Where is the dividing line between romantic devotion and psychotic obsession? How can you know whether your romance is Titanic or Fatal Attraction? Veteran Spanish writer/director Vicente Aranda (Lovers) uses the story of Queen Joan "the Mad" (1479-1555) -- daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, mother of Charles I of Spain (who became Emperor Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire) -- to look at this age-old question ... and to heat up the screen.
Ignacio De Amo
Livid Lover: Queen Joan "the Mad" (Pilar López de
Ayala).
Details
Opens Friday
The Embarcadero Center and the
Act One/Two
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Beyond indisputable names and dates, it's difficult to assess Mad Love's historical accuracy, not only because the story of Joan is not precisely a staple in American schools, but also because the professional historians' opinion of her mental state has varied greatly over the years. As Aranda presents it, in 1496 -- four years after her parents' sponsorship of Christopher Columbus paid off -- the 17-year-old Joan (Pilar López de Ayala) is sent off to Flanders for an arranged marriage with Archduke Philip of Habsburg (Daniele Liotti). The engagement is strictly political: The two have never met.
One might expect this marriage of convenience to be loveless, and one would be wrong. From the moment Joan first meets the sizzling Philip -- it is not for nothing that he's gone down in history as Philip the Handsome -- we see the glint in her eye and hear the magnified sound of her heart thumping. Philip seems equally taken with this Winona Ryder look-alike and carries her off to bed after a 90-second ceremony.
For a while, things are hunky-dory: Not only are the two sexually compatible, but Joan starts popping out potential heirs to the throne at an almost alarming rate. She's a literal kingmaker, which pleases Philip, but the fact that she prefers to breast-feed her spawn despite the availability of wet nurses galore makes him begin to wonder whether she's perhaps a tad ... strange.
This is but the first hint we get that the notion of Joan's "madness" might be entirely a social construct. What sane woman would breast-feed if she didn't have to?
On top of that is the fact that Philip isn't just an archduke; he's also, you know, a guy. And like lots of guys, he's got a roaming eye. Unlike lots of guys, he's got the royal prerogative to boff damn near anyone he wants. The entire court conspires discreetly to keep from Joan what everyone else knows: Philip fools around.
When, at what is already a particularly traumatic juncture in her life, Joan discovers Phil in the sack with someone else -- one of her ladies-in-waiting, no less -- she goes mad ... or, perhaps, just gets mad. To a 17th-century perspective, it likely looked like the former, but to us her extreme reaction seems more justifiable. Still, this outburst, plus the general fact that her raging libido far outstrips her regal dignity, gives her political enemies an opening to start transferring all her inherited power to her husband, whose ambitious advisers have always seen the marriage as nothing more than a temporary strategic alliance.
Just as Philip is about to win, there's a real-life plot twist: Despite his appearance of robust good health, the 28-year-old monarch is suddenly carried off by an unnamed disease. (History seems no surer of its nature than "a fever.") Joan, ever the Catholic, believes his death is her fault. When a monk convinces her that Philip will revive, she tours the countryside with his corpse rather than bury him. For the sake of hygiene, at the very least, he's eventually buried, and Joan is placed in a nice padded fortress, where she lives to a ripe old age.
Mad Love is at least theoretically a remake of Juan de Orduña's 1948 Locura de Amor (roughly, Love Crazy) in which Fernando Rey (The French Connection and several Buñuel films), of all people, played Philip the Handsome. Given its sponsorship by Franco, it's unlikely that the earlier version was quite as steamy as the new one.
At 75, Aranda can still make his actors sizzle on the screen as well as he did 10 years ago in Lovers. The explicitly hot bits here may be few and far between, but what there is of them is choice.
The film is beautifully mounted, but more to the point, the issues are subtly presented, managing to walk a fine line with regard to the question of Joan's madness. We're never quite sure where Aranda stands on the nature of her mental state.
The central problem for American audiences is the difficulty of keeping track of the court intrigues. Presumably in Spain -- where López de Ayala won the Goya Award for Best Actress, and the film itself lost in many of its nominated categories only because of competition from The Others, which was considered a Spanish film despite its Hollywood connections -- viewers are expected to know the basic story of Joan and the historical context. But for the rest of us, it quickly becomes confusing as to which court we're in at any given moment, and whether it's Joan's inheritance or Philip's, and just which nobles and connivers are on whose side.
Of course, all of these questions aren't really relevant to the heart of the film, but struggling to figure them out can compromise one's ability to focus on what's important.
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