“The Chaperone” makes you want to see a major drama about Louise Brooks, but this movie is far from it. Her mother has agreed to the trip only if Louise is accompanied by a chaperone, and the woman who volunteers for the job is Norma Carlisle ( Elizabeth McGovern), a Wichita society matron of scolding rectitude who still wears a corset and staunchly favors prohibition. Just being in New York in the ’20s, she’s living in her own movie.īut she’s doing it with a restriction. Richardson’s features are a little softer and rounder than Brooks’, but beneath that haircut, with red lips and black eyebrows, she comes off as radiantly knowing - the original Edie Sedgwick It Girl, a mischievous and reckless daredevil who sees that the world will be her oyster as long as she treats it that way. The energy that pours out of her on the rehearsal floor is the same eroticized audacity that takes her into a speakeasy, where she speaks her mind by reading yours. She wants to be a dancer in the Isadora Duncan mold (and Richardson, with a dance background, communicates this directly), yet her passion isn’t for dance, exactly. The movie is set in 1922, the year Brooks left her lovely but stuffy hometown of Wichita, Kan., to travel to New York City, where she’d won a coveted spot in the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. What actress today could approach playing Louise Brooks? Her fusion of delicacy and fire was unique, yet in “ The Chaperone,” the vivacious and daring Haley Lu Richardson plays Brooks at 16, when she was just starting out and feeling her power in the world, and damned if she doesn’t conjure a dose of the Brooks mystique. She had an inner sparkle that allowed her simply to be, and that was the thrust of her presence: a revolutionary new definition of womanhood that stripped all the old roles away, leaving nothing but her casual goddess incandescence. And this comes over in her films.” Brooks may be the one screen actress of the first half of the 20th century who conveys not just feminism but post-feminism that’s how ahead of her time she was. The critic Kenneth Tynan observed, “She’s the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker I think I’ve ever known. Brooks, unlike every other actress of the silent era, even the greatest ones (Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Theda Bara), didn’t go in for grand displays she understated her smiling freedom and sensuality, letting the emotions flow through her startlingly delicate and precise features. Depicting a child wise beyond her years suddenly turned loose in the figurative candy store, her maturity in fulfilling her womanly yearnings is convincing.And, of course, it’s the ivory-skinned siren who wore it. Her dance movements are a delight to watch. While Norma is genuinely fond of Louise, Louise has other fish to fry. The key to unlocking its mysteries lies with the handyman in a New York orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Norma’s search has occupied her adult life. The unremarkable woman who actually went with Louise (that Louise went to New York with that chaperone is fact) is replaced by a woman whom the film slowly develops into somebody whose real objective was to find her own identity. The subtleties of the raw materials that Fellowes provided give McGovern the wherewithal to deliver a strong emotional current of charm and verity. And that, more than the events in Louise’s life, is the seed from which the film grows.Įlizabeth McGovern plays Norma Carlisle, wife of a Wichita lawyer, mother in her early 40s of two adult sons, who volunteered to chaperone the teenager in the big city. Louise’s mother was reluctant to send her daughter so far at age 16 without a chaperone. Director Michael Engler’s debut feature film (after a distinguished career in TV series and telemovies) begins at that point. ![]() It’s subtle, clever writing, drawing on a book by Laura Moriarty telling about Louise’s career that began when in 1922 she was offered a place at the New York school of modern dance conducted by Ruth St Dennis (Miranda Otto) and Ted Shawn (Robert Fairchild). THE screenplay for “The Chaperone” telling how 16-year-old Louise Brooks shed the shackles of middle-class life in Wichita, Kansas, in 1922 to become a member of a modern dance company and later the star of 17 silent and eight sound films between 19, is the work of Julian Fellowes.
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