The Governess (1998)

The Governess is Artemisia or Miss Potter meets Girl With A Pearl Earring. When the Sephardic Jewish maiden Rosina's well-to-do fish-merchant father is murdered in the streets of London (by a Gentile, the Jewish community fears), her lifestyle choices are to marry a rival fish merchant as old as her father or to hire on as a governess on the Scottish Isle of Skye. (Single women in the 1840s are regarded as unable to do anything but live as the dependents of their fathers or husbands.) As a closet Jewess emerging into the larger world to live among Christians under the name Mary Blackchurch, Rosina (Minnie Driver) wins over her difficult young charge Clementina (Florence Hoath) and ultimately proves to be the intellectual and professional equal of her scientist employer, Charles Cavendish (Tom Wilkinson), who is laboring to devise a photographic fixative process that Mary herself (during a secret Passover celebration in her room) accidentally discovers. Working away together in his estate's laboratory, which is off-limits to his emotionally tenuous wife (Harriet Walter) and all others, Mary's adventurous streak emerges in an intellectual as well as a physical attraction to her employer. (The few who criticize this film mistakenly presume that women fall in love only for youth and not also for intellectual or professional companionship.) Mary seduces Charles, initiating an unrequited love. "We can be anything we want," she says, but as a Christian and a family man he resists and ultimately rejects the new ground she has broken. The cultural rift climaxes here because he is familiar with temptation and sin while she only thinks of happiness or unhappiness. Furthermore, as a scientist, Charles requires self-control to succeed in his work and to publish his process in advance of the daguerreotype; his refusals to continue the dalliance that she assumes will be a lifelong professional and intimate partnership cause her to become unhinged. We see full frontal nudity of the senior Cavendish and (twice) the junior, Henry Cavendish (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), plus (twice) Mary's aureoles and her full dorsal nudity. The Governess is redolent in Jewish culture and period costume and its character studies are intriguing. It is ultimately a movie about societal convention vs. self-actualization: In what ways do we limit, hinder, handicap -- or allow others to limit -- our own prospects for happiness? 4.5 stars.