Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O’ Connell, Holiday Grainger, Tom Hollander, Matthew Morrison, Kevin McKidd, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan, Zach Galifianakis, Judi Dench, Christopher Waltz, David Harewood, Alexandra Gilbreath, Cara Delevingne, Sebastian Armesto, Michael Nardone, Cressida Bonas, Daisy Chadwick, Michael Smiley.
A rare flower and an extraordinary soul can cause an unsuspecting person to lose their mind, to seem crazed and suffering from a fever that is unnatural, out of step with their lives; obsession is a far greater disease than many people give credit for. It is only a short step to the ruin of compulsion and the pain of ownership in which obsession dangles its siren-like tentacles in the face of the unsuspecting, a fleeting glimpse of appreciation turning sour, a rare bloom surrounded by love, turned inevitably to hunger, picked, chewed and spat out, leaving what was a beautiful, unsullied treasure, now nothing more than a rag tag of mutterings and regrets.
Obsession and greed in the same hands are a potent mix, the thought of making money and running commerce of what can be considered fragile is something we have not yet learned the lessons of avoiding, the commercial enterprise of finding thousands of pounds exchanging hands in the attempt to own a single person, a flower of untold splendour is carried out in today’s world under the guise of education. The tulip craze that almost ruined the Dutch nation for a generation and which burst its bubble in a splatter of want across its landscape, has inappropriately continuously followed as a business model ever since. Supply and demand, the wreckage of a capitalist system that sees us forever broken.
It is a warning that comes in the form of the exquisitely produced and filmed story Tulip Fever. Set amongst the back drop of the heady days of Amsterdam’s insane buying and selling of tulips and cultivating a mass industry out of the striking flowers, a young woman and the artist commissioned to paint her and her level-headed husband, lose their minds in a cocktail of desire, lust and obsession. It is the ramification of this obsession which, like the aftermath of the bottom falling out of the market in tulips, which sees suffering and heartache for all touched by this madness; and yet out of the madness and the peat of their dangerous liaison, happiness blooms in the end for those whose hearts were always verging on the pure.
Whilst Alicia Vikander and Dane DeHann shine as the young pair of obsessed lovers, it is perhaps to the elegance of Tom Hollander as the less than scrupulous Doctor Sorgh and Christopher Waltz as the honourable but cuckolded merchant, Cornelis Sandvoort in which delivers its finest, and most potent imagery and moments.
Based upon Deborah Moggach’s novel and the screen-play co-written by the author with Tom Stoppard, Tulip Fever is a superbly adapted film art, a measure of just how far we will go to turn obsession in possession, even it causes the object of our desires to wither and die.
Ian D. Hall