i’ll see you in your dreams
by
Douglas Messerli
John
Meehan, Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Constance Collier, and Vincent
Lawrence (screenplay, based on a story by George du Maurier), Henry Hathaway
(director) Peter Ibbetson / 1935
The
French Surrealists, helped along by the work’s rediscovery by Paul Eluard, adored
Henry Hathaway’s 1935 film, Peter
Ibbetson, based on the tale of 1891 by George Du Maurier. For them it not
only encapsulated the concept of a love that survives all obstacles expressed
in the term l’amour fou, but, through
its shadowy, slightly blurred sequences created by cinematographer Charles
Lang, perceived it as a sensual justification for the primacy of dreams. If
this fact might help to elevate the film’s status for English and American
viewers, it also simply reconfirms the retrograde Romantic tendencies of that
movement and its questionable idealization of childhood, as well as their often
patriarchal genuflection before what they saw as the “feminine principle.” And
even if one finds plenty to enjoy in this fairy-tale like fantasia, one has to
wade through the film’s excessive sentimentality and rigid religiosity to get
there.
His superior may be blind, but he sees right
through his favorite worker, suggesting he take a break in gay Paris. There,
our diffident hero encounters, at a local museum, a worker who might be more at
home in a dance hall, with whom, without hesitation, he immediately takes up.
Indeed, we realize it’s a perfect combination because it will never lead him into
evil; she is so every day and course that she cannot possibly lead such a
distracted young man astray. Peter is so dreamy
that he hardly knows she is there, particularly when they wander out to the old
estate he inhabited as a boy. Like an adult child, his new-found paramour runs
straight to the swing, expecting him to push her up into sexual ecstasy, while
Peter stumbles around the now decaying grounds, rummaging like a sleepwalker,
through the memories of his distant past.
Returning to London, he is immediately
bundled off to York, where he has been asked to design an addition to a stable
on the wealthy Duke of Powers (John Halliday) estate. The man’s beautiful wife,
the Duchess (Ann Harding) wants the new stables to match precisely the ancient,
straw-thatched creation of decades before. Sound familiar? If this lovely lady
does not precisely seek a simulacrum, she is certainly expressing her
preference for an imitation of life, while our hero is determined to “make it
new,” to tear down the old stables in order to construct a useful, more modern
structure to house her husband’s beloved horses. Briefly, the two wittily duke
it out, the young architect winning over the equally stubborn Duchess,
particularly since she immediately perceives there are greater things at stake.
While they recognize they now have no
choice but to break off any further intercourse—if for no reason than to keep
that pure and innocent relationship from becoming tainted by the carnality they
now both desire—we recognize that they have no longer have any choice in the
matter. They are doomed by the very fact that they have been expelled from that
childhood Eden. Embracement and kisses symbolically replace what is a virtual rape,
as they enter a world where the Duke’s attempt to end their retreat from time
through murder can result only in the end of his own present life. Peter kills
the Duke in self-defense, but destroys him and his lover in the same act.
The rest of the story unfurls—or we might
better say, rewinds—itself as if the two were simultaneously staring into a
mirror. Once more, Peter is pulled away from his loved one, this time to endure
an even more horrific imprisonment, because it is real, than the one which he
suffered as a young lad. There, like Christ, he is mocked, beaten, and,
finally, crucified on the frame of his own bed. Both, through intense suffering
and near-death, find themselves now able to transcend life, particularly since
they have, in fact, long ago given up the present. Mary visits her lover in his
sleep, returning to him through the emblem of a ring, the next morning. And
once they realize the powers they now have to escape the world in which they
are only slightly still contained, they meet nightly in each other’s dreams.
If this “transcendent” experience might
have been presented, by a more imaginative group of writers and a more
brilliant director, as a true world apart from the one we know, by, let us
imagine, an eerie surrealist landscape or, better yet, a slightly askew
Expressionist world that
could transport
us visually into another time and place, Hathaway and his five scribes instead
present us with what later might be described as a Hallmark Card vision of
paradise. There’s a wonderful moment, when Peter (like Christ’s Peter, a rock),
after temporarily losing his faith, encounters a monstrous landslide that
nearly does him and his dream-love in; but they quickly rediscover those heavenly
pastures where they lay down in bucolic pleasure throughout the long night, the
music swelling up into Wagnerian
proportions in case we missed the point. Even a rock eventually crumbles.
Even more banally, when our worn-out
heroine finally dies, she meets her lover one last time to invite him into a
Christian-like paradise, all spirit and no fun. “I’m waiting for you,” she breathes
out the last words she is permitted to speak. God is such a kill-joy! But then,
I guess he is willing to allow this couple through the pearly gates, despite
the red letters (or perhaps purple passages) this clichéd piece of cinema has
blazoned across their chests.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, without so much
prudery and propriety, and ending in a far-less ethereal after-life—these
ghosts do fortunately materialize—did this all so much better.
Los Angeles,
December 14, 2014
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