Wild Nights

J. and LB and I saw Wild Nights with Emily Dickinson at the uni theatre tonight.

I confess, with some embarrassment, that I didn't know about the 1998 scholarship on Dickinson's letters, and that some of my ideas about her were still inhabiting that old persona of recluse and self-silencer, though I knew she'd been heavily edited by her so-called supporters.

What a beautiful act of restoration this movie is -- quite literally -- of art and of truth.

The film's been compared to The Favourite and it does share aesthetic as well as thematic threads with that film -- if you liked one, I think you'd like the other. Both are funny, and self-aware of themselves as constructed works of art.

Wild Nights feels loose, low-budget, sometimes improvised -- it reminded me a little of Drunk History -- except then occasionally it plunges you through the ice into the lightless sea. It's sometimes mannered, sometimes arch, sometimes very moving.

If you left five minutes before the end, you might think this was a light, clever act of historical revisionism -- when in fact it is publicly undoing an awful revision and erasure of queer love and desire. The "what happened after" text at the end, over the quiet scrape of eraser on paper, enacts a devastating act of rewriting in the viewer's mind. (Or my mind, anyway.)

The wind is blowing, and I am promised a wild night about the beautiful shed. I'm glad.

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