The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom by Bruce Bennett

Author:Bruce Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

Jude beaten by the farmer

Jude returns to the village, Marygreen where he joins the group of primary school pupils who are assembled for a photograph. He then follows the teacher who is leaving the village for Christminster with his possessions on a horse and cart. He tells the boy, ‘If you want to do anything in life, Jude, that’s where you have to go, even if it means giving up everything else for a while.’ With an irony that becomes clear later, and which is the first of the many grim ironies around which this narrative is oriented, he advises him that, ‘You can choose your future’. With a shift to colour, the adult Jude (Christopher Eccleston), now a stonemason, is shown working on scaffolding in a church. During his lunch break he sits by the river reading Greek – reading and recitation is a motif used to represent his commitment to self-improvement – when he is interrupted by a young woman, who tosses a raw pig’s heart at him. Arabella (Rachel Griffiths), a sexually confident and flirtatious woman who was washing pig’s viscera in the river and is closely associated with the animal, goes on to seduce Jude in a pig sty and they subsequently marry when she becomes pregnant. The open-air wedding feast is a brief interval in which the film reproduces the pastoral mise-en-scène of flowing dresses, dancing, musicians, flowers and food. However, the abrupt telegraphic narrative structure of the film in which many scenes are reduced almost to vignettes, and the rapid editing mean that we are denied the opportunity for contemplative enjoyment of these images. After the wedding night, where Jude is surprised as Arabella undresses, to find that she wears a fashionable wig, the film shifts to the winter as the two of them are required to slaughter the pig they received as a wedding present. Jude sticks the animal reluctantly and then leaves Arabella to hoist and butcher it. He returns later to find a note pinned to a side of pork. It explains that she had not tricked him into marriage and she had genuinely believed she was pregnant. It announces that she is leaving for Australia and wishes him luck now he is free to travel to Christminster.

The text of the note is read in voice-over as Jude travels by train, a motif used several times in the film. The film is punctuated by train journeys, which function as a transition between stages of the story, but the physical mobility of the characters does not equate with social mobility or progress. As Pidduck notes, ‘Exceptionally, in Winterbottom’s Jude and the 1900 segment of Orlando, the steam engine appears as an interruption – a noisy harbinger of the Industrial revolution disrupting the peaceful English countryside’ (Pidduck 2004: 97). The recurrent train journeys disrupt the sense that the story takes place in a historically non-specific but distant past. Instead they propel it forwards into a relationship with the present.

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