96 | Sight&Sound | May 2020
By Alex Ramon
“His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that
spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was
extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each
thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her,
each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence,
justified of its intense identity and made one with this
act of possession... But when darkness returned she
was free.” Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
The ending of Henry James’s 1881 novel The
Portrait of a Lady remains one of the most debated
in literature. Manipulated into marriage with
a gold-digging aesthete in Italy, the American
heiress Isabel Archer decides to return to
Rome – and, it seems, to her husband – though
whether to resume her marriage or to assert her
independence is unclear. Her decision, reported
rather than dramatised, follows on from two
events: an intense encounter with the dying
cousin whose intervention fatefully made Isabel
a wealthy woman, and, more particularly, the
reappearance of Isabel’s suitor Caspar Goodwood,
whose aggressive romantic attentions have
become an irritation to her and whose return
at her most vulnerable moment suggests an
opportunistic attempt to win her at last.
The ambiguity of Portrait’s ending, which
leaves Isabel used but wiser, represents a
challenge to an adapter: so much so that the 1968
BBC version ventured no further than the cousins’
deathbed reunion. However, it’s a challenge
that Jane Campion meets in characteristically
bold fashion in the conclusion to her 1996
adaptation. Campion and screenwriter LauraJones originally planned an ending which
interpreted the protagonist’s decision in terms of
female solidarity. Isabel’s return to Rome was to
be motivated by her concern for her stepdaughter
Pansy, whom Isabel would come to claim in
the final scene, liberating the girl from the
convent to which her father had confined her.
This conclusion was ultimately ditched,
though, and instead Campion makes Isabel’s
charged encounter with Goodwood the climax.
In doing so, the director brings her Portrait full
circle in two significant ways. The ending not
only returns Isabel to the English garden where
she refused a marriage proposal six years before,
in the scene in which we first met her; it also
connects to the film’s controversial prologue in
which a group of modern-day Australian women
are seen communing in the woods as their
observations on intimacy are heard via voiceover.
At the time of the film’s release, Campion
was variously praised and derided for injecting
contemporary awareness and overt sensuality into
the staid surface of heritage cinema. But attentive
readers will note that the physicality is already
there in James, who rewrote the final meeting
between Isabel and Goodwood in a later edition
of the novel to create a more erotic encounter. The
film’s achievement lies in rendering this subversive
conclusion in sensuous cinematic language.
The sequence begins with Nicole Kidman’s
Isabel alone, an overhead shot accentuating
her vulnerability in a wintry landscape that
contrasts with the summertime lushness
of the same location in the opening scene.Almost inaudibly, Isabel mutters to herself, “I
adore a moat” – the words previously spoken
to her suitor in her first scene. The tension
increases as Isabel rises, startled by an unseen
presence. “You frightened me,” she declares.
The camera reveals the object of her address to
be Goodwood (Viggo Mortensen), approaching
through the trees. Goodwood makes his assertive
appeal to Isabel. Turning her back to him, she
resists. But the pair then come together in a sudden
kiss, the camera circling around them in tight
close-up. Wojciech Kilar’s rapturous, romantic
score rises to suggest the formation of the couple
and the conclusion of Isabel’s journey in the
traditional position of a heterosexual embrace.
But the notion of the kiss as the fulfilment of
screen romance is radically subverted. Fleeing
the man who seems to have been waiting in
the wings to be her saviour, Isabel abruptly
pulls away, running back to the house, in a
dynamic slow-motion sequence. The lights
inside the house are visible, and Isabel comes
to rest in the doorway, her hand on the latch,
before turning away from the domestic sphere
to gaze outward, as the film fades to black and
Kilar’s music finds a peaceful resolution. Isabel’s
action feels both ambiguous and decisive, the
“possession” offered by the “monotonously
masculine” Goodwood (in James scholar Leon
Edel’s phrase) rejected for other options.
“The whole of everything is never told,” James
wrote in his notes for the novel. Campion’s film,
even more unresolved, keeps faith with that
perspective. In a work juxtaposing innocence and
knowledge, freedom and entrapment, the Old
World and the New, the protagonist’s position
on the threshold feels entirely appropriate.
Framed in the doorway, Kidman’s Isabel looks
out beyond the frame, the precariousness
and possibility of her future powerfully
evoked in a final, open-ended portrait.THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
The conclusion of Jane Campion’s
1996 adaptation subverts the idea
of the kiss as the fulfilment of
female destiny and screen romanceThe ambiguity of the novel’s
ending represents a challenge to
an adapter, but Campion meets it
in characteristically bold fashion
ENDINGS...