While reviewing
Anthony Harvey's 'The Lion in Winter', 1968,
Alex von Tunzelmann writes in her remarkable book '
Reel History: The World According to the Movies', 2015:
"...The Lion in Winter
takes place at Chinon, a French residence of English king Henry II, over
Christmas 1183. Henry’s heir, Henry the Young King, had died just months
before. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was his prisoner. Relations with his
three remaining sons, Richard the Lionheart, John and Geoffrey, were on a knife
edge.
People: The events shown did not actually take place at
Chinon over Christmas 1183. The film elides a meeting of Henry with his sons at
Angers earlier that year, with a summit between him and Philip II of France at
Gisors on 6 December. Still, the prickly family Christmas is an event with
which many in the audience will identify, though most families only plot each
other’s grisly demises as a whimsical fantasy. Not so the Plantagenets, who are
ready and waiting with actual armies to take each other out if the division of
the turkey (or the kingdom) goes the wrong way. Peter O’Toole gives the same
performance as Henry II he gave in Becket, with the same delicious result. This
time, though, an Eleanor of Aquitaine has been found to match him in the form
of Katharine Hepburn. ‘I haven’t kept the great bitch in the keep for ten years
out of passionate attachment,’ growls Henry. ‘I could peel you like a pear and
God himself would call it justice!’ bellows Eleanor.
Romance: Henry has decided to marry his young mistress, Alys
Capet, to his drippiest son, John. Petulantly, Alys objects: ‘I don’t like your
Johnny. He’s got pimples and he smells of compost.’ Goodness, you couldn’t be
that picky in the twelfth century. Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...."
Peter O'Toole as King Henry II and Jane Merrow as Alais
courtesy: AVCO Embassy Pictures
That was the reality of 12th century: Everyone had pimples and smelled of compost...
Sadly no history book, movie, play captures the smells....
George Orwell has said: "One of the essential
experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of
human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its
necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil
war."
No literature in Marathi on Panipat, 1761 quite captures the smells that must have prevailed when Marathas were caught in a siege for weeks before the famed battle that broke out on January 14 1761.
For some one like me, with ultra sensitive sense of smell, it would have been hell, probably enough to kill me much before the battle!
On this blog, I have written lovingly about the days we spent at Kolhapur during our childhood. What I never mentioned while writing that was the smell of night soil that prevailed around our aunt's house where we stayed. Manual scavenging was still practised. The bucket of the bucket-toilet that was used by almost half a dozen families was located just a couple of meters away from the entrance of my aunt's house!
