Tulip Fever: A Not-So-Thrilling and Overly Moralistic Historical Melodrama
Set in 17th-century Holland, Tulip Fever tells the story of Sophia (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful orphan forced into marriage with a wealthy merchant, Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). Although Cornelis showers her with affection, Sophia doesn’t love him and feels trapped in their life together. One day, Cornelis commissions a young artist, Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan), to paint their family portrait. As the work progresses, Sophia and Jan fall in love and begin a secret affair. With no means to offer Sophia a better life, Jan decides to try his hand at tulip trading, a booming market where fortunes are made and lost overnight. He hopes to quickly earn enough money to escape with Sophia to the colonies, far away from Cornelis.
.jpg “Still from “Tulip Fever””)
Production on the film began in the early 2000s. Filming took place in 2014, but the release was repeatedly delayed due to the distributors’ uncertainty about the film’s potential.
Expectations vs. Reality
When the trailers promise a historical melodrama filled with forbidden love between attractive characters from different social classes, you might expect a variation on Titanic. The kind of story where love conquers all, even death itself, not to mention stuffy prejudices and arranged marriages.
The Amsterdam of today bears little resemblance to its 17th-century counterpart, so the street scenes were filmed in a studio in England, using large-scale outdoor sets.
A Moralistic Tale
Tulip Fever, however, takes a different, more morally upright path. The film is based on Deborah Moggach’s novel of the same name, which itself is clearly inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Like its classic predecessor, the modern novel doesn’t glorify all-conquering passion but instead highlights its destructive nature. To emphasize her point, Moggach draws a parallel between the fever of love and the pathological stock market frenzy surrounding tulips. The 17th-century “tulip mania” was one of the first financial bubbles in history, and many Amsterdam residents were ruined when they invested in bulbs, hoping that prices would rise indefinitely. The main love story in the film ends more happily than the tulip trade, but it’s not quite the happy ending you might expect when Sophia and Jan first kiss.
Parallels and Contrasts
As in Anna Karenina, the forbidden love of the main characters is contrasted with the “allowed” love of Sophia’s maid, Maria (Holliday Grainger), and her suitor, a fishmonger. However, these young people are not as idealized as Levin and Kitty, and the film makes them pay for their transgressions against morality. But they are moving in the right direction, and family happiness awaits them. This isn’t a spoiler – the story is told from Maria’s perspective, recalling her youth, and the woman hints at the very beginning of the film that everything will be fine for her in the end.
A Mixed Bag
So, it’s a moralistic film mixed with a historical excursion. The creators of Fever did best with the excursion. If you want to understand how the flower bubble was structured but fall asleep reading Wikipedia, the film will show you 17th-century Amsterdam and the tulip exchange in vivid colors and with interesting details. The love stories in the film are played by charismatic stars, but the leading characters are drawn much more primitively than in Tolstoy, and they don’t evoke much sympathy. Therefore, the “soap opera”-like, not always logical twists and turns of their lives are not as captivating as the plot of Anna Karenina or Titanic.
On the other hand, the action unfolds quickly and diversely. There’s erotica, romance, painting, tulip cultivation, and trade… And comic scenes, for which Zach Galifianakis from The Hangover is responsible as Jan’s friend, and Tom Hollander as a lustful gynecologist (one of the heroines becomes pregnant during the story). So, if you’re not expecting a genre masterpiece and just want to immerse yourself in the past and experience the diversity of Dutch life, then Tulip Fever might be worth your attention.