Cinema: Erratic Bust

SAVAGE MESSIAH Directed by KEN RUSSELL Screenplay by CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

Ken Russell is a director whose appetite for excess verges on petulance. His enterprise in films like The Music Lovers and The Devils was not to reconstruct history but to disembowel it; one felt that if he were to try a biblical spectacular, all the extras would be wearing Mickey Mouse wristwatches. His directorial tone has the subtlety of a timp roll played on an eyeball. A new Russell film, particularly one about an artist (the dramatization of artists’ lives being his forte, or rather his fortissimo), is therefore to be approached warily —especially with a title like Savage Messiah. What squalling imp have those nuns of Loudun now suckled?

In fact, a comparatively restrained one. The messiah in question was Henri Gaudier, a gifted French sculptor who, having emigrated to London, became a central figure in the avant-garde before being killed in World War I at the age of 24. Russell’s theme is the long, violent and platonic love affair between Gaudier and a neurotic Polish writer almost twice his age, Sophie Brzeska, whose name he joined to his. Hampered by poverty, his life truncated at a moment when most artists are only beginning to work, Gaudier-Brzeska did not produce a large body of sculpture; but he was an indefatigable letter writer, and much of his correspondence survives. The letters —like the sculpture—reveal a marvelously vivid mind, impassioned, quick, generous, with flashes of precocious subtlety.

Russell’s Gaudier (Scott Anthony) has the ebullience and charm of the original, if not the depth: the sculptor emerges as a stereotype of the rollicking boho, leapfrogging over beds and smashing dealers’ windows, spouting off against Establishment art values from the top of an Easter Island head in the Louvre, and performing unlikely — and, in real life, unrecorded — feats of gymnastics like carving a marble torso several feet high in six hours flat to im press a dealer. Sophie Brzeska is played by Dorothy Tutin — an elegantly controlled and touching exercise in tight, fey dottiness.

Alas, the context in which Russell sets these performances is obtuse to the point of caricature. Did Gaudier-Brzeska have a mistress? Then she must be a pneumatic and witless art groupie (Helen Mirren), daughter of a landed cavalry officer, who does her obligatory nude scene on the staircase of an immense, frigid Adam country house; she must also be a suffragette, which gives Russell much opportunity for lumpen-sexist travesty by having her do a song-and-hop number about votes for women in a nightclub and then, at Gaudier’s demand, drop her knickers onstage. Around 1912, the real-life Gaudier was commissioned to do a portrait bust of a Major Smythies, who — considering the time and place and the modernity of Gaudier’s work — can hardly have been a fool. Russell turns him into a florid cross between Kaiser Bill and Colonel Blimp, querulously posing in a drawing room on a white horse. Do such absurdities matter? Not if Russell’s aim was slapstick parody. Yet, to judge from his publicity, Russell believes that his erratic mediation between Vasari and Groucho Marx tells some truth about the creative processes of his hero. But it does not, and so Gaudier-Brzeska joins the line of artists — Gauguin, Michelangelo, Van Gogh — whom the movies have turned into silhouettes of the romantic outsider.