+ FAMILY PLOT? Weisz as the mysterious title character in My Cousin Rachel.
DIRECTOR ROGER MICHELL has been quoted as saying of the novel My Cousin Rachel that its creator, Daphne du Maurier, “lights her scenes like Caravaggio and writes them like Hitchcock.” So how to account for his film version, one without menace or shadows or the voluptuous morbidity that’s the hallmark of gothic melodrama? It’s true that du Maurier’s novel which the English author of Rebecca and The Birds published in 1951—has its sluggish patches. But it also has a cumulative gloomy undertow, and it’s a ine example of melodrama, a much-derided form that has frequently served to express what can only be called feminist concerns.
Essentially, it’s a novel about the fear and unworldliness that underpins traditional masculinity, as well as the sexual jealousy that turns it into a toxic brew. The story is told by Philip Ashley, a 24-year-old orphan who has been brought up by his cousin Ambrose on the latter’s estate in Cornwall. Together, they live a life utterly without women, comfortable in their moldering, masculine domesticity. When Ambrose’s weak constitution sends him to Italy, in search of warmer weather, he meets and marries a half- Italian, half-English widow named Rachel.