“When I was writing the screenplay, I already knew that Kristin would play Mary, so I had her voice in my head throughout” |
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Maugham sensed a theme close to his heart: that of a woman who gives in to passion, but discovers that it has monstrous long-term consequences. His story simplified the encounter - his heroine has just the one night of passion before the suicide of her lover overturns her life.
The real problem that Isherwood and subsequent Hollywood scribes faced was in making the character, Mary Panton, sufficiently sympathetic to be at the centre of a story, let alone a Hollywood film.
Belinda Haas, too, had to face up to this problem, and soon decided where the answer lay. “Our first task was to make her more human, more like one of us, and at the same time to make her feel more modern, but without betraying the period,” she says, admitting that she was drawn to the project because so many famous Hollywood writers had failed to turn it into a screenplay.
“Maugham had created a very interesting, conflicted and dynamic personality, but one who learns nothing about herself in the course of the story. There is no redemption for her because she doesn’t change; she doesn’t learn and she doesn’t develop. In our version, what saves her and makes her more interesting is that, in the end, she is prepared to accept the consequences of her action, and at the same time she makes the decision to become her own person.”
It also helped that the role is played in the movie by Kristin Scott Thomas, in a part strikingly similar to the one that brought her to international fame in The English Patient. But that, it turns out, had always been part of the plan - or perhaps, more properly, the dream. The dream, however, became a reality when Philip Haas - who had directed Scott Thomas in Angels and Insects - discussed it with the Oscar-nominated actress and won her enthusiastic commitment.
British aristocrat Sir Edgar Swift (James Fox) |
“When I was writing the screenplay,” says Belinda Haas, “I already knew that Kristin would play Mary, so I was writing the part for her. Having worked with her before, I knew exactly what she could do with a line, so I had her voice in my head throughout. And it also meant that Kristin was able to give me her own very strong views about what her character would say or do.”
In the screenplay version, Mary’s situation is much more fully fleshed out, there are far more people involved, and the action takes place over a longer period than the two days of Maugham’s original novella. The date and the place, however, remain the same: Florence, in the summer of 1938, when Mussolini’s Fascists were just beginning to take full control of the country.
In the movie version of Up at the Villa, Mary is a young widow visiting friends in Florence. Having suffered at the hands of her late husband, a womanising drunk, she makes the decision to accept the proposal of a much older man, Sir Edgar Swift (James Fox). She does so, not because she loves him, but because he will give her the comfort and security she needs. At a dinner party one evening, though, she meets well-heeled young American drifter Rowley Flint (Sean Penn), and finds herself confiding in him. That same night, on the drive home, she encounters a young Austrian refugee called Karl (Jeremy Davies), who had also been at the dinner.
On a whim, she invites him to stay at the luxurious villa she has borrowed. And, when he tells her his story of fleeing Austria, she is so moved she takes him to bed with her. But he misunderstands the gesture, vows undying love and, when his affections are spurned, turns violent and draws a gun. In the ensuing confusion, he shoots himself. Flint helps her move the body, and the local police assume it was a suicide. Subsequent developments, however, oblige Mary to reveal what has happened to Sir Edgar. Although appalled, he feels it his duty to stand by his offer of marriage, even though it would mean abandoning his career (he is about to be named Governor of Bengal). This is enough for Mary to realise what she has to do to regain her sense of self: she releases Sir Edgar from his promise and prepares to leave Florence. But, at the very last minute, Flint walks back into her life...
It wasn’t Maugham’s languidly elegant depiction of a vanishing way of life and the values it represented that attracted director Philip Haas. Quite the contrary. What interested him about the novella was the very modern theme of one woman’s struggle to come to terms with an act that has consequences she would never have expected. Also significant was the fact that the story was set in a country (Italy) which Haas knew well (he grew up there) at a crucial moment in its history: 1938.
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