Anna And The King

Anna And The King

Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut of Siam are one of the oddest couples in pop culture. A man with 42 concubines and 23 wives, who puts one of his women to death for exchanging a letter with her lover but is pretty much a good-hearted guy, and a schoolmarm who spends her days flirting with him but won’t sleep with him because well, he’s not white, I guess; it can’t be because he has all those other wives and kills people.

So why is she so hot for him? Henry Kissinger helpfully explained that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Mongkut has it in Siam anyway. Why is he hot for her? Because she stands up to him. In fact, more than any other form of sexual activity (this being a close second), telling off a sadist is what cringing masochists live for.

The sick-making undercurrents that ripple through “The King and I” have nagged at me through years of sitting through various stage and screen versions of the show. It’s surely Rodgers & Hammerstein’s least happy musical. The story isn’t supposed to make you think; it’s an exotic escapist entertainment for matinee ladies who want to fantasize about sex with some intriguing bald savage and exercise their harem fantasies on somebody else’s kids. There isn’t really ever any reason for an adult male ever to see this show.

Now comes “Anna and the King,” which with its two hour and 20 minute running time actually cost me six hours of my life; it seems four times as long as “The King and I.” This version stars Jodie Foster opposite Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat. It tells the same story mostly in the same flat monotone as did Deborah Kerr (in blackface) surrounded by Uncle Toms.

But there is one huge advantage to the straight dramatic version over the musical version: It doesn’t have “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” And the screenplay has other wise improvements on the source material. The king, for example, says “and so on and on” only once, and “et cetera” not at all. There is only one time he tells Anna her head cannot be higher than his; productions of the stage show belabor this last point with such sadistic repetitiveness that it ought to be performed in front of one of those police lineups where they inscribe feet and inches.

Foster’s performance projects an odd aura. Here is an actress who is supposed to play a woman in love, and she seems subtly uncomfortable with that fate. I think I know why. Foster is not only a wonderful actor but an intelligent one one of our smartest. Few things are harder for actors to do than play beneath their intelligence; oh, they can play dumb people who are supposed to be dumb, but it’s almost impossible to play a dumb person who is supposed to be smart, and that’s what she has to do as Anna.

She comes to Siam as a widow with a son and finds herself in the clutches of this egotistical sexual monster who has a harem at his palace. He is charming: so is Hitler, and Hannibal Lecter for that matter. She has to try to teach the King’s children (I think I heard 68) and at the same time civilize him by British standards, which were imperialist, racist and jingoistic but drew the line at chaining women up outside the palace walls for weeks on end like dogs.

By the end of the film she will have danced a couple of times with the king, come tantalizingly close to kissing him once or twice, civilized him slightly (although he hasn’t sold off all his concubines) so there are memories for her journal which Rogers and Hammerstein can use when they stage it as a musical play on Broadway where people never get tired of romance novels set to music.

I think Foster sees through this material from beginning to end, and doesn’t believe a word of it. At times we don’t see somebody playing a nineteenth century schoolteacher; we see somebody biting her tongue because she’s a modern woman. Chow Yun-Fat is good enough as the king, maybe better than Yul Brynner because he’s less pleased with himself. Bai Ling has some touching moments as Tuptim, the beautiful girl given to the king as a bribe by her father (a tea merchant) who loves another man, etc., etc., fatal in both cases.

There’s also the usual nonsense about plotting against the throne; just once I’d like to see one of these movies where nobody bothers. In this case Anna and Mongkut make an elaborate journey by elephant during which he pulls off a military trick that couldn’t have been done if Wile E. Coyote had 50 crates of Acme dynamite.

Then credits tell us that under the influence of his son educated by Anna, Mongkut led Siam into the 20th century, established democratic institutions (more or less) and so on, to which my only reply is to inquire after the democracy. Also no mention of Bangkok’s role as a world center of sex tourism, which has also been carried on for generations in exactly the footsteps of this good king.

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