MovieChat Forums > Parade's End (2013) Discussion > sylvia and christopher in france

sylvia and christopher in france


Do they have sex in the bedroom scene when sylvia visits christopher during the war in france? If not, why? I was sooo happy they were going to get together but everything waa ruined and he went off with boring valentine! :/

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No. Potty interrupted them, which reminded Christopher of Sylvia's infidelity and her mischief-making. Then the Potty thing got Christopher mixed up with the military police officer who already hated him for not court-martialing the young Canadian soldier for being caught after curfew and instead upbraiding the military police. So Christopher wasn't exactly enamored of Sylvia when her games got him into trouble.

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Thank you :)

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I wondered this too - I felt the scriptwriter wanted to leave it a little ambiguous, even if it didn't happen. It makes you feel more disappointed when Sylvia eventually gives up - that the possibility was still open, if she had been as open with him as at that point. The final scene of them together that Sylvia sets up with the tree and the cancer diagnosis is instead a bad parody of that moment of openness, imo, which is why you feel so disappointed that they don't explore that stronger level of emotion.

Somehow Valentine seems this dull-as-ditch, goody-two-shoes mistake, whilst Sylvia is his intellectual equal and doesn't let him away with as much. Reminds me of Mansfield Park, in a way.

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whilst Sylvia is his intellectual equal and doesn't let him away with as much.


If you think Sylvia was his intellectual equal, then you have not paid attention enough.... She couldn't understand the first thing about politics and she wasn't interested to at all, and she thought science was dull and boring(scene where he is correcting the encyclopedia ), while Valentine could speak fluently Latin and was extremely well read....

Sylvia advanced in life with beauty, sex and manipulation. Those were her weapons.

Valentine advanced with ideals, intelligence and beauty.... She didn't play petty,stupid games and it was her win.

Silvia could have won him over, especially in France, but for that she would have to let go of her old self, her pride and her manipulative antics. It was her loss.

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I was comparing this to Mansfield Park, in which the more obvious heroine gets bested by the quiet mouse in the corner. It is very difficult to read MP and not get swept along with the brilliance of the 'baddies': and the faults of the 'goodies' are also very real. I feel the same way about this adaptation of Parades End - I haven't read all the books yet, so my apologies if, being based on the TV series and not the book, my views seem a bit controversial.

I felt in the series at least, Christopher and Sylvia were both portrayed as brilliant, at the start of the series, at least. Sylvia is his equal, but not his clone. Christopher is a brilliant statistician. Sylvia is a brilliant tactician. She is worldly and manipulative, yes, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. The scene when she corrects her husband revising the Encyclopaedia Britannica at breakfast, for example, is, I would suggest, just as much a right for her as it is a wrong. Yes, Christopher has done nothing wrong, and she just wants more attention, but he is also gawkily blanking her and failing to give her that attention. She knows he is brilliantly clever, and finds it attractive, but she still stops him becoming a mere functional machine reiterating facts. You can see how such a marriage might have worked had they both been willing to concede: he brings the knowledge, and she the social ability. A woman of Sylvia's age and class would have had access to education, yes, but only as an ornamental accomplishment. She has been taught, I suggest, to view Latin and science as 'too deep' for her. Her raw intelligence has gone into her social life. The story shows how destructive that is, because it renders one entirely at the mercy of other people: the only answer it provides to problems is to be sexier, to be more desirable so that others (always men) will do it for you. It renders Sylvia incredibly antagonistic to the flawed society around her that renders her as an individual powerless, yet unable or unwilling to do something positive to change it. She is Christopher’s equal: she is pathologically bored, but like him she sees past a great deal of the pretensions of the people around her.

And so the scene in France is an exaggerated replaying of that initial fight. Sylvia is determined to extract attention from Christopher, making him jealous etc etc, but revealing underneath it all that as she has waited 5 years for him, she must have some feelings for him. Christopher, initially oblivious, responds to this incredibly powerfully, much more dramatically I feel than any expressions of affection for Valentine. He has, after all, by passively withholding his affections, and by intending to give them to Valentine, been just as destructive as Sylvia’s initial affair. Ironically, the unintentional result of this is perhaps what Sylvia had initially planned with Perowne: it makes Sylvia jealous and threatened, and in the revelation of her own vulnerabilities she becomes human and desirable. Dramatically speaking, marriage is a much more powerful bond than courtship or flirtation, and it does create arguments and scenes of this intensity. The pre-marriage stuff is all we see with Christopher and Valentine, rendering their scenes perhaps a little devoid of energy in comparison.

Valentine is an enthusiast, at least in this version, but she is not brilliant in the same dramatic way that Sylvia is: I didn’t feel it was even suitably emphasized that she was particularly well-read or literate, in any case. As a younger woman, from an academic family, she is of course more open to education, and symbolizes a brighter future for women. Of course, her role as a suffragette and teacher is more wholesome than that of society bride, but somehow I couldn’t entirely believe it. She is too clearly a male fantasy of the ideal woman to be entirely credible: younger than your wife, unchallenging and gentle, conveniently in love for years at a time with no real hope of a return, but who plots to have an affair with you anyway. In this version, for much of the time I did feel she was the worthy ‘other woman’ who shouldn’t have Christopher, but find someone else. The switch at the last episode was a surprise – a believable surprise, but believable for those more cynical reasons than the wholesome ones.

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That's a text wall that actually discourages answer... So, I'll keep this short.

Silvia is not brilliant, she's just manipulative and extremely selfish. She's lucky that she's beautiful and very sexy. She wants freedom but in very narrow way (sexual) and she has money to protect her. Rebecca though plays her brilliantly.

Valentine is very intelligent and idealistic. She is very well read and she helps her mother write(type) her extremely intelligent articles.

You can see the difference between Silvia and Valentine if you look at their mothers and what they teach their daughters.

Edit:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2055303/quotes?mode=desktop&ref_=m_ft_dsk
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You seem surprised, all your eyebrows have gone..

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Text wall, indeed!

To add to the opinion above mine I would add that Sylvia seduced him on the train and the intimation is that she already knew that she was pregnant and looking for a chump. And Christopher was 99% sure that he wasn't Micheal's father but he did the stand up guy thing and not only did he give him his name he bonded with him.

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