Writer/director Richard Levine’s film SUBMISSION is being promoted as a modern updating of the novel “The Blue Angel.” The book was famously adapted into a 1930 film THE BLUE ANGEL by director Josef von Sternberg, a film which made Marlene Dietrich an international star.
In the Dietrich film, a straight-laced, aging professor becomes enamored with a beautiful young singer (Dietrich) in a local nightclub called the Blue Angel. The professor’s obsession with the singer has disastrous results, particularly for him. This forbidden passion is particularly risky for a man expected to set a moral example for his pupils, so he tries to keep it hidden lest he lose his livelihood and reputation, but he is under a compulsion he can’t resist.
In this updated version, the man is still a professor but instead of falling for a nightclub singer, his forbidden sexual obsession is for a student. In both cases, what the professor is doing driven by sexual obsession and is unethical and forbidden by the standards of his times. However, the premise sounds more like an update of “Lolita” than “Blue Angel” but actually, SUBMISSION has only tenuous ties to either and instead is a more timely tale of temptation and sexual harassment.
Stanley Tucci plays the professor, Ted Swenson, a well-respected author teaching at a small college in Vermont. He is a happily married man, whose wife Sherrie (Kyra Sedgwick) is a doctor and they live in a lovely, large house. It is just that Ted is frustrated with his new novel, which is not coming together, and he is kind of bored with quiet academic life too. When the middle-aged professor is approached by one of the students in his creative writing classes, Angela (Addison Timlin), who professes to be a great fan of the professor’s one published novel, he is flattered. She asks him to read and critique the first chapter of a novel she is writing. Swenson is surprised to find the student’s writing is strikingly good although it is also racy, sexual, bordering on pornographic. There is clearly a little envy, as he remains stuck with his own novel, but he soon becomes enamored of both the writing and the writer. Angela suddenly seems to turn up everywhere he goes on campus, proffering compliments or confiding personal tragedies, and also offering more pages to read. The professor starts to lose his professional perspective.
Tucci gives a fine performance as Swenson. The same can be said of the rest of the strong cast, which includes Janeane Garofalo as a friend and co-worker in the English department of the college. The problem with this film is not the actors or the direction but the idea behind the script.
There are plenty of warning signs that Swenson should heed, with scenes where his fellow professors talk about avoiding even the appearance of sexual harassment but Swenson plays little attention. The audience senses early on there is something not entirely honest about this student, but the professor does not see it until he is well mired in the situation. Every time he steps too far over a line, one can sense he knows he knows he is on thin ice. Yet he proceeds anyway.
To be honest, I have not read the novel “The Blue Angel” but I have seen the Dietrich film, and I suspect far more readers are familiar with THE BLUE ANGEL movie than the book. The von Sternberg’s film revolved around sexual obsession but also the social divides and restraints of that era, in which the professor belonged to “respectable society” that was supposed to keep apart from the “morally questionable” underclass world to which the nightclub singer belonged. The divide one should not cross was social as much as anything, in that tale of an inappropriate relationship. In THE BLUE ANGEL, the professor and the singer exist in different worlds. SUBMISSION poses a different morality tale, one of uneven power. The professor in THE BLUE ANGEL may have a respectable position in society, but he does not have the same kind of power over the singer that this professor potentially has over a young student at his college.
This tale of seduction, stupidity and self-destruction purports to be based on THE BLUE ANGEL but viewers are more likely to think of Harvey Weinstein and other recent news stories of sexual harassment and abuse. But instead of “believe women,” the message is this film is the opposite, with the young woman as plotting temptress, the one with an agenda. Making the student in this film such a plotting deceiver gives one a creepy feeling about this film, since it is the common claim of offender that they were enticed. True, the young woman in this story is not innocent but hiding Swensen’s guilt behind THE BLUE ANGEL and its old morality tale about “bad women” does not change that fact that this middle-aged professor, unlike the sheltered soul in the book, should have been worldly and aware enough not to cross that ethical line. When power is uneven, claiming it was consensual does not matter.
SUBMISSION does have one thing in common with THE BLUE ANGEL, in that both are cautionary tales for their time. In the case of SUBMISSION, that message may be that no matter how tempting, men in positions of power should not cross that ethical line with those they have power over – lest they lose all. Unlike that earlier story’s sense of tragedy, this character deserves what he gets.
RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
