A conscientious film adaptation of one of the most famous plays by Henrik Ibsen.
To the film adaptation, in fact, there are no claims - after watching the film, "Doll's House" you can not read - and, not least thanks to the film adaptation, the entire artificiality of the artistic constructions of this shaggy ruler of the doom will be clearly revealed. The story told in the play is cleansed of any signs of life; the characters with flesh but no blood act not as people but as ideas with human names; the action is completely enslaved by the author’s design and the inevitable truth is immaculately embedded in the inevitable final dialogue of the main character with her husband. It is possible, of course, that in reality, the prototype of Nora Laura Keeler said something similar to the words of Nora to her husband, but her quarrel ended somewhat differently - she ended up in an insane asylum. It happened a few years before the premiere of “Doll’s House”, and they say that Laura was in correspondence with Ibsen and even asked him for help, but like no support from the playwright did not receive.
Knowing in advance what this “drama of ideas” is about (namely, this is how most of Ibsen’s plays are characterized in special literature), it is not interesting to watch it, because no one has yet managed to bring originality to the formulas. It is unlikely that you will watch the film and it is unlikely that you will go to the theater for a production. Involuntarily recalls Anton Palich, who did not love Ibsen very much - every good production of Chekhov is good in its own way, all good productions of Ibsen are good in the same way.
However, despite the artificiality and lifelessness of the Doll’s House, this play is extremely curious in that it is one of the first and most striking manifestos of the struggle for women’s equality. In it, a woman, perhaps for the first time in European literature, declares that, in addition to the duties of a wife and mother, she also has duties to herself.
Oh, yeah. What do you think is my most sacred duty? No way. And that's what I have to tell you? Or do you have no responsibilities to your husband or your children? Oh, yeah. I have others that are equally sacred. No way. You don't have one! What's that? Oh, yeah. Duties to oneself. No way. You're a wife and mother first. Oh, yeah. I don't believe that anymore. I think first of all I am a human being, just like you, or at least I should try to become a human being. I know most people will be on your side, Thorvald, and the books say the same thing. But I can no longer be content with what most people say and what they say in books. I need to think about these things myself and try to understand them.
The tragedy of a woman as a creature socially subordinate to a man, his father and then his husband, the tragedy of the morally corrupting depravity of such submission, the falsity of the “classical” family of the XIX century, the incompatibility of the “ideals” of such a family with “living life” and with human dignity, are exposed in the “Doll’s House” with the ruthlessness of good journalism. Something in this pamphlet remains relevant for the beginning of the XXI century.
7 out of 10