If he hasn’t cast a spell over you yet, he will by the time you see how he slow dances.
We can’t see him but we know he’s there, fine in his dinner suit, brooding on the sidelines, watching her spin around the floor with another man, a man who isn’t her husband. Soon enough, he will be the other man, not just on the dance floor and not before the tension between them builds, excruciatingly, and she beats him into submission.
But first, and most importantly, they must face the music and dance.
Early in The English Patient (1996) Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) find themselves on the dance floor of a ballroom in a chic Cairo hotel. Other bodies swirl around them, but the film’s director, the late, very great Anthony Minghella (1954-2008), pushes the camera in on them, narrowing its gaze to show how the world has reduced down now to just these two elegant people, turning slowly and effortlessly to the beautiful Rodgers and Hart standard ‘Where or When’.
Like Minghella’s camera, Almásy’s gaze narrows down on Katherine and she is caught under its spell. As they dance, they talk. Katherine asks Almásy why he followed her yesterday from the market to the hotel. Almásy replies that he was concerned about a European woman on her own, in that part of Cairo, and “felt obliged to … as the wife of one of our party.” She suggests he could have ‘escorted’ her instead, that his following her was almost ‘predatory.’ He says nothing, just focuses his rapacious eyes on her and they tell us everything we need to know without a word ever leaving his mouth. That gaze is intense, so intense at first that she can’t meet it, can’t look back. He won’t back down, won’t look away. His eyes, like his arms, now that they have her in their grasp, won’t let her go.
When I first saw The English Patient I was just as spellbound as Katherine. I still am. Ralph Fiennes has a way of looking – of beholding his subject, observing and considering it – that is quite intense, powerful and even a little unsettling. I was caught under the spell of those pale blue-green/grey eyes, deep pools of empathy and fire. Ralph Fiennes has eyes that look like they contain secrets and he concentrates them into a gaze that could burn a hole right through you. Among actors working today, I think only Michael Fassbender comes close to being able to trigger this much damage with just one look.
Fiennes’ eyes provide a way into discussing his acting style. You can distill much of his power as an actor when you look at his other scenes in The English Patient – not those scenes where we see him handsome and passionate with Katherine before the war, but later in the last days of the Italian retreat, when he’s confined to a bed in that ruined Tuscan house, burnt beyond recognition, being nursed by Juliette Binoche’s sympathetic Hanna. Here, he’s a mass of thickened scar tissue and damaged organs. His face has been emptied of expression; his eyes are the only way we have into his character’s experience and emotional life. They are eyes that contain secrets, to be slowly revealed as the narrative unfolds.
Fiennes has a compelling, penetrating gaze that has served him well in weighty, serious cinema roles. He has eyes so extraordinary, really, that whenever I look at a photo of him or watch him on screen, they are the first things I see and the only thing I can focus on throughout the viewing experience. It’s almost like the rest of his face is just a smudge. This was effective in The English Patient and also in the role for which he is most well known with a wider audience, as the Dark Lord, Voldemort, in the Harry Potter franchise, where his face, in its hideous, snake-like deformation is ultimately obliterated, just a blank canvas from which those two piercing eyes look out.
And to date, Fiennes has also been a part of two of the biggest film franchises of all time – as the previously mentioned Voldemort from The Goblet of Fire to The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (four of the seven Harry Potter films), and now as Gareth Mallory in the Bond films from Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes), replacing Judi Dench as M from the end of that film on.
One of my first encounters with Ralph Fiennes and that magnetic gaze was in Robert Redford’s underrated gem, Quiz Show (1994). Here, Fiennes plays the real life Charles Van Doren, who made it rich in the 1950s on the quiz show ‘Twenty One’. In the early days of television, Van Doren – a WASP with family ties deep in the East Coast intelligentsia – became a symbol of aspiration and desire for the TV watching masses. Pitted against Herb Stempel (John Turturro), a less attractive American (working-class, crass, Jewish), Van Doren, like all previous winning contestants, is given the answers, and is in turn seduced by the money that audiences tune in to see.
To return to The English Patient, where Minghella builds a series of scenes around subtle shifts in Fiennes’ eyes. In two pivotal scenes, built around Almásy watching Katherine, Fiennes’ eyes expose his character’s emotional state.
In the first, at the height of his affair with Katherine, he sits and watches her help serve at a serviceman’s Christmas dinner from an alcove at the back of the room. When she approaches, he tells her to say she’s sick, to swoon, so she can disappear into a dark corner with him. His eyes are lustrous and lustful. You can see, just in those eyes, how full he is with her. And he tells Katherine that he can’t sleep, can’t write, “I’m trying to write with your taste in my mouth.”
Perhaps nowhere is Fiennes’ ability to shift the tone of an entire scene with his eyes more powerfully on display than in his extraordinary performance as Commandant Amon Goeth in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). Fiennes’ gaze has been put to good use many times in roles that require danger and menace. As Goeth, we see an actor highly skilled at playing characters that exist in the greyer areas of human behavior. Which isn’t to say that Fiennes makes this Nazi monster sympathetic, but rather that he is able to unnerve us in the same way Goeth must have unnerved all those around him, with an erratic temperament that could turn in the blink of an eye.
Throughout her time as his housekeeper, Helen is brutally mistreated by Goeth. In a particularly disturbing scene, Goeth comes downstairs in the middle of a party to thank her for being a good cook and well-trained servant. He attempts to find a line of common experience between them as two lonely people and says, “I would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness … What would that be like, I wonder? What would be wrong with that?” Look into Goeth’s eyes and it seems he’s trying to work out his conflicting views, between attraction and repulsion. But as viewers we continue to feel unnerved as he moves closer. The scene is shot dark, with minimal lighting, adding to a menacing sense of claustrophobia for Helen and for us. He asks, “Is this the face of a rat?” He caresses her face, her breast, and says that he feels for her, but then he turns back, suddenly, chillingly, and says, “No I don’t think so, you Jewish bitch. You nearly talked me into it, didn’t you.” And then he slaps her face.
In this scene, as he does throughout Schindler’s List, Fiennes gives Goeth a disquieting, slippery sense of menace. He keeps us on edge by muddying the spaces between black and white, a far more effective approach than a caricatured portrayal of evil would be. This ability to create a constant sense of unease has also served him well in very different films, as Voldemort but also as Harry in In Bruges.
In case you hadn’t guessed, Fiennes fever is upon me once again with the release of two new films – Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel in which he has the lead and The Invisible Woman.
Fiennes is truly delightful as M. Gustave H, the concierge of The Grand Budapest, a lustrous alpine hotel in the fictional republic of Zubrowka. When we first meet him it’s 1932. M. Gustave excels at providing ‘exceptional service’ for the old, rich blonde women who flock to the Budapest. He also acts as a fervent mentor and advocate for the young, refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori).
Fiennes has always had a screen presence suggestive of another time; perhaps, because of the many period films he’s been involved in, but also something else not quite so obvious. Fiennes brings to every film a fully formed narrative that extends well beyond the page. While M. Gustave spends much of the film capering about attending to the needs of others, and later planning his own escape from wrongful imprisonment, it’s impossible not to feel that there is more to M. Gustave’s story than we get to see here, that there are depths on which Fiennes has built this amiable chap. And while M. Gustave’s eyes are for the most part bright with life, they also contain a melancholy that hints at a well of sadness contained in the line of service.
In The Invisible Woman, Fiennes, as Charles Dickens, says, “Every human creature is a profound secret and mystery to every other.” Fiennes is an actor who I think has always known this. And his performances, so compelling and nuanced, have peeled away layers to try and get to this truth. From Amon Goeth to Count László de Almásy to M. Gustave H, those eyes have worked their wonders to unlock some profound secrets, for him, and for us.
He’s so very good in Grand Budapest isn’t he? I was also very taken with his directorial debut Coriolanus. Very disappointed I missed The Invisible Woman when it was released in the UK earlier this year but I hope to catch it soon. Wonderfully thorough post Anna!
Yes, he is. Not that I was at all surprised, really. He is one of those actors who I can think can do it all.
Spot on about Michael Fassbender
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I can report that he has that same remarkable presence in the flesh. I happened to be sitting a couple of seats along from him at an opera a few years ago – around about the height of the Harry Potter films. Even in a milling crowd, he stood out, and not just because he was the only male in the audience (besides myself!) who wasn’t wearing the de rigueur bow tie. Coming eye to eye with him as he edged past me to take his seat isn’t something I’ll forget in a hurry – charisma is almost too mundane a word for what emanates from him. At the end of the performance, he applauded more loudly than anyone else, and I’m pretty sure his eyes were wet as he did.
He also made for a frighteningly convincing, hard-headed version of a Blair-like Prime Minister in David Hare’s recent Johnny Worricker trilogy for TV.
Very jealous to hear that. Sounds like a truly unforgettable moment for you.
What a splendid and breathtaking overview of his work. I hope Mr Fiennes reads this and commissions you to write his biography some day. 🙂 I can’t name any other critic or journalist who has captured the nuance and power of his craft so well and acutely.