(1980) An exquisite adaptation in three hours of Thomas Hardy's novel, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, by director Roman Polanski. In 1970 British author John Fowles remarked in an essay: "Although the machinery and the cathartic effect may, in a book like Tess, seem analogous to that of classical tragedy, the aura and the texture of the story are realistic…. It is symptomatic that the several attempts to dramatize Hardy's works have all failed miserably."

I don't know if Fowles, whose own novels - The Collector and The French Lieutenant's Woman - have been successfully adapted to cinema, changed his opinion after seeing this film a decade later. For me, having also read and greatly admired Hardy's thirteenth novel, the film captures the realistic "aura and texture of the story" with careful attention to details - the dripping bags of cheese processing, the collection of straw, the steam-driven machinery - and photography of the landscape from Wessex to Stonehenge.

Events get underway when Parson Tringham informs Jack Durbeyfield - a shiftless, impoverished father of six - that he is the oldest descendant of an ancient family, the D'Urbervilles, who in former times had been of renown and wealth. At the same time his daughter Tess (Nastassja Kinski) is among the white-clad girls and young women in a club dance when three young men happen by, one of whom dances with the girls, though Tess declines.

Over in Trantridge resides another branch of the D'Urberville family to which Tess's parents send her, hoping for some sympathetic help - the only horse has died - from a prosperous relation. Tess meets Alec (Leigh Lawson), the presumptuous son of a blind, invalid woman who lives in the new-built mansion; he arranges for Tess to manage the poultry farm and turns his attentions on the beautiful girl, assuming a country lass without means will soon succumb to his better standing. However, Tess discovers that Alec is not her cousin; his deceased father's actual surname was Stokes until he purchased the more impressive d'Urberville for himself.

On the road at night Alec rescues Tess from a row with a peasant woman; but as he rides off with her holding on to him from behind, a man says to the others: "Out of the frying pan into the fire." In the woods after failing to win Tess over with a gentle, generous approach, including his having provided her father with a new horse, he rapes her.

For a few weeks she accedes to his romancing her before sneaking off to return home, though he overtakes her on the road, promising after she refuses his offer of a ride to help her in any way if she's in need. Ignoring his earlier proffer, she gives birth to a sickly baby, baptizing and burying it herself.

Again she leaves her home in Marlott to work on the kindly Mr Crick's dairy farm where she makes friends with three other milkmaids and makes acquaintance with Angel Clare (Peter Firth), son of a rector who's apprenticing himself to become a farmer. When the butter won't come, someone repeats an old wives' tale: "Somebody's in love." The other girls each fond of Angel, especially Izz, dream of having him for themselves; but when he carries each of them one at a time on their way to church (which he doesn't attend) in their Sunday best across a flooded road, he says to Tess, the last to be carried, who at first demurs: "Three fourths I did for your sake alone."

When their affections have entwined them, Angel asks her to marry him. "I cannot be your wife," she mournfully replies. He reminds her of their first encounter in Marlott when she refused to dance with him. Finally Tess explains why she cannot marry him: since he has mocked old families as being "worm-eaten," he wouldn't approve of her family's having been descended from the D'Urbervilles. "None of that matters," Angel assures her.

Against her mother's warning, Tess writes a letter of confession the night before she is to be wed: "You will hold the rest of my life in your hands." Angel demonstrates no reaction when he sees her in the morning, but the paper she'd slipped under his door had lodged beneath the rug unseen.

Following the wedding Angel takes Tess to a honeymoon residence he has rented for them and gives her an heirloom necklace with earrings. Before proceeding to consummation, Angel clears his conscience by confessing to a brief debauchery in London with an older woman, expecting Tess will forgive his indiscretion. Readily she does but then shares her own sordid past with Alec. Unfortunately Angel is not so forgiving: "You were one person. Now you're another…. You are not the person I loved but another woman in her shape."

How are their circumstances different? "Forgiveness isn't all," he says with severity: though she had been sinned against, he holds her responsible for weakness of character from a corrupted family. Alec is her natural husband, Angel says. To keep up appearances, Tess will return to her parent's home. "If I can bear it," Angel says in farewell before departing for Brazil, he promises to fetch her.

Instead, Tess finds shelter from Marian, whom she'd known at the dairy farm, and hard work on Mr Groby's farm, a neighbor to Alec, who locates her there (informed by correspondence with Tess's mother of her circumstances). "I'd have done my duty by the child, on my honor," Alec tells her. "Obstinacy becomes stupidity," he criticizes her after further offers to provide for her and her homeless mother and siblings following her father's death (1832-1888).

Tess's many letters to Angel went unanswered because he was ill in Brazil; but with his return to England, having read them, he sets out to find her, determined to show her mercy after so many injustices and cruelties had been visited upon her. Tess's mother tells Angel: "She don't care to see you, sir. Never." But relents enough to say that Tess resides in Sanbourne, a city on the coast. His persistence locates her in a boarding house where she, Mrs D'Urberville, lives with Alec: "It's too late." He pleads: "I'm not the man I was. I've suffered too."

Though Angel promises to save her, he cannot.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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