Screening at TIFF: Nia DaCosta’s ‘Hedda’

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic stage play Hedda Gabler, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda seeks to reinterpret and modernize the late 19th-century material. However, in the process, it loosens the nuts and bolts of Ibsen’s dramaturgical machine, causing it to ricket until it falls apart. As visually pristine as it is dramatically dull, it’s one of the fall festival season’s most perplexing “prestige” films.

The story, now set in mid-20th-century England, follows disaffected aristocrat Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) as played by Tessa Thompson, on the day of a lavish party thrown by her academic husband George (Tom Bateman). It opens with an overt hint as to Hedda’s mindset: her suicide attempt at the lake by her husband’s estate is interrupted by a phone call informing her of the long-awaited return of her former flame—and George’s academic rival—Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), a gender-bent incarnation of the play’s Ejlert Løvborg, gesturing explicitly towards a queer reimagining.

Dissatisfied with her marriage to George, Hedda spends much of the evening manipulating her way through the guest list, both in order to amuse herself and in an attempt to secure her waning financial position. However, the camera’s relationship to Hedda’s lies and half-truths ends up feeling odd. The film has a curious new framing device not present in the play: Hedda is interrogated by local police about the evening’s events—which, the cops hint, ended in bloodshed—but this calls into question the movie’s narrative POV, since we’re made privy to moments of scheming to which Hedda would under no circumstances confess.

Still, this logic is easy enough to sidestep, since the story returns infrequently to Hedda being questioned and remains largely tethered to the party the previous evening. Like Ibsen’s work of theatrical realism, the film is a performance piece first and foremost, and in that vein, it nearly succeeds. As Hedda goes from room to room, forcing conflicts between some characters and inserting herself in between others, Thompson has a remarkably self-assured physical presence in one of theater’s most coveted roles. Unfortunately, her efforts are often undone by her bizarre delivery.

It would be folly to harp on the fidelity of the characters’ accents—they’re English versions of Danish-speaking characters penned by a Norwegian playwright—but the efforts by American actress Thompson to maintain an upper-class English accent prove challenging, to say the least. She has the right intonations but lacks enunciation, causing her to swallow her words. In a film where language is of great importance, given the specific ways Hedda manipulates the people around her, the story is hard to follow.

On the other hand, Hoss, who hails from Germany, plays this new version of Lovborg both with her original accent and—more pertinently—with a showy desperation as her character’s psyche comes undone. She’s the movie’s indisputable highlight, running circles around every other performer and practically swallowing the story whole with her distinctly theatrical gusto. The cast all perform admirably (including Bateman, whose naïve portrayal of Tesman has hints of rom-com Colin Firth), but the film’s aesthetic parameters make their drama difficult to gauge.

Hedda Gabler has always been an unpredictable force, but the version of her seen in Hedda charges in random, unforeseen directions, hopping and skipping from one subplot to the next without much by way of energizing motive. The camera remains trained on her (and on other characters when necessary) for lengthy periods without cutting away, to the point of robbing the film of the one advantage it has over most theatrical adaptations: the ability to use editing to shape a story’s emotional contours. DaCosta’s work here has little sense of rhythm, reaction, or revelation. It plays, instead, like a series of isolated skits shot almost entirely in static close-ups, preventing either camera movement or the actors’ blocking and body language from providing a sense of what might be happening physically or emotionally at any time.

This languid approach especially kneecaps moments of hedonism and frolic, during which the party guests let loose, allowing Hedda to slip in and take advantage of their drunken vulnerabilities. However, the movie is concerned with neither subtlety nor subtext, and seldom establishes a difference between Hedda as she exists in her own mind (and behind closed doors) and the way she acts around other people. It’s a film where each calculating motive exists out in the open—an approach that, oddly enough, applies to its depiction of queerness too. If it was ever the intent to have Hedda and Lovborg’s dynamic feel illicit (or that between Lovborg and the young and vulnerable Thea Clifton, as played by Imogen Poots), then attempts at doing so may have been lost in the haphazard edit, which values individual shots and moments over a moving cinematic fabric. That the characters are queer adds little to the story, despite a setting where queerness might theoretically make for added secrecy.

This disconnect is emblematic of Hedda’s overarching problems. The movie and its protagonist are too linear and straightforward, despite DaCosta’s attempts to pull the material into the present through the lens of societal evolutions in the mid-20th century. The subtextual is constantly subsumed by the overt—if there’s subtext present at all. This renders visual flourishes like warm tones and even stylish double dollies (à la Spike Lee) practically moot, despite the theoretically enrapturing nature of each technique. Hedda speaks in easily understood double entendres, and when the time comes for her to lay out her ploys, her chaotic decision-making ends up explained in simplistic terms. The mischievous score by Hildur Guðnadóttir incorporates breathy whispers, but at no point does Hedda feel like a film of secrets, even though it has the presentation of one. Everything the movie is or does exists on the surface, an approach that’s hardly enough to sustain interest or intrigue for more than a few minutes at a time.

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