Thursday: meet with Mum and Dad at Somerset House, by the ice rink. Then to the Sickert show at the Courtauld gallery next door, before making our way down to the Dulwich Picture Gallery for ‘The Age Of Enchantment’: a fantastic exhibition of Beardsley-influenced fantasy illustration up to the 1930s. Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson et al. Includes Beardsley’s own desk. Mum shocked about Beardsley’s death at 26. Easy to forget, given the enviable amount of work he still managed to put out. An above-average lifetime’s work, in a far too short lifetime. Bump into the artist Sina Shamsavari, whose drawing style carries something of the same influence down the line.
Friday: with Ms Silke to the Odeon Mezzanine to see Sleuth. It’s a slightly self-consciously modern remake, all jump cuts between surveillance cameras and overly close close-ups, with Jude Law in the Michael Caine role, Caine in the Olivier role, and Harold Pinter rewriting the script. Pinter the actor even gets a clever cameo.
Very Pinter indeed, in fact, with more character study going on below the surface than Anthony Shaffer’s original. The 70s film was ultimately a straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller, despite its unique twists. No sign of the anachronistic Shaffer line that Morrissey purloined for ‘This Charming Man’: ‘You’re just a jumped-up pantry boy, who never knew his place.’
Pinter’s additions include Caine’s millionaire character listing various celebrities he claims to know: Madonna, Dick Cheney, Mike Tyson, even The Queen. Were I Pinter (or director K Branagh), I’d replace ‘Madonna’ with ‘Morrissey’, partly by way of reference, but also because the goings-on are more like a Morrissey lyric. Jude Law plays the young Caine as a bisexual gigolo – if not an actual rent boy – with elements of the young Terence Stamp in Billy Budd, while Caine is more tender and sympathetic than Olivier. So the games the men play hint at a Wilde v Bosie roleplay. Which makes sense given the focus on Pinteresque suggestion (the dialogue never quite what the characters are really saying) and the actors’ chemistry. It’s just that the film gets a bit lost in its own twists and double-bluffs by the end.
Bizarre detail: Caine’s gadget-heavy mansion is operated by a remote control that’s clearly an iPod Nano in disguise. Why?
Bump into Sina S again, this time in Cambridge Circus on the way home.
