Agnes in a Field of Mayhem

Mercenaries led no peaceful life at the beginning of the 16th century. But it wasn't much better for anyone else in 1985's Flesh+Blood. Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in this not unvarnished but certainly brutal depiction of the period by director Paul Verhoeven. There's plague, rape, and rotting corpses, but the cinematography is pretty as paintings and the music by Basil Pouledouris sounds like it was written for a Robin Hood movie from the '40s. Enjoyable but sometimes an odd juxtaposition. The main problem with the film is a lack of focus but it's still marvellous to behold.

It's part of a collection of Jennifer Jason Leigh movies on Criterion right now and, I must say, she is the most impressive part of the film. Verhoeven seems to have a knack for finding actresses who will go to just about any extreme and call him a genius afterwards (as Leigh did in an interview for this). But for my money, most of the genius is Jennifer's.

She plays Agnes, an aristocrat's daughter. Much is made of her virginity as she's betrothed to Steven (Tom Burlinson), a young nobleman with aspirations of scientific achievement. There's a great scene where she's trying to dig up mandrake beneath two ghastly hanged corpses and he pitches woo beside her.

It's a sweet little love scene and the two treat the grisly flesh above them as little more than willow branches. Verhoeven makes his point about how normal carnage was.

She's captured by the mercenaries led by Martin (Hauer). There's an attempted gang rape but only Martin succeeds in taking her and we can see from Hauer's performance and the way Verhoeven shoots it that he does so only reluctantly, as a way of protecting her from the rest of his men. Then follows a love triangle composed of Martin, Agnes, and Steven, which was apparently something forced on Verhoeven by producers, according to Wikipedia. In this case, I'd say the producers were right because Agnes is the most interesting character in the film for how she plays the two men against each other. The audience is left to wonder if she truly cares for either one, or if she cares for both. The brutality of the circumstances she's forced into should be weighed against any betrayal she commits, but how much is unsure because of how uncertain are her own desires.

Flesh+Blood is available on The Criterion Channel.