The Happy Prince is a new take on Oscar Wilde’s final years, the period that has haunted and inspired many artists after Wilde’s death. The film is a creation of Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and starred in it, and who seems not to have been afraid of possible comparisons of his vision to previous ones. The famous 1997 film by Brian Gilbert inevitably comes to mind, thanks to the vivid portrait of Wilde as painted by Stephen Fry. While Gilbert’s film was interested in tracing all famous moments of Wilde’s homosexuality scandal, focusing on his libel case and delving into intimate moments between Douglas and Wilde, Everett as a director follows a completely different path.

The film focuses on the final three years of Wilde’s life – those spent in exile in France. The biographical details of these years are rendered faithfully, although the structure of the film is such that we always see them through a prism of Wilde’s memory. We see Wilde and Robert Ross (Edwin Thomas) spending months in France in the seaside village of Berneval-le-Grand, Douglas (Colin Morgan) and Wilde reunited in Rouen, and we also see Wilde’s Parisian days in Hôtel d’Alsace and his friendship with a young French man and his brother. Here one may suspect some liberties in Everett’s screenwriting for the story’s sake, as this pair fit too well as a circular framing device for Wilde’s affectionate scenes with his sons in the beginning of the film. Wilde’s final days and death are also shown in the film, with the Irish priest Fr Dunne conditionally baptising him into Catholicism, and his faithful friends Ross and Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) by his side.

The most interesting concept of Everett’s approach – which sometimes makes it difficult to follow the film’s jumps in time – is the subjective lens of the whole film. We see the events unfolding in Wilde’s memory, hence constant flashbacks from his French days to earlier moments of glory and happiness, and also visions of apparitions including his wife Constance, played by Emily Watson. The montage of these memories with events of the last three years is done very intricately. At certain points one could get lost as to where film takes us, but the vertigo created by these pictures of Wilde’s mind is worth experiencing. Less effective is Everett's presentation of Wilde as a sufferer, a constant wanderer who has been unfairly treated by the cruel and callous laymen around him. Wilde’s religious search becomes an additional strand of the film’s plot and imagery, hence comes the stress on his pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth (that is derived from Saint Sebastian and Melmoth the Wanderer). This view is too simplistically superimposed on every scene we see, and at some point one gets tired of the director’s constant pathos. While Everett as director seems to be faithful in interweaving some pieces of Wilde’s writing (The Ballad of Reading Gaol, as well as some of Wilde’s witticisms, is quoted, with the tale of the Happy Prince being read throughout the film) into the film, he seems to put Wilde as a writer aside in favour of depicting a human being in degradation.

More interesting and surprising in their honesty are abundant physical details of Wilde’s disintegration: Everett’s character is indeed old, decrepit, overweight and dying of either an ear infection or syphilis. He applies rouge to his lips and sings songs in French restaurants, exhibiting vulgarity and lust at the same time as kindness, affection and sophistication. His old age, sagging cheeks and grey complexion contrast with the startling feminine beauty of Alfred Douglas (played by Colin Morgan with a touch of decadence) and his Italian lover. There is also an interesting scene of Wilde’s encounter with jeering students (Tom Wilkinson is one of them) that reminds one of Visconti’s Death in Venice in its juxtaposition of an ageing man aware of this world’s beauty and youth that is cruel in its carelessness. Edwin Thomas is very persuasive in his youthful honesty, kindness and loyalty to Wilde, while Colin Firth’s appearance as Reggie Turner and Emily Watson’s tender and subdued Constance add to one’s feeling of witnessing a really excellent acting ensemble. Rupert Everett as an actor playing Wilde is incredibly brave and multi-faceted, and the nuances of his path to death constitute a true kaleidoscope of acting ability, as he is somehow physically different in almost each scene of the film. His eyes are always piercing, his observation of the world around him never stops, his moods fluctuate with kindness always resurfacing even in the ugliest moments.

Such once-in-a-lifetime acting from Everett delivers much more nuance than his directing ideas which are too straightforward. The film's truly artistic moments and brilliant acting have to be constantly separated from the coarse obviousness of director’s ideas. Everett should have allowed everyone of us to dream up our own ‘happy prince’, but he unfortunately does not.