CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
IN Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1893), Mrs Arbuthnot turns out to be of considerable importance to Lord Illingworth: she is the mother of his illegitimate son. In A Man of No Importance, a country house near London is replaced by Dublin and instead of the gentry, all the characters in the film are ordinary people, warts and all, and as removed from The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Screenplay writer Bary Devlin is more concerned to represent details of Wilde’s life, his interest in poetry, the theatre, and young men, than to duplicate the events in Wilde’s plays.
The interrelationship of performance and identity is prominent in a film which opens and closes with images of drawn curtains. These images are extended into a neat conceit through the use of Alfie Byrne (Albert Finney) as a bus conductor who entertains his regular customers with readings from Wilde. When a new passenger joins his crew, he sees her as Wilde’s Salome and decides to produce the play.
Indeed, he lives vicariously through the world and life of Wilde: the bus driver (Rufus Sewell) is his “Bosie”; the butcher Carney (Michael Gambon) becomes his Queensbury; and the bus conductor who dislikes him is actually called Carson, the name of the attorney who prosecuted Wilde.
As Alfie, Finney convinces one of the character’s goodness, his starved tenderness, of the hurts endured by his soul. In confronting the insensitivity that characterises a hypocrite, Alfie becomes a man of some consequence for his sister and friends.
Eartha Kitt’s sultry version of Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love is heard on several occasions. The words surely endorse whatever form love takes. At the end of A Man of No Importance, the relationship of the older intellectual man to the younger man, his “Bosie”, is likely to be a platonic one, but Alfie has found a poignant release from the prison made by himself and social conventions.