A Little Princess
With Liesel Matthews, Liam Cunningham, Eleanor Bron, and Errol Sitahal.
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Cuaron makes us feel the conflict between East and West visually as well as emotionally. In India the sand is the color of turmeric, the tropical air is spicy, “tigers sleep under trees,” ancient statues rise out of swimming holes like mythical creatures, children share the cooling waters with pachyderms, and “the sky is the color of a peacock’s tail.” Storybook India is replaced by storybook New York, but New York as the kind of cruel place Jane Eyre or Oliver Twist might have encountered–a world of grandfather clocks and mahogany, mantelpieces and mice, eaves, attics, and propriety. Cuaron captures well Burnett’s description of it: “Everything was hard and polished. The very armchairs seemed to have hard bones in them.”
Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron) is emblematic of repressive adults and authoritarian systems: she wants to extinguish Sara’s creative spark. Even before she’s under Miss Minchin’s thumb, Sara complains about the school’s formalities, the rules that make one “always feel as if one has done something wrong” without quite knowing why. When Sara’s father is apparently killed, she becomes the archetypal orphaned child confronting a hostile world, with Miss Minchin as her evil stepmother. Sara’s stories seem out of place in Miss Minchin’s world, but after the adults are in bed Sara tells a privileged circle of friends the tale of Rama and his princess: He tries to protect her by drawing a magic circle around her in the sand. But when Rama is gone the princess leaves the circle and is imprisoned by a ten-headed demon in the “attic” of a castle, prefiguring Sara’s banishment to the attic of the seminary. Sara identifies with the princess–her mantra is “All women are princesses. It is our right.”
The generosity of Ram Dass restores Sara’s faith. In the morning she’s awakened by a gust of snow that blows the attic window open. Walking to it, she sees across the alley in the window opposite hers Ram Dass, his hands raised to the heavens; Sara too raises her arms in a silent “prayer.” Then, in a marvelously comical cut, bristles pop out of a smokestack followed by a soot-blackened head. The juxtaposition of purity and filth brings to mind William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper.” Little Tom Dacre, poisoning his lungs with soot by day, at night dreams “that thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, / Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. / And by came an angel who had a bright key, / And he open’d the coffins and set them all free; / Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, / And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.”
