Kubrick’s filming of Nabokov’s Lolita is perhaps his
first great filmic maze, subsuming eroticism (or even any real engagement with transgressive
sexuality) to a recurring sense of entrapment, of obstacles and traps and
distances needing to be traversed: in retrospect it may feel like much of the movie
consists of watching cars in motion. James Mason’s Humbert Humbert says early
on that every game has its rules, referring to his initial calculation of
marrying a woman he detests, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), in order to be
close to her teenage daughter Lolia (Sue Lyon); they are rules though that he
perpetually fails to navigate adequately, learning only near the end of the
movie that the object of his obsession was always more focused on another,
playwright Clare Quilty. After Charlotte’s death, Humbert sets out to establish
a new life with Lolita, behind the cover of being a respectably urbane professor
and single father, but his strategy, while arousing the suspicion of neighbours
and observers, pales in effectiveness against Quilty’s wild iconoclasm and bizarreness,
brilliantly embodied by Peter Sellers as a man operating almost outside normal time
and space (the film’s opening and closing scenes, sealing the intertwined fates
of Humbert and Quilty, might almost accordingly be taking place in a different dimension,
as if jumping two Kubrick movies ahead). Kubrick’s sly casting underlines the
ridiculousness of Humbert’s desire, Mason’s full and searching presence often
hilariously contrasted with Lyon’s deadpan superficiality (as in the scene
where he tries to impress her by reading from “the divine Edgar”), the effect
aided by the film’s frequent sense of dislocation (arising in part from filming
such a deeply American story in the UK); his ridiculousness sealed by the deliberately
strenuous ordinariness of Lolita’s ultimate arrival point, pregnant and married
to a decent man of only modest prospects, Mason’s Humbert crumbling like one
who’s truly reached several kinds of end.
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