Of Inhuman Bondage

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2015)

There is a scene in "Educating Rita" in which the heroine is reading a copy of Somerset Maugham's novel "Of Human Bondage" on a bus. "Ooh, my husband's got lots of books like that" says the woman sitting next to her. "What, Somerset Maugham books?" "No, bondage books!"
Bondage books may at one time have been the province of the dirty old man, but in 2011 they became a literary sensation with the immense success of E. L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey". I have never read Ms James' magnum opus, sadomasochism not being my thing, so cannot speculate as to just why it proved so popular, but I caught the film adaptation when it was recently shown on television. The precise significance of the title is never explained in the film, although I presume it is a play on the main male character's surname. (I note that even though this is an American production the British spelling "Grey" is not Americanised to "Gray" in the title).
The story deals with Anastasia Steele, a college student who begins a relationship with Christian Grey, a brilliant young entrepreneur who has become a billionaire at the tender age of 27. Nobody in a movie is ever referred to as a "millionaire" these days, now that a million pounds is no longer a fortune but merely the top prize in a gameshow. When I was at school, I was taught that a "billion" meant a million million. Now it has been devalued to mean a thousand million, probably to suit America's super-rich who needed a word which would set them apart from mere millionaires or even multi-millionaires.
The film is not a comedy, but it makes use of one standard romantic comedy plot device; there always has to be some obstacle standing between the two lovers and their happiness. Here the obstacle is Christian's strange taste in love-making. He is not interested in any form of sexual activity which does not involve sadomasochistic humiliation and wants Anastasia to play the "submissive" to his "dominant". He even makes her enter into a bizarre "contract" in which they agree which sexual practices will be permissible between them and which will not.
Several actors, including Ryan Gosling, turned down the part of Christian because they were not interested in the character, and I can understand why. Jamie Dornan, who was eventually cast, does not get much out of the role, but then there is perhaps not a lot to get. We hear something of Christian's back story, of his hard childhood and of how he was seduced at the age of fifteen by an older woman who introduced him to sadomasochistic practices, and the implication is that these experiences have left him damaged goods, psychologically speaking, but I felt that we needed to know a lot more about his past in order to understand his character.
Anastasia, however, is more interesting. She is happy to go along with Christian's whims, although it seems quite clear that she regards them with, at best, bemusement and, at worst, disgust. At first I wondered if she had been persuaded to try and conceal her revulsion by the thought of all the billions she would enjoy should she ever become Mrs Christian Grey, but the truth is more complicated, and Anastasia less mercenary, than that. It gradually becomes clear that she has quite genuinely fallen in love with Christian, who away from the bedroom can be charming and generous. (I say "away from the bedroom", but actually that is not quite accurate. As far as Christian is concerned bedrooms are only for sleeping and not for sex; all his sexual encounters with Anastasia take place in a special chamber). She finds it difficult to cope with the thought that the two of them want quite different things from their relationship. She wants romance and tenderness, whereas he simply wants sexual pleasure, and her difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that his idea of sexual pleasure is very different from hers.
There is a surprising amount of psychological depth, at least as far as Anastasia is concerned, and Dakota Johnson (daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) proves a surprisingly likable heroine. On the basis of this film she strikes me as a better actress than her mother; I was never able to sympathise with any of Melanie's characters in the way I can with Anastasia. Dakota's performance here reminded me more closely of her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, in Hitchcock's "Marnie", another sexually charged drama about an ill-matched couple.
I must admit that I watched the film more out of idle curiosity than out of any real interest in its subject-matter. It is not, however, simply some pornographic romp, which is what I feared it might be. Yes, there are sex scenes, but then it would have been difficult to make a film out of this particular story without sex scenes. "Fifty Shades of Grey" is not in the same class as "Marnie", but it is considerably better than I thought it would be. 6/10