‘But every time I thought I knew what Alan was like, I found he had changed. He’s a very enigmatic and surprising person. He’s a giggler, but he’s quite imposing. I didn’t know where I was with him at first.
‘He was very terrifying and scary on set, working with such intensity. Acting is such a strange and curious thing to be doing, it’s a very weird job. Everyone has their own methods. Gillian Barge is not an improviser, she learns her lines until she’s word-perfect. With Alan, it was much more introspective. He wouldn’t necessarily always communicate it, you would have to intuit it. But compared with taking a theatre company round the world, being on a film set was like a holiday. I felt like a dog let off a leash.
‘Alan and I went out to the wine district for one day, and we also went on some incredible walks. I have a lot of friends in Vienna, so Alan and I were hanging around in cafés and cooking meals with them. He was very sweet. He was helping an Austrian friend of mine with his role as the father in my production of Lucie Cabrol. He’s considerate that way.
‘He has a seriousness, not an aloofness. When the project was conceived, it was conceived with his name attached to it. He’s the principal actor holding the whole thing together, and he would spend a lot of time behind the camera as well as in front of it.
‘I think that kind of thing can be quite intimidating; but Roger is not a tyrant director like Coppola, his style is much more collaborative. Alan brings his own allure to the film. He treated the entire script with enormous respect. He was concerned to portray the complexity of Mesmer as a man who was out of his time. To portray him as a sexual philanderer is not true to the intentions of Potter. Mesmer came to the conclusions that only Freud came to a hundred years later.
‘Medicine was enormously politically dominated: it was divided between healing and surgery, and surgery won. Mesmer was stumbling upon an early psychotherapy, and this was illuminated by a confrontation with sexuality. The ambivalence of that is what’s fascinating.
‘There is a very strong sense of the loneliness of this man, and there were some very mesmeric sexual moments in the film . . . a simmering sexuality there. Potter brought out a lot of the wry humour and humanity, and we almost revolve inside Mesmer’s head. It’s a very internal drama – a man trying to make sense of the world. He develops an unspoken sexual relationship with Amanda Ooms as a patient who has been sexually abused by her father. There’s an ambivalence about her character, and my spying on her sessions with Mesmer adds to that.
‘We filmed in a wonderful castle at Fertod in Hungary, a sort of Versailles in semi-ruins. It’s now up for sale. We also filmed in a medieval town called Sopron. I enjoyed myself terrifically.
‘I think the finance people in films are sometimes psychopathic,’ is Simon’s final verdict. ‘It’s just a great great shame that Mesmer was never followed through. Having so many co-producers didn’t help; they were always turning up on the set.’
So what of the movie itself? The cinematography has a luscious integrity, perfectly in keeping with the period; and all begins well as two dainty eighteenth-century clockwork figures revolve on a music-box to the lush sounds of a Michael Nyman composition in unusually romantic mode. The image could be taken as a metaphor for the way so many competing interests chased each other round in ever-decreasing circles.
The whiskerless Rickman looks youthful and vulnerable in the role. His theories of animal magnetism are mocked by the surgeons from the Royal Society of Medicine, which has summoned a special assembly to examine his claims. One can’t help thinking of the Inquisition. They question him about his visit to a lunatic asylum with a sympathetic fellow doctor. ‘We walked through the pillars of misery and Dr Mesmer wept. I saw him take away a seizure,’ testifies the colleague. A dropsical leg has also been cured. Mesmer has persuaded people that a cure lies in their own hands, can be part of their own experience.
We see a flashback of a girl having fits. Mesmer strokes her face and chest, encouraging another sceptical physician to follow suit. She raises herself up after what looks like a faith-healing session. The other doctor disputes the cure and insists on bleeding her instead. ‘Open up one of her veins.’ He thinks Mesmer’s methods are pure superstition. ‘Passion and medicine do not mix. The moon is a symbol of lunatics.’
Rickman’s Mesmer, moving around as if in a dream or trance, insists: ‘I have made a discovery that will lift pain and misery.’ In the role of his wife, Gillian Barge conveys a most ambivalent attitude towards her man: she jeers at him, yet boasts of him to others: ‘My husband has an original mind.’ Nevertheless, she describes him as ‘the son of a shitarse gamekeeper. Don’t I pay the bills and give you some sort of entry into a better society?’ And she calls him ‘a genius living on his wife’s charity’. His only defence is sarcasm, referring to her ‘generous spirit, tact, charm and missing back teeth’.
Most of the time he seems in a world of his own, and the interior life of Mesmer is never satisfactorily explored by the script. The man is little more than a romantic ideal, despite all Rickman’s efforts to give this sketch some depth.
He tells a shallow woman on a balcony: ‘We could hear the music of the heavenly spheres if only we strained to listen.’ He also informs her, in one of the script’s more stunning non sequiturs, that man is the only animal to know it will ultimately die.
The next scene shows a blind girl in a veil, playing the piano. She then has a fit, writhing on the floor as if in the grip of a grand mal. She is Maria Theresa, played by the extravagantly beautiful Amanda Ooms. Mesmer watches, transfixed. The surgeons are about to bleed her when Mesmer rises and says: ‘This young woman is in urgent need of the attention of Franz Anton Mesmer.’ He shoves them unceremoniously aside. ‘They should never cover such an exquisite face.’ A distressing tendency to refer to himself in the third person is the first sign of Mesmer madness.
Ooms lies moaning on the piano; Rickman raises his hands like a conductor. When he places his hands on her face and body, she screams. He runs his fingers down her bodice. His nostrils dilate and he flings his head back as she goes quiet.
He mumbles about the sun being a magnet that draws us out. ‘There’s an unseen force . . . an animal magnetism moving from me to you,’ he whispers. ‘You can feel it, you can feel it. Here is your patient. She has not been harmed.’ Then he stalks away.
As is his wont, Rickman wears no wig; he dislikes too much artifice. His hair is swept back from his face, and he reeks of repressed sensuality. Everything in the film conspires to turn him into an enchanted figure, the focus for all female eyes but not quite in touch with his own urges. There’s an air of wonderment about the character, who seems to be working out the plot as he goes along. Of course he’s ridiculously idealised. We hear the music of magical prisms from a chandelier in his study where he holds court, a Copernican globe in the background.
As his colleague applies an instrument of torture to a weeping Maria Theresa’s sightless eyes, we see a flashback to the girl being sexually assaulted by her father. ‘If only you knew my ache,’ he says, his hands on her breasts, ‘you can have anything you want.’ She asks to be taken to Mesmer. In a glib piece of camerawork, Mesmer’s face dissolves into a shot of the moon.
The journey back to childhood, where the watching, waiting, eavesdropping child is the father of the man, is integral to a Dennis Potter screenplay. The film shows us the young Mesmer, perched on a rock and listening to the beat of the universe. The adult Mesmer is still haunted by him.
A pretty waif adores Mesmer and tells him outside his door that she loves him. ‘You think you do,’ he says gently. When Maria Theresa is brought by her father to Mesmer’s house, they walk in the garden and the besotted waif watches jealously from her window as she plays her music box. This is Francesca, the young cousin of Mesmer’s wife.
‘I can hear the turn of the world,’ says Maria Theresa. ‘And can you hear the human heart?’ Mesmer asks her whimsically. ‘When I was a boy, I too could hear the
turn of the world.’ There follows a very intense scene in which he strokes her lower arm and holds her hand, telling her that she would never want to see for herself the contamination of the world.
There is a mob at the gate: the rabble invade the house and Mesmer meets them on the stairs, saying like the man of destiny he is: ‘I’m the one you seek.’ They have all come for healing. The halt and the lame follow Mesmer down stone steps for an experiment in electrical impulses. He tells the crowd to join hands in a charmed circle: this is the scene that used real inmates from an asylum.
‘You poor people,’ he says compassionately. ‘Poor, sick, pitiless world. Where shall we end the abuse and cruelty?’ He goes round the circle, strengthening the force between them. ‘This force needs pain, and pain will resist.’ There is much agonised crying and lamentation when he uses the cane as a kind of lightning rod. They break the circle and all have fits. He hugs some of them, trying to pass on his energy. They quieten down. ‘The storm has passed over you. Each of you has gone some little way towards harmony,’ he says; perfectly on cue, we hear the music of the spheres.
Then the clamour begins again: they berate him, because their illnesses are still there. ‘You have to look in,’ he says defensively, but he is assailed by self-doubt.
Back in his study, Mesmer encourages Maria Theresa to be tactile. He clasps her face and asks her to breathe, his lips very close to hers. His wife bursts in, as wives tend to do, and accuses him of kissing his patient. This is a moment of pure farce, clumsily introduced. It’s a pity that we see so little of the volatile home life of the Mesmers, apart from the laying on of threatening hands around her neck as he says sarcastically, ‘Light of my life, leave us.’
The sexual tension is almost tangible as he meets Maria Theresa in the gardens for a Braille version of sex. Her fingers travel over the prominent Rickman lips, getting to know him. Back in his study, he runs his hand along her neck; she (and by now presumably half the audience) is almost brought to orgasm. ‘No, father,’ she suddenly blurts . . . and her secret is out. Her father has been molesting her.
‘Don’t be ashamed,’ he whispers, hugging her. Mesmer shows tremendous restraint, but it’s clear that he’s overpoweringly attracted to her. He runs a silk scarf across her throat in an intimate gesture and then blindfolds her with it.
Days later Mesmer takes off Maria Theresa’s silk bandages; she still insists that she sees only darkness. ‘What is to be is out of our hands,’ he insists. ‘We make our own lives.’ He is trying to make her assert her will-power.
A lucky fall, somewhat unconvincingly choreographed, restores her vision. The pains in her head have gone. ‘Now my head sings instead.’
There follows a scene of extraordinary erotic intensity, all the more powerful for the way in which Rickman carefully reins himself in. ‘I knew before I met you,’ he says, as if this is their destiny, and their kiss creates the most exquisite frisson. He has awakened every one of her senses. Mesmer knows he is falling in love, but the erotic pull of the universe is irresistible. ‘Oh let it go, let the arrow fly,’ he says testily to a stone Cupid with its bow poised to strike at human hearts.
The character is instinctively gallant, which must be a first for Dennis Potter. Seeing Francesca molested at a window by his sly stepson Franz, Mesmer rushes up the stairs in order to fling Franz down them. As he explains venomously to his wife, ‘I’m cleaning the house.’ But alas, it’s chucking-out time all round. The action moves forward to his expulsion from Vienna, when Mesmer and his baggage are flung out of a coach. ‘You know the orders . . . keep out of the city.’
‘This is a day of infamy and outrage that shall long be remembered,’ says an outraged Alan Rickman, his moon face so caked in mud that he looks like a B-movie monster from a very black lagoon. It’s a great moment of unintentional hilarity which rather undermines all the self-conscious Romanticism that has gone before.
And so on to Versailles in the Dennis Potter time-machine, where Mesmer has developed a reputation for curing paralytic fits. An over-ripe beauty asks him to cure her backache. She says that it hurts ‘at certain times’. ‘Your nerves are out of alignment,’ he says smoothly, extricating himself subtly from a tricky situation.
He asks a group of ladies to form a circle. ‘The force in me comes flowing into your flesh, your nerves, your bones.’ They are asked to clasp a series of rods suspended over a large barrel of water. There is a chorus of ladylike moans as he puts his hands on naked shoulders, telling them to place the rods upon whatever part of the body ails them most. ‘It surges,’ he says, and the group groan. ‘Your body is now a battlefield.’ There is a cacophony of orgasmic shrieks.
This is the infamous scene of mass hysteria, straight out of Ken Russell. One woman writhes on the floor in a fit, while another’s head plops foolishly into the barrel of water. It’s absurd and grotesque. Are we supposed to assume Mesmer, the misunderstood idealist, has now become a cynical charlatan? The film sends out conflicting signals, unable to make up its mind.
‘I cure the sick because I can reach into their souls . . . This is just play-acting,’ he tells his friend Charles. ‘One day we shall come to acknowledge that our emotions and our bodies are not separate.’
There are sounds of civil insurrection outside, presaged by that film-maker’s cliché: a runaway horse. ‘When society is sick, all its members are too,’ Mesmer says to the medical assembly that is about to denounce him.
‘Gentlemen, you are in the veriest danger of losing your lives,’ continues Mesmer, who appears to have extraordinary extrasensory perception, aware that the mob are approaching with their lighted tapers. Is this the first stirring of the French Revolution? We are never told.
Maria Theresa has lost her faith and is back in the darkness again. ‘You abandoned me,’ she says. ‘I cannot see.’ ‘Do you want to see?’ he asks her rhetorically.
Mesmer dreamily relives his boyhood; Potter is forever rewinding the tape of life. ‘When I was a boy, I could see from one horizon to another. Everything was in harmony, in balance, except human beings. And I could not bear to do nothing about it.’
The last shot shows Mesmer and Maria Theresa, side by side but apart, in an abandoned hall from which everyone else – horse, mob, fellow physicians – has vanished. On balance, even anachronistic Sarajevan helicopters might have helped.
No wonder the project ended in frustration for all concerned. It’s a fragment, a tantalising might-have-been that provides little more than a sumptuous showcase for Rickman’s sexuality.
Nevertheless, Alan Rickman’s performance as Mesmer did win him the Best Actor award at the 1994 Montreal Film Festival. And at Dennis Potter’s memorial service in November of that year, Alan kept faith with the writer’s memory by reading from the script of Mesmer. It seemed as dead now as Dennis.
12. ‘GOD DIDN’T MEAN HIM TO PLAY SMALL ROLES’
THE CELEBRITY OF an actor, hired to recite other people’s words, is a source of agonised embarrassment to Alan Rickman. Not only does he long to direct more, but he is acutely aware that the writers don’t get the credit that the performers do. Actors should be the servants of the writers, as he once put it, but they get promoted over the heads of the playwrights instead. As Peter Barnes wryly remarks, ‘A lot of people haven’t grasped that actors are not making up the words as they go along.’
Stephen Davis once told me how Alan had stood up at an awards ceremony while dishing out the acting prizes and said, ‘Can we please spare some thought for the writers?’ Davis added: ‘It is extraordinary that we are such a visualising culture that we are now living in the cult of the actor. In Hollywood, they are the ultimate royalty; and Alan is embarrassed at the amount of publicity given to actors. I think he is very conscious that he is an actor who profits greatly by success and fame and charisma but who is very careful that he doesn’t use people as a grandstand for his career, because he’s a man of very high principles. But it does cut both ways: you create a tremendous amo
unt of mystique by being Garboesque. It’s a win-win situation to be in.’
Alan Rickman routinely rejects so many roles that Ruby Wax says she feels sick every morning at the thought of the amount of money her purist friend is turning down every single day. Dusty Hughes’ story of the ceiling-high piles of script in Rickman’s flat suggests a crazy paper factory. No wonder Alan has to be fanatically tidy. He is famously faddy and principled, but that doesn’t stop him being offered first choice on countless projects. Perhaps that hard-to-get quality simply whets producers’ appetites: they know he’s not to be bought for any price. Indeed, you could dine out for years on revelations about the major roles that Alan Rickman has declined. Nevertheless, he is contrary enough to moan about the parts he doesn’t get.
When he reached 50, Alan Rickman found himself at a crossroads whose three-fingered signpost behaved like a demented weathervane according to mood. One direction pointed to continuing film stardom, another to heavyweight theatrical roles and the last to directing.
He risked typecasting in the first, he was often too busy to pursue the second and he was a relative newcomer so far as the third option is concerned. No wonder he was frustrated. He had never been more in demand for major movies; yet Alan Rickman faced a quiet mid-career crisis.
Before the Rivergate controversy drove a wedge between Rickman and his old colleague Jules Wright in 1993, he complained to her one day that nobody asked him to go on stage anymore. ‘The problem is that people become inhibited about asking him and assume that he’s not available. Maybe Alan is lost to the theatre now, like Gary Oldman,’ said Jules to me in 1995.
Alan Rickman Page 26
