Daisy: A Study

SO FAR this year in film has ushered forth two unquestionably vapid Daisies, plucked from two unquestionably fertile literary minds, played by two unquestionably beautiful women. First to be deflowered was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow plays the role with all of its attendant splendour and graceful, but inevitably brutish, carelessness. Farrow maintains a delicate balance between a gay childishness with her illicit lover, Gatsby, and a wanton callousness, a total disregard for anybody's feelings. Henry James's novella, Daisy Miller, adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich, is a portrait of exactly that kind of woman. But Cybill Shepherd's performance is slightly more questionable. In fact, the whole movie is questionable, like one of James's long spiralling sentences, full of commas, semicolons, and dashes--seemingly interminable. Bogdanovich's problem is that he can't capture James's true genius on film; his eloquent logic and perfect grammar which exact a very precise, objectively presented psychological mood.

The story runs like this: a young American dilettante studying in Switzerland meets and falls immediately in love with a delicate but forthright American girl on an extended holiday in Europe with her family. But the proper American boy, while utterly fascinated by this spontaneous girl, can't come out of his somber cocoon long enough to express his love, more through a fear of social impropriety than of rejection. In one sense, the story is a psychological Romeo and Juliet: his family of assumptions and hers won't let their loves come together. There's also a element of class barriers, although neither Frederick Forsythe Winterbourne (Barry Brown) nor Annie P. Miller, alias Daisy (Cybill Shepherd) have money problems. Winterbourne has all of the necessary graces to succeed in the elite American circles of Europe while Daisy, a mixture of pariah and parvenu, doesn't even know enough to hold her teacup with her pinky extended. The real tension arises when she rejects his stiff pleas for conformity and rebels against the double-standard demands of his social circles. Daisy goes out with strange men late into the night; she burns and glows in the dark like a luminescent jewel until she is consumed by Europe.

James's intention was to reveal the hypocrisies of the snobbish upper classes. His little sketch of Daisy is the portrayal of everything they scorn; even more, it is an affront to the whole of Victorian society and its stiff, sexual repression. Daisy, said one Philadelphian publisher in rejecting the long story written in 1878, was "an outrage to American girlhood." Yet, Daisy is not an outrage: She is the one alive person in the story amidst a virtual morgue of grey propriety. She's also coquettish, a flirt of the worst sort, and a damnable tease. But throughout the story one is never sure if it's not just a reaction to what is expected of her, if in America she wouldn't be the life of the party. In Henry James's Europe, the locale for most of his novels, she is the literal death of the party.

If one had to sum up what Bogdanovich has done to the novel in his film in one sentence, it would have to be a line uttered in absolute disgust about Daisy's flirtations and how they violate expected sex roles: "A man may know every one, men are welcome to that privilege." The implication is that Daisy may certainly not know everyone, and Bogdanovich sets out to exploit the underlying sexual currents of this statement. One of the mysterious qualities of James's novella is the question of Winterbourne's motives. At the very beginning there are intimations of an illicit relationship between him and another woman never seen in the book. Then the narrative returns to the story at hand and we are led into Winterbourne's mind only enough to tantalize. You can never really tell if he's out to win Daisy's heart or her other parts. It's as if James were saying, "Draw what conclusions you may about Winterbourne's motivations." And Bogdanovich does exactly that; he ruins the suspense by spelling it out in big capital letters: SEX.

Take, for example, the character of Mrs. Walker, the dominant figure in Rome's exclusive American circle. She is a kind of bridge between high society and the real world. Instead of rejecting Daisy outright, as all of her uppity friends do, she tries to save the young girl's precariously balanced reputation. Bogdanovich turns this worldy-wise matron into a more raw, sensual character with hints of an affair just ending between her and Winterbourne. Admittedly, Eileen Brennan's performance as the feline Mrs. Walker is very convincing. However, to pull it off completely, the film has to enlarge another character from the book into Mrs. Walker's present lover. This fellow that throws Winterbourne knowing glances about his real intentions with Daisy.

If ever you've gone off with a member of the opposite sex at a party, for perfectly innocent reasons of conversation or just escape from the masses and left behind a friend who makes everybody look your way before you're through the door, then you know how insidious this character is. Frankly, James wouldn't have stood for him; the sexual undertones are too explicit. No, James leaves those doors through which two people walk to the imagination of the reader. He gives you the gossip, and from there, it depends on how perverse or vivid your imagination is. Bogdanovich's is depraved: he makes Winterbourne's feeble mobility into a hypocritical desire for Daisy.

BUT THESE ARE all trifles. Here is a perfectly good story, James's first popular success made for the first time into a movie. Eventually it has to be dealt with on its own terms. And these terms are, for the most part, non-cinematic in the avante-garde sense of the word. Bogdanovich sticks strictly to the traditional narrative film, so much so that editing is kept to a minimum. Instead he prefers smooth transitions within scenes: the long-shot, dolly-in and pan. The colors are rich, almost too opulent--the Victorian chambers begin to blend into each other in a boring kind of luxuriance, and that doesn't help the sometimes tedious dialogue.

Bogdanovich is absolutely aware of how his faithfulness to the novella's dialogue makes the film slow-going. (To be fair, he's done an amazing job with James's ostentatious, overblown verbiage.) He knows how to tantalize in his own medium as much as James did in his through surprising cuts between scenes.

Frederick Raphael, who co-authored the script, throught up the film's most striking flourish. Its scene is not the expected lavish suite, but a steam-bath replete with floating tea-trays and chess-games. It's a crude American vulgarization, inspired no doubt by the array of gadgetry available to backyard swimming pool aficianados, but it works wonderfully to spark dialogue-dulled attentions back onto the screen. There are little self-parodies of the film's seriousness like this throughout, and while they work to keep your attention they only attest to a certain amount of disinterestedness in the real story and its need for extensive but-tressing.

Henry James originally subtitled Daisy Miller as "A Study." Later on, in a 1909 preface to the novella he suppressed the subtitle, claiming it was mere poetic artifice. But he also wrote then that readers might have mistaken the subtitle for a literal epithet to his "poor little heroine's" name, characterized by flatness. "Flatness indeed," wrote James, "one must have felt, was the very sum of her story; so that perhaps after all the attached epithet was meant but as a deprecation, addressed to the reader, of any great critical hope of stirring scenes." If the film had used the subtitle, its viewers would have been correct in just such an assumption. Bogdanovich can't offer anything beyond a literal, superficial interpretation in his Daisy Miller. Sexual undertones are about as subtle as the emulsion on celluloid; without them it couldn't work at all; with them it's just barely worth seeing. But be warned: take James's words to heart.