Angels & Insects
"Angels and Insects" is an opulent revel in Victorian perversity, and further proof that director Philip Haas can't be accused of avoiding challenges. After making his debut with Paul Auster's "The Music of Chance," Haas and his wife and coscripter, Belinda, here take on A. S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia," a novel designed to stress the parallels between the insect world and rigid Victorian society, with its seething drives and predatory sexuality concealed. He serves up the women (in a family of gentry amusingly and wickedly called Alabaster) wearing moth-like dresses and wings, flitting about a formal table, fat white matriarch at its center, wheezing and stuffing chocolates into her face when she isn't giving birth to children. Even without the men dancing attendance on them, some devotedly, some decadently, we feel the presence of more than hothouse claustrophobia. Obviously, it's an elaborate trap for the naturalist (Mark Rylance) brought there after a time in the South American jungles to do some cataloguing for the paterfamilias (Jeremy Kemp), an amateur insect collector. The newcomer falls in love with the pallid beauty (Patsy Kensit) and thinks he's dreaming when it is arranged that he will marry her. Just what's going on takes some time to emerge -- not that there aren't unsettling hints at regular intervals. Haas often cuts to the bristling and severely hierarchal ant colony, part of the curriculum of the family's children, who are tutored by the bug expert as part of the deal. Haas, like Byatt, means to shock us with the carnality of the Victorian hive -- and does. Pale princess Kensit comes to life at night in a glass- walled conservatory when the naturalist releases a rainfall of moths around her, not realizing that she could give them lessons. In fact, the film is startling in its refusal to settle for the kind of decorous surfaces behind which the Victorians hid so much. "Angels & Insects" is frankly filled with carnal energy, the heat of ungoverned couplings and the unmistakable scent of something creepy going on. Provocatively, it plays the subterranean hum of sexual drives against a carefully structured society, producing a tension between the savage and the civilized -- then dissolving the line between them. The biggest contrast is between the film's two women -- wan Kensit, who shows a surprising sexual capacity, sometimes seeming drugged on sex, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as a poor relative, clear-eyed, strong, resourceful; abilities stifled by the societal role into which she has been slotted. She's impassioned but has no sex life; Kensit has one but seems to be sleepwalking through it. No teacup-rattling here, no nostalgia. The characters in this hive mean business, play for keeps as Victorian England quivers from the attack on its beliefs by Darwin's "Origin of Species." "Angels & Insects" is a little shocking, inescapably unruly, impressively stylized as it dances between passion and poise. Buggery has never had it so good
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