Cinderella (2014): CALL discussion notes

The plot. We all know the story. Rebellious servant girl, suffering under capitalist oppression, marries handsome, wealthy and noble foot fetishist. 

The importance. All us girls grew up with this story. It invested us in dreaming of becoming a princess. Then came that damn feminism that rejected that illusion/aspiration and overthrew the assumption that a woman’s salvation and self-realization depended on her landing a man. Her sole-mate.

So Kenneth Branagh retells Cinderella for the current-wave feminist age. Can such an archetypal pre-feminist fable speak to our time and does any magic survive? Does the story still work?

How do the following details address the problem of recasting the old story for the new age:

1. The infant Ella’s gift of imagination, e.g., seeing a cloud as a horse. 

2. The “evil stepmother” and the motivation Branagh gives her both in the early scene of her overhearing Ella with her father and later, when she tells Ella her own life — as a fairy tale.

3. Ella’s renaming as Cinderella.

4. The black court officer’s help.

5. Ella introducing herself to the prince as Cinderella.

6. Ella proposing to him.

7. Ella forgiving the stepmother.

8. Reviving the Freudian song, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.”

9. The stepmother’s smashing of Ella’s hidden glass slipper.

10. The extraordinarily, congenitally kind Ella showing courage.

11. The film’s faith in magic.

12. Changing the cartoon’s grandmotherly fairy godmother to an edgy fashionista.

13. Ella’s conversation with the king.

14. The king’s deathbed reference to Ella as the girl who’s always losing her shoes.

15. The stepmother’s connivance (aka blackmail) with the court official.

16. The prince’s characterization. 

Consider the following elements:

1. Why does the house have a chandelier with glass swans on it?

2. What is the thematic point of Ella’s gift request for her father? Is it magical?

3. How are elements of animation woven into the live-action reworking of the Disney original? e.g., the transformation scenes (to and fro), Gus-Gus and the other mice, the satanic cat Lucifer, the bluebirds, etc. 

4. With blank slates (aka unknown actors) as Ella and the prince, how does the casting of familiar actors draw on their personae from earlier work? E.g., Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother, Derek Jacobi as the old ruler, Rob Brydon as the court painter, Cate Blanchett as stepmummy. Hint: Blanchett recently played Blanche du Bois on Broadway, then a variation on that character in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.   

5. What does the clothing signify? Why does the fairy godmother change Ella’s mother’s dress from pink to blue? Why does the stepmother begin in widow black, laced with gold, and end in bright green? (There is always design in the design.)

6. What is the function of the stag?

7. What’s the effect of the fairy godmother delivering the film’s voice-over narration?

8. Ella stays in her family’s house and servitude out of faithfulness to her parents.
 9. The stepmother begins her life story with "Once upon a time." How does this, together with the survival of animation in a live action film, suggest we live in fictions?

     

Consider the significance of the following lines:

1. Bibbity bobbity boo.

2. Have courage and be kind.

3. Go Goosey.

4. Animals talk to us, if only we could understand them. 

5. I can’t drive. I’m a goose.

6. I’m not a footman. I’m a lizard. Enjoy it while you can.

7. Just because it’s done doesn’t mean it’s what should be done.

8. When there is kindness there is goodness. When there is goodness there is magic.

9. You needn’t call me [stepmother]. Madame will do.