Last week, a glamorous-looking Emma Thompson was beaming from the front pages in a sexy red dress, slit up one thigh, as she triumphed at the London Evening Standard awards as best actress, for her role as a shakily married suburbanite in
Love Actually. The performance is also up for a Bafta next week. That came hot on the heels of the Golden Globes in New York, where another Thompson project, the epic television film
Angels in America, won five prizes. The 44-year-old actress, recently married to Greg Wise, father of four-year-old Gaia, is back in the spotlight. But there’s still a small cloud threatening this rosy scenario:
Imagining Argentina, howled down by the press corps at the Venice International Film Festival in September as one of the worst films ever made.
Happily for them, neither Thompson, the film’s lead actress, nor its writer/director, the playwright Christopher Hampton, was at that first press screening in Venice. The outcry it caused made headlines. It started as a few muted guffaws, which then grew into outright laughter that spread around the hangar-like cinema on the Lido. As the end credits rolled and the unintentionally ironic slogan “Never Again!” appeared, some of the worst booing ever heard by Venice veterans erupted, punctuated by a few cries of “Shame!” The reaction to Imagining Argentina was made all the more troubling by the fact that Hampton’s drama was meant as a serious exploration of a real tragedy. Adapted from Lawrence Thornton’s award-winning 1987 magical-realist novel, it is set in Buenos Aires in 1976, during the ruling military junta’s “dirty war” against the Argentinian population, and deals with the fate of the 30,000 “disappeared” — people deemed to be critics of the regime who were seized and made to vanish, as if by some diabolical conjuring trick. Thompson plays a journalist who joins their ranks, while Antonio Banderas, as her husband, suddenly discovers he has psychic powers allowing him to “see” the hidden stories of los desaparecidos. Apparently keen to expose the horrors visited upon Argentinians behind closed doors, Hampton spares us little as Thompson’s character endures rape, tied face down to a table, and torture.
How did it come to this, that that nice double-Oscar-winning actress from Sense and Sensibility had signed up for a role that would make her the butt of press ridicule? But Thompson wasn’t seeking a sensationalist project. Torture is one of the many issues she has personally campaigned against for the past two decades. And she didn’t do those scenes lightly, it seems.
At a press conference following the now notorious screening, she voiced her concerns. “I have worked a lot for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which is the only organisation in Europe that deals with the victims of torture, and having read a lot about it and investigated it over 20 years, I’m very uncomfortable about showing it,” she said. “I actually feel it’s impossible to show. Chris persuaded me that, in this instance, we had to see certain things. But I utterly sympathise with people who can’t accept that.”
She was still calm and open-minded about the press hostility when we met a couple of days later in a Venice hotel to discuss the film. Wearing a floral summer dress and sporting a healthy tan, she was far from downcast, amazingly, and even buoyant.
I put it to her that it wasn’t the explicit brutality of the film that concerned most critics, it was its style, the way torture was combined with poetic sequences showing, for instance, Banderas following a flamingo in his car and sadly strumming a lament on his guitar while his wife and daughter are excruciatingly abused. What might have worked in Thornton’s book, where the reader’s imagination is allowed to play over its rich and allusive imagery, now just seemed silly at best, tasteless at worst.
“Of course, we were very concerned about whether this would work, and whether it was possible to combine that kind of hard reality with any sort of mysticism. I wouldn’t describe it as an entertainment,” she said, almost indignantly. The problem, as she sees it, is the subject matter. “I always think of a film or a piece of art as a crystal in your hand, where you’re looking at something in a different way. I think if Imagining Argentina had not been about torture particularly, then it might not have got people going the way it has. Because torture is not openly discussed very often, people don’t know very much about it; a lot of the time they don’t want to know about it. It’s hidden, it’s illegal and, in a sense, it’s one of our last taboos. So I felt it was really important to make something that combined an art form with this reality.”
But didn’t the press reaction to the film imply that the attempt had failed? “Wait a minute,” responds Thompson sharply. “I went to one screening, last night, and there was an incredible, emotionally charged reaction, from an audience made up of the public — I don’t value your audience more than I value that audience.”
Thompson had attended a screening of “civilians”, ordinary Venetians who reportedly gave the film a six-minute standing ovation. So perhaps it will play better with the public than with critics. Her analysis is that the hostile response came from journalists, and that showing them the film first may have been a strategic error. (Interestingly, Thornton’s novel, though not the film, is told through the eyes of a journalist who finds his faith in empiricism challenged by a different version of reality.) “One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to sit a roomful of any single profession down, especially a rational profession like journalists, to watch this film. If I had been distributing it, I would have said you cannot do it this way, because this is not a film you can sit and respond to like any normal film. It wasn’t made in that way, and I don’t think it should be treated in that way. So I think that was a risk.”
So should the film have been shown at Venice at all? “I’m glad you asked me that because it hadn’t really occurred to me that it might be the wrong place. When everybody said Venice to me, I said it was a good idea.” Thompson thought Venice would be preferable to big marketplaces such as the Cannes and Berlin festivals, because its audiences are traditionally, as she puts it, “people who really care about film”. “Maybe,” she reflects ruefully, “the correct place to show it is somewhere like a human-rights festival. On the other hand, this is not a documentary. This is an attempt to make a piece of art about torture and about ‘the disappeared ’. I think it was always going to be hard.”
It’s doubtful that Thompson’s career will be damaged by Imagining Argentina, but you get the feeling that if it does turn out to be a failure, it will hit the actress hard personally. She has campaigned for years on behalf of human-rights groups and was a vocal opponent of the Gulf and Iraq wars. She has campaigned for the Labour party, helped raise awareness about homelessness and world poverty and has spent years writing a screenplay about the murdered Chilean troubadour Victor Jara, learning Spanish and travelling around Chile in the process. The weight of responsibility she felt doing Imagining Argentina was obviously enormous.
“You have got to feel in your heart that you haven’t let anyone down. That you haven’t misrepresented the women who really experienced this. That you have done your best to find out as much as you can and show something as real as possible so people understand a little bit.” And she is quite sure she did her best: “I gave more than I have ever given — and I couldn’t have used more of myself, or meant it more, or done better. Then you sit back and say, ‘That’s okay.’ It’s not someone else saying you did a good job that’s important.”
It’s all worlds away, of course, from the role she’s been seen in since and the next part on her schedule. How do you square a torture victim with the PM’s sister in Love Actually and Nanny McPhee, the governess she will play in her own adaptation of the Nurse Matilda stories of the 1960s? For Thompson, intriguingly, they come from the same source. “Nanny McPhee will have everything I believe in about how people should behave, struggling with what it is to be human,” she told Variety. “That goes for Love Actually as well. I’m not into doing agitprop. And what appealed to me about Imagining Argentina was its imaginative approach.”
In the circumstances, too imaginative perhaps. The film may have its heart in the right place, but it’s marred by Hampton’s uncharacteristically heavy-handed approach. Thompson, though, is a pleasant surprise. This is not Emma Thompson the gushing luvvie, formerly of “Em and Ken”, as she is often caricatured in the British tabloids. (They were out to get her again in Venice, publishing a photograph that appeared to show her crying in response to Imagining Argentina’s critical battering: she wasn’t.) Refreshingly, she is a steelier woman, prepared to stand by a film that reflects her commitment to issues beyond acting and arguing her corner with clarity and passion.
She is also unexpectedly aware of her own limitations. “In the same way as when I’m trying to write my screenplay about Chile, this role terrified the life out of me, because I thought, ‘What do I know? I’m just a f***ing north London actress.’ But slowly you have to build your confidence, and if you’re still passionate about it, you must try to do it. Always try to do it, even if you fail.”
Imagining Argentina opens in April
