Mad about you

Did Joan, the queen of Castile and heiress to the crown of Aragon, inherit the clinical insanity of her grandmother, or was she driven to desperation by forsaken love? Spanish writer and director Vicente Aranda takes the stand, in his elegantly envisioned Mad Love, that Joan was a victim of her own emotions in a period when public display of personal feelings was unacceptable.

He synthesizes bits of documentary information from the 15th and 16th centuries with a subjective, modern interpretation of characters. The result is so vivid a portrait of a woman consumed by lust and love and crushed by betrayal that it conjures up the intoxicating fumes and emotional ghosts of a freshly painted Rembrandt.

Mad Love, Spain’s 2001 Academy Award entry for Best Foreign Language Film, opens in 1554 as a dethroned Joan sits in a dark room. An off-screen narrator, who sporadically clarifies historical detail throughout the film, tells us that she is 74 years old and has been locked up for nearly 50 years. She is known as Joan the Mad (Juana la Loca is the original title of the film).

“I do not fear death,” Joan tells us. “No matter what, it will take me to Philip.” She is referring to her husband, a Flemish monarch, inveterate womanizer and Fabio look-alike (at least here) known as Philip the Handsome. (Nicknames, we are learning, were all the rage back then).

Then, the story flashes back to 1496. Princess Joan (played by Pilar López de Ayala) sets sail to the Brussels court where she is to enter into a marriage with Philip (Daniele Liotti) arranged by her parents, Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, and Philip’s father, emperor Maximilian. Joan leaves behind a childhood sweetheart. Philip is the complete stud. We see him first during archery practice. When the couple meets, he is miffed that their wedding is to take place in a week. He makes a court official bless their union and carries his nubile bride to the bedroom with Neanderthal aplomb. (“We will see you in a week,” he casually tosses over his shoulder.) Their political obligations fall away as quickly as their clothes, and we settle into a relationship akin to a loudly ticking, carnal time bomb that is fueled by his infidelity and privileged station in life and her consummate passion and jealousy.

Mad Love is a melodrama of operatic scopes that toys with a sort of “chicken-or-the-egg” rumination on Joan’s growing outrage. It is ripe with court intrigue, sensuality, the abuse of power and a domino-like effect of betrayal in which even Joan soils her soul. The jumble of sex and politics in Mad Love smacks of Clintonian double standards and amorality. Philip uses his hunting lodge and palace as makeshift whorehouses and even entrenches a Moor mistress as one of his wife’s ladies in waiting while Joan struggles to maintain happiness at the top tier of a political and social asylum run and counseled by inmates.

Ayala is excellent as the pained and alternately satiated or famished princess who is told to take consolation in living in sanctity with a man even though it may be a terrible task at times. She is transformed from naïve princess to a jaded “baby machine,” who gives birth without complication and even severs the umbilical cord with her teeth with all the nonchalance of sewing a button on a blouse. Liotti has just the right swagger and shallow gaze for a man who turns to other women for what his own wife is willing to provide in abundance.

The film has numerous memorable scenes that feel like they leap from museum and art-gallery walls, including a royal procession meandering through the countryside, and ladies in waiting dancing outside their queen’s bedroom.

It’s a gorgeously photographed production in which the ladies paint her lips and nipples with fragrant henna to help her drive men of wealth and power nuts and prepare them to sell out humanity for sexual favors.

“It’s your duty,” says Joan’s mom about her marriage. “You were born a princess and must accept it. It has political reasons, but some happiness is also possible.” But the sticker shock on that happiness can certainly be a killer.