DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE NAME : HOUSE OF MIRTH

One of my aims in this year’s festival was to introduce my mother to the concept of festivals and to make sure she got a taste for them. We tried out one film, again a classic that I will possibly write out later but in fact maybe not, but it was a disaster. A little too “artistic” for well… Anyone’s taste, even mine. I mean I appreciated it but didn’t like it if you see what I mean… So anyway, this was “take two” in that area. An adaptation from a novel, a period piece, I was pretty confident this time round would be a success. It was, in that Mom loved it, however I wish someone had told me Edith Wharton’s books (this one at any rate) were so damn gloomy. I felt quite shell-shocked on exit. I mean, I see that it had to be that way, it was meant as a social critique after all, but still…
We are in the year 1905, in New York. “Society” lives on in pretty much the same way as it does now, and there are the hubs and then those on the outskirts. One of the inhabitants of the outskirts is Lilly Bart. She is a “member” but an unfortunate one; she is an orphan, has a small income of her own but is heavily dependent on her maiden aunt whose attentions she shares with another cousin Grace. To obtain independence, those days being what they were, Lilly must marry and as soon as possible, things are not as simple as they seem however. Quite apart from the fact that she has made a bit of a name for herself as a “man hunter”, and the fact that she has rather large gambling depts, she has a very real but very complicated liaison (one can barely call it an affair even by the standards of those days) with up and coming (but not wealthy) lawyer Lawrence Seldon. We arrive as spectators at a critical time in her life: when she must sink or swim, and every decision may actually be one of life and death… Will she be able to make the right choices though?
The book – and thus the film – is a stinging critique of American “high society” at the turn of the century. Of course in actual fact, the morals were no tighter than they are today, affairs were carried on whether you were married or not but you had to know how to keep up appearances. If you were “caught out” as it were, your name was stained forever, and getting back “in” with the friends of yore was very tough. This condition affected your entire future as once you were “out”, those who wanted to get “in” had to cut all ties from you too for fear they would be “tainted” with your stain… Add to this the condition of Lilly, this is the turn of the century, women were not well educated and could not expect to get good jobs, by this I mean jobs that would ensure a living and independence, so “connections” are everything… Life, social life, love live, all is reduced to walking a maze of very confusing tightropes and one false step will send you plummeting in to the abyss. When it is such a false and harsh society that we are criticizing, you can imagine that the story of Lilly is not a happy one…
And I am sorry to say that some of the values of the day still seem to be valid today. True, women are educated and can gain their independence, get jobs easily; for a woman like Lilly, yes there would be a fall but the fall wouldn’t be as great as it is in the story… But still the “high society” survives, the rules of entry are still strict, and the morals, though looser, still imperatives… Rather sad to think about it for any length of time, but human nature I suppose…