Barry Lyndon (1975) by Stanley Kubrick

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REVIEW – Handel's sarabande that opens the film announces the theme of fatality. This is basically the subject of Barry Lyndon, which is infinitely sad, almost unbearable melancholy, yet conceals great humanity. Stanley Kubrick was unable to realize his great project on Napoleon despite a titanic work on the subject, and adapted a lesser-known novel by William Thackeray, a 19th-century author, author of Vanity Fair and The Book of Snobs. Everything in this film is dissimulation, decoys and false pretenses equal to the title. Barry Lyndon will never be Barry Lyndon. The first part entitled How Redmond Barry Acquired the Title of Barry Lyndon is ironic. He will never have the much-coveted title. Only Redmond Barry will remain, the unfortunate adventure of an upstart and a vain man. 

Barry Lyndon is the great film on vanity, a major theme in the 18th century as in Les Liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.  What this sentence could sum up: if you want to punish men, give them what they desire.

If Kubrick begins with a duel scene where Barry's father is going to die, it is not by chance since the duel is not only part of the society of the time, but serves as a canvas between dominant and lower social classes through the historical rivalry that takes place in the 18th century and which will end up in the note that Lady Lyndon signs to her ex-husband, Redmond Barry, marked with the year 1789, the date of the French Revolution which sees the abolition of “privileges” and the death of the Aristocracy. This duel also serves as a weave in the imagination of the young Barry in his rivalry with the world and which will find two outcomes: that with John Quint at the beginning, and at the end in his fall with his stepson, Lord Bullingdon. Mimetic rivalry that concerns us all in life. Quest for territory: sexual territory, political territory, economic territory, symbolic territory like the monkeys at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nothing has changed.

Kubrick uses such a story as a pretext to paint a portrait of the human condition in all eras. There is the ruling class and the lower class. Both are only doubles. The first dominates and crushes the second, which then wants to fight and take its place, believing illusorily to put an end to all domination. Only a privileged few will benefit from it. History does not happen with the coherence and the arranged story that we give it. It is only an immense theater and a strange simulation where each of the characters has the wrong costume and plays a role without knowing it by not taking reality for what it is. Sad clumsy extras who think they will achieve a victory when this only sounds their defeat in the end. This is the driving force of history for Kubrick and in the fact that revolutions have failed.

What appears in this most explicit film of the filmmaker is the complete misunderstanding between the plane of reality and the plane of illusions, between what the characters hide, and their will masked behind their facade. False appearances, disguises, masks, game of dupes, role play and game of doubles incessant and constant as we will see. This misunderstanding at all levels inflects the characters in their tragic destiny. 

After the anticipation film A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick changes register, but in fact, he does not change it. As much as A Clockwork Orange was “costumed”, Barry Lyndon is as they say a “period film”, another kind of dramatized and ritualized civilization. The characters are constantly performing, made up, costumed, made up, powdered, as if they were acting on a stage that is reality.

The aesthetics of the film are sumptuous. Barry Lyndon is decked out with a voice-over, the voice of an extradiegetic narrator, who establishes a special relationship, since sometimes it describes the action and sometimes it mocks, intervening in counterpoint to what is happening visually. A mode that allows the action to be distanced while establishing a dialogue with it, between what the image supposes, but which the commentary “destroys” in passing. 

Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) is not seen as a caricatured evil man, but on the contrary, as an insecure, shy, and inexperienced being, plunged into the fog of inexperience. He is a sensitive being, under the thumb of his mother. It is this banality that will lead him to an incredible destiny and not an individual filled with an evil will from the start. A small thing. The question is: how will such a shy man become an odious character bloated with vanity ?

When his cousin Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton) asks him to look for his ribbon hidden in his chest, Redmond tells her that he cannot find it. However, his request was very clear. Nora is a flirt and Redmond should have questioned the point of falling for such a woman who was going to drive him crazy. 

At that time, the United Kingdom, threatened with invasion by the French, was raising regiments. Redmond finds a formidable rival: the virile Captain John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), himself more of a coward than a real fighter. Redmond is abandoned by his flirt who danced with John Quin. When he learns that Nora is playing the same game with the latter, a better match with whom she is going to marry, he throws a glass at Quin's head. The duel takes place, but let's note that since everyone is playing this register, it is a fake duel. No one will die. It is theater. 

Kubrick never ceases to unmask the lies and dissimulations in the actions of individuals while showing that they are intertwined with the unfolding of History. Each scene is stripped of the slightest commonplace. Believing he has killed John Quin, young Barry flees to Dublin on horseback with 20 guineas in his pocket. En route, he is robbed of his horse, guineas and pistols by Captain Feeney (Arthur O'Sullivan), a distinguished hoodlum, but a hoodlum nonetheless.

This scene is symptomatic of Kubrick's treatment. Far from being brutal, it is on a par with a presentation in a living room. Captain Feeney is not there to serve him, but to rob him. The introductions continue in good faith until Redmond is robbed. He will keep only his boots. In this film that shows the other side of the decor, indicating the theater and the falseness of appearances, the intentions hidden behind a civilized facade, the filmmaker reveals a crucial aspect: things do not happen as we have the impression that they do. It is the same in history. Proof that the interest is not to unfold it according to clichés, but to delve into the unusual and incongruous aspects as here in the dialogues. 

If Redmond does not have the stature of a hero as he is duped, robbed, betrayed and played with, he is also a vigorous man as during the duel with a soldier that Kubrick stages with an unstable camera to show the eruption of violence contradicting the meticulous development of the frames throughout the film.

Redmond then enlists in an infantry regiment during the Seven Years' War. He finds his friend, Captain Grogan who tells Redmond that Nora has become Mrs. John Quin. John Quin has recovered from his injuries: the bullet was only tow. The Bradys could not accept a duel and risk losing 1500 pounds. The duel was a sham in order to get rid of the fiery and vain Redmond. More theater.

During a battle in the Seven Years' War, Redmond loses his friend, mortally wounded. His emotion is sincere and touching, indicating that he is not an insensitive man. This is an opportunity for Kubrick to stage the double movement of the sophisticated death drive, both rational and deadly, that is the rigorously gridded war, arranged as on a chessboard, aesthetically beautiful, but disastrous in deaths. Which recalls the battle in Spartacus. This battle is equal to the 18th century and to human nature, violence surging behind the symmetry and the ordered and rational arrangement of the lines.

Redmond is disillusioned. “It's all well and good to dream of glorious war in a comfortable armchair. It's another thing to see it up close.”, the narrator tells us. From then on, young Barry only thinks about leaving the English army. It is thanks to a singular opportunity that he succeeds. He surprises two naked soldiers in a river. One of them must leave for two weeks to Bremen to bring important dispatches to Prince Henry. Redmond takes advantage of this to steal his horse and assume his identity. New disguise.

This disguise is practiced in the sentimental domain as at the beginning with his cousin. While deserting, Redmond meets a young woman with a child, her husband being at war. They become lovers and a pretty pastoral love story takes shape. In this fairly romantic picture, at the moment of leaving, they say I love you. But the narrator, like a Gustave Flaubert, breaks the spell: “A lady who falls for a boy in uniform must be ready to change lovers quickly, otherwise, her life is sad. The heart of Lischen (Diana Körner), similar to many neighboring towns, had been stormed and occupied several times, before Redmond invested it.” Another false appearance. Kubrick indicates here the illusions that human beings have about each other by representing a reality that is in fact completely different. As a great filmmaker, he lays bare this same illusion in cinema by the image itself. This is basically what cinema is for. And art. 

Kubrick continues to interweave this individual and historical double game. Posing as Lieutenant Fakenham, Redmond meets Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Krüger) but the latter unmasks him and arrests him. Redmond claimed to be carrying dispatches to a general who had been dead for ten months. Redmond is unlucky, he is mistaken about the world, but he fools no one. He ends up with the Prussians and earns his first reward by saving Captain Potzdorf at the Battle of Audorf. When the war is over, he becomes his right-hand man. The man who lied and assumed an identity is asked to be a spy to unmask another spy. Indeed, Potzdorf has his uncle as Minister of Police and hires Redmond. He must spy, in Berlin, on a gentleman in the service of the Empress of Austria, the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee). He is a professional gambler, a libertine, a lover of women, of good food. As he is of Irish origin, Redmond is the ideal man to investigate him.

Redmond and the Knight of Balibari get to know each other. Meeting a compatriot, Redmond, moved, reveals everything to him. Kubrick thus shows that this man also knows how to be “sincere” by playing all the roles and all the doubles, as much fooled as he is fooled. Redmond plays the reverse spy, and reports the facts and gestures to Potzdorf and the Minister of Police by playing a double game. Another pretense. As the Knight of Balibari and Redmond cheat at the game, they swindle the Prince of Tübingen, a close friend of the Great Frederick. The Prince feels cheated and decides not to pay his debts and incites the Knight of Balibari to challenge him to a duel. As it is impossible for the Prince to fight, the knight will be taken back to the border. New pretense, the Knight of Balibari has already returned to the border while Redmond pretends to be him. Everyone hides, cheats, steals or lies. Lies are at the basis of social life as well as love life. This is the engine of history through the little story in Kubrick.

It is then that fate resounds, through music, the admirable Trio opus 100 by Franz Schubert which will seal Redmond's destiny. He sees in the courtyard the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), Viscountess Bullingdon of England, a woman of vast fortune and great beauty, wife of Sir Charles Lyndon, Knight of the Order of the Bath, minister of George III, an invalid, in a wheelchair, worn out by gout. She is accompanied by the Countess's chaplain, Mr. Runt who acts as tutor to her son, the little Viscount Bullingdon. The only female character who finds favor in the eyes of the filmmaker.

Kubrick reduced the actress's dialogues to make her an almost mute character, a judicious choice that shows how authentic, readable, but silent her love for Redmond is, all interior, without mask and without theater. He does not need words. He is emotion itself, rich in his feeling, the opposite of those around him who hide their will with words. But this woman's love is so worthy that in a theatrical society, of subterfuge, of false pretenses, it can only fail. Barry Lyndon clearly puts face to face a mimetic being and a non-mimetic being, Redmond Barry and Lady Lyndon like a kind of duel that cannot take place in contrast to those in the film. All the lies, the theater, the dissimulation that were current give way to something real and concrete. And rare. 

The famous candle scene was lit by two 70-candle chandeliers and filmed with a 50 mm lens with an aperture of 0.7. This device gives the sequence a spectral appearance, as if the characters were powdered and made-up ghosts giving themselves human appearances. Carnal automatons whose little life that animates them, like the candles that will soon go out, only serves them to play cards and win or lose money. Long agony of a class eaten away from the inside, already dead, but still believing itself to be alive and in good health. Except Lady Lyndon who comes to burn herself in the fires of love by choosing the wrong “target”. To her misfortune.

It is no coincidence that everything is played out at a gaming table where Redmond conquers Lady Lyndon who never stops looking at him with a look so intense and beautiful that one cannot doubt for a single second her sincerity. She falls madly in love, with dignity, seriously, in silence. This is where Redmond makes his biggest mistake. Having lived in permanent duplicity, he plays at being the lover he is not with a woman who truly loves him. His sincerity has given way to dissimulation. Eroticism becomes a game. And the game quickly becomes competition and the competition becomes a struggle for power.

Lady Lyndon then goes out for a walk, soon joined by Redmond. In a lateral tracking shot accompanied by Schubert's Trio which punctuates her walk, Redmond joins Lady Lyndon as an upward movement towards her prey and towards a much-desired destiny at the same time as she sounds her doom in the same burst.

This scene of restraint and grace, without a single word, Redmond kisses Lady Lyndon. It is rare in cinema that a love scene does not require words. In the novel, Redmond pursues Lady Lyndon with his attentions, who resists before succumbing. Kubrick has profoundly modified the plot. In Thackeray's novel, Redmond and Lady Lyndon do not kiss after having only looked at each other. Lady Lyndon resists before succumbing. She ends up hating Redmond while loving him. She even conspires against him.  

The following scene opens with the death of Sir Charles Lyndon at a gaming table as Redmond comes to him. Kubrickian irony. Sir Charles Lyndon, who claimed that he would survive all those who wanted to take his place, now succumbs. The narrator concludes: “Read in the Chronicle of St. James. Died at Spa, Belgium. Sir Charles Reginald Lyndon, Knight of the Order of the Bath. Long representative of His Majesty in various courts of Europe. He leaves a reputation which has endeared him to all his friends.” A worldly and hypocritical interlude. The lie continues. Thus ends the first part.

The second is entitled: “Misfortunes and disasters that struck Barry Lyndon.” Lady Lyndon is the most “human” character in the film, and the one Stanley Kubrick is closest to. Walled up in her silence, swallowing her humiliations, she does not take revenge (will not take a lover), and until the end, she loves this man she should not have loved. She is noble, twice if you will, by birth and heart. If she loves, it is her misfortune, but she truly loves. She did not choose Redmond based on his class. She probably cannot explain it to herself, but she loves and that alone is enough in her eyes. Love is her destiny.

In both the novel and the film, Redmond is an infatuated character, an incorrigible vain man who takes out his villainy on others without realizing the harm he does to others. He uses Lady Lyndon's affection to extort money from her, and subject her to his crazy spending. Just after the marriage between Redmond and Lady Lyndon, the little Lord Bullingdon understood this right away. Just before, Redmond, who became Barry Lyndon for a short time, was not very concerned about smoking next to his inconvenienced wife. When she asks him to stop, he finds nothing better than to blow smoke in her face. From then on, he will accumulate the mistakes of the upstart: despising his wife in front of his son, especially when the latter sees Redmond kissing a maid in his company. It crystallizes Lord Bullingdon's hatred of him. 

The connection between Redmond wallowing in debauchery and Lady Lyndon with her two children is of a cruelty that is difficult to take. Like the bath scene where, flatly apologizing for her scandalous behavior, Lady Lyndon is ready to do anything out of pure love and pure humility. The hand she extends to him and the kiss she gives him are proof of this. The text read in French by Barnabé Farmian Durosoy entitled Les sens, chant soixante, is Lady Lyndon's dream, but one that she will never achieve.

The critical scene is when Redmond severely corrects Lord Bullingdon who refused to kiss him. Redmond makes him a rival, a formidable double who will reach his peak in the duel scene. An obvious error, but classic jealousy, because little Bullingdon comes from the genes of Lady Lyndon's ex-husband, reinforcing his father-in-law's hatred in his desire to remove this hated rival. Especially since Redmond has had a son in the meantime whose every whim he will indulge.

But as his mother tells him, Redmond doesn't have a penny of his own. He has nothing. He must have a title, that of Lord. Kubrick establishes well both the stupidity and greed of men and the cold calculation of women, especially his mother who will prove to be ruthless when she dismisses Reverend Hunt and takes control of the estate. If Redmond's mother keeps her son under her thumb, Lord Bullingdon wants to find his place next to his own mother, both will fail through too much “love” and too much ambition.

The machine then runs relentlessly. Barry ruins the family with his social climbing in order to obtain a title, he despises his wife, arouses the hatred of Lord Bullingdon and from then on, everything will turn against him through lack of restraint and inability to love. He must give receptions, buy paintings, make offerings, etc., to please. He considerably burdens Lady Lyndon's fortune and definitively destroys his relationship with Lord Bullingdon. After the latter has corrected little Bryan, Redmond severely whips his stepson. A punishment that brings the young man's hatred to its peak. The impact finds its outlet when, during a concert, Lord Bullingdon spits out to his mother all the grievances he has in his heart towards this Irish upstart. Redmond inflicts a violent public correction on him, all the more clumsy because he does not possess the aristocratic codes. From then on, people distance themselves from him. His creditors are rushing to his door. 

His son has to die for Redmond to understand what suffering can be. He suffers as he made Lady Lyndon suffer. But it is too late. And there again, it is his own fault since he has refused Bryan nothing. If he was a good father, he never taught him to say no. Inevitably, the latter disobeys him when his father asks him not to see and to ride the horse alone before his birthday. Episode that will cause the accident and the death of young Bryan. Upsetting scene when we contrast the joy of little Bryan at a party and the one where he is dying asking his parents to reconcile.

Redmond takes refuge in alcohol. Resentment transforms Lord Bullingdon into a clone of Redmond without taking into account that the latter is overwhelmed by grief due to the death of his son. Which is not what Lady Lyndon does. She avoids the mimetic spiral to the point that she turns her violence against herself in a suicide attempt. Lord Bullingdon's jealousy is understandable, but just as blind. This resentment is illustrated by his entrance (in a tracking shot) at a moment when he goes to meet Redmond to challenge him to a duel, an entrance similar to Alex (in a tracking shot) in A Clockwork Orange, dressed in a similar way when he enters the record store.

In this scene of the duel, we have two doubles, one facing the other, as if in front of a mirror. Having become more humble after the death of his son, Redmond shoots the ground to spare Lord Bullingdon who takes advantage of the situation to shoot and wound Redmond in the leg, which the latter will be amputated. A formidable game of chess where vanity and arrogance compete for first place. Mutual class hatred from which no one emerges a winner in the end. Kubrick does not take sides. He sees men and women at work, whatever their condition. They function in the same way, tormented by jealousy, ambition, the desire for power and notoriety. The filmmaker shows their fate deep down in all eras.

Here again, Kubrick modified Thackeray's novel since in the latter, Lord Bullingdon does not challenge Redmond to a duel and returns to his mother. In the film, this duel is placed at the end, a symmetrical mirror reversed to that of the first. Painful irony, Redmond is wounded just like his father who was killed. As if he had shot himself through his double, Lord Bullingdon whom he created and carefully maintained.

In the end, Barry loses everything. He becomes Redmond Barry again. He goes into exile and receives a pension every month. He returns to his mother, fallen, by his own ambition. If 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) illustrated the quest for territory at the anthropological level through the apes and the imperial reason through Hal 9000, Barry Lyndon is more pragmatic in analyzing how she acts humanly in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment with always a dominance and a struggle on both sides to enter into rivalry, cause of the Revolutions as indicated by the draft signed by Lady Lyndon and which bears the date of 1789. 

Kubrick's irony is to indicate that this reconquest by Lord Bullingdon of the kingdom and his mother is as derisory as it is vain since the bourgeois Revolution that is being prepared behind the scenes will definitively bring him down, him and his caste for greater control. A tragic speech especially since those who try to escape this merciless struggle are radically annihilated even within their own ranks.

This century of Enlightenment, the so-called century of rationality and the colossal deployment of technology that is coming, therefore fails to stem the human shadow while believing to control it in a luminous way. History is on the move. A twilight film, Barry Lyndon is the other side of 2001: A Space Odyssey, this odyssey of the species that ends in the supreme murder of humanity by the computer Hal 9000, rationality itself. The 18th century haunts the filmmaker and we find it in several films including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or at the beginning of Lolita (1962) with Gainsborough's painting. Kubrick therefore does not set his film by chance in the 18th century, which hides within it, as in all other eras, its share of violence. A Clockwork Orange was the fierce criticism of this desire to organize society using the same methods as Alex, just disguised and legitimized behind a scientific guarantee. Kubrick is the great skeptical and disenchanted filmmaker of the strongest human illusion, the one that thinks it can solve or organize the world by enlightened, generous, or rational principles. Kubrick clearly indicates that all this is just theater, a masquerade hiding a violent struggle in the background.

The last scene of incredible emotion indicates how the trap has closed on Lady Lyndon, held under the thumb of her son, especially when the latter gives her the bill intended for her ex-husband and looks at his mother, feeling that he is also the cause of her ruin. Lady Lyndon's melancholy air says a lot about her failed and fallen love, forever fled, as cruel as the illusion was strong. Schubert's music underlines the tragedy. Only Lady Lyndon has never played, but she is the one who loses everything. It is not the humble who make history, but the vain of the two clans who compete in ambition to keep their quest for territory.

The film ends with an ironic Kubrickian title card to mock all this class machinery and that equality only exists in the grave, not in reality. Obviously, it would have been wiser for Redmond to accept Lady Lyndon's love and end his life peacefully with her. Of course, if he had been less vain, there would have been no film. If it exists, it is because human nature is like that. Fatale.

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