Maurice (1987)
Oct. 18th, 2019 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alwaysalready(Crossposted from my Letterboxd)
A beautiful, lush, sensual masterpiece. Manages to make cricket seem sexy and fun! That's almost all you need to know right there.
The costumes are so beautiful. And yet you're aware from the start that this society is dangerous, dangerously constraining. You can feel it trying to close around Maurice like a noose... as soon as he leaves Cambridge it's like there's a ticking clock set in motion. And of course everything is tied up in class, as well as the law. He's not a country aristocrat, like Clive - but he's still a gentleman. His life is supposed to be dictated by respectability; his life is supposed to be about going to the club in a dinner jacket to see his friends, about getting married and having children because that's the correct thing to do.
So, yes: society and the law both are a noose waiting to close around Maurice's neck. The outcomes available all seem so bleak: marrying a woman, like Clive, who tries to convince both of them that he thinks that women are fantastic but only succeeds in growing dead inside. Or there's living a gay life, like Risley, and quite possibly being caught and prosecuted and losing all position in society. It's worth noting how in the final cut of the movie, once sentenced, Risley vanishes. He walks down the stairs and vanishes beneath. He is now beneath notice. His long shadow stays, of course. But he's gone.
Or then the other options are to stay unattached, or to leave the country. Or so it seems. Maurice lurks, undecided, trying to cure himself while understanding it to be a hopeless endeavour. The scenes where he's hypnotised - where he's insisting that what he really likes is short hair! It's horrifying and futile.
So then of course it's completely wonderful when Alec Scudder appears. No, not appears - when he makes his move. Scudder lurks for a long time before he makes his desires and motives known. When he finally climbs into Maurice's window - an echo of a much earlier scene at Cambridge, when it was Maurice climbing through Clive's window - it's like... he's so effervescent, so irrepressible, so impossible to ignore. He's finally bubbling over.
There's a lot more to say about the clandestine nature of the affair, the way it starts based on Scudder reading into Maurice's distressed actions a signal to him... but we know why this is. Being gay was illegal, having gay sex was illegal. But even though we know logically why the encounter starts this way, it still maintains a kind of non-logical, dreamlike quality... it reads as a magical, tender moment, just as it is also transgressive across both sexual and class boundaries.
And then in the morning: Alec is still there, and Maurice is still there. Even after Maurice has reluctantly let Alec leave, get back to his duties (and the way the shot here makes it seem at first that he might still be there, but no, of course he's slipped away deftly, is masterful) there are still signs that he has been there. Mud on the floor, clothes that Maurice has to hide. Nothing that can concretely point to an encounter (although the butler? footman? has his suspicions) but enough that we, and Maurice know that it hasn't evaporated, that it was real.
A lot of the push and pull between Maurice and Alec after this first sexual/romantic encounter is based on the fact that they have a very shaky foundation for trust, and for knowing what a relationship like theirs could look like. Surely men like Alec blackmail men like Maurice, and yet, surely men like Maurice always prevail over men like Alec? They hash this out, in the British museum: all that weight of history behind them. History tells them that at this time, in England, they can likely not expect anything other than this. Despite history's plurality; despite the way it has changed, its strangeness. It has led to this moment, and this moment in many ways seems solid, inescapable, brutal.
But neither Alec or Maurice want to play the part. They're tired of being crushed under the weight of the expectations and roles that society have for them. Maurice doesn't want to get married to a woman he doesn't love, and Alec doesn't want to be a servant, treated as beneath notice by useless old posh ladies and patronised with sad tips by gentlemen like Maurice himself. And the blackmailed and the blackmailer are just another incarnation of expected societal roles; cautionary tales, criminals both. To become these people would to give up on the love and desire that each feels for something much less. It would be easier to give up. But they don't.
Neither of them is a reluctant lover, not really. Alec doesn't want to hurt Maurice's little finger, he says; he doesn't want his money, either. Remember that he refused his tip before they'd ever slept together. Even then, was there a refusal to let the relationship become tainted by this exchange, by taking on a servile role to Maurice directly? What Alec wants is equality; he wants to be treated as someone who is worthy of and able to receive love. He threatens Maurice because Maurice has hurt him; because Maurice calls him "Scudder", treats him as something other than his equal. And because Maurice didn't respond to his letter - didn't come to see him in the boathouse, his private, secluded place, site of his intimate fantasies.
Maurice was just scared, and kind of passive. He's passive for so much of the film - not sure what to do, how to avoid the noose, the trap that he can feel closing. But once Alec is in front of him again... once they're in the museum, once he's felt the threat again and felt it almost be spoken to an outside party... it's almost like we see some of that fear evaporate. He gives Scudder's name as his when talking to this outside party, as a coded signal to Alec, as a weird way of flirting with him,,, and almost of apologising, of taking on the name that he had previously used to put him down, and to drive the class wedge between them.
It's like once Maurice has Alec in his arms and is able to hope, trust believe that he will have him again (after Alec misses his ship!) - this gives him the courage to turn his back on society, on the society that has been crushing him his whole life. Alec is willful, unexpected. Effervescent - I'm not going to let go of that word. He bubbles over, with desire or anger, with feeling. He will live his life as he wants. There are ways in which he is shaped by and is fearful of society, but they are not the same. They have not shaped him nearly the same.
Maurice can't get enough; and it teaches Maurice, shows him another way. There is a way out of society - if he has the courage to follow it. And of course, he does. That final scene between Maurice and Clive is so wonderful - finally seeing Maurice able to be honest, assertive. Smiling as he says that everything's wrong - because of course, it is, as far as Clive will understand it. But Maurice is in love. Maurice's love is right; therefore, society is wrong. Yes, yes, everything's wrong, but it always has been. At least for Maurice circumstances are finally going right.
I haven't read the book yet and I'm sure that the final scenes work well there - but I love that the film has Clive and Maurice talking before Maurice gets to the boathouse. I love that this is how his story ends - scooping Alec up and kissing him, and being told that now they can't ever be parted. They escaped; they made it out. The boathouse is this soft, idyllic, sensual space. But it's also a real one, with a real fraught history between the two of them.
Also, that kiss. It is extremely romantic and I'm going to have a little cry if I think about it for too long.
There's a lot to say about the pastoral spaces of this film vs the ornate, stuffy, crumbling houses. In short: nature is queer, and even big fancy country houses are always going to fall down in the end.
But also: Maurice wants a romantic partnership. He wants to love someone in a way that will sustain him, in a way that will sustain the man he loves. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look like the partnerships that society deems acceptable; it can be different, it can come about in completely unacceptable circumstances to everyone else... but it's still real. It's real love - realer than anything else we've seen. And it may be strange and wild, but it can find a home. And do it does. Fiercely, with their eyes and hearts open.
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Date: 2019-10-18 08:11 pm (UTC)I think there might have been a cut tag fail? It looks like the cut was just for the brief mention of costumes rather than the bulk of the post.