Favorite Characters: Christopher Isherwood (Christopher and His Kind)

I already reviewed this movie years ago, so there’s no need to review it again for Other Doctor Lives. In that case, I’ll talk about the character instead, with added focus on Matt Smith’s fine performance. Before we start, here’s my Other Doctor Lives addendum to my original Christopher and His Kind review: Accent Watch – So, so RP. Recommend? In General – I would. It’s a pretty well-made LGBTQ period piece, which I like, and it’s fascinating to get such a different look at Germany in the years before the war. Matt Smith – Definitely. Smith is great here, and despite the film coming about between series 5 and 6 of Doctor Who, he did a fine job putting Eleven out of my head while I was watching (a few spoilers.)

Admittedly, Christopher and His Kind plays a little differently to me after having read the book, which has a fairly different focus and sensibility. I still like the film, though, so I view it more as a separate entity apart from the book, using some of the figures from the memoir to tell the story it wants to tell (a bit like Christopher Isherwood actually did, refracting his real-life experiences in Berlin into The Berlin Stories? We’re getting into Charlie Kaufman levels of meta here.) And for the film’s version of Christopher, the character is drawn in a pretty compelling way.

Christopher never outright states the ethos of his narrator from Goodbye to Berlin, “I am a camera with its shutter open,” but that’s kind of the approach he brings to being in Berlin. In regards to the “characters” he encounters, like Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross, we see the way he takes them in as an observer, already beginning to formulate how he’s going to write about them in his books. And when it comes to the rise of the Nazis and the coming signs of war, Christopher is very much, “Oh, I don’t do politics.” He’s against the Nazis, but he doesn’t take Hitler seriously, doesn’t think they’ll really come to power, and doesn’t see why he should have to take a “stance” on it. As the story goes on and the country shifts deeper and deeper into fascism, he does have more of a political awakening, but his initial position is much more Switzerland.

Because Christopher isn’t there to explore Berlin’s politics and culture. As he very clearly says, he’s there “for the boys.” I really like that Christopher, who’s such an insular, intellectual character and who obviously comes from a majorly-repressed upper-crust upbringing, is so naked in his desire for love, affection, and sex. Despite his smarts and despite knowing that Caspar is a rentboy, he still fools himself into thinking Caspar likes him as much as he likes Caspar, and he makes no bones about falling head over heels. There’s a scene where they’re all at a lake somewhere and Christopher and Wystan are talking by the shore while Caspar is doing stretches and posing on the dock, and there’s this little moment where Christopher waves and calls out, “Caspar!” and just lights up when Caspar indulgently waves back, and it tells you so much about what Christopher is like in love.

While his relationship with Heinz is very different, it’s similarly reflective of how fast and hard Christopher falls. If Caspar is the grinning Adonis, Heinz is sweet-faced and delicate, someone Christopher can protect and provide for. Christopher isn’t a fighter, but he uses his money and status to try and help Heinz’s family and is for for Heinz emotionally through tough times. And as the situation in Germany gets more and more unstable, Christopher’s personal crusade of the war becomes his effort to get Heinz out of the country before he can be conscripted.

I love Smith’s performance in this role. Like I said, I don’t think of Eleven once while watching him in it. Christopher is so many things all at once: he’s fussy and uptight, he’s bossy but a little insecure, he’s smart, he’s simultaneously fascinated with the minutiae of human beings but disinterested in the larger societal backdrop, he’s by turns delighted and desperate in love, he’s self-centered but also a good friend. Smith makes all of that fit together into one consistent character who feels true to himself throughout, which is a tidy balancing act.

Christopher and His Kind (2011)

I saw this made-for-TV BBC film when it first came out in DVD, but this is the first time I’ve seen it since reading the memoir on which it’s based.  While my newfound knowledge of and love for the book definitely colors my opinion of the movie, I’ll try and keep this review as film-based as possible and save the comparisons for another post.

Like the book, the film presents Christopher Isherwood’s time in pre-war Berlin, where he meets the people who would inspire the characters in The Berlin Stories.  His official reason for going to Berlin is just that:  a change of scene in which to write.  Unofficially, though, his real aim is to fall in love with beautiful German boys.  Similar to Cliff/Brian in Cabaret (depending on if you’re talking about the stage or screen version,) he savors the party in Berlin while he can, until the looming specter of the coming war is too stark to ignore.

As far as the plot goes, the movie feels a bit stitched together.  Scenes are sometimes placed alongside each other rather than strictly seeming to lead into one another, although, based on the source material, it’s an understandable fault.  I really can’t think of a single Isherwood book I’ve loved for its riveting, tightly-drawn plot.  No – the beauty of Isherwood is the extraordinary life he breathes into his fascinatingly-specific characters, and that’s particularly true in this film, which presents the real people he fashioned into characters.  To that extent, it doesn’t really matter what’s happening onscreen, as long as Gerald Hamilton, Jean Ross, and Christopher himself, are part of it.

Which of course means that the acting is vital.  Can the performances make these people as vibrant as they are on the page?  As Christopher, Matt Smith is superb:  intellectual, naively unaccustomed to life in Germany, somewhat snobbish, ironic, a bit bitchy, and wonderfully earnest in love.  He’s somehow aloof and warm at the same time, and it’s clear why people would be drawn to him.  I always like seeing Toby Jones (the Dream Lord from series 5 of Who,) and his Gerald (a.k.a. Mr. Norris) is very well-realized.  He has Gerald’s affectations and vanity down to a tee.  And I can’t sing the praises of Imogen Poots (also excellent in Miss Austen Regrets, another fine British telly biopic) highly enough.  Her Jean is undeniably the best Sally Bowles I’ve ever seen.  She’s simultaneously brash and brazen and vulnerable, and the way she sings is perfect:  just shy of in-tune, and lackadaisically, like she’s doing you a favor by letting you watch her.

Because this is a BBC production, there are plenty of other familiar faces.  As Christopher’s mother, Lindsay Duncan steals every scene she’s in, Pip Carter (who previously worked with Matt Smith in Party Animals) plays W.H. Auden, Christopher’s boyfriend Heinz is played by Douglas Booth (recently Pip in a Masterpiece production of Great Expectations,) and who’s that playing Heinz’s brother, who’s being drawn in by the Nazi’s promises?  None other than Tom Wlaschiha, Jaqen frickin’ H’ghar from Game of Thrones.

Warnings

A fair amount of sexual content (including sex scenes, flashes of nudity, and a brief depiction of BDSM,) some language, drinking, smoking, and thematic elements.

Christopher and His Kind (1976)

Oh, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin.  He gave us the stories first, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, fictional tales born out of his real pre-war experiences in Germany.  In time, those stories became plays (I Am a Camera) and musicals (Cabaret) and film adaptations of plays and musicals.  And finally, in Christopher and His Kind, he wrote the real story.

In reading Isherwood’s memoir, I was surprised to find so many differences between it and The Berlin Stories.  I’d been under the impression that the book spent much of its time sorting out the fact and fiction from the stories, offering up anecdotes of the real people who inspired the characters and putting Isherwood’s sexuality back into the narrative.  Part of this is down to Christopher and His Kind’s TV movie adaptation, which I saw prior to reading and which does mainly divide its time between Berlin antecedents and Isherwood’s romantic history.  However, stories about Gerald Hamilton (Mr. Norris,) Jean Ross (Sally Bowles,) and their contemporaries only make up a portion of the book.  There’s so much more to it than that.

First, Isherwood devotes a lot of attention to The Berlin Stories itself, discussing his writing process, his discarded drafts, and his reasoning for specific inclusions, changes, and deletions.  He gives the same treatment to other works he wrote during the years covered by the book and generally provides a fine, interesting portrait of the writer at work.  We meet other writers of the day, those Isherwood socialized with, admired, spurned, collaborated with, and was mentored by.  He includes plenty of correspondence between himself and other writers, letters and telegrams about his work and assorted other subjects.

Like the Berlin anecdotes, though, our look at Isherwood’s career isn’t the main thrust of the book.  At its heart, it’s about Isherwood’s homosexuality and his social, mental, and emotional journey in coming to view himself as a member of a tribe.  We see the connections he excised from The Berlin Stories, and he gives us both his justifications (narrative focus, audience relatability, legal issues) and his true reasons (fear of exposing himself as gay) for making his narrator avatar entirely sexless.  We go into detail about the men he loved, especially his years-long relationship with a young working-class Berliner and Isherwood’s efforts to help him escape Germany.  He visits Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, reads E.M. Forster’s Maurice, and struggles with his mother’s perception of his life.

Most of all, we see Isherwood come into his gay identity.  Not just being gay but consciously aligning himself with a subculture and holding to their ideals.  He begins his journey as an individual looking to enjoy himself, fall in love, and get a taste of everything Berlin’s underground has to offer; he concludes it profoundly changed, recognizing himself as part of a community and actively working against its marginalization.  The memoir is so frank and vulnerable.  It highlights moments when he hid himself out of fear and his shame at not being bolder.  It details his awakening into the possibility of true love and his deeply personal outrage that his love is regarded as less authentic than other people’s.  It chronicles his growing political awareness and his realization that all of his allegiances are filtered through his existence as a homosexual, that he can’t hold with any party that fails to recognize his validity as a human being.  Reading the book, you can help but feel that this is a subject Isherwood kept quiet about for a long time, and he’s finally breaking his silence.