Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Movie Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread (Oh This Should Be Poly!)



(South Bay Poly Newsletter, June 2012)

It’s a bit of cliché by now:  If polyamory were accepted, we’d lose the conflict in a large percentage of popular books and films.

Where Angels Fear to Tread, based on the 1905 E. M. Forster novel, would make a beautiful poly movie.  Phillip travels to Italy to retrieve the baby son of his dead sister-in-law from its Italian father.  Charlotte, a family friend, accompanies him.  Phillip’s upper class English family despises the father for being Italian and socially “inferior.”  But Phillip loves Italy and the Italians, who seem so “alive” compared to his own stuffy English background.

In the process of trying to retrieve the baby (an attempt which ends in disaster—the accidental death of the baby), Charlotte falls in love with the Italian.  She returns to England to avoid the possibility of ever seeing him again and acting on her feelings.  In the film (and this is apparently a bit different than the novel), it is hinted that she may marry Phillip.  Indeed, Phillip seems quite taken by Charlotte.  Charlotte feels ambiguous towards Phillip—but admits to being in love with the Italian.

But so is Phillip, perhaps!  When Charlotte says “I love him—Gino,” Phillip immediately replies:  “I love him too.”  What did this mean in 1905, when the book appeared, just ten years after the Oscar Wilde scandal?  We know now that Forster was gay.  Of course, the British of the time thought of male-on-male sex as always “perversion,” never love.

So the three characters might have lived happily together in Italy!  But Forster couldn’t have written that ending in 1905!  Indeed, he never “came out.”  Only after his death was his gay novel, Maurice, published, with the assistance of Christopher Isherwood.