The Blood Oranges (1998)

A film by Philip Haas of a John Hawkes novel I briefly considered for my “top 50 novels since ‘68” list but culled. I wish I could call it a draw – what the film loses from the novel’s intricate literary game-playing and layers upon layers, it gains in immediacy and concreteness. But I can’t – once again, the film of a novel is not as good as the novel, because There’s So Much More In The Novel. In fairness, there’s not vastly more in the novel, but I do miss what was left out. This far from trivialises the film, though. It’s still a fucked-up movie from a fucked-up book with all the same creepy unease, all the uncomfortably unsexy sexuality, all the atmosphere, so mysteriously indefinable, and those intimations of Gothic horror peeking from the edges, only just kept at bay by the sun. 

The basic set-up is this: Cyril (beautifully played by Charles Dance) may or may not be a charming psychopath, or he may just be a very woke, hyper-mature, forward-thinking guy who has transcended bourgeois morality. He lives a blissful life in a very nice house, just outside a village in a pointedly unnamed country that looks Mexican, with his pretty wife (the actress who played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks), in a progressive liberal open marriage. At least, it's an open marriage when anyone else is around, but for the most part, they live entirely cut off from the world, and from normal life. We know absolutely nothing else about them, and basically never find out anything more. One day, a tourist couple with some young children get stranded and Cyril and his wife take them in, and immediately set out to seduce them (not the kids, chillax). Things don't end brilliantly. Or they do, depending on your viewpoint. 

Unfortunately Hawkes’ piece de resistance of grotesquerie has lost all its novelty since he introduced it in 1971 so the film suffers from a revelation without the dark seedy impact Hawkes was counting on. But even though there are a profusion of key scenes and excellent details from the novel that I mildly regret didn’t make it in (to varying degrees of mildness), and they have (with some wisdom) tamed the rococo chronological structure that Hawkes showed off with, on the whole this is pretty much the novel brought to life. Except for the film’s explicitness about that once-inconceivable-now-old-hat act, it would take some deep musings (and a better memory) to decide if the film takes any firm positions that the novel leaves open, although if I remember rightly, “Rosella” is only the name that Cyril gives his Hispanic maid, whereas in the film that does appear to be her real name as another character from the village addresses her that way. 

Maybe the film could have been more oppressively intense, more vivdly grim and heightened, but the airy ambiguity of it, as if half-eschewing or wilfully repressing the nature of the situation, is also true to the novel in its own way. There’s a touch of Marienbad to the whole affair. Whether a film determined to be literary, entirely given over to symbolism and multiple interpretations and subtexts, is really in the spirit of cinema as its own art-form, could be taken as a good question with this film as a test-case. Haas gives us an abundantly, richly hued and saturated realisation of a lot of the novel’s crucial imagery, on an unmistakably low budget, so he makes it as cinematic as possible within his own constraints, but our basic mode of relating to the film is to make a neat little account of how it all fits together so that we can ponder and settle on the real meaning, instead of feeling that the materials of film have been manipulated in themselves to create their effect on us directly. We’re constantly sifting what we see. When we think about another creepy-relationship film, The Night Porter, our whole emphasis of how to understand it falls on working out how the film has systematically guided our responses. With The Blood Oranges, we’re really concerned with what the film has shown us in a much more calmly cerebral way, so that it feels like less has been exploited about the form Haas is working in – this character represents that, that character represents this, and their scenes enact a philosophical view of how those concepts affect each other, which we can then précis in our heads. There is an argument, of course, that this is exactly how an art-film should work – as I say, test case. 

Like Mother!, you could think of the main male character as a stand-in for (or satire of) a film director, but really the film closest in thinking and design to The Blood Oranges is Sirens, which presents a very similar concept (to the point of being an obvious twin movie) in a far more ingratiating and harmless manner which works so much more successfully in making its case. Haas prefers a sinister ambiguity about what his film’s case actually is, always keeping us at arm’s length, which makes it a more challenging and nuanced experience intellectually but could also be taken as just using cleverness to hedge his bets in comparison to Sirens, rather like this sentence. 

For all that, The Blood Oranges does linger on in the mind, a naggingly vague provocation, and while a fever-dream intensity might have suited it even better, its off-centre dreaminess is precisely what makes it haunting.