An Ideal Husband

***

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam

Director: Oliver Parker

Rating: PG
Review: Peter Calder

When this, Oscar Wilde's penultimate stage work, opened on January 3, 1895, it was the work of an artist at his peak - even if he was poised for a terrible descent.

The critic for the Saturday Review, one George Bernard Shaw, praised the original production's thoroughly modern tone, singling out the hero's "assertion of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoing as against the mechanical idealism of his stupidly good wife."

And it's perhaps that modern sensibility that Parker seeks to exploit here in bringing to the screen the story of a man blackmailed into betraying what he stands for.

Sir Robert Chiltern (Northam), a successful MP, is approached by the mysterious Laura Cheveley (Moore) to publicly endorse a dodgy overseas scheme in which she has invested heavily. When he declines, she threatens to release incriminating evidence about him. And if the process by which he disentangles himself is marginally less fascinating to us than it was to the late Victorians, it still makes for an engaging literary - and literate - thriller.

The peril of public humiliation - and the unreliability of moral absolutes - were matters well-known to Wilde, and they fuelled many of his pithiest epigrams. And there are plenty of those on show here: "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance," or "Everyone is a paradox; it makes society so obvious."

So it's a little disconcerting to find Parker - who managed to drain his 1995 Othello (with Denzel Washington and Kenneth Branagh) of most of its blood and lust - showing so little faith in his source material. In striving to make Wilde "relevant" a century on, he introduces an unwelcome tone of naturalism and makes perfectly good characters perfectly dire (Driver's Mabel, a pert and showy miss who is meant to be proto-feminist but is just irritating, is the most glaring example).

Worse, he inserts knowing jokes that aren't very knowing at all. He has the Chilterns attend the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest (it didn't open until six weeks after Husband). Then he has Wilde giving the famous curtain speech ("... you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself") which he had given at the opening of Lady Windermere's Fan almost three years earlier. That's the kind of crass showiness that would have made the eternally elegant Wilde's blood run cold.

That said, this adaptation is rich in pleasures. Parker has extracted marvellous performances from a peerless cast among whom the astonishingly versatile Moore stands out. Her Mrs Cheveley, a black heart beneath an alabaster bosom, is a precise and chilling reading and she is ably matched by Blanchett and the two pompous and stuffy men.

Their work celebrates Wilde's genius. Too bad that so much of Parker's takes the lustre off it.


Head: Rough but remarkable GENGHIS BLUES (five stars)

Directors: Roko and Adrian Belic Rating: G

The truth of the often-ignored axiom that a documentary - like any other movie - needs a strong central character is triumphantly demonstrated in this film, which was the popular favourite at the midwinter film festivals.

Genghis Blues' main man is Paul Pena, a shambling, slow-talking bear of a blind blues musician who lives in San Francisco. The composer of the Steve Miller Band hit Big Old Jet Airliner (a song which probably sounds a lot better when he does it) he has played what he calls "gutbucket scratchy blues" with the likes of B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt. But the music he performs here is of a different order altogether.

Surfing the dial on his shortwave radio in 1984, he stumbled on a broadcast of khoomei or throatsinging. This extraordinary music sounds like an unearthly chorus of jew's harp and penny whistle. (Pena's description is more colourful. He says it's "just like Popeye singing the blues.") It is produced by modifying the size and shape of cavities in the mouth and hails from Tuva - a mountain-bound autonomous republic sandwiched between Mongolia and Russia.

Enchanted, Pena sets about learning throatsinging (and the Tuvan language as well). In the meantime, the Belic brothers, growing up in suburban Illinois, are lucky enough to have a mother who locks the TV on the documentary-rich PBS channel, where they find out about Tuva.

One thing leads to another (the route by which the boys cross paths with Pena is one of the film's best subplots) and the three of them, with some pretty fascinating sidekicks, end up at a throatsinging festival in the Tuvan capital of Kyzyl.

There he meets the throatsinging maestro hero Kongar-ol Ondar (whose local appeal he sums up by saying he's like JFK, Elvis and Michael Jordan rolled into one) and becomes a national sensation.

The Belic boys' movie is rough-as-guts - it was made for barely $40,000 which, given the travel logistics involved, is mindboggling. But it works in a way only the best documentaries can. It takes us - literally - where few of us will ever go and it puts us in the company of some pretty extraordinary human beings along the way.

I can't think of a documentary I've enjoyed more. For once, that "not to be missed" tag can be wholeheartedly applied.