Barry Lyndon, Euro-cynic
Stanley Kubrick's picaresque appraisal of a continent torn between its noble ideals and dissolute reality suddenly seems so not very 250 years ago, says Phil Hoad.
But even here there’s a kind of tension. Kubrick’s visual reference points weren’t just the harmonious likes of Constable and Gainsborough, but the more scabrous Hogarth, too, whose Marriage-à-la-Mode series may have influenced the long tracking shot taking in the dissolute lackeys chez Lyndon. And the director had to step outside, to a more individualistic era, to find a musical motif that bled enough sympathy for the antihero: Schubert’s Piano Trio in E Flat, Op. 100. “One of the problems which soon became apparent is that there are no tragic love themes in 18th-century music,” he later told interviewer Michael Ciment. Even as the film is gearing up into a curtain call for unrufflable European order, it still can’t totally repress these anarchic, wayward energies.
This is the imperfect cadence Barry Lyndon ends on: both undermining and affirming in its Europeanism. Teasing out the last trills of Schubert as Lady Lyndon stalls over signing her financial kiss-off to Barry, Kubrick intimates that a second’s misgiving is still capable of scuppering the grand-historical course of things. The date on the annuity is December 1789. Perhaps, in the remake, it could be June 2016.