The Arts His Master's Voice
The Servant. (Warner; 'X' certificate.)—Two- faced Woman. (Empire; 'A' certificate.) .
The main, ostensible theme of The Servant i:; the relationship between two men, who to start with are master and servant: Tony, a silly, handsome, rich young man who plays with the idea of doing a job but never quite gets round to it, and Barrett, a creep of a 'gentle- man's gentleman,' as purposefully anachronistic as his master while it suits him, and fifteen or twenty years older. But it also involves one in speculation about the whole business of servi- tude (domestic branch, anyway), and harks back to last week's Genet-based film Les Abysses, with its theme that 'No one is born to be a domestic servant.' What we see is not just the (fairly conventional) downfall of an idle youth, whose servant becomes 'his procurer in exotic debauch, but the basic unfitness, in a world that is said to believe that all men are equal, and at least goes round repeating it and striving to- wards the idea of it, of the relationship between master and servant at all: of a state in which a man calls his junior 'sir' and allows himself to be shouted at, because the younger man happens to pay his wages, and the youth expects to be waited on, coddled, kept physically snug in every way when he is past the age of snugness, and to have' a tame listener, chatter and confidant about the house, with whom he is (necessarily) on intimate terms, though not necessarily on friendly ones.
Losey's careful, observant direction, some- times cryptic but always, one feels, deliberate and well in. control, is psychologically sure- footed though occasionally weird in detail: I wonder, for instance, whether he meant Sarah Miles, as the bait set by Barrett to trap the youth, to turn out a`figure of fun, a wildly un- likely seductress'? Or whether Dirk Bogarde, who gets Barrett's pussyfooting nastiness brilliantly, is meant to be quite so obtrusively bogus and intrusive, so clearly insolent right from the start? James Fox as the youngster (he was the public schoolboy who finally won the race in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner) is so right there is almost nothing to say: physically he is the perfect Tony, and his healthy, out- door good looks make his final swoop into the depths more touching than if he had been a decadent, Dorian Grayish character to start with, But what breaks the film in two and skips the most difficult moments is the fact that we are shown the men before and after the reversal of their roles, but not in process of reversing them.
Pinter came to mind again when I saw Two- /need Woman revived as part-of another Garbo season ('by public demand,' and it really seems to mean it this time), because here, in simple, indeed pre-Freudian-looking terms, is The Lover, or something pretty much like it. I saw it in Paris in 1947, dubbed in French, and had a hazily disagreeable memory of it. Now, Garbo being Garbo, and glorious beyond even the most nostalgic memories of her, it has been extrava- gantly praised, mostly (I have a feeling) because Garbo is there at all. This time 1 disliked it less, and found it (of course) fascinating as an un- familiar exercise in Garboism, but still unsatis- factory, because in the tale of an austere young woman who, to win back a bored husband, pre- tends to be her own quite opposite twin sister, Garbo is asked to go beyond her scope. The whole style and manner are unsuited to her, and George dukor's direction, as it drags her through the piece, is flip and smart in a way that goes against her whole personality, her tender, in- effable, almost incredible presence.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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