6 - Louis Malle and Uncle Vanya

Summary

To a degree even greater than applies with, for example, opera, cinema is a quintessentially collaborative artform. Almost without exception, a film given a commercial release on any scale is not an expression of even the director’s intentions in isolation, but the product of multiple authors, screenplay writers, camera operators, casting directors, producers and executive producers, post-production and film conglomerate magnates. At the most commercial end of the spectrum a major Hollywood production can even become an exercise in so-called ‘product placement’ and ‘subliminal brand endorsement’, in the shape of James Bond’s Aston-Martin, or Michael J. Fox’s Nike trainers in Back to the Future (1985). Does a film come into existence primarily as an act of artistic expression, or first and foremost to shift popcorn and soft drinks? Scarcely a big budget production by American standards ($1.75 million), Louis Malle’s film Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) might seem a long way from Hollywood films of that sort, but even here, as will be seen, questions of something akin to brand promotion are not entirely irrelevant.

Nonetheless, it is hard to see how this film could be further from the expected Hollywood model, even though Malle filmed in the United States rather than his native France, and he uses an entirely American cast. In the first case, the film is a screen adaptation of a stage play, not a formula favoured by the Hollywood commercial ‘blockbuster’ system, rare exceptions being 12 Angry Men (1957), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), or Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), adapting Edward Albee’s 1962 stage play. However, Vanya on 42nd Street, as an adaptation of a late nineteenth-century classic Russian stage play, involves still further layers in the process of collaboration. In another, political sense of the word, collaboration might be said to explain the fact that Malle spent the later 1970s making films in North America rather than in his native France, and in English.