Ulises

Having enjoyed Joyce's complex novel so keenly I was prepared to be disappointed by Joseph Strick's and Fred Haines's screenplay, given the fabulous complexity of the original text. However, the film turned out to be very well done and a fine translation of the tone, naturalism, and levity of the book.

It certainly helps to have read the original text before viewing the film. I imagine the latter would seem disjointed, with very odd episodes apparently randomly stitched together, without a prior reading of the text to help grasp the plot.

It's amazing to see how "filthy" the film is, given that it was shot in Dublin in 1967. The Irish film censors only, finally, unbanned it for viewing by general audiences in Ireland as late as 2000 (it was shown to restricted audiences in a private cinema club, the Irish Film Theatre, in the late 1970s). Joyce's eroticism is not simply naturalistic and raunchy, it offers many wildly "perverse" episodes. Never mind that so many of these fetishes were unacceptable when the book was published in 1922 - they were still utterly taboo when the film was made in 1967.

It is astonishing and heartening to watch the cream of the Irish acting profession of the 1960s, respected players all, daring to utter and enact Joyce's hugely transgressive text with such gusto.

Bravo!

As if the film were not of value in itself, this is an excellent way to get an overview of the novel as a preface to reading it. In the summer of 1968 I saw the film in NYC; that fall in graduate school, I read the book for the first time. Some of the pleasure in reading the novel was my memory of the scrupulously detailed film. And for better or worse--and I've now read and taught the novel for over three decades--Milo O'Shea is still Leopold Bloom.

To adapt the words of some venerable Austrian nuns, how do you solve a problem like 'Ulysses'? Considered by most to be the greatest book of the 20th century, it is also, notoriously, one of its most difficult. How do you film a book where each character exists in a narrative set on 16 June, 1904, but also corresponds parodically to Greek mythology. Where each chapter is a parody, pastiche, interrogation of a whole host of literary styles and conventions, where almost every line is an allusion, crucially mutated, to literature, theology, philosophy, history etc. Where each character, event, setting, is subject to rigorous verbal deconstruction, so that they can seem to dissolve in front of our eyes, and put back in playfully different combinations; or where whole episodes evolve from word games. Where each setting is rich in historical significance, providing a meta-narrative to all the squabbling narratives that comprise 'Ulysses'.

Take, for example, the episode 'Proteus', where Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach. In the book, his mixture of observation and thought creates an unsettling, difficult text, where what he sees and what he thinks meld indistinguishably into one another, and the reader risks getting lost, fixed as he is in the flux of Stephen's head, not guided by an impartial narrator. We travel in fragments, on a Dublin beach, through the centuries, from Elsinore to the Renaissance to Paris, from literature and politics to memory, all the while doused in vast philosophical imponderables. Strick shows us a young man walking on a beach chased by a dog to the bathetic recitation of the novel's words. On paper, the dog inspires a number of puns, including colonialism, intellectual slavery and man's mortality. Here it's just a dog. The words are full of soundbites such as 'ineluctable modality of the visible', phrases that have to be gone over, worked out, understood, necessitating maybe even a dictionary. To have them sped read seems self-defeating, unless you know the book, and if you are only making a film for people who've read the book, than what's the point?

Strick films the formal landmine of 'Ulysses' with a studied focus on narrative. He avoids structural rupture, or any attempt to translate the novel's techniques, many borrowed from cinema, into film. A true 'Ulysses' would require someone with fiendish formal daring, a massive intellect, a sense of history and place, but also someone with a love of stories, resonant sentimentality, and popular culture, and, especially, a taste for farce. Godard of the 60s, maybe, or Richard Lester. Or some unholy mixture of Welles, Huston and Gerald Thomas.

ULYSSES is redundant, full of scenes slavishly recreated with dialogue spouted verbatim, but arbitrarily selected so that they make no sense. It might have been an idea to take a couple of digestible narrative lines and create a film around them, but Strick wants to get everything, and, in a standard feature film, can only give a few minutes to each episode, which makes a nonsense of them. Even on this level, his filming is fizzleless, flat, cautious, as if what is said in 'Ulysses' is crucial, when, of course, it's how it's said that counts. The crucial dichotomy of the novel, between Stephen's intellectualism and Bloom's corporeality, is fudged, and the triangle between Stephen (man), Bloom (womanly man) and Molly (woman) only comes about by pilfering the book's structure.

This is the accepted view of the film, and it is theoretically accurate. It makes the film sound inept, which, as Joyce, it may be, but it is very entertaining. Milo O'Shea is an incomparable Bloom, transcending the leaving cert level script, capturing this hero's multifaceted humanity in all its inglorious glory, his decency and desire, his tragedy and sense of exclusion (the mirroring of virulent racism in Bloom's time with our own more sophisticated age is chilling), and his peerless good humour.

He is supported by an extraordinary cast, many of whom are familiar from TV or theatre, and anyone who is not Irish will completely miss the frisson of seeing Dinny Byrne as a cheeky Lothario, on a birthday-suited pedestal, or, most alarming of all, Mrs. Cadogon as a leather-booted, whip-wielding Madame. Barbara Jefford is an extraordinary Molly Bloom, that hothouse flower spending the day in bed, voluptuously ordinary; her soliloquy is one of the best things in the film - it completely bypasses Joyce's intentions, but in its mixture of voiceover and silent, literal imagery it achieves a dreamlike power reminiscent of Perec/Queysanne's later UN HOMME QUI DORT.

There is great humour throughout, usually courtesy of Bloom, my favourite being his entry into a cafe of uncommonly audible munchers; the Nightown sequence, though again a travesty, is great fun, more Nabokov or Flann O'Brien in its Carrollian topsy-turvy, even if you wish, as did John Devitt who introduced the film, that it had been magicked by Fellini.

This was a Bloomsday treat at the Irish Film Centre. And the print itself was of historic interest, in that it was a censored one from the 1960s. Instead of cutting offending scenes, the sound was simply turned down, signalled by an amusing warning noise, or the picture being blacked out. Luckily I have the video (and the book!) so I went to check what I'd missed, which wasn't very much, some innuendo, a few choice epithets and Molly's orgasmic face. The decisions behind the censoring were erratic, as some scenes left intact seemed more fruity than some of the victims. In a film based on words, this vandalism, interrupting especially a soliloquy of snowballing impact, made me increasingly furious, and reminded me that relative liberalisation in this country after decades of Franco-like repression, was not all that distantly achieved.

There was real pleasure, as a Dubliner, though, in seeing the city of my parents in clean monochrome - due presumably to budgetary constrictions, Strick made no attempt to recreate turn-of-the-century Dublin, making another evasion of Joyce, but achieving something pleasantly different none the less. And as I could never have hoped, Martin Dempsey is perfect as my favourite Joycean character, Simon Dedalus, like all his friends mean-minded, selfish, dreadful, but capable of great humour, and in his recitation of a heartmeltingly sad melody, emotional beauty.

Could Ulysses be filmed? A tremendous novel becomes an atmospheric, entertaining, and generally absorbing film, losing none of the humour or the pathos. Perhaps a little slowly paced to start with, but filming around Dublin in black and white with an interesting cast and a variety of interesting approaches means the film is well worth seeing. Much better than expected.

Norman Mailer once observed, "There is a particular type of really bad novel that makes a great motion picture." With that in mind, this feeble attempt to film the greatest 20th Century English novel falls flat, as pointless an exercise as dramatizing "The Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes or the Declaration of Independence. It just can't be done. Joyce pioneered the plotless novel, concentrating on character development and situation, together with the melding of his characters' inner thoughts running in a hodge-podge of images and overlapping, run-on sentences. For those unfamiliar with the work, "Ulysses" is the story of an author in search of a character about whom he can write a novel: two men, one middle-aged, one young, wandering aimlessly through Dublin for 18 hours, finally meeting in a brothel, and then discussing their day over a cup of cocoa. That's it. Joyce himself joked that he had written a novel that would keep English professors busy for the next century, and the deciphering of his masterpiece has become a cottage industry. This is not a motion picture: rather, it is a tour de force in the nature of Charles Laughton reading from the New York Telephone directory: the presentation may be brilliant, but the exercise is pointless. The actors recite Joyce's prose brilliantly and Milo O'Shea, Maurice Reeves and Barbara Jefford, as Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus and Molly Bloom respectively, look exactly like what one would imagine the characters to appear, but this is hardly enough to sustain the viewers' interests for an excess of two hours. Literary critic John Greenway observed, "To read it ['Ulysses'] with ease, one should have a PhD in comparative languages and literature." Indeed, Joyce himself spoke some 15 languages fluently and his work abounds with multiple lingual puns. Caveat: unless you have at least majored in English Literature and taken a graduate course in James Joyce, you won't have the slightest idea what is going on here - nor will you care.