Cult Cinema: The Governess (1998) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

British writer-director Sandra Goldbacher only ever directed two feature films between 1998 and 2001 with her randy 19^th century period drama The Governess followed by her 1970s Brighton Isle set drama Me Without You.  While Goldbacher would eventually foray into British television, working in the TV movie Ballet Shoes as well as such shows as The Hour, Victoria and most recently The Reckoning, her strikingly visual and distinctly feminine first two features remain curiously overlooked in the film community as lightweight curiosities rather than starkly original visions of the woman’s experience in a male dominated sphere.  

Recently the Motor City Cinema Society screened a rare 2.35:1 widescreen print of Goldbacher’s debut The Governess starring GoldenEye and Good Will Hunting character actress Minnie Driver alongside the late and great Tom Wilkinson, a sumptuous yet tightly budgeted period drama which made a minor splash when it was released in 1998 before being lost to time.  A shame as it posits a unique if not tragicomic romantic drama about what it means for a woman to transcend the intellectual and business acumen of her contemporaries and mentors against the gender status quo at a time when such undertakings risked scandal and/or ruin.

 
1830s London, Rosina da Silva (Minnie Driver) lives the high live as the daughter of a well to do Sephardic Jewish family when her Faberge Egg is shattered by the streetside murder of her father.  Entombed in debts and refusing an arrange marriage to an older suitor and/or prostituting herself, she reinvents herself as a Protestant Italian governess named Mary Blackchurch and puts an ad out for work to support her family.  Immediately landing a spot as a governess for a Scottish landed gentry, she immerses herself into the family of Charles Cavendish (Tom Wilkinson) a studied patriarch and scientist focused on solving the problem of developing photographic prints on paper.  

In between navigating his bored highfalutin wife’s (Harriet Walter) woes and trying to school a bratty little girl named Clementina (Florence Hoath), Mary discovers Charles’ darkroom and secretly becomes his assistant/muse/mistress in a heated love affair.  Their cheating is threatened by the return of druggy dropout son Henry (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who also takes up a romantic interest in Mary after discovering her true hidden identity.

 
From Calendar Girls cinematographer Ashley Rowe’s lush and painterly Super 35 camerawork, moving romantic score by Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow composer Edward Shearmur and elliptical, sometimes experimental cutting and transitions by The Secret Garden and Bent editor Isabelle Lorente, The Governess is a lovely and enticing looking and sounding work.  Though later scenes do tend towards a kind of Adam Greenberg/James Cameron bluish look, a number of others couldn’t help but point to Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and its lush widescreen vistas.  

The film is full of strong technical and performative virtues featuring a largely female driven crew and an evocative, impassioned performance from Minnie Driver as a free-thinking young woman who traverses the roles from apprentice to equal and then successor rather swiftly over the film’s two-hour running time.  Tom Wilkinson is one of the all-time great English actors and with this film he takes on a role both boldly boisterously fearsome and intimately vulnerable.  Jonathan Rhys Meyers also gives a flamboyantly physical performance as a bad boy before also exposing his inner weaknesses to the camera.  And of course Harriet Walter remains a staple of the British period drama from Sense and Sensibility to more recently Downton Abbey and The Crown.

 
A tight but beautiful little British indie drama, The Governess released in the US under New Yorker Films before later being picked up by Sony Pictures Classics (though sadly fullscreen only on the US DVD) fared mostly well with the critics and turned a decent profit of around $3.8 million which is sizable for a British period drama.  Though many took umbrage with the film’s nebulous if not anticlimactic finale, as a whole it is a remarkable first-time accomplishment that begs the question why Sandra Goldbacher didn’t further her career in feature film directing.  Lost to time somewhat though gradually rekindling a viewership over boutique theater screenings here and there, The Governess isn’t always consistent with logic or plausibility when you examine the particulars (no pun intended) governing this film but emotionally it makes sense as a longing if not mournful paean to what it means to stone your heart and mind up in order to achieve success in this life.

--Andrew Kotwicki