Queer monster of an artist that he was, Henry James could seldom keep a secret – at least with respect to his work. About his early masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, he revealed several in the Preface composed for the New York Edition of that novel: its date (1879) and whereabouts (Florence) of inception; its deliberate displacement of incident by character as the intended vehicle of plot; its grand architectural principle of design. James even went so far as to disclose what was ‘obviously the best thing’ about the book: namely Chapter 42, the quiet interlude in which Isabel Archer sits by her dying fire, far into the night, taking the dismal measure of her imprisoning marriage to Gilbert Osmond. ‘Reduced to its essence,’ James coyly admits, the episode is merely a ‘vigil of searching criticism; but it throws the action further forward than twenty “incidents” might have done.’ Designed ‘to have all the vivacity of incident and all the economy of picture’, the whole chapter is simply a representation of Isabel’s ‘ motionlessly seeing’, an enlargement of consciousness that signifies a crucial recuperative advance toward the heroine’s empowerment.1 What more tantalising incentive for cinematic translation could a feminist director want? Yet ‘the best thing’ about James’s Portrait does not appear in Jane Campion’s Portrait, an omission surely worthy of interrogation. P( 177)

 Admittedly, the challenge would be intimidating: how might a long, silent psychological tableau be conveyed through a necessarily abbreviated sequence of visual images (enhanced by a soundtrack)? Perhaps it can’t – and Campion’s avoidance of this moment in her film should be viewed as an indirect acknowledgement of a strategic problem of screen adaptation. Yet, what we do see in Campion’s Portrait subverts the convenience of this logic, because in other instances the director does use the camera to reveal the inner life of Isabel Archer (or at least her erotic fantasies). The issue, then, is not tactical but editorial, less one of technique than of judgment. How—and why—did ‘the best thing’ about the novel end up on the cutting room floor?

 In a preface to her screenplay of The Portrait of a Lady, Laura Jones comments on her intimate collaboration with Campion over ‘what kind of film it could be’. As they searched out the novel’s feminist implications over a series of meetings, director and writer resolved that their script should affirm the universal implications of ‘what it is like to be a girl like Isabel, in any time’. To accomplish this end, Jones asserts that they ‘had to do what James had done’, to understand Isabel (echoing a crucial phrase from the novelist’s own Preface) as their ‘“centre of consciousness”’2 Campion’s failure in translating According to Cynthia Ozick, Isabel (played by Nicole Kidman) is ‘far more Ms. Campion’s creation than James’s’, a crudely reductive parody of the novel’s complex original.3 As Janet Maslin quipped in the New York Times, ‘Instead of faithfully reiterating James’s novel, Ms. Campion choose to reimagine it as a Freudian fever dream.’4 In place of James’s nineteenth-century romantic idealist, Campion’s Isabel is a thoroughly postmodern female masochist.5 P( 178)

The episodes to which almost all viewers have had conflicting responses are really just three in number. The film’s anachronistically contemporary credit sequence (2:40) underscores the viewer’s status as voyeur, as a series of modish, casually dressed young women stare directly out from the screen or pose deliberately for the camera that observes them in restrained black-and-white.9 Before these images appear, and while the screen remains black, the soundtrack allows the audience to eavesdrop on several women (with conspicuously Australian accents) as they soliloquise on the erotics of a kiss, thereby audibly foregrounding the film’s central visual motif. In juxtaposing faceless, disembodied feminine subjectivity with a focused insistence on the female body-as-subject, Campion scripts a paradoxical kind of preface to her film, which when begins in medias res with Isabel Archer’s agitated reception of Lord Warburton’s offer of marriage. This unexpected visual rupture, doubly violent to anyone anticipating a more leisurely foregrounding of the subject (such as we so memorably recall from James’s novel), almost forces the viewer to gasp for air.10 P( 179)

The mood of the scene now modulates with the amplification of the musical score. Caressing her cheek in immediate repetition of Goodwood’s uninvited touch, Isabel then glides down the length of the bed, letting the silken fingers of its fringed canopy voluptuously brush her eyes and forehead. Invited, in reverie, to stretch across its breadth of chintz, Isabel displays her (still clothed) body for Goodwood and Warburton, both of whom press their lips to her, fore and aft. Turning her head to one side, Isabel opens her eyes to see her cousin Ralph beside her on the bed, watching intently as she receives the others’ kisses and touches.11 Startled by the sense of being observed, Isabel recoils from her fantasy, and the three men dissolve from the screen (Ralph independently, Warburton and Goodwood locked in violent confrontation.) P( 180)

On screen, Isabel’s ‘vibration’ doesn’t last for 10 minutes (rather 2:14), but what we see more than compensates for that compression. Making visually explicit what James reticently suggests, Campion’s treatment of this scene is richly nuanced, psychologically, especially through the inclusion of Ralph, whose presence as spectator marks his ambiguous role in the structure of Isabel’s sexual desire. In becoming aware of Ralph’s longing gaze, less voyeuristic than sympathetically vicarious, Isabel simultaneously becomes aware of the extent to which she has objectified herself for her lovers, an epiphany that both feeds and disrupts her fantasy of arousal.12 This evocative scene works at once to convey Isabel’s ripe vulnerability as well as to confirm her modest, virginal capacity for self-defence. P( 181)

Together with the ruthless foreshortening of the novel’s expository prelude to the heroine’s arrival in England (to begin with Warburton’s proposal of marriage is to dispense with nearly one-fifth of James’s text, the whole American foreground of Isabel’s career), the rather bald vulgarization of Osmond makes her decision to marry him simply inexplicable. The novel’s careful elaboration of the social context of Isabel’s half-educated unconventionality, her impulsive will and the irritable moral consciousness with which James endows her—all this can only be glanced at in Campion’s film through a kind of visual shorthand. After refusing Warburton, Isabel decides to go down to London (confirming her impulse to run from things that perplex her), in order to meet her American friend, the journalist Henrietta Stackpole, and tour the capital. On the morning of her niece’s departure for the city, Mrs Touchett insists that her cousin accompany her so that European standards of decorum can be observed: ‘With Ralph you may go anywhere,’ she explains. ‘Isn’t anything proper here?’ Isabel angrily asks. Bluntly, her aunt rejoins: ‘You’re too fond of your own ways, miss.’ While Isabel ransacks her wardrobe, setting aside things for the servants to pack, the camera rapidly shifts perspective to reinforce the impression of her impetuosity. But when she turns to answer Mrs Touchett’s question, the focus briefly lingers on the dressing screen behind her; for an instant we can observe more closely an intimate detail of Isabel’s personal surroundings. P( 182)

A fifth slip at the top of the series remains totally obscure (and possibly blank). In fact, only the first two are readily legible to the viewer (the camera pauses for only a fraction of a second in its upward sweep), suggesting that while Isabel correctly has supplied a definition for probity, she is still uncertain about the meaning of nihilism. P ( 183)

When Isabel finally meets her fate in his museum-like Florentine villa, the camera again works to circumscribe her vision and volition. In the novel Isabel feels very much that she is in the presence of a truly distinguished man. ‘His pictures, his medallions and tapestries were interesting,’ James reports; ‘but after a while Isabel felt the owner much more so, and independently of them, thickly as they seemed to overhang him. He resembled no one she had ever seen…Her mind contained no class offering a natural place to Mr. Osmond—he was a specimen apart’(PL,224). In Campion’s version, Isabel’s comprehension of the whole setting seems much less significant than Osmond’s taking his daughter between his knees, circling her waist with his arms, and stroking her bare forearms with his hands. The lingering image of Osmond’s more-than-fatherly fondling sensualises Isabel’s apprehension at the expense of equally significant social or aesthetic impressions to which she might otherwise be susceptible. Whereas James’s heroine comes away from this first meeting impressed with Osmond’s remarkable success in preserving his worldly independence, Campion focuses instead on Isabel’s Iatent sexual curiosity.13

 From this point onwards, the film deliberately forecloses Isabel’s imagined freedom and inclines towards a kind of visual prurience. Wanting, confessedly, to ‘physicalize what James only implied’,14 Campion bestows on Osmond an overwhelming tactile magnetism. The first touch of a man’s lips—outside the realm of fantasy—snares Isabel completely. ‘I’m absolutely in love with you,’ Osmond says as he forcibly kisses her beneath the bower of her parasol. His words—and lip—haunt the young woman as she journeys to far off lands, an interlude (1:45) marked for us by the visual anachronism of a grainy black-and-white home movie. Nominally intended to be an amateur souvenir of the heroine’s travels, this rapid sequence of clips also serves as a surrealist vehicle to disclose her psychological entrapment. Isabel’s instinct to flee what confounds her no longer answers her predicament. Seen from above, the tossing of the ship, the back-and-forth shifting of furniture and cargo, reflects a disturbing new inner ambivalence; the lateral roll of the steamer suggests stasis rather than forward motion. Likewise, the exaggerated speed of some of the footage (Isabel, clad in desert garb, atop an Egyptian camel) abruptly contrasts with the camera’s arrested focus on bizarre, isolated images: an enormous pair of lips echoes Osmond’s fateful declaration; a plate of beans labially transmogrifies to repeat his words again; the swirling pattern of the parasol becomes a vortex into which Isabel’s nude, prone body plunges. For the film to become more self-conscious than its heroine may seem an odd reversal; but with this compressed montage of cinematic styles, Campion surely is commenting on her own medium rather than on James. The filming of a lady now takes precedence to the portrait of one, but the logic of the act seems inexorably pornographic.15 P ( 184)

Most tellingly, perhaps, Isabel’s inward reactions to her situation seem difficult for the director confidently to place or understand. While Jones’s screenplay attempts faithfully to record Isabel’s moments of self-discovery in tandem with the novel’s unfolding structure, Campion rearranges these scenes in a kind of editing juggle. When Isabel finally sees, horrifically, that Madame Merle shares Osmond’s interest in capturing Warburton (‘let us have him,’ she inadvertently declares), her startled reaction takes the form of a question: ‘Who are you…What have you to do with me?’ Glacially, Madame Merle responds: ‘Everything.’ As before, Isabel’s instinctive reaction to unpleasantness is to escape through physical withdrawal. Jones’s screenplay registers this by next showing Isabel walking by herself in a twilit grove of cypress trees (‘contemplating the ruins of her happiness’ [PL-S,105]). P( 186)