Hedda

 

“Sometimes I can’t help myself. I do things all of a sudden, on a whim.”

“Hedda Gabler doesn’t love anyone but herself, and Hedda Tesman doesn’t exist.”

“I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.”

Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House

There are many memorable scenes in Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, but the one that will stick with me the longest doesn’t even have the titular character in it – it’s Nina Hoss’ Eileen Lovborg, entering a room in which the learned men have segregated themselves to smoke their cigars, casting a spell on them when she tells them about the book she is working on. Nina Hoss, who played Hedda Gabler herself for six years on the stage of the Berlin Deutsches Theater, is an outsider. She has a doctorate and is conducting groundbreaking research into human sexuality, and is hoping to ascend to a professorship for which Hedda’s husband George (Tom Bateman) is also competing, and the cards are stacked against her in 1950s England, mostly because of her gender but also because she’s an out lesbian. She enters the room with the confidence of a few drinks (after a period of abstinence that Hedda has deliberately sabotaged, knowing she is likely to ill-behave while drunk) and the fury of a woman who is brilliant but marginalised. Not only are these men keeping her out, they have, collectively but specifically in the case of George, also proven themselves to be boring at best, irrelevant at worst, stagnant in their views and research. She grasps them entirely when she talks about how she has come to research fetishes. They miss why the research is salient, life-saving, to her: that the idea of things considered beyond the pale in the past may become acceptable in society in the future holds a promise that she will one day be accepted for her own sexuality. Her audience sexualises her through her story, but it also becomes clear that what she could contribute to academia far outweighs what they could in their mediocrity. The potency of her story is a hint at how successful her book will be, and how this will make her professorship more likely, by making herself so undeniable that not even Hedda’s meddling or George’s connection to the establishment will save him. It’s spell-binding, but also, ultimately, her doom. 

Hoss has been an undeniable actress for a long time now, especially in her films with German director Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Barbara), but was in my opinion criminally underused in Todd Field’s Tár – here she gets to shine, and play against Tessa Thompson, who is following up her stunning performance in Rebecca Hall’s Passing with another unforgettable one. Hedda and George have just moved into their new mansion, a property that far outstretches their limited budget. The lavish party they are throwing is meant to ensure George’s professorship, and it isn’t George’s ability to prove his worth on which this endeavour depends, but Hedda’s, to charm the people who are making the decision. George is a precarious character with little to recommend himself: he has snagged Hedda, an unlikely achievement, but beyond that there is little he can do on his own. He has bought the mansion because Hedda, in an awkward pause in their conversation, has passingly remarked that she would like to live in it, to give us a sense of the kind of person he is, and he seems to doubt his inability to keep his wife, especially when the people invited to the party remind him how many of them she has had affairs with. If he doesn’t get the job, the entire undertaking would collapse: even the staff know they are likely to lose a house they can’t even fill with servants permanently, and Hedda doesn’t seem the kind of wife who would stick around very long if financial ruin should befall them. 

At the centre of Hedda a question of freedom. Both Hedda and Eileen are limited by society and have carved opposite ways into an approximation of liberty, but both are still trapped, and their paths towards more of it pit them against each other. Hedda needs her husband to be successful so they can pay for the lifestyle she wants, a lifestyle that mainly functions as a distraction from the boredom of a brilliant mind contained by a tedious marriage. Even Eileen’s escape is closed to her: as a black woman she would have been even less likely to succeed in academia, and Eileen’s pleas to her to try and build something for herself instead of her husband don’t take into account how much harder that would be for her. Eileen – now helped by her new girlfriend, the very sober (in both senses of the word) Thea (Imogen Poots) is closer to being respected academically than she has ever been, her research is focused and brilliant, but in the end, she is still the only woman in a room full of men who only listen to her because her stories are salacious. And regardless of how much of her work is helped along in essential ways by her partner, Thea still isn’t given credit in her writing, but subsumed in Eileen’s success. 

To complicate matters, Hedda and Eileen used to be lovers. Eileen’s entrance into the party shows – it’s maybe the only time, except for the last moment of the film, where we get close to seeing Hedda not wear a mask, to seeing her true self – that Hedda still loves her. They have their own theme music, and everything around them appears to still. Later, there will be allusions to their turbulent relationship that almost ended in homicide, but in the background to all the events is an alternate reality in which Hedda chose Eileen instead of a conventional life with a husband, where she was brave enough to attempt the same wire act that Eileen is trying to pull off. It is only after Eileen makes it clear to her that she now loves Thea that Hedda begins executing her plan of destruction, a plan so tailored to work to bring down Eileen that it could only have been created by someone who knows her intimately. She destroys her sobriety by taunting that the men would never take her seriously if she can’t drink with them. She creates the circumstances that allow her to destroy the valuable manuscript – that Eileen has inexplicably brought to the party. She is deliberately driving Eileen to suicide, to self-destruction, and hands her one of her father’s guns in the end. These guns are highly symbolic of their own. Hedda was the illegitimate child of a general, beloved, but her only inheritance is her father’s beloved gun collection, and instead of turning these weapons against the masculine structures that contain her, she aims them at Eileen, another woman struggling with the same restrictions. All her father has given her is these weapons and a sense that she deserves more than she has been allowed to have, but to achieve more she must destroy a woman she still loves. 

Hedda is at times a surprisingly funny film, for centring a woman whose only freedom is to toy with others like they are pieces on a board (often, Hedda is found elevated above the party, watching what is happening, planning her next move), for a film in which there is no sense of solidarity between the female characters struggling for control over their own lives. The men are pathetic, or predatorial, especially the character of the Judge (Nicholas Pinnock), who has helped George purchase the mansion but is only waiting for an opening to take possession of Hedda by any means necessary. DaCosta’s ability to contain all of this within a party and the grounds of this grand house is stunning – the standards from the live band, the dresses, the set decorations as lavish as they hint at the doom looming from their unaffordability – and it is only at the end, in the water of the lake, when Hedda has swum away from shore, that there is a glimpse of a future that may not end in destruction. 

2025, directed by Nia DaCosta, starring Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock, Tom Bateman, Finbar Lynch, Mirren Mack, Kathryn Hunter.