Campion, Kidman Paint Innovative, Enigmatic 'Lady'

Don't judge by appearances, so the saying goes, and certainly not by the opening credits of "The Portrait of a Lady." As images of young women in various poses and distinctly 20th century attire drift on to the screen, you think for a moment that you've stumbled into the wrong theatre. Then you realize it's Jane Campion directing, and you brace yourself for a completely "reinterpretive" take on the Henry James classic.

Fortunately, James fans can relax a little. Apart from the opening and a few surrealistic dream sequences (which are, of course, creations of the director) this new film adaptation is surprisingly faithful to the novel--at least on the surface level of plot and dialogue.

An attractive American girl of the late 19th century, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) comes to England to visit her wealthy expatriate relatives. She succeeds in charming both her invalid cousin, Ralph Touchett (Martin Donovan), and a fine English lord (Richard Grant). But she refuses the lord's proposal of marriage and expresses her desire to see more of life. Her cousin, intrigued by her independent vision, persuades his dying father (John Gielgud) to leave her sufficient money to realize her dreams. Mr. Touchett complies, and upon his death Isabel inherits a fortune.

She goes to Italy to begin her quest to "see life," but through the plotting of a duplicitous friend, Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey), gets ensnared by a cold-hearted aesthete and fortune-hunter, Gilber Osmond (John Malkovich). Their marriage quickly sours, and tensions between them rise to a crisis. First, Lord Warburton, Isabel's old suitor, reappears and begins to pay court to Pansy, Osmond's lovely but completely subjugated daughter. Later, Isabel learns that her cousin Ralph is dying.

All this is straight from the original text, but there are definite Campionesque touches that separate the film from more traditional Merchant-Ivory or "Sense and Sensibility"-style approaches. Hauntingly ethereal music of reed flutes, reminiscent of "The Piano" though written by a different composer, runs throughout the movie. Wildly tilted shots of staircases and courtyards sporadically break up the Renaissance symmetry of Florence. The lush beauty and color of balls and beautiful Italian gardens are interspersed with visually spare scenes enveloped in bluish shadows. The symbolic medium of a glass case or prisonlike bars distorts our view of the characters.

And then there are the dream sequences: a fairly tame but eerie sexual fantasy near the beginning; and later, a dream involving a series of black and white images, beginning like an early '20s film reel but dissolving into even more dreamlike images of whispering lips and a hand gripping Isabel's waist--first clothed, then naked.

The director's style enshrouds the story in an atmosphere of mystery that is further accentuated by Kidman's engimatic remoteness. The pain of Isabel is evident, but not the inner spirit that makes her so attractive to Ralph Touchett (and so aggravating to Osmond). This may be due more to the scripting of the role than to her acting, but in any case it is Isabel more than any other character whom we find fundamentally unfathomable. Why does she submit to such a wretched marriage? What is it that she wants? Whom does she truly love?

These questions are inherent in the book as well, but there is more psychological penetration in James than in Campion, even if the same ambiguities remain. Watching the film, you may wonder once or twice whether there isn't a strain of masochism underlying Isabel's sexuality--or vice versa.

On the other hand, the character of the superlatively cultured and corrupted Madame Merle, Osmond's female counterpart and ally, is as complex as Isabel's yet far more comprehensible and as effectively conveyed, if not more so, in the film by Campion as in the book. The rest of the acting is good as well, though Malkovich's Osmond is a bit too repulsive to convince us that Isabel could ever have fallen for him.

Intriguing, visually beautiful, but emotionally distant, Campion's "Portrait" is a spare one--or rather, an abstract one with spaces that are left to the viewer to fill. In the end, viewers will get as much out of it as they are willing to pull from it. Campion doesn't give any answers, only openended questions, powerful in their suggestivenes but frustrating in their essential opacity.