PARTISAN REVIEW
87
and sad, suggestive of a last fling at being free. They say goodbye
over tea and cakes -- Nora to make a "loving" marriage to
Torvald, Kristine rejecting the man she loves (Krogstad) to marry
desperately for money. The film ends on a full-circle inversion of
the beginning with Kristine coming together happily with
Krogstad, and Nora, disillusioned with Torvald, leaving him.
Nora's famous rhetorical speech at the close, as well as the
metaphor of the title, seem appendages in Losey's film. Where
Ibsen's play tends to be apsychological and rhetorical -- its
mystery communicated through symbol and portent -- Losey's
film is about displaced feelings, about the divided needs of self and
community. Losey is concerned with parallels, his characters in
various contexts secret sharers in the lives of others.
Krogstad's anger at Nora has to do with a complicated identi–
fication. A former classmate of her husband's, a man pursuing
similar ambitions, Krogstad sees Torvald's success as in some way
related to his own failure, as if the two were on some kind of
balance beam. Also, he has been persecuted for the same crime
Nora has committed with, until Krogstad comes to persecute her,
no consequences to her at all. As in
Accident
where Stephen;s and
Charley's marriages are presented to us as parallel in certain ways
by juxtaposing scenes of Stephen with each of the two women,
Losey ·alternates near the end of
A Doll's House
scenes between
Krogstad and his children and Nora and her children. In fact,
Krogstad's avenging appearance in the film is associated with
children. Nora, playing a game, is hiding under a table. When she
lifts the tablecloth, expecting to see one or another of her
children, Krogstad appears as if from nowhere. It gives the film,
like much of Losey's later work, a nightmare ambience -- reality
coming out of the central character's deepest wishes and fears.
Losey's
A Doll's House
is a film about self-deception and dis–
placement. Nora deceives her husband, borrowing money from a
potential enemy, to save him. She refuses to borrow money from
Dr. Rank because he announces he is in love with her, though she
is willing to flirt with him to get the money. Nora believes that her
"good" marriage is sustained by lying to her husband and offering
the intimacy of her confidence to others. The maid, Anna-Marie,
loves Nora's children in place of her own. Torvald, while thinking
