The Chaperone

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Noourhan A. @noourhan Jun 27 Such a good film about a great actress it’s really a great story about breaking boundaries and living for ourselves and our happiness The filming and the story telling were average See more Daniel G @DanielGodoy 09/19/2022 Really nice period piece, with acting that was clearly a work of love and dedication of the professionals involved, with a pretty soundtrack and good rythm. Not really world-changing or having some all-encompassing message. See more tom m @RT96790832 10/05/2021 This was reasonably entertaining. I'm a fan of Elizabeth McGovern and she did not disappoint in this film. Not a great film, but entertaining enough. See more 01/03/2021 Elizabeth McGovern is such a sensitive actor, always a pleasure to watch, and the script gives her enough to work with, though it could be a good deal better. Haley Richardson is fine in the role of Louise Brooks but I really didn't get Geza Rohrig in this, first of all he's supposed to be German and he clearly is Eastern European do the filmmakers have so little respect for the audience that they don't think we can tell the difference? His lines seem to be muffled as well. He's a good actor, but seems miscast here. A passing TV drama, an interesting idea and McGovern lifts it, but overall disappointing. See more 09/20/2020 I very much enjoyed this film and I'm not usually a fan of films set in this time period. The actress who portrays Norma was captivating to me, she kept me watching, made me laugh and cry. See more 08/16/2020 Louise Brooks was one of the epic Hollywood crash and burn stories -- one grim enough that her biography should probably be required reading as a cautionary tale for all young actresses venturing into harm's way. The saga of Lulu is worthy of a major motion picture. Unfortunately, The Chaperone is not it. The Chaperone is an enjoyable film if taken on its own terms; it is a well produced, high quality, made for tv Masterpiece presentation, grounded in excellent performances by Elizabeth McGovern and Haley Lu Richardson as the young Louise Brooks at the very beginning of her meteoric, and brief, career. The high audience scores reward this effort, and some of the critics concur. On its own terms, this is a fine enough small movie. The majority of critics, however, believe that Julian Fellowes chose to tell the wrong story, and I tend to agree. It would be interesting to know about the pre-production conversations underlying this choice. As written, The Chaperone is a tale of changing social mores and, especially, women's liberation (especially regarding sex), framed by a contrast between a respectable older woman (McGovern) suffocating in a sham marriage with a closeted homosexual and the daring young flapper Louise Brooks (Richardson), hellbent to defy convention, shatter taboos and reach for the stars. To the first situation, Fellowes brings a jaded British aristocratic sensibility, sneering at the conservative sexual ethics of Wichita, Kansas, in the 1920's. To the second ... well, that brings us to Louise Brooks, the REAL Louise Brooks, not the legend so beloved by the modern critics eager to make her an icon of social and sexual liberation. The truth is that young Louise was raped by a neighbor at age 9; she was likely a classic example of the frequently catastrophic effects of very early sexual abuse (e.g. depression, alcohol and drug abuse, chronic promiscuity and an inability to form stable emotional relationships). Louise's story is unfortunately far too common -- and she was far from the only Hollywood horror story -- but most such tragedies play out far from the limelight, in neighborhoods just like yours and mine. From childhood on, Louise was a badly damaged young woman caught in a self-destructive spiral. Fleeing Kansas at age 15 to study and perform with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing, she was fired at age 17. She caught on as a New York showgirl and was soon a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. She caught the eye of Hollywood producers (both in and out of bed) and made her film debut at 19. She spent the next three years as a society sensation in Hollywood A-list circles and was a regular visitor at William Randoph Hearst's San Simeon estate. Her film career during this outwardly glamorous period was mediocre, consisting mainly of supporting roles in forgotten films, but she was much in demand as a young starlet valued as eye candy and as a party girl. She recklessly bedded everyone from stagehands to costars, from Charlie Chaplin to Walter Wagner (Paramount) to William Paley (CBS) to George Preston Marshall. She was married at 20 and divorced at 22. By 1929, she had poisoned the well in Hollywood enough to flee to Europe, where she made three films in less than a year before returning to the U.S. (Her two German films are regarded as her best work.) On her return, she was still a big enough name to try to restart a career, but she had soured on Hollywood and Hollywood had soured on her; she was trouble and too hot to handle. (The modern term "hot mess" is probably a considerable understatement.) She was bankrupt by age 26 and was done in Hollywood by 1938, at age 32. She bounced back briefly to Wichita and then moved to New York, where she worked as a shop clerk. She fell back on what she did best, working as a high class courtesan; as her appeal eroded, she became a common prostitute with escort agencies. By this time, she was a suicidal pill-popping alcoholic who probably survived mainly because one of her wealthy lovers from her glory years had arranged a monthly stipend; nonetheless, in her autobiography she admits to contemplating suicide. She was living as a recluse in New York when she was eventually rediscovered in the 1950's by an historian of the film industry and was persuaded to write on her experiences. She showed enough talent to find a second life as a capable writer, but she still died alone and in near-poverty in 1985. Given this history, I am befuddled at the clamor of the critics who want a movie that celebrates Louise Brooks as an exciting symbol of women's liberation and the sexual revolution. Hers is, rather, a disastrous story of everything that can go wrong. A suicidal, pill popping alcoholic prostitute as a symbol of women's liberation? Really!!!??? Yes, she was one of the brightest celebrities in Hollywood for about three years. She lived big. She looked sultry onscreen and her daring haircut became iconic; there's a memorial for you. And she crashed as hard as one can crash. The Chaperone briefly acknowledges the child sex abuse but quickly moves on, with Louise's defiant refusal to be a victim. (A textbook case of denial, but I digress.) It hints at the grim afterstory in an epilogue at the end of the film, but only makes reference to some "hard years" in New York. It presents Louise Brooks in the ascendant, played with great verve and charm by Haley Lu Richardson, though with the sex largely stripped out and the heavy drinking -- she was already abusing alcohol as a young teen -- limited to one scene. (In The Chaperone, she's 15 and just leaving home; Louise at 20 or 22, with her life already disintegrating behind the glamorous facade, would require a completely different storyline.) This would be a movie worth making, provided one could find and match three different actresses of very different ages to play Louise at the appropriate stages of her life. But anyone contemplating such a movie should think very, very carefully about the story they intend to tell. The iconic flapper with the bob haircut and with the world as her oyster represents the shortest period of her life, and the rest is tragedy. See more Read all reviews

The Chaperone

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