an Oscar Wilde retrospective: the (un)Happy Prince

In a cheap Parisian hotel room Oscar Wilde (Rupert Everett) lies on his death bed. The film The Happy Prince chronicles Wilde’s destitute final years in France as a tangle of memory streams, boozy vignettes and flashbacks within flashbacks. As the audience, I am drawn to observe Wilde's failures with ironic distance, detachment and dark humour. The film opens with Wilde in 1897 leaving a British prison after serving two years for gross indecency. There is an early flashback to him telling stories as he put his two sons to bed. The somewhat autobiographical story of the happy prince, a gilded statue who allows a swallow to denude him of all his gold to feed the poor permeated the movie. We then watch him wander, exiled and frequently penniless, through Dieppe and Naples before expiring of meningitis in Paris 3 years later. Contrasting flashbacks from the humiliation of his trial to the opening-night adulation underline the tragedy of his fall. We also experience the unrequited love triangle between Wilde, the beautiful and manipulative Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan) and Wilde’s devoted literary executor Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas). It seemed that Bosie left Wilde for younger and beautiful lovers, while Wilde played the unrepentant hedonist with the dutiful and loyal Robbie. Wilde treats his loyal allies with ungrateful negligence. While he maintains his male friendships with Robbie and Reggie Turner (Colin Firth), he cannot reconcile with his wife Constance (Emily Watson) and loses her financial support. He does however befriend a young Paris rent boy and his tough kid brother and holds them spellbound with his fairy-tale of the happy prince. It is the closest Wilde comes to any form of personal redemption, where he realises that love is the only thing worth worshipping. To complement this sad and melancholic content, the film is filmed in dark and seedy alleyways, pubs and faded restaurants. The constant horror of humiliation and poverty is at odds with the characters' indulgent search for luxury. So perhaps after all, there is a higher order explanation where polite society was prepared to turn a blind eye to homosexual affairs with the lower orders, who could be bought and bought off. It seems that Wilde's flaunted connection with the Queensberry family was a class transgression and his fatal flaw. So as a tragic genius, he lived and died for love.