Lolita
Guild Pathe, 1997, Rated R
Review by Daniel Batt
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

RETURNING HOME FROM THE preview of Adrian Lyne's Lolita, I saw out of the corner of my eye two women at a bus stop. In what was a surreal mix of fantasy and (what I'm sure I wrongly term ) instinct, I saw them start undressing as I turned to look directly. As my eyes fixed on these two now nude women at the bus stop, I recoiled as I discovered they were merely girls-schoolgirls, no more than 12 or 13. For a little over two hours I had been seeing things through the eyes of a tragic, yet cleverly poetic and self-justifying paedophile. A world where innocence becomes eroticised and 14-year-old girls conjure the longing ache of that first teenage crush.
Adrian Lyne's Lolita brought a now familiar discourse into the public spaces. Those favouring its censorship were categorised as 'right wing' moralists (taking cues, perhaps, from the conservative Lyons Forum), and those favouring its release as Chardonnay-sipping élites whose one concern was untrammelled freedom of expression. And opposition to the film came from some unexpected quarters. Former James Bond star Roger Moore spoke at a conference on child exploitation against the film's release and revealed his own story of child sexual abuse.

The film, based on Vladimir Nabakov's novel of the same name, is the story of Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons), a European academic whose 'first love' at 14 ends in tragedy: Annabel dies suddenly of typhus and something inside him "is frozen forever". In his 40s, he moves to lecture in America, the 'new world', where he ends up staying with the widowed Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffiths) and her daughter Delores-to Humbert "Lolita" or simply "Lo" (Dominique Swain).
This version of Lolita by Adrian Lyne (91/2 Weeks, Flashdance, Fatal Attraction) is a much richer visual experience than Stanley Kubrick's black and white 1960 version. The teenage affair with Annabel is dreamily filmed in the warm hazy Tuscan tones of that sensual photographer David Hamilton. When Humbert arrives in America, the colours are cooler, almost washed of warmth. This later version also has a much more sympathetic Humbert. Jeremy Irons plays him as a tragic figure rather than the scheming James Mason (the most frustrating of actors to watch) in Kubrick's version, let alone the far more sinister Humbert of Nabakov (who molests a Lolita another two years younger than the film versions).

Humbert drifts into marriage to Charlotte Haze, with what appears the one intention of getting closer to Lolita. The book suggests this unequivocally, but this is part of Lyne wanting to portray a more sympathetic Humbert and make a legal film ("You couldn't film Nabakov's Lolita and stay out of jail", one industry insider apparently commented). But when Charlotte discovers Humbert's paedophilic fantasies in his journal, in her shock she flees across the street, only to be killed by an oncoming car. Humbert, freed of the one impediment to his plans, picks up Lolita from school camp and takes her to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel without telling her of her mother's fate.
Lolita is (perhaps in the absence of a father), a precocious girl of 14, at once awkward and childlike, while also exploring her developing sexuality and femininity. She flirts with Humbert, while he in the detached semi-reluctance of some molesters, plans, yet also wouldn't dare to 'plan', to take this many steps further.

That first night at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, Humbert is powerfully portrayed as a man on the edge of the abyss. He books two beds for the room, yet still stays when he discovers they are all taken and a double is all that remains (in Lyne's film, there is still time to turn back). There is a clergy convention at the hotel, and one priest is overheard telling another how "God sees all!" When Humbert is on the verandah contemplating his return to the sleeping Lolita (in the book she is drugged), he meets for the first time Clare Quilty (Frank Langella), his rival, in the end, for Lolita's affection, and a man much farther down the road of evil. "Where on earth did you get her?" Humbert thinks he hears Clare ask. (Clare replies something about the "weather"). Humbert can only catch sections of Clare's reply because all the while moths are bursting into flames in some brutal '50s bug-zapper, a metaphor for Humbert's 'journey into hell'.

Nabakov's novel is unquestionably a work of genius. Appearing in the top ten of almost any list released of the '100 greatest novels of the century'. While he was alive, Susan Sontag proclaimed him the "greatest writer writing in English", a great feat for someone whose first language was not English but Russian. Nabakov brilliantly takes the reader into the mind of the paedophile, with all the tragic poetry of self-justification, yet unequivocally portrays incest as evil, defiling and a journey into hell-a journey where youthful innocence, the main thing which attracts Humbert, is inevitably destroyed. Lyne's film has a rich selection of voice-over pieces taken straight from the book, with Nabakov's sublime, melifluous writing which seems almost to drug the viewer.

When Kubrick made his version of Lolita in 1960, the public horror at child sexual abuse, Oprah Winfrey confessions and Woody Allen were light years away. A generation later, a film dealing with this sort of subject matter managed not only to bring out conservative opponents. Susan Edwards, after stating her credentials as a "left wing libertarian, a defender of free speech", wrote in the Melbourne Age that there "are times, and this is one of them, where freedom of expression should be restrained and cannot prevail", arguing that the film "glamorises and normalises sex with children". Kubrick's "Lolita", Sue Lyon, would probably agree. "I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to world stardom at 15 in a sex-nymphet role to stay on a level path," she later would say when her life fell apart after the film.

Yet while Lyne's film doesn't intend to "glamorise and normalise sex with children", it illustrates the paradox of our media culture: in film, one person's tragedy is another's glamour. Natural Born Killers parodied the media culture of violence, yet saw countless 'copy cat' killing sprees by those who read the text the 'wrong' way; the unrelentingly tragic Once Were Warriors, a caustic anti-violence film if ever there was one, somehow allowed Maori youth to idolise Jake the Muss a violent drunk of a father who also happened to be one hell of a fighter. The poetic tragedy of Humbert's 'descent into hell' will be appalling to most of us, but perhaps there will be those whose lives already veer toward tragedy, and use the 'poor me' poetry of self-justification. And how does censorship account for that?

Daniel Batt is Editor of Zadok Perspectives. Daniel_Batt@msn.com.au