Barry Lyndon (1975) by Stanley Kubrick

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REVIEW – Handel's sarabande which opens the film announces the theme of fatality. This is basically the subject of Barry Lyndon which is of infinite sadness, of an almost unbearable melancholy yet concealing a great humanity. Stanley Kubrick was unable to realize his major project on Napoleon despite titanic work on the subject, and adapted a lesser-known novel by William Thackeray, 19th century author, author of The Vanity Fair and The Book of Snobs. Everything is dissimulation in this film, lures and false pretenses equal to the title. Barry Lyndon will never be Barry Lyndon. The first part entitled How Redmond Barry acquired the title of Barry Lyndon is ironic. He will never have the coveted title. All that will remain is Redmond Barry, the unlucky adventure of an upstart and a vain man.

Barry Lyndon is the great film about vanity, a major theme in the 18th century as in Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. What this sentence could sum up: if you want to punish men, give them what they want.

If Kubrick begins with a duel scene where Barry's father will die, it is not by chance since the duel is not only part of the society of the time, but serves as a canvas between dominant and lower social classes. through the historical rivalry which took place in the 18th century and which will ultimately result in the note that Lady Lyndon signs to her ex-husband, Redmond Barry, marked with the year 1789, the date of the French Revolution which saw the abolition “privileges” and the death of the Aristocracy. This duel also serves as a weave in the imagination of young Barry in his rivalry with the world and which will find two outcomes: that with John Quint at the beginning, and at the end in his fall with his stepson, Lord Bullingdon. Mimetic rivalry that concerns us all in life. Quest for territory: sexual territory, political territory, economic territory, symbolic territory equal to the monkeys at the beginning of 2001, a space odyssey. Nothing has changed.

Kubrick uses such a story as a pretext to paint a final portrait of the human condition in all eras. There is the ruling class and the lower class. Both are just doubles. The first dominates and crushes the second which then wants to fight and take its place, illusorily believing to put an end to all domination. Only a privileged few will benefit from it. History does not happen with the coherence and arranged narrative that we give it. It's just a huge theater and a strange simulation where each of the characters has worn the wrong costume and plays a role without knowing it by not taking reality for what it is. Sad clumsy extras who think they will achieve a victory when in the end this only spells their defeat. This is the driving force of history for Kubrick and the fact that revolutions have failed.

What appears in this most explicit film by the filmmaker is the complete misunderstanding between the plane of reality and the plane of illusions, between what the characters hide, and their will hidden behind their facade. False pretenses, cross-dressing, masks, fooling, role playing and incessant and constant double playing as we will see. This misunderstanding at all levels influences the characters in their tragic destiny.

After the anticipation film A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick changes register, but in fact, he does not change. As much as A Clockwork Orange was “costumed”, Barry Lyndon is, as they say, a “period film”, another kind of theatricalized and ritualized civilization. The characters are constantly in performance, made up, costumed, painted, powdered, as if they were playing on a stage which is reality.

The aesthetic of the film is sumptuous. Barry Lyndon is equipped with a voice-over, the voice of an extradiegetic narrator, who establishes a particular relationship, since sometimes she describes the action and sometimes she mocks, intervening in counterpoint on what is happening visually. Mode allowing us to distance the action while establishing a dialogue with it, between what the image supposes, but which the commentary “destroys” in the process.

Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) is not seen as a caricatured bad man, but on the contrary, as an unsure of himself, shy, and inexperienced, immersed in the fog of inexperience. He is a sensitive being, under the control of his mother. It is this banality that will lead him to an incredible destiny and not an individual filled with an evil will from the start. A little thing. The question is: how will such a timid man become an odious and vanity-filled character ?

When his cousin Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton) asks him to look for his ribbon hidden in his chest, Redmond tells her he can't find it. However, his request was very clear. Nora is a flirt and Redmond should have questioned the point of being infatuated with such a woman who would drive him crazy.

At this time, the United Kingdom, threatened with invasion by the French, was raising regiments. Redmond finds a formidable rival: the virile Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), himself more coward than real fighter. Redmond is neglected by his flirt who danced with John Quin. When he learns that Nora is playing the same game with the latter, a better match with whom she is going to marry, he throws a glass at Quin's head. The duel takes place, but let's note that since everyone is playing in this register, it is a false duel. Nobody will die. It's theater.

Kubrick continues to unmask the lies and dissimulations in the actions of individuals while showing that they are intertwined with the unfolding of History. Each scene is stripped of the slightest commonplace. Believing he had killed John Quin, young Barry fled to Dublin on horseback with 20 guineas in his pocket. En route, he is robbed of his horse, his guineas and his pistols by Captain Feeney (Arthur O'Sullivan), a distinguished crook, but a crook nonetheless.

This scene is symptomatic of Kubrick's treatment. Far from playing brutality, it is the equal of a presentation in a living room. Captain Feeney is not there to serve him, but to rob him. The presentations continue in good earnest until Redmond is stripped. He will only keep his boots. In this film which shows behind the scenes, indicating the theater and the falsity of appearances, the intentions hidden behind a civilized facade, the filmmaker reveals a crucial aspect: things do not happen as we have the impression that they happen. It is the same in history. Proof that the interest is not to unfold it according to clichés, but to explore the unusual and incongruous aspects as here in the dialogues.

If Redmond does not have the stature of a hero as he is duped, robbed, betrayed and played with, he is as vigorous a man as during the duel with a soldier like Kubrick uses an unstable camera to show the eruption of violence contradicting the careful elaboration of the frames throughout the film.

Redmond then enlisted in an infantry regiment during the Seven Years' War. He finds his friend, Captain Grogan, who tells Redmond that Nora has become Mrs. John Quin. John Quin recovered from his wounds: the bullet was only tow. The Bradys couldn't agree to a duel and risk losing 1,500 pounds. The duel was a sham in order to get rid of the fiery and vain Redmond. More theater.

During a battle in the Seven Years' War, Redmond lost his friend, mortally wounded. His emotion is sincere and touching, indicating that he is not an insensitive man. This is the opportunity for Kubrick to stage the double movement of the sophisticated death drive, both rational and deadly, which is the rigorously gridded war, arranged like on a chessboard, aesthetically beautiful, but disastrous in terms of deaths. . Which is reminiscent of the battle in Spartacus. This battle is on par with the 18th century and human nature, with violence emerging behind the orderly and rational symmetry and arrangement of lines.

Redmond is disillusioned. “It's very nice to dream of glorious war in a cozy armchair. Another thing is to see it up close”, the narrator tells us. From then on, young Barry only thought of leaving the English army. It was thanks to a singular opportunity that he achieved this. He surprises two naked soldiers in a river. One of them must go back to Bremen for two weeks to bring important dispatches to Prince Henry. Redmond takes the opportunity to steal his horse and take his identity. New disguise.

This disguise is exercised in the sentimental domain as at the beginning with his cousin. While deserting, Redmond meets a young woman with a child, her husband being at war. They become lovers and a lovely romantic pastoral takes shape. At this rather romantic scene, as they leave, they say I love you. But the narrator, like Gustave Flaubert, breaks the spell: “A lady who is infatuated with a boy in uniform must be ready to quickly change lovers, otherwise it will be a sad life for her. The heart of Lischen (Diana Körner), similar to many neighboring towns, had been stormed and occupied several times before Redmond invested it. »Another false pretense. Kubrick indicates here the illusions that human beings have about each other by representing a reality which is in fact quite different. As a great filmmaker, he exposes this same illusion in cinema through the image itself. That’s basically what cinema is for. And art.

Kubrick never ceases to interweave this double individual and historical game. Posing as Lieutenant Fakenham, Redmond meets Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Krüger) but the latter unmasks him and places him under arrest. Redmond claimed to be carrying dispatches to a general who had been dead for ten months. Redmond is unlucky, he misunderstands the world, but he fools no one. He found himself among the Prussians and acquired his first reward by saving Captain Potzdorf at the Battle of Audorf. Once the war was over, he became his right-hand man. The person who has lied and stolen an identity is asked to be a spy to unmask another spy. Indeed, Potzdorf has his uncle as Minister of Police and hires Redmond. In Berlin, he must spy on a gentleman in the service of the Empress of Austria, the Knight of Balibari (Patrick Magee). He is a professional gambler, a libertine, a lover of women and good food. As he is of Irish descent, Redmond is the ideal man to investigate him.

Redmond and the knight of Balibari become acquainted. Meeting a compatriot, Redmond, moved, reveals everything to him. Kubrick thus shows that this man also knows how to be “sincere” by playing all the roles and all the understudies, as much duped as he is duped. Redmond plays the reverse spy, and reports the facts and gestures to Potzdorf and the Minister of Police while playing a double game. Another false pretense. As the knight of Balibari and Redmond cheat at the game, they defraud the Prince of Tübingen, close friend of the Great Frederick. The Prince feels cheated and decides not to pay his debts and incites the knight of Balibari to challenge him to a duel. As it is impossible for the Prince to fight, the knight will be taken back to the border. New false pretense, the knight of Balibari has already returned to the border while Redmond pretends to be him. Everyone covers up, cheats, steals or lies. Lying is the basis of social life as well as love life. This is the engine of history through the short story in Kubrick.

It is then that fate resounds, through music, the admirable Trio opus 100 by Franz Schubert which will seal the destiny of Redmond. He sees in the courtyard the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), Viscountess Bullingdon of England, a woman of vast fortune and great beauty, wife of Sir Charles Lyndon, Knight of the Order of the Bath, minister of George III , a cripple, in a wheelchair, worn out by gout. She is accompanied by the Countess's chaplain, Mr. Runt, who acts as tutor to her son, little Viscount Bullingdon. The only female character who finds favor in the eyes of the filmmaker.

Kubrick reduced the actress' dialogues to make her an almost mute character, a judicious choice which clearly shows to what extent her love for Redmond is authentic, readable, but silent, all interior, without mask and without theater. He doesn't need words. He is emotion itself, rich in his feeling, in contrast to those who surround him and who hide their will with words. But this woman's love is so worthy that in a theatrical society, of subterfuges, of false pretenses, she can only fail. Barry Lyndon clearly pits a mimetic being and a non-mimetic being, Redmond Barry and Lady Lyndon, face to face as a kind of duel that cannot take place opposite to those in the film. All the lies, the theater, the dissimulation that was going on gives way to something real and concrete. And rare.

The famous candlelight scene was lit by two 70-candle chandeliers and filmed with a 50mm lens with a 0.7 aperture. This device gives the sequence a spectral appearance, as if the characters were powdered and made-up ghosts giving themselves a human appearance. Carnal automatons whose little life which animates them like the candles which will soon go out only serves them to play cards and to win or lose money. Long agony of a class eaten away from the inside, already dead, but believing itself to be still alive and in full health. Except Lady Lyndon who comes to burn herself in the fires of love by choosing the wrong “target”. For his misfortune.

It is by no means a coincidence that everything is played out at a gaming table where Redmond conquers Lady Lyndon who never stops looking at him with a look so intense and so beautiful that we cannot doubt for a single second his sincerity. She falls madly in love, with dignity, gravely, in silence. This is where Redmond makes his biggest mistake. Having lived in permanent duplicity, he plays the lover he is not with a woman who truly loves him. His sincerity gave way to dissimulation. Eroticism becomes a game. And the game quickly becomes competition and the competition becomes a struggle for power.

Lady Lyndon then goes out for a walk, soon joined by Redmond. In a lateral tracking shot accompanied by Schubert's Trio which punctuates his march, Redmond joins Lady Lyndon as if in an ascending movement towards her prey and towards a much-desired destiny at the same time as she announces her doom in the same momentum.

This scene of restraint and grace, without a single word, Redmond kisses Lady Lyndon. It is rare in cinema that a love scene does not require words. In the novel, Redmond pursues Lady Lyndon who resists before succumbing. Kubrick profoundly changed the plot. In Thackeray's novel, Redmond and Lady Lyndon do not kiss after only looking at each other. Lady Lyndon resists before succumbing. She ends up hating Redmond while loving him. She even conspires against him.

The next scene opens with Sir Charles Lyndon dying at a gaming table as Redmond comes to him. Kubrickian irony. Sir Charles Lyndon, who claimed that he would survive all those who wanted to take his place, now he succumbs. The narrator concludes: “Read in the Chronicle of Saint James. Died in Spa, Belgium. Sir Charles Reginald Lyndon, Knight of the Order of the Bath. Long representative of His Majesty in various courts of Europe. He leaves a reputation that endeared him to all his friends. » Worldly and hypocritical article. The lie continues. This concludes the first part.

The second is entitled: “Misfortunes and disasters which befell Barry Lyndon. » Lady Lyndon is the most “human” character in the film, and the one Stanley Kubrick is closest to. Walled in her silence, swallowing her humiliations, she does not take revenge (will not take a lover), and until the end, she loves this man she should not have loved. She is noble, twice so if you like, by birth and by heart. If she loves, it's her misfortune, but she really loves. She didn't choose Redmond based on her class. She probably can't explain it to herself, but she loves and that alone is enough in her eyes. Love is his destiny.

Both in the novel and in the film, Redmond is an infatuated character, an indescribable conceit who transfers his villainy onto others without realizing the harm he does to others. He uses Lady Lyndon's affection to extract money from her and subject her to his extravagant spending. Just after the marriage between Redmond and Lady Lyndon, little Lord Bullingdon understood this immediately. Just before, Redmond, who became Barry Lyndon for a short time, was not concerned about smoking next to his inconvenienced wife. When she asks him to stop, he finds nothing better than to blow smoke in her face. From then on, he will accumulate the mistakes of the upstart: despising his wife in front of his son's eyes, particularly when the latter sees Redmond kissing a maid in his company. It crystallizes Lord Bullingdon's hatred towards him.

The connection between Redmond wallowing in debauchery and Lady Lyndon with her two children is cruelly difficult to stomach. Like the bath scene where she flatly apologizes for her scandalous behavior, Lady Lyndon is ready to do anything out of pure love and pure humility. The hand she extends to him and the kiss she gives him bear witness to this. The text read in French by Barnabé Farmian Durosoy entitled The senses, sixth song, is Lady Lyndon's dream, but which she will never achieve.

The critical scene is when Redmond severely corrects Lord Bullingdon for refusing to kiss him. Redmond makes him a rival, a formidable double who will find his peak in the duel scene. Manifest error, but classic jealousy, because little Bullingdon comes from the genes of Lady Lyndon's ex-husband, reinforcing the hatred of his father-in-law in his desire to remove this execrated rival. Especially since Redmond has had a son in the meantime whose every whim he will ignore.

But as his mother tells him, Redmond doesn't have a penny of his own. He has nothing. He must have a title, that of Lord. Kubrick well establishes both the stupidity and greed of men and the cold calculation of women, in particular his mother who will prove ruthless when she dismisses Reverend Hunt and takes control of the domain. If Redmond's mother holds her son under her thumb, Lord Bullingdon wants to find his place near his own mother, both will fail with too much “love” and too much ambition.

The machine then races relentlessly. Barry ruins the family through his careerism in order to obtain a title, he despises his wife, arouses the hatred of Lord Bullingdon and from then on, everything will turn against him through lack of restraint and inability to love. He must give receptions, buy paintings, make offerings, etc., to please. It takes a considerable toll on Lady Lyndon's fortune and permanently destroys her relationship with Lord Bullingdon. After the latter corrects little Bryan, Redmond severely whips his stepson. Punishment which brings the young man's hatred to its peak. The impact finds its outlet when, during a concert, Lord Bullingdon spits to his mother all the grievances he has in his heart towards this Irish upstart. Redmond inflicts a violent public correction on him, all the more clumsy as he does not possess the aristocratic codes. From then on, we move away from him. His creditors flock to his door.

His son must die for Redmond to understand what suffering can be. He suffers as he made Lady Lyndon suffer. But it's too late. And again, it's his own fault since he didn't refuse anything to Bryan. Although he was a good father, he never taught her to say no. Inevitably, the latter disobeys him when his father asks him not to see and ride the horse alone before his birthday. Episode which will cause the accident and the death of young Bryan. Upsetting scene when we contrast little Bryan's joy at a party with that where he is dying, asking his parents to reconcile.

Redmond takes refuge in alcohol. Resentment transforms Lord Bullingdon into a clone of Redmond without taking into account that the latter is overwhelmed by grief due to the death of his son. Which Lady Lyndon does not do. She avoids the mimetic spiral to the point that she turns her violence against herself in a suicide attempt. Lord Bullingdon's jealousy is understandable, but equally blind. This resentment is illustrated by his entrance (in a rear tracking shot) at one point when he goes to meet Redmond to challenge him to a duel, an entrance similar to Alex (in a rear tracking shot) in A Clockwork Orange, dressed in a similar way when he enters the record store.

In this duel scene, we have two doubles, one facing the other, as if in front of a mirror. Having become more humble again after the death of his son, Redmond shoots to the ground to spare Lord Bullingdon who takes the opportunity to shoot and wound Redmond in the leg, the latter of which will be amputated. A formidable chess game where vanity and haughtiness compete for the prize. Reciprocal class hatred from which no one wins in the end. Kubrick doesn't take sides. He sees men and women at work, whatever their condition. They function in the same way, driven by jealousy, ambition, the desire for power and notoriety. The filmmaker shows their fate in all eras.

Here again, Kubrick modified Thackeray's novel since in the latter, Lord Bullingdon does not challenge Redmond to a duel and returns to his mother. In the film, this duel is placed at the end, a symmetrical mirror reversed to that of the first. Painful irony, Redmond is injured just like his father who was killed. As if he had shot himself through his double, Lord Bullingdon, whom he created and carefully maintained.

In the end, Barry loses everything. He becomes Redmond Barry again. He goes into exile and receives a pension every month. He returns to his mother, fallen, through his own ambition. If 2001, a space odyssey (1968) illustrated the quest for territory at the anthropological level through the apes and imperial reason through Hal 9000, Barry Lyndon is more pragmatic in analyzing how it acts humanly in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment always with dominance and a struggle on both sides to enter into rivalry, the cause of the Revolutions as indicated in the bill signed by Lady Lyndon and which bears the date 1789.

Kubrick's irony is to indicate that this reconquest by Lord Bullingdon of the kingdom and his mother is as derisory as it is vain since the bourgeois Revolution which is being prepared behind the scenes will definitively put him and his caste to the ground for a greater control. A tragic speech, especially since those who try to escape this pitiless struggle are radically destroyed even within themselves.

This century of Enlightenment, a century of rationality and the enormous deployment of technology that is coming, therefore fails to contain the human dark side while believing that it can be mastered in a luminous way. History is in progress. A twilight film, Barry Lyndon is the other side of 2001, a space odyssey, this odyssey of the species which culminates in the supreme murder of humans by the computer Hal 9000, rationality itself. The 18th century haunts the filmmaker and we find him in several films including 2001, a space odyssey (1968), or at the beginning of Lolita (1962) with the painting by Gainsborough. Kubrick therefore does not place his film by chance in the 18th century, which hides within it, as in all other periods, its share of violence. A Clockwork Orange was the fierce criticism of this desire to organize society using the same methods as Alex, just disguised and legitimized behind scientific backing. Kubrick is the great filmmaker, skeptical and disenchanted with the strongest human illusion, that which thinks it resolves or organizes the world through enlightened, generous, or rational principles. Kubrick makes it clear that this is all just theater, a charade hiding a violent struggle in the background.

The last scene of incredible emotion indicates how the trap has closed on Lady Lyndon, held under the thumb of her son, in particular when the latter gives her the money intended for her ex-husband and looks at his mother feeling that it is also the cause of its ruin. Lady Lyndon's melancholy air says a lot about her failed and fallen love, forever fled, as cruel as the illusion was strong. Schubert's music underlines the tragedy. Only Lady Lyndon never played, but she is the one who loses everything. It is not the humble who make history, but the vain people of the two clans who compete in ambition to maintain their quest for territory.

The film ends with a completely Kubrickian ironic twist to make fun of all this class machinery and that equality only exists in the grave, not in reality. Obviously, it would have been wiser for Redmond to accept Lady Lyndon's love and quietly end his life with her. Certainly, if he had been less vain, there would have been no film. If it exists, it is because human nature is like this. Fatal.

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