"A person’s reconquering of their own self is carried out under the double sign of deliverance and redemption providing the film its internal, dramatic progression, a victory over self-contempt and fear of the contempt of others."
So says Jacques Rivette in his piece on Hitchock's Under Capricorn. It's easy to project certain elements of this film onto those subsequently made by Rivette. I'm thinking of Duelle, Gang of Four, The Duchess of Langeais. There is the unsettling artifice of the setting for one. A "queer" Gothic mansion, as it is described, in which the strangeness seems to be less about the architecture or design and more about the people who reside in it. The house isn't dark in the grim sense, but it certainly has a deathly quality to it. And is Charles Adare not a Celine and Julie type figure? Not really, I know. But he is a good-hearted meddler who treats the Flusky home as a stage where he seems to come and go as he pleases.
In fact, what are we supposed to make of the main trio? Wilding in his screwball comedy, Cotten seeming so noirish, and Bergman in her melodrama. The film has elements of all these styles, so it works, but it's important to remember how disconnected these characters are, and how much the film is the project of their reconstruction- in spite of the essential phoniness of their environment. There needs to be some constitution of the self in order for it to be transcended and for human bonds to then be built.
Rivette so beautifully captures the nature of this trio that I'm not inclined to say much more:
"The transfer of responsibility for the sin had previously split the couple, the one assuming the punishment, the other the bad conscience. This first sacrifice, wrongly consented to, obliges them to abandon themselves to the euphoria of other incessantly renewed mutual sacrifices. In the end, it is not possible for them to abandon the sacrifice and accept happiness without the third person in turn taking it on before departing—the carrier of evil, bringing in her wake the drama’s Erinyes, far from Australian land."
Milly as the villain stands outside the triangle because her self-hatred manifests as the urge to destroy another. But to love like the Flusky's, one needs to suffocate under the weight of love. Charles realizes the impossibility of this and moves on, while Milly stumbles blindly until the end.
Imperfect, but a masterpiece.
*Watched at Film Forum so I have no screenshots.
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