THREE MUSES
Three films - Woody Allen's 'Hannah And Her Sisters', Scorsese's 'Life Lessons' and Michael Powell's 'Age Of Consent'.
Three artists - Max Von Sydow, Nick Nolte, and James Mason.
Three muses - Barbara Hershey, Rosanna Arquette, and Helen Mirren.
All three films share a common affinity in that they all include in their stories the fascinating archetype of the male artist and his younger female muse.
- Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)
In Woody Allen's "Hannah And Her Sisters", Barbara Hershey plays Lee, sister to Mia Farrow's Hannah of the film's title and muse to artist Frederick (Max Von Sydow), who is perfectly portrayed as an awkward and cranky misanthrope. I remember only too well house-sitting one summer for a similar such artist who possessed a precious and rarefied angst that seemed to cast a shadow over the idyllic country cottage he shared with his much younger wife. In order to maintain his perfectly ascetic life he had certain demands of how they lived that needed to be met in order to optimize his artistry, including a complete avoidance of the outside world and a monastic and carefully managed itinerary for the senses i.e. no television or computers. What he did have, though, was an incredible collection of classical music (including a tonne of Mozart) on record which he shared between his small studio inside the main house and his larger, more modern studio up near the woods at the end of his garden. One afternoon I remember sitting with a friend listening to Keith Jarrett's 'La Scala' concert whilst overlooking the bowl-shaped valley below the cottage and suddenly beginning to understand something about the artist's abstract work as his canvases, like Kubrickian monoliths surrounded us in the space, came alive.
But I digress ...
Frederick: "I'm just trying to complete an education I started five years ago with you."
Lee: "I'm not your pupil. I was but I'm not."
Frederick: "When you leave the nest I just want you to be ready to face the real world."
When Frederick is introduced by Michael Caine's Elliot (husband to Hannah) to a rock star called Dusty (Daniel Stern) who is looking for paintings to cover the vast walls of his home, the spiky painter snaps back, "I don't sell my work by the yard!" This flashpoint of anger is only a precursor to a far more significant injury to his ego when he discovers that his live-in muse, Lee, is in love with another man whom he assumes to be younger than himself although we, the audience, know it's the middle-aged Elliot. There's a palpable sense of fear, almost terror in Frederick's voice as he faces the prospect of growing old alone without a woman in his life to help him navigate his autistic dealings with the outside world.
Stating in a panic, "You are my only connection to the world!' to an overwhelmed Lee forces her to reply astutely, "Oh God. That's too much responsibility for me. It's not fair."
The outgrowing of the older man/artist as a mentor seems to pose a far greater existential threat to the male partner in this arrangement than the female one who may or may not have been exploited as a muse for the artist's own personal and professional interests.
Perhaps losing Lee is the price Frederick has to pay for his indulging and repropagating a concept that dates back to 7th Century Greece.
His Achilles heel.
2. Life Lessons (1989)
First things first, Nick Nolte as New York artist Lionel Dobie has never been better on film. He plays the role of the established Manhattan artist like a grizzly bear with all the insecurities of a young boy trapped in a man's body. Through his myopic and self-absorbed world of creating art, he has become increasingly paranoid and vulnerable to the realities of other people's judgments and feelings toward him which explains why he lives like a reclusive minotaur inside his labyrinth-type apartment.
In this story, loosely based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Gambler', it is Rosanna Arquette playing the live-in muse and it's established early on in the film that she is well past the physical stage of their relationship and it is only by both Lionel's sheer child-like possessiveness and desperate persuasion that he just about manages to keep her in his life while he completes his magnum opus.
The fear of being alone while forced to meet a deadline to create a masterpiece appears to create the perfect condition for Dobie to achieve the heights of his artistry as a painter. But once again, it'll come at a heavy price as his relationship with Paulette is to be sacrificed on the altar of his genius. However, unlike Frederick from 'Hannah And Her Sisters', we suspect that Dobie may just be wily enough to pull off the trick of persuading another muse into his life as indicated by the private viewing scene at the end of the film where he flirts with a young woman seeming all too well practiced at this strange dance of courtship between artist predator and his unsuspecting prey.
Far more presentable at the private viewing in the final scene than at the start of the film where Lionel resembles more of a human easel, splattered with various paints, it's clear that emerging from the act of creation has civilized him momentarily until he inevitably returns back to his primal state with yet another sacrificial muse.
And no doubt she, too, will have to endure his endless playing of Procol Harum's 'Whiter Shade Of Pale' and Puccini's 'Nessun Dorma' to scale the heights once more.
3. Age Of Consent (1969)
Twenty years earlier the British director Michael Powell, Scorsese's cinema hero and part mentor, made his own artist and muse movie 'Age Of Consent'.
In the film, Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is a painter who, after attending an exhibition of his work in Manhattan, realises he's lost his mojo and decides to return to his native Australia where he lives in a shack by the Great Barrier Reef with his dog, Godfrey, and befriends young Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren) as close to a mermaid as you might find, a sort of beach combing Ariel (from either Disney or Shakespeare). Buying Cora's fresh catch from the bay over the ensuing days and weeks after arrival, Morahan eventually persuades her to model for him.
Mason's character is a long way from the intense and overbearing Mephistopholean Svengali and impresario, Boris Lermantov (Anton Wallbrook) in Powell's earlier masterpiece 'The Red Shoes' (1948) who plays puppet master to young ballet dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) which leads to a tragic climax. There is a subtle connection between the two films in how the older men live vicariously through the youthful energy of younger women though in Morahan's case it's more generally benign.
A tragic incident arrives in the sunny paradise of 'Age Of Consent' also but the protagonists manage to avoid any major repercussions other than a cautionary warning to move on from their idle arrangement of artist and muse.
While "Age Of Consent" may be considered (by some) a somewhat lesser entry in Powell's prolific cinematic canon, it does appear prescient of later Aus-based masterpieces such as Nic Roeg's 'Walkabout', Ted Kotcheff's 'Wake In Fright' and Peter Weir's 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' where the Australian landscape in all of them entwines itself with the deeper issues of human psychology.
Fascinating also that both Powell and Scorsese (as mentor and student) both made films dealing with the artist/muse relationship capturing the dynamic in different but comparable ways.