The Oppression of Innocence

[setsuled]

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Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. I chose to watch The Age of Innocence again, Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel. I first saw the movie a few years before reading the book so I was surprised by how funny the book is. Wharton's merciless satire of 19th century New York high society becomes a melancholy tale of lost love in Scorsese's hands.

The movie's certainly well cast. Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder offer the perfect contrast of a sharp, intelligent woman obliged by society to bear a yoke of quiet indignity and a pretty young woman for whom the world is a simple, pretty place. There's a wryness in Wharton's narrative that's largely absent from the movie. Pfeiffer's performance is more wounded while the impression of the scandalous divorcee in the book is a little more one of boldness. Still, it's a lovely film.

As with a lot of period films, I couldn't help being reminded of Japan to-day. Many of the manners depicted in the film and book, particularly the inability to speak of many things directly, still have currency in Japan.

The Age of Innocence is available this month on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1980

The roughly mannered goat was given grass.
A tardy status formed the gist of gold.
The other lookers deemed the man an ass.
Still more were wont to call him merely old.
But smarter sorts were wont to ponder on.
A tray of tiny pearls was served to God.
Such actions call for sorting wicked prawn.
But which of them were bad or simply odd?
Let judges show for what they're paid for life.
Let war and peace be brokered by the bed.
The chorus holds there be a better strife.
A pretty kind that ends with no-one dead.
So raise chimeras over states and kings.
And break the fingers wearing evil rings.