DVD of the Week: The House of Mirth

The great British director Terence Davies is a cinematic archeologist, using images to reveal the enduring power of the past in the present day. In the clip above I discuss his 2000 feature, “The House of Mirth,” his adaptation of the novel by Edith Wharton—set nearly a century earlier, in New York—which unpeels sharp and poignant paradoxes of bygone norms, indeed, of social and aesthetic life overall. The formality of relationships, the harshly judgmental and moralizing repression of wide swaths of authentic emotion, the enforced rigidity of manners all combine to torment a free-spirited, open-hearted woman such as the movie’s protagonist—and also to inspire an ornamental graciousness, a sublime surface sheen, and an exquisite intricacy of artifice such as our own freer and less-inhibited age is unlikely to inspire. His new film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” starring Rachel Weisz, is slated for a December release here; I’m deeply impatient to see it.