![]() ![]() Having dispatched her would-be rapists, V then starts monologuing: He is articulate and alliterative, ornate and orotund, a veritable "vichyssoise of verbiage", as he puts it. We first meet him when he rescues Evie (Natalie Portman) from a trio of predatory "Fingermen" - the secret police who enforce the curfew and enjoy the opportunities it affords. ![]() Hugo Weaving plays V and we never see his face, only the snook-cocking Fawkes mask: It's a brilliant performance because he makes the immobility move he renders the static, unchanging visage versatile. As he explains, what remains of his tissue and muscle is no more the "real" him than is the disguise: There is nothing behind the mask there is only the idea. Why does "V" - as "the terrorist" is known throughout the film - wear a Guy Fawkes mask? Well, he was unjustly imprisoned and, while in the state's hands, hideously disfigured - so that's a touch of The Phantom of the Opera, too. It moves the usual predictable genuflections toward Orwell and 1984 - the Supreme Leader beamed in on giant telly screens, etc - and adds a dash of The Scarlet Pimpernel and, more explicitly, The Count of Monte Cristo. The stylized smirk is really quite ingenious: it conjures not an angry humorless anarchist (as so many of them are) but a witty, dashing cocker of snooks. I believe it was David Lloyd (the arty half of the Moore & Lloyd words-and-pictures double-act) who came up with the idea of using a Guy Fawkes mask as a motif for the original graphic novel, and, as it was the middle of summer when the muse descended, he had to draw it (in those pre-Internet days) from memory. That said, although they share essentially the same political vision, the film of V for Vendetta does far less vandalism to its source material than, say, the film of Children of Men. Why do dystopian futures on the big screen all have to be the same? The rainbow coalition reeling under yet another "socially conservative" "right-wing" regime of dour authoritarian plonkers: is that the only script available? homosexuals." Okay, I understand why the Left wants to keep the full panoply of favored victim exhibits in its Diversity Petting Zoo intact, but God, it's awfully boring, isn't it? I don't find it difficult to imagine dystopian futures where the gays and imams are on opposite sides: The stormtroopers of Big Gay cracking down on recalcitrant mullahs, or, conversely, the new mutaween of an Islamized west busting up lesbian rugby nights. V for Vendetta is set in a fascist Britain of 2027 and begins with a rabid telly pundit lip-curling his way through a list of verboten classes of persons: "Immigrants. I suppose I might as well get the whiny stuff about the politics out of the way first, so here goes: ![]() It's true that the film has its share of cheap applause lines with coy insertions of Bush-era obsessions like "rendition". Mr Moore dissociated himself from the screen adaptation because he believed it had reduced his story, while retaining its UK setting, into a tedious dispute between "American neoconservatism and American liberalism". V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue and written and produced by the Wachowski Brothers, was adapted from a "graphic novel" (ie, comic book) from the Eighties by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. For that we have to thank a film that came out a decade or so back, just in time to miss the quatercentenary of the original Gunpowder Plot. In the United States, however, Guy Fawkes and his visage remained entirely unknown - until recent years, when it suddenly started turning up at antifa protests and, for those who like their activism a wee bit less active, as Twitter avatars on the Internet. I regret that the tradition of children wheeling homemade effigies of Fawkes through the streets and crying "Penny for the Guy!" has all but vanished - although it still existed, albeit in somewhat menacing form, when I last lived in London twenty years ago. Since the attempt to assassinate King James I and blow up Parliament in 1605, November 5th has been celebrated in the United Kingdom as Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, and it persists in many unlikely parts of the Commonwealth, from St Vincent to South Africa. ![]()
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