No Country for Old Virgins — Or, Come to Think of It, Shameless, Tricky Harlots, Either
So I went to see The Other Boleyn Girl, this afternoon, with a few acquaintances of mine. I’ve been a bit out of the loop, lately, and if I hadn’t happened to overhear half of a satirical SNL sketch, last night (’Excuse my ruddy color, I’ve just come back from the field — where I was having sex with a horse’ — a dig at the film’s legendary ‘Thighs’ scene) I’d be able to say that I walked into the film with no preconceptions, whatsoever — I hadn’t even seen the official movie poster before I sat down to watch the film.
If you’re arching an eyebrow at the word ‘film’, I’ll wholeheartedly agree that the plot of this movie left much to be desired. Melodramatic, salacious, facile, glib, torrential without ever reaching depth… I love history, but I’m not a tremendous buff of the Tudor period — a History Channel special, The Six Wives of King Henry VIII, is about the extent of my knowledge, here — and yet, even I knew that the storyline had taken an exceptional degree of poetic license in interpreting history into a two hour motion picture.
Anne Boleyn has historically been described as intensely contradictory. She was the individual who pressured Henry VIII to secede from the Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope, which the movie I saw today attributes to nothing else aside from her sheer lust and aim for power. And yet, Anne, a consumate courtier, a lover of cards and revelry, and a dauntless power broker, was also intensely religious. She owned one of the very first Bibles written in the English language, and worked quite hard, via her later courtly influence, to save the lives of Protestant reformers who had been condemned to death for heresy. She was quite well versed in both the spiritual and political ramifications of the religious turmoil of her age and had a very clear, quite heart-felt position that the Catholic church’s corruption and weakening of both integrity and authority was damaging to the one true faith. To portray Anne Boleyn’s push towards severance with the Roman Catholic Church as little more than petty and rashly spontaneous power-grabbing is to erase at least half of the exceptional woman that she truly was. One might as well portray Voltaire as an empty-headed fop or Anne’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, England’s Virgin Queen, as a mere frigid figurehead.

Which brings me to a more general complaint — that of Natalie Portman’s quaking, quivering ‘nervous breakdown’ moments in the film, which reminded me quite a bit of Milla Jovovich’s quivering, quaking and hyperbolic fits of crying in 1999’s story of Joan of Arc, The Messenger. They both represent the sort of portrayal which says that, well, obviously women can vie for power, but just as obviously they can never truly handle it once they have it and, moreover, the indisputable reality is that they simply cannot create anything as solid or as sensible as a plan to carry them through the thick of things once they’re in them. What trade-offs we modern women accept to see an iconic figure played up in lights. It quite makes one wistful for the late Katherine Hepburn.
Having said all that, The Other Boleyn Girl is visually and thematically stunning. The rich, lush backdrop of the set, combined with the gorgeous period costumes, luscious photography and lighting, and the full commitment of the cast to their dialogue and characters, creates a strange and fantastical hybrid-beast of a film — half low-brow camp, ala Valley of the Dolls, half reverential mysticism.
Which is why I might even half-heartedly recommend it — given an understanding that it’s the film and not the lady the film portrays which is the truly insubstantial eyecandy.




Admittedly, I read this book several months ago, yet it’s had such an impact on me I wanted to turn back time and review it here.
I can’t resist pointing out, however, the difference between the two versions of this book that were released in Canada and in the US. The Canadian version is a straightforward description of what this book is about. The US version, on the other hand, is almost a plea before the reader can look any further — "Bear in mind that we have plenty right now — this book is not about depriviation! Here, look at this big juicy tomato!" And it really isn’t about deprivation. It’s about an awareness that will hopefully lead to revitilization.










