In 1993, Martin Scorsese brought to the screen Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence: a story of forbidden love, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.
“You gave me the first glimpses of real life and then told me to continue living the fake one. No one can resist this.” “I resist.”
Exactly a century separates New York, represented by Martin Scorsese V These good guys from what serves as a frame to Age of Innocence: two worlds that, at least on the surface, could not be further apart. In his 1990 masterpiece, Scorsese chronicled the rise of mobster Henry Hill among New York organized crime and the Gambino family in the 1970s. However, in 1993, the director took us into the luxurious drawing rooms and other meeting places of the New York bourgeoisie of the 1870s in his transposition Age of Innocencea literary classic published by Edith Wharton in 1920: a very rare foray into costume melodrama in Scorsese’s filmography, and one of the most exciting projects of his career.
If the underworld These good guys it was an “asphalt jungle” governed by the laws of cruelty and oppression established by a rigid mafia hierarchy. Age of Innocence representatives of New York high society: a luxurious microcosm that we get to know through the opera house, during the production Faust Charles Gounod, and from the point of view of the young lawyer Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day Lewis. Written by Martin Scorsese with Jay Cox (who will return to collaborate with him for Gangs of New York AND Silence), Age of Innocence It debuted in American theaters on September 17, 1993, a few days after showing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, and eventually became one of the Italian-American director’s most successful films.
Impossible love in the golden cage of New York
To the brilliant madness of “Those Good Boys” but also the next one Casinoreflected here in high self-control Lifestyle a social class strictly bound to a precise series of rituals: the existence of Archer and his peers unfolds with rigid cyclicality between balls, receptions, courtesy calls and social evenings, in a whirlwind of always the same faces and under gazes that are penetrating – and infallible. the intuition is Mrs. Mingott, a wealthy matriarch played vividly by Miriam Margolyes. It is in this context that the “foreign” element suddenly materializes, and is therefore destined to remain marginalized: Mrs. Mingott’s niece, Ellen Olenska, has just returned from Europe and is saddled with a controversial reputation due to her marriage to a dissolute Polish nobleman. A figure that looks great Michelle Pfeiffer it imparts a radiant grace that Archer cannot remain indifferent to.
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Through the interaction between Archer and Countess Olenska, commented on by a narrative voice (originally Joan Woodward’s) that recalls the literary matrix of the story, Martin Scorsese thus inserts the dramatic structure of the film: not just the story of the canonical “forbidden love”, but an immersion in the emotional universe of two people , imprisoned in a reality with merciless outlines. This is a reality presented in Dante Ferretti’s rich scenography, dominated byhorror of horrors in the scenery and setting, in the magnificent costumes of Gabriella Pescucci, awarded with an Oscar; a reality depicted by photographs by Michael Ballhaus, another of Scorsese’s very loyal collaborators (but before that the historical director of Rainer Werner Fassbinder), in which sudden flashes of light pierce dimly lit interiors or envelop Countess Olenska in the glow of a golden sunset over the sea.
The quest for freedom and the end of innocence
The entire visual apparatus is necessary to illustrate the struggle in which the secret feeling between the two main characters – Archer is engaged to the heiress May Welland (Winona Ryder), and Countess Olenska has not yet decided whether to ask for a divorce – collides with social conventions and Puritan morality environment to which they belong. “Isn’t there anyone here who wants to know the truth, Mr. Archer?“, asks Olenskaya, impatient with the codes of conduct imposed on her; “True loneliness lives among these kind people who only ask you to pretend.“The desire for freedom and the opportunity to truly be oneself, as opposed to an inviolable system of power or an already established fate: this is one of the key themes of Martin Scorsese’s work, traced even in his “apocryphal gospel” The last temptation of Christ is expressed here in a suddenly blazing melody , in the cracks of history, imbued with a sense of oppression and imprisonment.
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From the first, silent heartbeats of Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, expressed even before words, through the radiant glances of Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, to the epilogue of acute melancholy, symbolically placed twenty-five years later (i.e. at the turn of two centuries) , Age of Innocence It can rightfully be considered one of the great love films of modern cinema. But at the same time, it is a great film about the conflict between the individual and society and the dichotomy between desire and sacrifice, between the desire for self-determination and the concept of guilt generated by conventional morality. In this perspective lies the “scandalous” modernity of Countess Olenska: the promise of happiness, which the protagonist will try to reach out to, but will not have the courage to grasp it to the end and not let go.