Mouse in Firelight

When is crime no longer crime?

I watched a film last evening, Firelight by name, a love story, and a tale of two crimes. A young woman, for pay, allowed herself to be made pregnant by a scion of an English peer whose lawful wife (the son’s, not the licentious Lord’s) was in a coma and, consequently, could bear him no heir. Hence, the first crime, a bargain forbidden by law, by custom, and – as it turned out – by the instincts of mother-love.

The girl-child is taken from the mother immediately after birth. The mother-for-hire accepts her fee, and leaves … for seven years. Somehow the comatose wife is still alive, but absolutely “dead to the world.” (This is in the 1830s, so we are asked to suspend a ton of disbelief that a totally comatose person, unable even to blink, could have been kept alive that long.) The child's mother, seeking somehow to find her way into her child’s life, hires on as her little girl’s governess. The rest – including the second crime – you can imagine, though some of the dialogue between the mother and child, and the father and governess goes far beyond the merely imaginable. If there is a flaw in the script, I did not hear it.

The miracle of the film – and it was miraculous – emerged for me as much out of what was seen as from the words and action. Sophie Marceau, the governess, is beauty personified. The child’s father, played by Stephen Dillane, looks to me like the sort of man who would take center stage in the pleasant dreams of women. Marceau and Dillane are a beautiful couple. Still, their charms might have been wasted by a director intent on titillation, but in the carefully restrained hands and mind of writer/director William Nicholson (“The Gladiator,” “Shadowlands”) their beauty is made to seem almost to emanate from the whole of the story and its pictures. The colors Nicholson caused to appear on the screen, and the way he has asked them to move – like “firelight” – upon the actors’ faces and against the sometimes frigid – but always liquid – scenery, creates a world unlike any world we might encounter simply “out there.” The film is art in its highest form: dramatic action unfolding as on a living canvas, poetry spoken as by the heart itself, music that reaches the ear, not so much as sound as barely sensed tension. Silence becomes dialogue, expressing thoughts that perhaps might have been spoken but never so eloquently as when left unsaid….

There had been at least one moment in the week or so when Dillane and Marceau were making the child, when the pure commercialism of their actions gave way to true passion ... to love, if you will to call it that. And they both knew it. Seven years later, when it has been almost invisibly made clear that the passion never died, Dillane asks the governess, in a room lit by the firelight of their yet unspoken love…

“Do you remember that moment when …” [fade to silence.

She replies: [silence] (When any other answer would have said it less clearly.)

Then, after a moment has passed, perhaps to let the audience “hear” what Marceau has heard…

Dillane: “Please tell me that moment can never come again.”

Marceau: [silence] (…and when, even the dullest must know that the deep and genuine love they had discovered in themselves seven years before has become objectively real, we begin to see, and not merely to feel, the “firelight.”)

The film also uses a few truly radical devices. It violates one of the stage world’s most honored clichés, Chekhov’s famous advice: “If you call attention to a gun on the wall in act one, be sure you fire it in act three.” But in a scene immediately after Marceau is hired as governess, the camera follows her as she walks toward a staircase. Just as she reaches the landing, her eyes, for the briefest instant, move to the left where she notices something outside the camera’s view. What was that something she has obviously called our attention to in act one? If we expect she has seen an object of some sort that will take on a meaning in act three, we have misled ourselves. She has “seen” nothing that relates to the plot. She has merely created a suspenseful tension that would otherwise have been much less had she merely ascended the stairs and “noticed” nothing. We have been caused to sense mystery without the usual trappings of relevance. Our emotions have been appealed to so subtly we hardly knew what was happening. We have been brought into the play at its most meaningful level.

In the end, after the story has turned itself on its head, after crime and circumstance have had their way with the characters, after two extremely moving climactic scenes – one between the lovers, another between the governess/mother and her child – the story folds together in a way that could never have been made so right had its every message been spoken. This story has no moral. If anything, it has an immoral, a denouement so perfectly in violation of what ought to be, we come away wondering why we are so happy that it ended just that way. Perhaps life occasionally presents us with instances when crime is no longer crime.