Time of innocence

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Movie
German title Time of innocence
Original title The Age of Innocence
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1993
length 140 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Martin Scorsese
script Martin Scorsese,
Jay Cocks
production Barbara De Fina
music Elmer Bernstein
camera Michael Ballhaus
cut Thelma Schoonmaker
occupation

Martin Scorsese's Time of Innocence from 1993 is a film adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence , for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 .

action

New York in the 1870s : The lawyer Newland Archer, who comes from a good family, is engaged to the pretty and friendly May Welland, a good match. He begins to question his planned life when May's cousin, the beautiful Countess Ellen Olenska, travels from Europe to New York and takes care of the social appearance. Ellen has left her abusive husband, a Polish count, which also makes her an outsider in the New York elite and makes her family fear an open scandal. Archer, in particular, tries to find a friendly place for Ellen among the other respected families in New York. In the process, he falls passionately in love with the unconventional Ellen and begins to doubt New York society, its morals and its views.

He stiffens Newland with the prospect of a dispassionate marriage to May and with his life in a frozen social system. However, he lacks the courage to break off his engagement and break out of society. So he can understand Ellen's desire for freedom through a divorce from the Count, but in his function as a lawyer he advises her to remain in the marriage, as unpleasant rumors could be stirred up in the divorce process that could destroy her society. Ellen therefore refrains from a divorce. In order to resolve his emotional conflict, he asks May and her family not to wait any longer to get married. May is skeptical and feels that something has come between her and her fiancé, but still agrees after he assures her of his love again. Archer finally confesses his feelings to Ellen and she reciprocates them, but explains that it is now too late - the wedding preparations are already in full swing thanks to Archer's influence.

After his marriage to May, he can only temporarily suppress his secret love for Ellen Olenska. His marriage to May is outwardly harmonious, but he never manages to look beneath the surface of his conventionally thinking wife. Ellen and Newland see each other several times, but this never turns into a "real" affair. When Ellen visits her grandmother in New York, she and Archer consider adultery and living together. At that moment, however, Ellen eludes him: She announces that she will soon be leaving for Europe, which completely surprises Archer. After a farewell party for Ellen, which is May and Newland's first society dinner, May tells him about her pregnancy. Ellen had found out about this before Newland, which was obviously the reason for her quick departure.

More than 20 years later, after his wife May passed away, Newland Archer, now 57, takes his son Ted on a trip to Paris. Ted arranges a meeting between Archer and Ellen, who lives there. Newland has not seen her since she left New York and she has now become a symbol of his missed opportunities in life. Ted tells his father that May told him on her deathbed that she and her children had always been safe with Newland, since he once gave up the thing he wanted most when he asked her about it. Archer replies that May never asked him, but finds comfort in the fact that she at least noticed his pain. Newland decides not to see Ellen again late, remains seated in front of her house, indulging in old memories of their mutual love.

Emergence

The film critic Jay Cocks made his childhood friend Martin Scorsese , who had been planning a romance film for a long time, aware of Wharton's novel Age of Innocence in 1980 . Scorsese's drug addiction, his stormy marriage to Isabella Rossellini and manic depression made it impossible to deal with this subtle material at the time, but at the end of the decade he had great cinematic success and also found peace in his private life.

After working on The Last Temptation of Christ , he read the novel and worked on a screenplay with Cocks for three weeks. While Cocks worked on the structure for another three years, Scorsese shot his hit films Good Fellas - Three Decades in the Mafia and Cape Fear before they both finished the book for Age with final details in December 1991 . Columbia Pictures committed $ 35 million for the production, and filming began in New York in March 1992 and ended in Paris in June 1992 . Planned by Columbia as an Oscar favorite, a release had to be postponed in December 1992 because of the complicated editing and the illness of Scorsese's father. After almost ten months of post-production, Time of Innocence premiered at the 1993 Venice Film Festival . As the director's masterpiece was hailed, the film was in competition with Steven Spielberg's Holocaust drama Schindler's list at the awards ceremonies in December 1993, which was equally successful with critics and audiences and which was ultimately to win the majority of the awards to be won, whereby Columbia was one of the Time of the innocence expected rain of prices was denied.

criticism

“A grandiose, photographed and staged drama about the conflict between longing and responsibility in a world shaped by rigid social conventions and narrow moral concepts. Actually very cautious, the inner drama of the main characters reveals itself through the language of signs and symbols of an environment reduced to externalities. "

- Lexicon of international film

Awards

literature

  • Edith Wharton : Time of Innocence. Roman (Original title: The Age of Innocence ). German by Richard Kraushaar and Benjamin Schwarz . Unabridged paperback edition, 7th edition. Piper, Munich and Zurich 1997. ISBN 3-492-22419-9
  • Martin Scorsese , Jay Cocks : The Time of Innocence. A portrait of the film based on the novel by Edith Wharton (Original title: The Age of Innocence ). Edited by Robin Standefer . With production photos by Philip V. Caruso. German by Barbara Först. Bastei-Verlag Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1993. ISBN 3-404-13541-5
  • Dana Poppenberg / Gerhard Poppenberg: Martin Scorsese. Introduction to his films and film aesthetics. Paderborn 2018. pp. 143–151.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on the various German-language book editions and titles see the name article
  2. ↑ Time of Innocence. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used