The Governess

The Governess
by Sandra Goldbacher

The Governess
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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Bruce Myers, Florence Hoath, Harriet Walter, Minnie Driver, Tom Wilkinson
Director: Sandra Goldbacher
Brand: DRIVER,MINNIE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.33:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-02-16
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Movie Reviews of The Governess

Movie Review: A window to a beautiful--and beautified--world
Summary: 5 Stars

The film starts with the celebration of Purim--a very fun, carnival-like, Jewish holiday--amongst the Sephardic (Spanish & Portguese) Jews of 1830s London. We see a synagogue, supposedly the 1700s Bevis Marks, and a rabbi leading the sermon--and wearing a top hat. This is not a usual portrayal of Jews--the synagogue is full of men in top hats, and the heroine, Rosina da Silva, is sitting in the gallery wearing a beautiful Spanish mantilla. There is no persecution, Rosina's family is not benighted--rather, they are fairly wealthy (as Rosina walks into her house, a maid drops her a curtsy) and worldly, but still steeped deeply and beautifully in their own customs (Rosina wears a Spanish headdress; Rosina and her suitor, Benjamin, dance a lovely dance in two circles of women and men, respectively, never touching, but darting glances at each other--to the tune of the nearly 1000-year-old Avram Avinu). The outside world is no more than a curiosity: the inspired discussion between Rosina and her younger sister centers about the mysterious desert that gentile have--it looks like semen and is called semolina (naturally, when Rosina comes to live with the as-gentile-as-possible family off the coast of Scotland, guess what she gets for desert?). Rosina's world is beautiful--it's music, laughter, beautiful fabrics, dancing, bright candle-light.

Outside, unfortunately, is Whitechapel--and it breaks into the happy celebration, when Rosina's father is stuck with a knife in the street outside. Here, it is possible to see the clash of the sheltered Jewish inside and the brutal outside. Rosina's mother, shaken, is whispering: "We do not get murdered... We do not have debts..."

Faced with the prospect of marrying a rather repellent fish merchant (a very similar character to Sholem Aleichem's disgusting Reb Leizer Wulf), Rosina chooses employment instead--as a governess. Of course, she over-dramatizes, and makes up for herself as Christian name as possible: Mary Blackchurch. Named so, she is hired by a gentile family in the Isle of Skye; the mother is boring and bored, dreaming of London, where she had never been, as if it is her rightful place to be there; the daughter--Rosina's charge--is a bit devilish; the father dabbles in "science" (in photography, Rosina later discovers)--and suffers because he cannot capture the images he makes, having no fixation: they fade, after a day or so, into nothingness; and the son has been sent down from Oxford after having been found in an opium den with a prostitute (supposedly). There, Rosina will become her employer's assistant--and mistress.

I loved the casting of Minnie Driver as Rosina--she has the archetypal Jewish beauty, and her black dresses and Spanish mantillas contrast beautifully with her mistress' ridiculous hairdos. Tom Wilkinson as Cavendish, Rosina's employer and love interest, I did not love quite as much. There was very little chemistry between them from the beginning; had Cavendish possessed a bit more charm, you could write it off on superficial attraction. Here, you only had to wonder what on earth has she found in him--enough to overcome her modesty? He looks tired and old and ruffled...

Rosina's exploits into photography are beautifully done--from the subject matter of Cavendish's experiments (mostly dead birds' wings), to her discovery of the saline fixation (during her lonely Passover celebration, she spills a bit of salt water onto one of Cavendish's fading prints, and it keeps the picture from fading), to the photo sessions in which they photograph each other, to Rosina's later work in London, where she uses a camera obscura to capture the beauty of her own people.

In general, the film itself is a bit like a camera obscura--one has the feeling of looking into dark box, and a world, wholly unexpected and wildly beautiful, is looking back at you. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the early Victorian era.

Summary of The Governess

A woman hired as a governess is taught the pioneering art of photography by the man she works for while she teaches him about passion.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 16-FEB-1999
Media Type: DVD
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