Tulip Fever
2017, 1080hd
Tulip Fever takes place in the 17th century,
not long after Shakespeare's time, and it is structured
very much like a Shakespearean comedy.
An prosperous elderly merchant rescues a beautiful young
woman from an orphanage and gives her a wonderful life.
She does not enjoy physical contact with him and he's a
stuffy bore, but he's basically a decent person and she
feels grateful to him. The man desperately wants
children, but he does not appear to be capable of
producing them, and she wishes she could stop having sex
with him.
The situation is further complicated when the vain
husband hires a hunky young painter to create an
official portrait of the couple. I guess you can figure
the next plot twist: the wife initiates an affair with
the hunk. Now the truly Shakespearean twists begin. The
wife uses her maid's cloak to sneak off to the artist's
loft. The maid's boyfriend spots her and thinks she is
the maid - cheating on him. He becomes despondent and
leaves the country, unaware that the maid is pregnant.
After some stops and starts, the two women finally come
to the conclusion that they can solve each other's
problem. The maid is about to have a baby, and the wife
needs one, so they resolve to pretend that the wife is
pregnant. When the baby is born, they will tell the
husband the baby is his. Of course the husband will know
what's going on if he sees his wife naked, but the
solution to that makes the wife even happier - no sex,
separate bedrooms. And the coup de grace is that the
wife will pretend to die in childbirth, thus permanently
obviating her sexual obligations to the old coot and
allowing her to start a new life with her young
lover. The women find a sleazy doctor to
facilitate the plan, and they are off.
Not credible, you think? Yeah, you're probably right,
but it's sort of fun, isn't it?. There are several more
unlikely, silly plot twists along the way, but you can
discover those for yourselves if you're interested.
The Shakespearean connection goes deeper than the plot
structure. This movie will probably remind you quite a
bit of another period piece about the same general
historical era, Shakespeare in Love. Both films are
essentially love stories from the Weinstein company
which combine elements of comedy and drama, and feature
Judy Dench in a small but important role. In both cases
there is a stuffy rich man cuckolded by a young artistic
man. In both cases there is a great focus on a specific
and popular profession in the late 16th-early 17th
century: the theater business in one, the tulip business
in the other. In both cases, a major character starts a
new life in the New World. Both include unlikely plot
premises, and both introduce unrealistic elements of
farce. The resemblance between the two films is not
coincidental because the two films share the same
screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, who is a great admirer and
student of Shakespeare. (He also wrote the
Hamlet-inspired play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead in the period before he became an A-list
screenwriter.) I love Stoppard's work, but he's in his
80s now, and I think he might be out of ideas and out of
touch. In addition to the script's reliance on
Stoppard's familiar, old-fashioned devices, the dialogue
is awkward, there's not much magic written into the main
romance, and every single plot twist is telegraphed so
obviously as to ruin the potential surprise or even to
elicit groans.
This movie was actually filmed back in 2014 and had been
languishing in distribution hell for years before
getting a modest 700-theater release in September. The
producers' lack of confidence was well founded. The film
opened in 23rd place and never gained momentum.
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The nudity was also disappointing, especially since there was
not much more than what we had already seen in the
trailer.
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