IT is hard to remember another production since Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon more than 20 years ago in which sumptuous costumes are matched by and somehow equated with extravagant personal misery. Grief appears to acquire a sheen and nobility when experienced by gorgeous beings swathed in silk and taffeta.
The protagonists of both films live in surroundings of rare beauty and, although Barry Lyndon is separated by a century from The Portrait of a Lady, each is set in a period when clothes were especially flattering to the body.
The Portrait of a Lady opens in 1872, just at the moment when women's fashion had begun to escape from the unfortunate style of the previous 40 years during which vast pannier skirts had restricted almost all movement. Jane Campion's previous film The Piano, which is placed a couple of decades earlier than Portrait, eloquently demonstrated just how much a woman of the mid 19th century could be hampered by her dress.
But in the aftermath of the 1870 FrancoPrussian war and the collapse of the French Empire, a new approach to the female form began to evolve, in which greater freedom of the body was allowed. The Portrait of a Lady's heroine Isabel Archer, in the opportunity she is granted to make choices - however unfortunate - about her personal destiny represents how women of the period had begun to experience a degree of liberation not permitted to their predecessors.
Of course, as Isabel's story demonstrates, any freedom offered to members of her sex was still very curtailed, not least in matters of dress. Long skirts like swishing reptilian tails are a recurring image in Campion's version of The Portrait of a Lady; their weight held a woman back and obliged her always to walk with an extremely measured gait. While skirts no longer ballooned out around the entire body, they were still gathered in an elaborate bustle at the rear. Both The Piano and Portrait include a large number of rainstorms, allowing the director to draw attention to the sheer weight of voluminous fabric, particularly when wet.
Similarly, thanks to whalebone corsets, the waist was pulled in tightly, an act which tended to impede breathing and, therefore, movement. During the closing decades of the last century, the focus of attention in women's fashion was on the bust and posterior, the shape of both exaggerated thanks to the nipped in waistline between.
The comparison with men's clothing of the time is striking, particularly when worn by Isabel's husband Gilbert Osmond. While her suitor Lord Warburton still dresses in a stiffly correct manner, Osmond represents the late 19th century's aesthetic tendency towards soft fabrics and loose fitting clothes. Throughout the film, he avoids wearing ties and favours pale linens or rich velvets. In general, Osmond's style is richer and yet more relaxed than that of his wife, as would have been the case at the time. The sobriety of her dress contrasts with Isabel's freedom of spirit, at least until she finds herself emotionally handicapped by Osmond.
In the novel Henry James's descriptions of Isabel Archer's clothes are rare, but almost without exception, the colour in which he dresses her is black. When she first appears at Gardencourt, the English home of her relations the Touchetts, she is called merely a tall girl in a black dress, who at first sight looked pretty". Mourning the death first of her father and later of her uncle, Isabel spends the first half of the novel in black.
But even when she reappears after her marriage, at the Thursday salon she holds in Rome, Isabel's dress - of black velvet - is still sombre. Gradually, this colour comes to seem the only one suitable to her circumstances, as the tone of the novel grows steadily darker.
Strangely, when it comes to clothing her heroine for the film - which is permeated throughout with a doom laden blue light - Jane Campion opts for a greater variety of tone than is given by James. The scenes in Florence, for example, see Isabel wearing white and floral spattered ivory and after move to Rome, while her clothes are dark, they are frequently in shades of green and scarlet.
Her hair described by Henry James as dark, even to blackness begins the film in a state of barely contained frizziness but then becomes an elaborately contrived coiffure after marriage. Like her clothes, this hairstyle seems to suggest the loss of spontaneity in Isabel's existence.
As The Piano demonstrated, Campion has a fondness for such metaphors as a means of underlining how repressive society during the last century could be. This Portrait of a Lady has much in common with Visconti's last film L'Innocente, made in 1976, but the latter - while just as beautiful to the eye - is considerably more skilful at depicting sympathetically the first moments of change between the sexes.
Like Martin Scorsese when he came to direct The Age of Innocence four years ago, Jane Camp ion seems to have been seduced by the appearance of the world being condemned. She lingers over details of costume, drawn towards the trim of creamy lace around a bodice or the tightly pleated taffeta of a double kick train. The camera flirts around black netting on high perched hats and pieces of gold filigree jewellery fashionable in Italy during the period. The sheer gorgeousness of the fabrics, and the settings in which they are placed, distract from the tragedy being played out.
The result is that The Portrait of a Lady entirely fails to engage except aesthetically it remains more costume than drama. For students of fashion history, this is a fascinating film but as a study of the problems faced by 19th century women as they began to engage with the possibility of freedom from social constraint, it disappoints.