TULIP FEVER by Campbell Dalglish, [email protected]

While the feverish auction of tulips ("tulipomania") brawls it up in the back room parlors of 17th Century Amsterdam, can a heated love affair between the orphaned beauty Sophia ( - “The Danish Girl") and her bedroom-eyed portrait artist Jan (Dane DeHaan - "Spiderman") rescue them from the grips of a marriage to the old "king of peppercorns?" The plot itself may sound ludicrous. How can anyone take such a love story seriously?

In this film, "Tulip Fever," playwright ("") and director Justin Chadwick (“The Other Boleyn Girl” and “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom”), create together a grandiloquent intrigue of adultery, money and love based on the novel by Deborah Moggach, (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).

After three years of "little soldiering" in bed with Cornelius, Sophia is unable to get pregnant and give Cornelius the heir to his estate he so desperately seeks. Even though he eventually falls in love with her and hires a painter to immortalize his claim to Sophia's beauty, he is ready to give her up if she doesn't produce. Then the subplot swallows the main plot. Servant maid Maria (Holliday Grainger - "My Cousin Rachel") and fishmonger Willem (Jack O’Connell "Unbroken") carry on a secret love affair in the kitchen. When Willem mistakes Sophia for his Maria, and sees her sneaking off to have sex with the painter, he loses his mind and is conveniently swept off to serve in the Navy for a year. Meanwhile the abandoned Maria discovers she is pregnant, and the main plot is now growing in her belly -- the possible heir to the estate that Sophia has been trying to produce for Cornelius. If Maria is caught pregnant, she will be fired. If Sophia does not produce, she will be returned to the orphanage. So the two work together for the next nine months to cuckold the aging Cornelius. Sophia will pretend to be pregnant while Maria hides her growing belly, and when the time comes they will hire the help of a dodgy male practitioner () to help fake the birth and give Cornelius his heir. The game is on.

When the truth comes out, as it always does, we fear some horrible consequence for the lovers. What will Willem do when he returns and learns his Maria was pregnant with his child? What will Maria do when she learns he didn't abandon her, but mistook her for Sophia cheating on him? What will Cornelius do when he learns how he has been so totally cuckolded, and that his baby girl is not really his but the daughter of a fishmonger and his maid? Will Jan discover whether or not Sophia drowned in the river of suicides where other desperadoes have lost all hope in their tulips? Just as everyone accepts the fate of the inflated value of tulips, will they be able to accept the fate of inflated love? In the end we learn that the key to true love is held by the elder Abbess, , who has created the alchemy behind the tulips and the love affair right inside her nunnery.

As though the chaos theory had stormed through a history of dramatic love stories throwing everything to the winds, one must view this film as satire, and enjoy the beauty of the tulip in all its pretentious and natural glory, knowing that adulterous love affairs such as these are neither harmful or murderous, but in fact find refuge in our most religious order as painted on the walls of our churches.

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