Innocence Surrendered
FILM: The Last September
DIRECTOR: Deborah Warner
STARRING: Keeley Hawes, Maggie Smith
GRADE: B
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STRANGER IN A FAMILIAR LAND: LOIS (KEELEY HAWES) IS ABOUT TO HAVE HER PROTECTED IRISH LIFE DISRUPTED BY CONFLICT IN THE LAST SEPTEMBER.
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A young Irish girl gambols through a verdant forest, giggling with
delight at her afternoon frolic with a handsome British military officer. She
is young, she is full of life, and she hasn't a clue about the implications of
her involvement with a man wearing the brown and tan uniform so widely
associated with oppression in her country. So begins Deborah Warner's richly
symbolic, deeply insightful The Last September, a film that looks
at the implications for a single family of the revolution that finally will
bring independence to Ireland.
Adapted by John Banville from the Elizabeth Bowen novel, The
Last September is set in the late summer of 1920. It is the story of Lois
Farquar (Keeley Hawes), the 19-year-old niece of Sir Richard Naylor (Michael
Gambon) and his wife, Lady Myra (Maggie Smith). Lois has lived all her life in
Ireland, as have her aunt and uncle. Lois has never been off her native island,
not even to England. Yet all the members of this family consider themselves to
be English-rooted, part of the occupying aristocracy whose lineage stretches
back 800 years. The Naylors and their kind live a luxurious life of garden
parties and massive gatherings with friends for festive picnics and graceful
games of tennis on manicured grass courts. These Anglo-Irish control most of
the good land in Ireland and live comfortable lives on the proceeds, all the
while looking down their noses at the "indigenous" Irish who serve them as
domestics or farmhands or keep the shops in the villages.
Interestingly enough, these land-owning, titled Irish also look
down upon the British soldiers who protect them from the rebels practicing a
bloody terrorism in their revolutionary campaign. The British enlisted men are
all products of the working class, and even officers like Lois' suitor, Capt.
Gerald Colthurst (David Tennant), are common men without land, breeding or
money. In short, the Anglo-Irish nobility are a people apart, separated from
the land from which their power and privilege stems, but separated as well from
the people in whose midst they have spent their entire lives.
Author Bowen and screenwriter Banville are wise, then, to focus on
the character of a sprightly young woman in the first flush of her maturity,
for it's far easier to generate sympathy for someone as yet largely untainted
than it is to make us care extensively for either the calculating Sir Richard
or the condescending Lady Myra. Lois, in contrast to her aunt and uncle, has
yet to see the world as divided into a small circle of "us" and a large mass of
unwashed "them." And as the course of the movie develops, she finds herself
torn between romantic feelings for the courtly and proper Gerald and an almost
overtly sexual attraction for a boyhood playmate, Peter Connolly (Gary Lydon),
who is now a leader in the Irish Republican Army. Caught between these
competing but mutually exclusive attractions, of course, Lois stands for (at
least the best of) her entire privileged set. For even Sir Richard and Lady
Myra cherish the physical beauty of their homeland and, in fact, regard
themselves as Irish however much their political loyalties lie with the British
crown. In this context, Bowen's choice to make Lois an orphan stands as
artistically significant. Literally without parents, Lois is figuratively free
to choose a heritage for herself.
The themes of this movie instantly recall Regis Wargnier's
magnificent Indochine, which looks at a family of 1950s white plantation
owners who consider themselves French as they speak French, eat French cuisine,
celebrate French art and music, even though they have lived for generations on
the green land of Vietnam. Lois is a girl who has enjoyed the privilege of her
elite rearing, but she has not developed a political consciousness. She grew up
with "indigenous" Irish children and still considers a shopkeeper's daughter,
Livvy Connolly (Emily Nagle), to be her best friend. And she thinks of herself
exclusively as Irish rather than English, so she is confused rather than
offended when she's taunted to "go back to England."
In the film's pivotal scene, when Lois has become increasingly
enamored of Livvy's revolutionary brother, Peter, going so far as to commit
crimes of cooperation to protect him, the two become lovers. But in the midst
of an act of consensual sex, Peter's powerful feelings of resentment -- not at
Lois personally, we presume, but at her station -- overcome him, and tender
lovemaking turns into rape. This can only be read as a sad emblem of centuries
of discrimination, a complicated and brilliant metaphor for the end of British
rule in Ireland. Revolutionary goals are seldom achieved peacefully. Many in
the Ireland of that era had grown weary of achieving independence by purely
political means. Violence, so many felt, was required. The Anglo-Irish were the
ruling English clan of Ireland, and they had to be forcibly swept aside.
So much is going on here. Representing the ruling class in her
person, Lois cannot bond with the Irish rebel; she has to be ravaged. And yet,
she is an innocent, a would-be peacemaker. In all wars -- revolutions and
otherwise -- innocents suffer as mightily as the guilty. If violence did not
prevail, then the peacemakers might have achieved a free Ireland without
bloodshed. Or perhaps not. Whatever, violence does prevail. People suffer and
die. Young women are raped. In the aftermath, Lois must choose who she will be,
and the experience has scarred her enough that she almost certainly becomes
someone different than she might have otherwise. An image that superimposes her
mirrored face on that of her jaded cousin Marda Norton (Fiona Shaw) suggests
the path Lois will take, that of resignation, cynicism and the pursuit of
self-interest. In Peter's rape, Ireland has cast her out, literally as well as
figuratively, and both will be the lesser for no longer being joined. Movies don't get much more impressive than this.
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