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Lillian Hellman’s stage play The Children’s Hour – filmed by William Wyler in 1961 with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn – is the well-known, earnest story of two women teaching at a private girls’ school whose lives are ruined by a pupil’s malicious accusation of homosexuality: it’s one of the earliest Hollywood movies to tiptoe around the existence of gay people, albeit clearly permitted to exist on the understanding that the people involved are really not gay.
But until this moment I knew nothing about the real-life libel case from 19th-century Scotland on which it was based, which in 2013 was the subject of a study by LGBT scholar Lillian Faderman entitled Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired The Children’s Hour.
It’s Faderman’s book which inspired this exhilaratingly candid, intelligent new movie from the German director and co-writer Sophie Heldman: a modestly budgeted film which is all about the writing and the intimate performances. It has vigour and clarity, combined with a frank acknowledgment of sex and sexuality. It makes The Children’s Hour look prissy and mealy mouthed.
Marianne Woods (Clare Dunne) and Jane Pirie (played by the film’s co-screenwriter Flora Nicholson) are two women who run a private girls’ school in Edinburgh in 1810. They are thrilled, if a little nervous, by a financial and social coup. They are getting three new fee-paying pupils – granddaughters of the imperious Lady Cumming Gordon, resoundingly and wittily played by Fiona Shaw, who as ever puts the grande dame smackdown on everyone else in the vicinity. Her connection with their academy will clearly be advantageous.
One of the girls Lady Cumming Gordon entrusts to the care of the Misses Woods and Pirie is Jane Cumming (Mia Tharia), a young woman of colour whose father, an official in the East India Company in Calcutta, was married to an Indian woman. Tharia shows us a difficult, proud young woman who is bullied and mocked by the white girls; Jane finds it easier to spend time with the two teachers who are made a little uneasy, sensing that their leniency and kindliness could backfire.
Jane – no fool – senses something between them; she admires them, wants to join them as a teacher and wants what she considers her own superiority to the other girls to be acknowledged. When it isn’t, she concocts a spiteful tale tricked out with imagined sexual details that she has gleaned from the smutty dorm whisperings. Lady Cumming Gordon withdraws her girls from the school, circulates a letter among other parents and the teachers take her to court.
One way to tell this story would, in fact, be to dramatise the court case in the present tense – something like Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy – interspersed with flashbacks. Heldman and Nicholson have chosen to give us the events more straightforwardly, with the libel trial merely acknowledged over intertitles before the credits.
The advantage of this approach is that it allows the movie to speculate and imagine the nature of the two women’s actual relationship – and fascinatingly, the drama shows us their sexual attraction only becoming a reality after the row has detonated: the accusation has brought their love into being. Pirie vomits in agony when their solicitor reads aloud to the two women the lurid fake details of what they are supposed to have done – her nausea is triggered by the grisly irony of the accusation being partly right in a way that it wouldn’t have been before the scandal.
But what then is Jane Cumming’s “education”? Perhaps what she ultimately learns is that racism trumps homophobia. Her testimony, as someone from India, was considered fundamentally suspect. In fact, another way to present and reimagine this story would be to assume that she was in fact right, she and other girls were abuse victims and that the official record was rigged in favour of the overclass. But as it stands, this very well acted film is an astringent and commonsensical account of what in all probability happened in private as well as in public: a story of race, class, sexuality and empire.
