Angels & Insects

Angels & Insects

No angels appear in the movie “Angels & Insects,” only insects. The Alabasters, a strange mid Victorian family who seem to emulate insect actions, live here. The mother is fat and white, wrapped in many yards of white cloth; she sinks into the nearest chair and waits for her brood to feed and pamper her. She is fertile like a queen bee; she spawns new Alabasters between headaches.

Into this house comes William Adamson (Mark Rylance), a dour Scotsman just back from 10 years in the Amazon, where he has been gathering rare specimens that were lost in a shipwreck all but one precious butterfly, which he presents to Sir Harald Alabaster (Jeremy Kemp), an insect enthusiast. It is shortly after Darwin’s first books, and Sir Harald is fascinated with natural selection.

The film based on A.S. Byatt’s short novel Morpho Eugenia is interested in this too and uses people to act out the insect world’s ruthless strategies and laws. Adamson stays as a guest at the Alabaster country house so he can organize Sir Harald’s insect collection. We cannot help noticing that the women of the Alabaster household themselves seem like part of an exotic collection; they wear dresses made of bright reds and shocking blues or bold yellows and blacks; they festoon their hairdos with flowers, berries, fruits, birds’ wings and even eggs.

The most captivating of these women is blond, ripe Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit), who has great masses of pre-Raphaelite hair; early in the film she runs sobbing from a ballroom because her fiance has just killed himself. Her supercilious brother Edgar (Douglas Henshall) accuses Adamson of having insulted her; actually Eugenia weeps for no more mysterious reason than that she feels like a good cry. Slowly, warily, like a potential victim testing a possible web, Adamson inches toward Eugenia; eventually he asks her to marry him. Extraordinarily, she agrees even though he is penniless and common born and she is rich and high-born.

All this time there has been a drab little ant bustling among the gaudy birds and bees. She is Matty Crompton (Kristin Scott Thomas), the family’s poor young governess; Matty loves Adamson but he scarcely notices her (she tells him bitterly: “you do not know if I am 30 or 50”). He does recognize her fine drawings from nature, however, and her studies of an ant colony.

I will say no more about the cunning plot. The story is like one of those traps set by exotic insects that lure their prey with sweet nectars and soft fragrances at the entrance, then fill it with acid. Note all the touches that betray Britain’s harsh pecking order in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign: the servants who turn to face the wall when a master or mistress passes; Edgar’s cocksure belief that birth gives him leave to insult his social inferiors; old Sir Harald’s smoldering rage at everything in creation but his beloved insects an anger that would love to pin wriggling things under glass.

Philip Haas directed this movie and wrote the screenplay with his wife, Belinda. They take full advantage of their source’s rich language A.S. Byatt; in a conservatory butterflies become “colored air.” I cannot recall any other film where someone is attacked by moths; Adamson talks in guarded evasions and sycophantic compliments, like an intellectual Uriah Heep; and when the trap of the plot finally springs and we discover a secret, the movie refuses to explain how it happened exactly.

The best they do is when Miss Crompton tells Adamson, “There are people in houses who know everything, yet remain invisible.” You should probably be somewhat acquainted with its world for “Angels & Insects” to work on you, which is the country homes of the British upper classes during the mid 19th century. Henry James said that this was the most pleasant world human civilization had ever produced for those lucky enough to live there.

However there were secrets buried within it too. Like a Merchant Ivory film turned upside down inside out back again upside-down right-side up all around topsy turvy turvy top backwards front ways behind itself inside out outside in one scene takes place in bright sunny woodland clearing where we lift up rock see fat slimy little slugs grubbing away at each other underneath that.

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