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Royal Bore

Suparn Verma

Hollywood has a habit of re-churning old classics and usually spewing out garbage.

Gus Van Sant murdered Psycho. Warren Beatty's loveshed Love Affair (An Affair To Remember) and Sidney Pollack's lacklustre Sabrina also figure amongst a host of other disastrous do-overs.

This time around, director Andy Tennant (of Ever After fame) tries his hand at what he perceived to be a safe commodity -- a remake of the classic Oscar-winning The King And I. This movie was based on a play, which in turn was based on the diary writings of English widow Anna Leonowens (Jodie Foster), who journeyed to Siam in 1862 to tutor the children of King Mongkut (Chow Yun Fat).

Let me be frank. I had my mind kind of set on Anna And The King being a disappointment even before entering the theatre, because even the promos lacked the soul and chemistry of its predecessor.

But I saw the entire film with an open mind and here is what I think.

The film looks brilliant with great production design by Luciana Arrighi, awesome costumes by Jenny Beavan -- all this captured through the lenses of Caleb Deschanel. But for three hours, the sheer beauty of the production fails to hold you because of several reasons.

Jodie Foster is impeccable as an actress, but her character is so prissy and overtly English that it's funny to find her romping about the palace grounds like she owned it. Chow Yun Fat is a very likeable actor and a master of action sequences, but a king-like quality he does not possess. He neither has the grace nor poise that Yul Brynner could summon with just lifting his chin.

Perhaps it's the writer's fault who never let him have an upperhand in the key scenes, tilting the balance towards Anna's character.

They never stop to examine how Anna slips into this new culture or even how she's able to remember the names of the king's 56 children, besides his 26 wives and 60-something concubines whom she befriends.

In Anna's diary, the romantic chemistry is kept to a bare minimum. Here it's blatantly put into words. The entire plot has been changed to accommodate a happy ending. The main sub-plot in the original was that, one of the King's concubines was already in love with someone else and revolves around how the King manages to get them together. But the story here takes another turn altogether.

One thing I would love to see in a mainstream big budget Hollywood production is a White man kissing a Black woman, or a Black man kissing a White woman, or an Asian kissing a White actress.

Denzel Washington never kissed Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief, Richard Gere never kissed Bai Ling in Red Corner, though Pierce Brosnan got lucky with his Bond status in Tomorrow Never Dies as did Moore in A View To Kill.

In romantic movies, the entire premise of the film builds up to the kiss. But when the makers fail to deliver what they promise, they sound their death knell. Even Gregory Peck kissed Audrey Hepburn who played a princess in Roman Holiday.

In Anna And The King it is not the actors who fail, but their characters. You never get close enough to them to empathise with them. Even in the emotional scenes, all you see are the grand sets. There is great production value in the movie's long shots, but viewers can scarcely glimpse the actors' facial expressions.

Maybe Tennant should have taken a page out of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor to figure out how to keep audiences glued to the characters, rather than paintings on a wall.

This film is a must for all interior decorators, art directors, costume designers and cinematographers. As for the common man, there is always The King and I, which also has those evergreen classic songs such as I whistle a happy tune, Hello, Young lovers, Getting to know you and Shall we dance?