The Age of Innocence': Scorsese Meets Edith Wharton and Edith Wharton Meets Her Match

There is a wonderful shot about twenty minutes into Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993): it is a long shot of a substantial New York apartment building standing at a snowy crossroads, while at the other three corners there is nothing to be seen but the earliest stages of foundation-digging. The shot, intrinsically stunning in its composition, colours and angle of vision, seems at first gratuitous: it is placed between two interior scenes and is apparently offered without comment. In itself, however, it constitutes a comment, ironically reminding us that this city with its pretensions and assiduously preserved rituals, behaving as if its decorums were sanctioned by generations of lawgivers, is in fact still in the process of being built.