I started watching the DVD of Jane Campion's 1996 film Portrait of a Lad but gave up. I realize that Campion is Australasia’s leading auteur director---acclaimed her ‘compelling stylistic innovation’--- but I found the visuals slow moving and the narrative tedious, in spite of Campion's concern with concerned with ambiguity or what is unseen or unsaid.

I sympathized with the way that Campion was presenting Isabelle Archer she might have appeared in her time and place---a different aesthetic of the female body than that of ideal or mask of beauty of the feminine ideal in classical narrative cinema--and her quest for subjectivity and the self-defined expression of desire in an oppressive patriarchical world. Its a re-reading of the Henry James novel from a woman’s point of view.

Though I appreciate that the film is concerned with Isabel’s journey from stubborn independence, to entrapment in a loveless marriage through to self-awareness-- the quest narrative is about repressed female desire and the dangers of desire ( a disastrous, unhappy marriage)--- I found the film boring, stilted and kind of sleepwalking.

It is a chilling film and much more than a period costume drama but its entrapped in the stereotype of a freethinking American girl being seduced and crushed by a blasé, corrupt Europe--- a tragic history of modern feminine desire. It is a dark Gothic romance that is leached of life.