THE GREAT LILIAN HALL

Ιούν 09, 2025 Κινηματογράφος 0

MOVIE REVIEW

THE DEFENCE OF WOMEN

The great Lilian Hall: by Yannis Fragoulis

70-year-old Lillian Hall is a matriarchal figure on New York theatre stages. For decades, her performances have earned her glowing reviews, glamour, money and an unshakable status at the top of Broadway’s aristocracy. Today, she can be seen rehearsing for her new show. She is about to star in a modern adaptation of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” directed by a modern, alternative, up-and-coming playwright.

The great Lilian Hall: The movie

For her it’s just another challenge, another season. For him it’s an artistic gamble, but also a commercial guarantee: experimental diversity is good, but a big name on the marquee fills the theatres. “It’s like sex-directing a big leading lady,” he tells her awkwardly. “You always think: was I good? Was I better or worse than the last one?”

Only lately Lillian Hall hasn’t been herself. Something’s going on. She forgets her lines, loses her connection to the text, the actors, the flow of the narrative-the flow of the day, of her life on and off stage. She blurs, she forgets, she hallucinates, she is tormented by excruciating insomnia. An MRI reveals the cause: she is in the early stages of dementia. Stubborn and frightened, she insists that she will continue with the show. After all, what else can she do? What else is left for her?

She has sacrificed everything else – her relationship with her daughter disturbed, life in the Manhattan penthouse lonely. Since her husband died, too, her only companion is her faithful housekeeper. But the battle with an abandoning mind is unequal and unfair. Will she manage to remain great until the final bow?

The great Lilian Hall: The survival

Michael Cristofer’s film is ostensibly a narrative about dementia and the battle of survival in that struggle. This, I think, is the occasion to talk about the actor’s battle to survive on the “stage”. To put it better, to carry through acting and show that he can do his best. An actor doesn’t just play for the audience, much more he plays for himself. Every play is a challenge, will he go the extra mile or stagnate?

Following this problematic we find “Opening Night”, by John Cassavetes. There we had something similar. The protagonist wanted to do her own acting and so she did her own variation, ignoring the text and the stage directions. The question was whether she would give what she wanted, whether she would be the great actress and whether the audience would like her. All of this creates an intense neurosis in humans that slowly destroys the parts of the brain responsible for perceiving and understanding reality.

In Cassavetes’ film the transgression was made and it succeeded. In this film we go further. This woman has to fight with herself. We see her struggling, accepting her illness, but not giving up. She is helped by her housekeeper who will stay loyal to her until the end. The whole show is based on her, the big name. This fact exacerbates the hysterical and, consequently, cannot serve her quest for a partial cure.

The great Lilian Hall: The struggle

The narrative shows us what is happening from the perspective of an outside observer. In this way, the viewer is involved in this case and puts himself in the position of this woman. He wishes to succeed, to play the role and surprise the audience, to receive the applause, in the end. The director advances the plot in small narrative steps, promising us a “good ending”, but this is not so achievable as the film time progresses. The viewer is caught between the negative and positive outcome, more towards the former.

At the end we get the real surprise. Hall is lost just before the premiere. Her housekeeper finds her and brings her back. Just before the actors are due to come out she arrives and goes on stage before her replacement takes her place. She performs, with the help of her housekeeper, and makes it through. So far we have something similar to Opening Night. The director dares to do something else. Another parallel narrative.

During Hall’s attempt to make it, we see, in black and white, a series of shots that speak of Hall, even of her talking about herself. Is this another film? Unknown! Quite possibly it’s a documentary or TV show talking about this great actress. But why were these shots taken? It seems that they were made before the actress became ill. But at the end, her daughter mentions the past. Here we have a turning point.

The great Lilian Hall: The internal search

Perhaps it was a tribute they were preparing when Hall was in her prime. But now it seems that either she can no longer perform or she is no longer alive. It is a fact that is not being said. This negation creates a distance from the factual as expressed throughout the film. She comes to meet the imaginary, Hall talking to her dead husband, watching him guide her, kissing him lovingly. We have the production of the imaginary this time by the viewer. He assumes and must draw a conclusion.

This process, in the spectator, takes place in his unconscious. In the deviation from the factual, emotion is produced. In this way two interesting themes are made: The first is the production of the feeling, the emotion, for this woman, as if she were either a familiar person or ourselves. The second is the understanding of what had happened, how this woman was functioning, how she finally made it, as the producer of the play says.

You leave the cinema troubled. You search for the truth. You understand that there is not only one dimension of reality. You make your own version and slowly you understand everything. This may take time, but it is a process of psychotherapy, as art should be. The film works and moves away from mere reporting, into the psyche of the person and there it evolves unpredictably, beautifully and continuously. The opera aperta, the open work, has always been the most productive form of art.

THE GREAT LILIAN HALL

Directed by Michael Cristofer

Script: Elisabeth Seldes Annacone

Photography by Simon Dennis

Editing: Joseph Krings

Music: Mac Quayle

Sound: Hugo Kundert, Chris Basta, Michael Phelan

Props: Brad Burnham, Kaitlyn Wagner

Costumes: Emilio Sosa

Producers: Bruce Cohen, Jessica Fox-Thigpen, Marie Halliday, Steven Rogers, George Scarles, Scott Thigpen

Cast: Jessica Lange (Lillian Hall), Kathy Bates (Edith Wilson, housekeeper), Lily Rabe (Margaret Tanner), Jesse Williams (David Fleming), Pierce Brosnan (T. Maynard), Michael Rose (Carson), Cindy Hogan (Jane Stone), Keith Arthur Bolden (Dr. DeMayo)

Production countries: USA

Year of production: 2024

Language: english

Colour: colour, black and white

Genre: tragedy, biography

Duration: 110΄

For more information on the credits and technical characteristics see here.

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