When Japanese-American film-maker Anna Biller asked herself the question all directors pose after a breakout hit – what next? – she already knew the answer.
The film she had made and which had been released to critical acclaim in 2016 was The Love Witch, part stylized horror, part colour-soaked homage to Hollywood melodramas, part feminist dissection of gender roles in modern America.
The film she intended to follow it with was a feminist update of the story of Bluebeard, the glamorous nobleman whose beautiful wives always disappear in circumstances which remain mysterious – until wife number seven uncovers his grisly secret.
The subject of several operas and many literary re-tellings (see Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber), it has echoes in everything from Jane Eyre to Rebecca to 50 Shades Of Grey. It has even become a verb – to bluebeard, meaning to seduce a woman and then variously betray, cheat and abandon her.
With the #MeToo movement well underway, potential backers for Biller’s Bluebeard film project were keen and easy to reach.
“I was shopping it around Hollywood and I had some success,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “But then the pandemic happened and everything shut down. So my partner suggested writing it as a novel and I thought: ‘Yeah, perfect. Great idea’.”
And so the unmade film became a book, Bluebeard’s Castle, in which succesful romance writer Judith meets the dashing Gavin at her cousin’s glamorous Cornish wedding and is whisked off her feet and into bed for the sort of mind-blowing sex she allows her heroines to enjoy but has never actually exprienced herself. Before you can say ‘Check the attic’ or ‘Is he all he appears to be?’, Judith is married and living in the rundown castle Gavin has bought in the English countryside.
As well as referencing the famous folk tale which is its source, Bluebeard’s Castle is a critique of male characters throughout fiction – think Jane Eyre’s Rochester, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Rebecca’s Max de Winter – and also of the modern genre of romance made popular by EL James’s 50 Shades trilogy.
Known as ‘dark’ or ‘provocative’ romance (James’s prefered desscription) it’s characterised by Biller as essentially “sado-masochistic”.
“It’s painful romance,” she says. “It has a very dark, cruel lover so it’s an updating of Heathcliff, Rochester and all of that, but with a romanticising of the hero at the end … In some ways Rochester, Heathcliff and Max De Winter are romanticised by readers but they’re all brutes. They’re all actually Bluebeards. Which is the point I’m making in my novel.”
As well as being anti-romance, Bluebeard’s Castle is anti-horror – at least in the sense that it returns to that form of woman-in-peril stories which once put the female perspective front and foremost. Examples include George Cukor’s 1944 thriller Gaslight, from which the term derives, or 1955 British noir Cast A Dark Shadow, starring Dirk Bogarde and Margaret Lockwood.
Biller, a cinéaste and paid-up horror fan, observed that in much modern horror “femicide is treated so lightly and as entertainment. This exploded something in my brain. I mean women-in-peril movies used to be from the point of view of the women. Then when extreme horror came, in they’re suddenly made from the point of view of the killer … since then in many genres of movies the female point of view has completely dropped out.”
Bluebeard’s Castle aims to redress the balance.
Part-pastiche it may be. But the novel’s underlying themes – the complicated emotions women feel towards men who are abusive or who employ various forms of control, coercive or otherwise – are deadly serious. Biller’s conclusions are based partly on research but also, she says, on “first hand knowledge.”.
“It’s almost like a God complex that some women have. They’re really good at empathy, at human undertanding, so they think they can bring this man around. Partly why they think they can do it is that if the man is a really serious abuser he knows how to play on that, to make the woman think he is weak sometimes and he does need help and she can help him – and to thank her for helping him and teaching him. This is how abusers operate and it’s one reason it’s so hard for women to leave because they’re being asked to stay and use their greatest gifts and strengths – emotional intelligence.”
In dark romance that usually works out, she adds. “The woman does fix the flawed man. They take this brute and they turn him into this perfect ideal lover. That’s what happens in 50 Shades Of Grey. Christian Grey is essentially Bluebeard – and then suddenly he’s not.”
And it’s why these books are so “addictive”, as she puts it. “Women want to get that feeling of power, because often they have a man in their lives who’s really difficult or they’ve had more than one.”
That in Bluebeard’s Castle Anna Biller turns the trope on its head won’t please everyone. But in the cold light or day, hers is the more realistic take on a story which is as gripping as it is troubling – and as relevant now as it has ever been.
Bluebeard’s Castle is published on October 10 (Verso, £12.99)
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