THE NAME OF THE ROSE

Reviewed by Helen Chavez Cast: Sean Connery (William of Baskerville), Christian Slater (Adso of Melk), F. Murray Abraham (Bernardo Gui), Michael Lonsdale (The ), Ron Perlman (Salvatore).

Plot Summary:

In the Year of Our Lord 1327, an English monk, William of Baskerville (Sean Connery), along with his young German novice Adso of Melk (Christian Slater), is sent to a remote Italian abbey to investigate the mysterious death of a monk. It is the dead of winter, snow blankets the ground, and life is interminably hard for the peasantry.

On their arrival, they find an abbey riddled with suspicion and fear, a place full of shadows and deceit. William is welcomed by the Abbott (Michael Lonsdale), but his investigations are hampered by a community unhappy about the intrusion, despite the death of their brother monk.

Nevertheless, William and Adso persist in their detective work, and come upon a hunchbacked monk, the enigmatic and eccentric Salvatore (Ron Perlman), whose picturesque and confusing manner of speech both irritates and intrigues them.

More deaths ensue, and the mystery deepens when a great library, a huge labyrinth of knowledge, is discovered by William. It becomes clear that the library is the key to the mystery and the deaths, but the situation goes from bad to worse when Bernardo Gui is sent to the abbey with a Papal legate to investigate the deaths. The Devil is thought to be at work, and Gui is the man to get to the bottom of it – he is an Inquisitor.

William and Adso now have to race against time to solve the murders …

Salvatore (Ron Perlman)

The misshapen, hunchbacked figure of Salvatore haunts the hidden places of this great abbey, his twisted body lurking in the shadows as he shambles from stables, to refectory, to graveyard. His bobbing, twitching body is topped by a face straight from the monstrous, carved depictions of the Apocalyse on the wall of the abbey. From the scrofulous, partly hairless head to the large, flattened nose, Salvatore is indeed the image of a demon.

But it is his speech that amazes Adso and arouses the interest of William. Babbling maniacally, Salvatore speaks in a unique mixture of English, Italian, Provencal French, and bad Latin.

On meeting Adso for the first time, he grunts and sticks out his tongue, a living gargoyle, and spews forth a gibbering tumble of words

"Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw on your anima! La mort e supremos! You contemplata me apocalypsum, eh? La bas! Nous avon il diabolo! Ugly cum Salvatore, eh? My little brother! Penitenziagite!"

As William explains to an incredulous Adso;

"He speaks in all languages – and none …"

Although he wears the black habit of the Benedictine order, His cry of ‘Penitenziagite!’ proves to William that Salvatore is a refugee from the Dolchenite order (Minorites, in ’s book), an order that believed in the poverty of man and which killed the rich to enforce their beliefs. Salvatore is a heretic, and it is this knowledge that inevitably leads Salvatore to his doom …

"The Name of the Rose" The Making of a Masterpiece

A commentary by Helen Chavez

In 1982 the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud was in the Caribbean promoting his remarkable film about prehistoric man Quest for Fire, when he read a small article in Le Monde about a book due to be published in France called The Name of the Rose.

Fascinated by the subject matter - a detective story set in a 14th century - he arranged to see a galley of the book. By page 200 he was hooked. Before he had finished the book he had managed to purchase the rights, and a four-year passionate quest to film Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose had begun.

Annaud had a fascination since childhood with medieval churches and his background was in Latin and Greek, so he was determined to portray the complexity and subtlety of Eco's novel.

"The challenge was to make a two-hour film out of a 500-page book, with the complexity of entertaining a mass audience, but also having to please an intelligent audience," he commented. "He [Eco] didn't try to cheat in order to make it easy for contemporary readers. Exactly because Eco is so precise and detailed about the period, the reader realises that man doesn't change; the setting changes, the rules change, but not the internal mechanism. Then you can identify with the period, and this is the subtlety of the book. I am trying to do the same with the film; to change the surface in order to understand that inside, man remains man."

Eco, however, did not write the screenplay. "He said it was my job to do the film and his only desire is for me to make a good one," Annaud said. They agreed that the screen credit would read 'A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's novel', palimpsest being a Greek word meaning a manuscript that has been erased so that a second text can be written over it, but with traces of the original text remaining beneath.

For the next three years Annaud scoured Europe looking for the perfect location for his project, visiting 300 abbeys in Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom without success. But when he was taken by producer Bernd Eichinger to Kloster Eberbach, near Frankfurt in Germany, Annaud described it as "a miracle". A Cistercian monastery built in the 12th century, Annaud decided to use the location for all of the interior shots for The Name of the Rose.

The huge Romanesque church built in 1145 was one of the most impressive sets in the film, and Annaud had four three-tiered iron candelabras made in Italy. Each one weighed a ton and took ten men to manoeuvre them into position, suspended from the ceiling. After filming was over, they were donated to the monastery.

The medieval dormitory built in 1250 was turned into the Scriptorium, and the magnificent medieval monastic hospital became the dining room. The wine cellars with their frescoes of vine leaves were converted into the Chapter House and the Bath House.

But Annaud also wanted to recreate the huge exterior of the monastery as portrayed in the book, so a massive set was built on a hilltop near Lazio, just outside Rome, by production designer Dante Ferretti.

"We have to build it," said Ferretti, "for the audience to see what a monastery looked like in the 14th century, because the reality of the period is beyond belief."

The next problem was casting the actors for what promised to be a challenging and difficult screenplay. The casting of stars was not important for Annaud and Eichinger, but Sean Connery was an obvious choice as William of Baskerville, the sleuthing monk. His energy, humour and physical presence made him ideal for the role. Sixteen-year- old Christian Slater won the part of William's novice, Adso of Melk, and The Girl was played by young Chilean actress Valentina Vargas. The part of Bernardo Gui, the political and fanatical inquisitor, was given to the great theatre and film actor F. Murray Abraham, fresh from winning an Oscar in 1984 in Amadeus, and William Hickey, who won great acclaim for his performance as the aging Don in Prizzi's Honor revelled in the role of the saintly Brother Ubertino. Last - but by no means least - the part of the babbling, semi-crazed hunchback Salvatore was given to Ron Perlman, in only his third film, his reputation as a distinguished stage actor ensuring this key role would be done with skill and sensitivity.

But the rest of the cast consisted of what Annaud termed his 'spine monks' - the backbone of the monastery, and Annaud assembled fifteen of the most extraordinary- looking actors. "In order to recreate the world of that time, I had to consider the health of the period," Annaud commented. "Medieval Europe had Gothic faces." Many of the characters are reminiscent of the paintings and drawings of Bosch and Breugel.

The desire for absolute authenticity drove Annaud to collect over 300 reference books covering the 14th century, and he hired medieval consultant Jacques le Goff, together with a team of seven historians to ensure the correctness of everything in the film.

Dante Ferretti supplied over 3,000 detailed sketches to the team of historians to gain their seal of approval on the designs. In Italy, skilled blacksmiths in small villages forged the great candelabras and created the huge bathing vats. Craftsmen carved the pews and desks for the Scriptorium out of seasoned oak, and two illuminators worked for six months to recreate the magnificent illuminated manuscripts. They were done according to ancient medieval standards, on parchment, the gold burnished on gesso (a mixture of slaked plaster of Paris, white lead and bolum armenum) to give it body and substance. The script was in Latin, Greek or Arabic, copying the great literary works of early history.

Annaud began filming at Eberbach in November 1985, and continued in Rome, Italy, from early January 1986 to late March. His cast of actors had to endure cold and extreme discomfort in wintery conditions, although Ron Perlman was heard to comment that it was a vast improvement on his last cinematic excursion with Annaud in Quest for Fire. He had played Amoukar, an under-achieving Neanderthal, clad in only skins and not much else. In The Name of the Rose, he said, he was at least allowed to wear shoes.

The film was released in September 1986, to critical and commercial acclaim. With a budget of only $16 million, the film grossed $77.2 million worldwide, and garnered a plethora of awards, including a British Film and Television Award for Best Actor for Sean Connery. The Name of the Rose has set the standard for both historical drama and murder-mysteries, its intelligent storyline and sombre, atmospheric lighting and camera-work caught the attention of audiences throughout the world.