Triumph of Love, an inspired adaptation of a 1732 play by Pierre Marivaux, slips into the Charles Theatre today without any of the ballyhoo that pushed The Importance of Being Earnest. But it's everything that botch of Wilde is not: supple, eloquent and enchanting.
The director, Clare Peploe, co-writing the adaptation with her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Marilyn Goldin, has turned what would seem to be an intractably theatrical comedy into a gloriously alive and entertaining movie.
Its coruscating core is the Princess (Mira Sorvino), the daughter of a general who wrested a nation from its rightful king. She now sits on the throne herself, respected and beloved - until she falls crown over heels for the one man who poses a danger to her, the true king's son (Jay Rodan).
A rationalist philosopher (Ben Kingsley) and his intellectual sister (Fiona Shaw) have raised him in seclusion and taught him to fear all women - especially, of course, the Princess. But once our heroine spies on the Prince as he skinny-dips in a lake, she realizes she must have him no matter what.
And the only way she imagines achieving that goal is posing as a young male scholar of independent means and transforming her lady-in-waiting (the porcelain doll-like Rachael Stirling) into a valet. In that dual disguise, they intend to invade the philosopher's gardens, get close to the Prince - and, once he's wooed and won, make him the Princess' husband and King.
What's wonderful about Peploe's handling of the material is its freshness. This is not the kind of classic farce that clicks along like a gleeful infernal machine; Peploe brings out its volatility. Nothing goes exactly as predicted from the very start, when a character called Harlequin (Ignazio Oliva) sees through the ladies' ruses and demands payment before he agrees to help them.
The Princess must read wildly different emotional landscapes as she glides from one garden or chamber to the next, then change plans at each turn and rise to rhetorical heights spontaneously. Everyone ends up besotted with her - the philosopher and the Prince believe she's a woman, the sister is convinced she's a man.
Peploe has expanded on Marivaux's material, and the result is deeply revelatory for every character, and for the audience. Not only are male and female stereotypes upended, but trust is restored among even the most suspicious citizens. The thinker - forced to include the heart in his philosophy - finally achieves profundity. When everything gets sorted out, the philosopher proclaims that "all is positive and negative at the same time" - and the sister, who in Peploe's version is a scientist investigating electricity, takes that verbal clue and uses it to rig the world's first generator. Love in this complex froth of a movie fuses the divides of human nature and raises it to euphoric realms of generous and creative feeling.
Peploe and her composer, Jason Osborn, have threaded themes from the 18th-century composer Jean-Pierre Rameau together with electric guitar riffs from Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. The combination succeeds where similar jazzy experiments (as in the current Earnest) fail because it fits the blend of period and contemporary elements that Peploe has sewn from dead-center to the edges of her tapestry.
The movie shifts with a mercurial sureness among elegant tableaux and hand-held shots of the characters as they fret and gambol. The way Peploe cuts and jump-cuts to slightly closer or different angles or takes of scenes, it's as if she's punctuating the poetic language with whip-like cinematic strophes. Along with lightning flashes of a contemporary audience watching this production from the grounds of the philosopher's estate, this technique makes us feel as if we're photojournalists eavesdropping on actors and characters caught in a performance.
Despite their artificial language and play-acting-within-the-play, we grow intimately involved with these people; we're as startled as the sister is when she sees those 21st-century viewers looking at her - or when, in a yet-more brilliant stroke, she sees through the text to the subtext and envisions both Harlequin and the Princess' lady-in-waiting as, well, harlequins.
Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost struggled mightily to be breezy, to the extent of incorporating musical numbers from 1930s screen and stage hits. Without even trying, Peploe in Triumph of Love made me think of that Rodgers-and-Hart standard out of The Boys from Syracuse, "Falling in Love with Love."
With the character's intellectual peacockery and the actor's virtuoso ability to show glints of spontaneity beneath severity, Kingsley's philosopher reminded me of the lines, "I weave with brightly colored strings to keep my mind off other things/ So, ladies, let your fingers dance and keep your hands out of romance."
He's so marvelously controlled, so of a piece with the busts of past philosophers adorning his grounds, that the vision of him suddenly appearing in a wig is the film's greatest sight gag. For him, falling in love with love will be "playing the fool," just as for his sister it will be "falling in love with make-believe." In that difficult, rewarding role, Shaw is simultaneously touching and ripplingly funny - a forbidding ice sculpture melting to a puddle.
Sorvino does more than match these British worthies; like the character, she suggests she's able to wrap them around her pinky finger. Her Princess is persuasive whether appealing to the philosopher's intellectual hubris or to the sister's dormant desires; when she's out of their earshot, she evinces comical befuddlement at her own machinations as well as a stinging regret for her own cruelty. And what saves the material from any hint of archness is Sorvino's ardor with the man she loves. With him she is as direct as she can be within the confines of her ruse, and heartbreakingly noble in her resolution of the complicated scheme.
Sorvino has struggled since winning her best supporting actress Oscar for 1995's Mighty Aphrodite, but here she shows the range that should sustain her through a long career. She's equally adept at the glamour of romantic fool's gold and the deeper luster of the real thing.
Triumph of Love
Starring Mira Sorvino and Ben Kingsley
Directed by Clare Peploe
Rated PG-13
Running time 107 minutes
Released by Paramount Classics
Sun Score ****