Helen Mirren as Marat

by Robert Boyd


still from Painted Lady, 1997

Painted Lady was a two part television movie from 1997 starring Helen Mirren. It has a strong art angle. Mirren's character is a penniless folk-rock singer past her prime. Her friend, a wealthy older man who lets her live in a cottage on his estate, is killed during an attempted robbery. The thieves were targeting his paintings and got away with one of them. The movie is about how she poses as an art dealer in an attempt to get it back and bring the killers to justice.

In the scene above, she has gone to her sister's house. Her sister is an art historian and her brother-in-law is an art consultant. He doesn't know she is in the house, and when he walks in, he thinks there is an intruder. Armed with a cricket bat, he bursts into the bathroom.



The whole ridiculous scene was set up so that Mirren could be put into a tableau that mimics J.L. David's famous masterpiece, Death of Marat (1793).


J.L. David, Death of Marat, oil on canvas, 65 x 50 3/8 inches, 1793

(Of course, Mirren's version had to be scaled differently for the television screen.)

As I've mentioned before in this blog, Mirren's career began with a movie about a painter. In fact, the post I wrote about Age of Consent is the all-time most popular post on this blog (why? I think people searching for nude photos of Mirren find that post. I hope they actually read it as well).

Death of Marat is a popular painting to recreate. If you type in "Death of Marat" into Google Images, you not only see many photos of the original David painting, you also see many imitations and homages. A big part of the Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land dealt with the creation of a version of Death of Marat made completely of garbage.

This scene adds nothing to the movie--in fact, it is contrived and unnecessary. But the movie is no masterpiece. It's a piece of entertainment with an interesting art angle, so I don't mind that the filmmakers decided to have a little art historical fun. And it no doubt flattered its educated viewers who recognized the homage. It made them feel smart.

Age of Consent

Robert Boyd

I watched a really odd movie last night about an Australian artist Bradley Morahan (played by James Mason) who moves to a shack on a small island in the Great Barrier Reef to recharge creatively, where he meets a young woman who becomes his model and muse (Helen Mirren in her very first film role). The movie is Age of Consent (so named because the Mirren character is under the age of consent--at least according to her alcoholic granny), directed by the great Michael Powell.



The film is from 1969, and is based on Age of Consent by Norman Lindsay from 1935 (the film brings the action up to the current day).



The cover of the book looks even more pervy than the movie! And the movie was petty daring. Helen Mirren begins her long tradition of getting naked on film in this movie. (The movie faced censorship in the UK.) Not surprisingly, when you google for images from the film, you get a lot like this:



Hey, and no wonder. Helen Mirren is gorgeous! But I was fascinated, watching it, by the problem that filmmakers have in depicting art in a film. It's especially tough when an artist in a film is supposed to be good. What do you show in the movie as a fictional artist's work? For this movie, they actually had two artists producing the work supposedly produced by the Morahan character. In the opening scene, we see a show by Morahan in a New York art gallery. The work looks a lot like late Matisse. (I couldn't find any still of it, or any of the other art from the movie, online, alas--you'll have to rent the movie.) The artist for this part was John Coburn, who was actually a very distinguished Australian abstractionist. That's one way to get good art for a movie--use actual good art. The paintings from the island, including many nude paintings of Helen Mirren, were produced by another distinguished Australian artist, Paul Delprat.

And that's one thing that's really cool about this film. It is really respectful of Australian art and its traditions. Norman Lindsay was a great (if esthetically reactionary) Australian artist who, as you might guess, really, really liked to paint nude women, and in the movie, in a scene in Morahan's studio, you can see rather prominently a book about Sidney Nolan, Australia's greatest painter.

According to Wikipedia, James Mason became a mentor to Sam Neill in the 1970s. This is really interesting because Sam Neill played Norman Lindsay in the movie Sirens (1993). This movie again featured quite a bit of nudity (hard to avoid if Lindsay is your subject), including Elle Macpherson (!). And in a perfect move by the filmmakers, Paul Delprat was once again brought in to produce the "Norman Lindsay" images. (It has to be said that Delprat's art doesn't look anything like Lindsay's!)

Last year, the Houston Cinema Arts Festival featured Michael Powell's The Red Shoes. The aim of the Cinema Arts Festival is to screen movies about art. Perhaps this year, they could screen Age of Consent (in a double feature with Sirens?)