THE 25th Anniversary Blu-ray re-release of Terence Davies’s The House Of Mirth gladdened my heart. He was one of Britain’s finest directors. His adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel is truly filmic, wasting not a word when gesture, lighting, or shot tells us all we need to know about the machinations of New York’s Belle Époque nouveau riche. These mannered, beautiful people resemble John Singer Sargent’s paintings and behave like Ecclesiastes 7.4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
Most characters reside in the latter abode: shallow, self-seeking, prizing the transitory pleasures of objects, status, and opulence, and ignoring what life is really about. And then we have Lily (Gillian Anderson), a spirit willing to break free, though the flesh is reluctant. Raised in that same society, but of slender means, she is reliant on her capricious aunt’s largesse. Marriage may ensure material convenience, but what a price contemporaries have paid! Lily holds on to a fragile independence, hoping for sacramental love.
It is actually there in her friend, Lawrence (Eric Stoltz), but his financial situation would ensure connubial impecunity. This moral dilemma assists Lily’s ruination, already in progress, thanks to a ruthless social circle that ostracises her for breaking its hypocritical rules. One recognises Davies’s Catholic fervour when castigating an iniquitous society blind to whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, and lovely. Lily, ultimately, comes to personify redemptive sacrificial love. These themes are further deliberated on in the disc’s cornucopia of extras. Such riches!
Cat. no. BFIB1554 /12 is available from home-entertainment retailers and the BFI Shop at BFI Southbank.