising position. But as with Davies' use of Wilfrid Brambell (known as the hideous, meanspirited dad in television's Steptoe and Son) in the Death and Transfiguration part of the Trilogy or of the alternative comedian Denis Leary as the father in The Neon Bible, the star performers here are stripped of their comforting familiarity and seem thoroughly engaged with the ruthlessly Machiavellian world Davies magisterially constructs.

Another tradition that flows into this extraordinary film is that of classic Anglo-American fiction. Wharton's novel rewrite4s in her later American world the non-Jewish half of George Eliot's great last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), the half that tells the story of impoverished beauty Gwendolen Harleth and her campaign to win a rich husband, the unlikeable Grandcourt. Eliot's Gwendolen gains her prize only to become the object of his withering scorn in a hellish marriage - in a way that inspired Wharton's friend Henry James in his Portrait of a Lady (1881). A quarter ofa century after James, Wharton gives the plot another American twist by having her spoilt, pretty heroine's love of independence and self-respect - actually, her virtue - thwart her schemes for making a mercenary, loveless marriage. One could also read The House of Mirth as Wharton's ironic inversion of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, with Lily Bart coming to her tragic end not through a 'virtuous' refusal of loveless marriages and of suggested adulteries - a refusal to play by her society's rules.

GRAND MINIMALISM

There are many reasons, then, to be curious as to what Davies' film is like. Perhaps its most immediately striking features are its sumptuous, moody look, recalling late-19th-century painters such as John Singer Sargent and James Tissot, and what one might call its grand minimalism - no expense spared on the sites of wealth (and sometimes misery) you see on the wide screen, but how they are shown is rigorously controlled, often without establishing shots. The square-on naiveté of some of Davies' previous compositions is adjusted to fit Wharton's world of angles, spin and evasiveness. On both The Long Day Closes and The Neon Bible Davies used production designer Christopher Hobbs and cinematographer Mick Coulter; here the design is by Don Taylor (Little Voice) and the photography by Remi Adefarasin (Elizabeth). And though Davies still obviously writes scripts in which, as he has said,"every track, every dissolve, every cut, every bit of music, every bit of dialogue is in there," to my mind the change of personnel has contributed to a gain in immediacy and drama.

Even more startling is the soundtrack. Above all in The Long Day Closes, Davies obsessively layered over the action a dense collage of musical quotations - from popular song, dance tunes, folk songs, classical music choral and orchestral (as well as recorded speech from radio and film soundtracks). This sort of 'composed film' (to adopt Michael Powell's phrase) created an effect so allusively rich that in places it was possible for viewers to feel the primacy of the visually presented action was cumulatively reduced to an illustration for the loaded sounds of the past. The House of Mirth radically cuts our ration of music so we become acutely aware of ticking clocks, closing doors, the lighting of cigarettes: we are closer to the intense, hushed, charged sound world of Bresson, Rohmer, late Kiéslowski or of Ingmar Berman's harrowing Cries and Whispers (1972), another Edwardian period piece quite without the nostalgic indulgences of 'heritage' and a film Davies rather breathlessly analysed in a 1990 Channel 4 Masterclass.

Bergman might be seen as one key poin tof reference for this The House of Mirth (the title, incidentally, from Ecclesiastes, VII.4, has nothing to do with fun: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth"). Francois Truffaut said in 1973: "Bergman's lesson is threefold: freedom of dialogue, radical cleanness of the image, and absolute priority of the human face." On the first count Davies here frees his upper-class, educated characters into relative articulacy compared with the often poignantly tongue-tied casts of his earlier films, sticking close to Wharton's subtly nuanced dialogue. On the second, cleanness of the image (that is, a fierce control of the framing and content of every shot), Davies was already notoriously in Bergman's camp, seeking the 'truth' but rejecting anything like cinéma vérité. But it is the third of these counts that seems the freshest element in the film, for Davies has before now mostly eschewed close-ups for medium or long shots where the set and its light and shade are almost as expressive as the face of the actor. "No one goes to a Terence Davies film for the acting," said Jonathan Coe in 1995; but one of the advantages Distant Voices, Still Lives had over its two successors was exactly the moving expressiveness of Freda Dowie, Angela Walsh and Pete Postlethwaite and the rapidity and animation of its ensemble playing.

THEIR LIPS TOUCHED

In The House of Mirth Davies has a sympathetic heroine, and he repeatedly brings us touchingly close to Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart, often veiled or turning aside or with her face partly shaded. The actress' long training in the evocation of paranoia (as well, perhaps, as the troubled past she has revealed in interviews) has proved the perfect preparation for the increasingly crushing weight of anxiety she has to convey here, as Lily's plans crumble and her friends successively betray her. It would be worth going to this film alone for the tense, hesitant, even sometimes stirringly erotic encounters between Lily and her equally self-divided, non-committal lover Selden, not rich himself and fatally put off by her gold-digging. In one profoundly memorable scene they have broken away at night from a grand house party to the magical seclusion of an ornamental garden bench in a recess surrounded by Chinese lanterns. Berman warns that film often can't translate "the intangible dimension, which is the heart of a literary work", but here Davies daringly draws us into the ache of sexual and emotional atraction these self-thwarting lovers's sudden proximity brings to life, filming the whole scene in one long, dreamlike tracking shot which gradually steals right up to them as they irresistibly kiss, but which painfully withdraws as they realise the impossibility of realising their love in this society. Wharton, dropping her ruthlessly satirical attitude for a moment, has a wonderfully light touch in this scene (the kiss is just "their lips touched" and immediately "She drew back"); but for us to be really moved by the failure of their relationship we need more than she gives us. Davies knows we have to feel the value of what is lost, and in this risky scene of intimate approach, snatched communion then agonised withdrawal he encapsulates the emotional arc of the whole story.

There is another kiss earlier in the film, in a scene where one could say Davies is giving a heart to the story that Wharton's original lacks. At a country-house party near New York, Selden and Lily, obeying what Wharton calls "an indwelling voice in each", have broken away from other pressures into a dreamy summer afternoon and sit side by side in the shade of a tree. Wharton beautifully evokes the powerful attraction of the moment even as the words of her two lovers express their mutual distrust and fear of commitment (Selden's sense of Lily's determination to marry rich, Lily's sense of Selden as probably just flirting). "All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth." But whereas Wharton ends this scene of frustrated near-intimacy with Lily cagily asking, "Were you serious?" and Selden's reply "Why not? You see, I took no risks in being so", Davies has an inspiration. They say this, then instead of departing, they kiss (in a tender close-up) - with the smoke of Selden's perpetual cigarette drifting wistfully across the frame. There is music for this scene, exceptionally, but baroque strings - aptly for these characters still profoundly constrained by their society - not, as one might have expected, the full romantic orchestra. Still in keeping with the Whartonian world, that is, though inflecting the Whartonian action.

BACKS ARE ELOQUENT

Davies subtly alters the angle of the novel in a number of ways. Lily's formative family background (or riches and sudden ruin) is not dwelt on and the film's elimination of authorial commentary (whereas Scorsese's The Age of Innocence retained "the voice of Edith Wharton" in voiceovers b Joanne Woodward) removes a whole layer of ironically superior rhetoric which presents Lily as a fated victim of evolutionary processes, a non-adaptable specimen of a dying class. This sacrifices much of Wharton's wit but also does away with the excessive presence of the storytller as a punitive deity whose insights into small vanities help her twist the knife in the side of her pretty victim. Anderson is good at making Lily's thoughtless innocence and her surprise at each new betrayal sympathetically believable; her concern for her appearance need not be read as preening when it is her chief asset in the marriage market for which she has been bred. The punitive element is also reduced by Davies' attenuation of the often contrived male-jealousy overplotting to which Wharton is prone: here Selden does not, for instance, see Lily coming out of Trenor's house late at night - a clunky coincidence not essential to the obstruction of their love (and tending to diminish its pathos). The film gives sufficient weight to the obstacles within the protagonists themselves.

Another key change to the novel is Davies' amalgamation of two different female characters. one is basically retained: Lily's dull, sneaking cousin Grace Stepney (Jodhi May), her rival in her rich aunt's affections and a schemer who secretly denounces her and wins her inheritance. The other, mostly eliminated, is Selden's dull, good, unmarriageable cousin Gerty Farish, poor and single and living a modern, independent life of social work in a flat of her own. Gerty in the book has a secret crush on Selden, but seeing he loves Lily overcomes her resentment of her beautiful friend - which seems the nobler because Lily makes snobbishly dismissive remarks about Gerty for which her final terrible social exclusion is a hideously disproportionate retribution. Davies' dropping of Gerty makes Lily less dislikeable and by allocating Gerty's crush on Selden to Grace he gives her a more complex motivation for her poisonous gossip. No longer simply a greedy, envious spinster, here she is young, tremulous and seemingly scared of what she's doing as she pours her bitcheries into the aunt's ear.

In 1995 Davies evoked his passion for "the beauty of small gestures" by describing a scene in Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon (1962) where a loving father has arranged a marriage for his daughter. "She doesn't want to get married, but she will, because her father wants it. She goes upstairs and the camera cuts to her upstairs: she is sitting with her back to the camera and all she is doing is these stroking movements over her hair. And it is heartbreaking." Davies may have been thinking of such tactfully minimal appeals for audience sympathy in his first scene between Lily and Selden: she has her back to Selden and to the camera in his shadowy apartment when, with an emotion she tries to hide, she reveals her loneliness and the value she places on him: "You don't know how I need such a friend." Backs are eloquent for Davies: there is a lovely, sad, poetic shot here, from above and behind, of a crowd of elegant backs slowly climbing the grand staircase at the Opera in which one distinguishes Lily's movement from the others through the sheer delicacy of the choreography.

Throughout, in fact, restraint gives power to small details of gesture and behaviour - hands, cigarettes, teacups, raised eyebrows, glances at the mirror - in this warped, supercivilised old world. It's a world in which Davies is obviously fully at home, and like the Bergman of Cries and Whispers he has the courage to linger in conveying the slowness of passing time. The House of Mirth matches the most controversial transitional sequence in The Long Day Closes - where a change of rug and the moving camera's vision of the changing light of the seasons brings us round to the point where Bud has to go to the big boys' school. Here, rivalling Scorsese for imaginative virtuosity, Davies transports us breathtakingly from Wharton's Book One in America to Book Two in Europe by tracking and dissolving through the empty rooms of a New York mansion to the strains of Mozart then moving out into the grounds in drenching rain (this auteur's trademark) and then to a stream, even stooping right down to the water's rippling surface, before suspending us over the more foaming water, now sunlit and Mediterranean, as the yacht Lily is on cuts through it and we come up again to a wide screenful of glorious Italian coast.

SALVATION AND TRANSCENDENCE

Davies' Wharton is quieter and more gruellingly painful than Scorsese's, whose achievement it equals. Comparing the two, one wonders why the best film versions of Wharton, not herself a Catholic, should have been made by the Anglo-American world's most identifiably Catholic fimmakers. Both Scorsese and Davies are preoccupied with martyrdom and victimisation, with a distrust of society's demands and with the self-destructive or cowardly impulses that can taint the purity of a cause; and Wharton's protagonists characteristically feel alienated from their society and give up the things they want most in life. Neither Scorsese nor Davies is now a practising Catholic, though both are marked by a concern with ritual; and their ambivalence about the lost comfort of a strict code to live by may well find stimulus in Wharton's detailed satirical picture of a hierarchical world where everyone is made to feel his or her place. But above all Catholicism dwells on sacrifice for love, on salvation and transcendence, and beneath Wharton's possibly protective ironies these are the motors of her finest stories, so that love, though secular love between people, is viewed as momentous, sacramental, the deepest thing - and thus, of course, the greatest risk.

In New York, New York (1977) Scorsese dramatised the trouble in his characters' showbiz marriage with painful irony by having the singer Liza Minnelli and the bandleader Robert De Niro quarrel nastily and publicly as they rehearse the light number 'Taking a Chance on Love'. The quarrel makes us horribly aware of just what a chance they took. The same song plays in Distant Voices, Still Lives over the shocking sequence answering the child's question "Why did you marry him, mam?" in which the raging father batters his wife, yelling "Shut up!" while the soundtrack sweetly comments, "Here I go again...Taking a chance on love." It is a suggestive parallel, for the line could be an epigraph to the two directors' Wharton films where they show vulnerable lives that are in one sense sustained but in another wrecked by love; and where they show love not as a choice of lifestyle but as a tragic gamble requiring total commitment and the readiness to suffer, for a lifetime if necessary.