Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Maurice
1987 · James Ivory · Maurice on Sightlines
A schoolmaster takes a boy down to the beach and draws diagrams in the sand. This is what men and women do, this is marriage, this is what you will want. Then he looks up, sees figures coming along the shore, and scuffs the drawings out with his shoe. Quick, embarrassed, thorough. The lesson stays taught; the evidence goes.
That is the first scene of Maurice, and it is the whole film in ninety seconds. Simon Callow's Ducie is not a nervous man by temperament. He is a man performing a truth-telling function on behalf of a society that has arranged never to have heard it, and his feet do the arranging. Deleuze had a name for a posture like that: the gest. Not a gesture that expresses a character's inner feeling, but one that exposes the social machinery the character is standing inside. Once you have the word, the film fills with them. The way a dinner table seats people. The way a tutorial is conducted. The way a cricket match distributes bodies across a lawn, everyone in their place, nobody touching.
Formally, everything about this film is classical. Katherine Wenning cuts on continuity; scenes are covered patiently and allowed to run; the story proceeds in order, in three movements, Cambridge then the crisis then Alec. In Deleuze's vocabulary that is the movement-image: somebody perceives a situation, acts on it, and the act changes the situation. Cinema ran on that circuit for fifty years. The strange thing about Maurice is that for most of its length nobody can complete it.
After Clive retreats into respectable marriage, Maurice perceives everything and can act on none of it. Deleuze's term for images like these is opsigns: pure optical and sound situations, where a character can only look and listen because no action is available. The person stranded in one he calls a seer. He found the type in postwar Italy, in people walking through rubble no action could repair. Here the rubble is legal. The Labouchere Amendment has made Maurice's desire a crime, so the only act his world offers him is to sit with Ben Kingsley's hypnotist and have the desire removed. He takes it. It fails. That is the film's coldest joke: the single available action is an action against himself.
This is worth pressing, because the standard charge against the heritage film, Andrew Higson's term for the 1980s cycle of handsome literary adaptations that Merchant Ivory defined, is that all that lovely upholstery sedates the politics. Contemporary critics found Maurice stately to a fault. Deleuze lets you see that the stateliness is the argument. You are made to sit through the dinners, the drawing rooms, the weather. Nothing advances. That is the point. Repression is not staged here as an event; it is the rate at which the film is allowed to move, carried by bodies holding ceremonial postures for longer than comfort permits. The tempo is the law.
Then there is Penge. Clive's country house, shot by Pierre Lhomme as damp, dim, softening at the edges, its grandeur visibly going. Deleuze built a concept out of exactly this, watching Visconti, and the debt runs straight through the lineage: Death in Venice taught art cinema how to film forbidden homosexual longing as painterly decay with strings underneath, and Maurice takes the whole technique, the slow staging, the aestheticised rot, Richard Robbins's score doing the speaking the characters are forbidden. Deleuze's name for the result is the crystal of decomposition. A crystal-image is a point where the present and the remembered or imagined stop being tellable apart; the decomposing kind is an entire ordered world sealed into such a crystal, still gleaming, rotting inward, run by people who cannot see they are living in the past tense. Clive inherits the house. He inherits its blindness with it.
But a crystal can have a flaw, and Deleuze calls that the crack: the fissure through which something escapes the totality. In Maurice the crack is a ladder leaning against a bedroom window at night, and the man climbing it is the gamekeeper. Alec works Penge's grounds. He is inside the house's economy and beneath its notice, and that is precisely what lets him move. Watch what Ivory does with the scene, because it is his most specific invention as a director. By 1987 the illicit nocturnal visit had a house style: furtive, shadowed, guilty. Lhomme lights it tenderly instead, hushed and warm and unhurried. The film declines to shoot the act as a transgression. That refusal argues harder than any speech in it.
The faces do the rest. Deleuze divided the close-up in two: the reflecting face, a contour holding a single quality, and the intensive face, all features and micro-movement, caught in the grip of something. Hugh Grant's Clive is a reflecting face, cerebral and charming, the feeling kept somewhere behind the surface. Rupert Graves's Alec is feature and appetite and physical directness, cutting straight across the film's decorum. James Wilby's Maurice, an ordinary young Englishman, is between them, slowly finding out which kind of face he has. This is the affection-image at work: feeling registered and not discharged, living in glances, hesitations and the words not said.
Every frame also has an outside. Deleuze distinguished the relative out-of-field, the next room, the road, from the absolute: a pressure from beyond the frame that cannot be given a location. For most of Maurice the law is that absolute outside. Wilde's imprisonment, the statute, a thing everywhere in the drawing room and nowhere on screen. Then Risley is arrested for soliciting a soldier and convicted, and the unlocatable acquires an address. That is the mechanism of Clive's collapse. He has learned nothing new. He has had it located.
What the film did to narrative was to refuse the terminus. Victim had shown the blackmail machinery; Brief Encounter had perfected the strangled English restraint that Wilby and Grant are still playing in; Sunday Bloody Sunday had already declined to punish the desire. Maurice carries that refusal backwards into the period film, the genre most invested in national self-flattery, and hands the ending to two men, one of them a servant. Released during the AIDS crisis and on the cusp of Section 28, a happy ending landed as a proposition rather than a plot. It also proved something about form: a radical claim does not require a transgressive style. The New Queer Cinema arriving a few years later would take the opposite route, and both routes worked.
The union is the film's one true act. A decision finally changes a situation, the circuit closes, the movement-image comes back on. But look where it leaves them. Whatever life follows lies past the last frame. The film can imagine the union and cannot picture a world that would hold it, so the absolute outside that began as the law ends as the possible life. Both unfilmable, and the film seems to know it.
So watch the thresholds next time. Windows, doorways, the ladder, rain on glass, hands that get near other hands and stop. And watch how long Ivory holds a room after the thing that could not be said has not been said. That held time is not politeness. It is the film showing you the shape of what is pressing on it.
Concepts in play
- the gest — Ducie's opening beach lecture: he draws sexual diagrams in the sand, then anxiously erases them — a posture that exposes the whole Edwardian arrangement rather than his private feeling; extended through the film's dinners, tutorials and cricket.
- crystal of decomposition — Penge shot by Pierre Lhomme as damp, dim and decaying, its aristocratic grandeur visibly rotting, used almost programmatically as the emblem of a dying order that Clive inherits.
- the cracked crystal (line of flight) — Alec the gamekeeper — the servant who works Penge's grounds and represents a vitality the great house can no longer contain — climbing the ladder to Maurice's window, staged with hushed nocturnal intimacy rather than furtiveness.
- the seer (voyant) — Maurice after Clive's defection: aligned point of view, no action available to him, and the only 'act' on offer is submitting to Lasker-Jones the hypnotist to be cured of himself.
- pure optical and sound situations — The realist, interiorised dramatic mode built on subtext — glances, hesitations, the words not said — in scenes of social ritual where nothing can be done and the characters can only look and listen.
- attitudes and postures (cinema of the body) — Wenning's unhurried, continuity-driven editing that asks the viewer to sit inside dinners, tutorials, cricket and drawing-room conversation, making repression a matter of duration and restraint rather than event.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Hugh Grant's Clive as nervous cerebral contour retreating into respectability, against Rupert Graves's Alec, whose physical directness and emotional openness cut against the film's decorum.
- affection-image — Wilby's restraint as an ordinary Englishman, with Robbins's romantic string-and-piano score supplying the warmth Edwardian manners forbid speaking — feeling registered and never discharged into act.
- absolute out-of-field — The Labouchère Amendment and the memory of Wilde's imprisonment pressing on every room from nowhere in the frame, until Risley's arrest and conviction for soliciting a soldier gives the threat a location and converts Clive's love into terror.
- movement-image — Classical continuity coverage and a chronological three-movement Bildungsroman whose sensory-motor circuit only closes at the end, when the film refuses tragedy and a decision finally transforms the situation into union.