88 "
JONATHAN BAUMBACH
himself a responsible and loving husband, is pathologically
insensitive to his wife's feelings. And so on.
It is clear in Losey's
A Doll's House
that Nora leaves her
husband for none of the rhetorical reasons she offers but because
she recognizes how self-centered and unloving he is, and she is
angry at him and deeply hurt at his betrayal. The film's ending is
truer and harsher and less emotionally satisfying than Ibsen's.
Losey has made a genuine movie out of
A
Doll's House,
and
though one might wonder why he bothered, it is as exciting a film
as might be made from Ibsen's drawing room thesis play.
Seeing Losey's films in sequence at a retrospective showing at
the National Film Theater in London, I became aware of the con–
sistency and continuity of a career that seemed superficially to be
divided into three or four distinct periods. Losey is the most
cinematic, and I suspect most important, of contemporary English
directors, his films increasingly assured and personal despite the
distancing device of their cool formalism.
If
at times they seem
merely elegant or, at their worst as in
Boom,
like pretentiously
beautiful travelogues, there is always something to look at in a
Losey film, moment-to-moment perceptual pleasures, small dis–
coveries of what the world might look like if one could only see it.
