Mallarmé, "Les fenêtres"

A work ("The windows") by this renowned French symbolist.  You can read the original here.

Fatigued by hospice bed and incense foul  
Aloft in plainest white against the drape,    
To empty wall's pale Cross of bulging shape,
The sly and dying man addressed his scowl.

He lurched, yet not to warm his coil's decay, 
But to behold the sun upon the stones, 
To press his body's thin white hairs and bones  
To sunbed windows of fierce browning ray.

Azure blue, hungry, hot, his mouth still young 
A treasure of past days anew breathed in,
And spoiled warm squares of gold, sweet virgin skin,
With long and bitter kisses now far-flung.

And drunk, forgetting fears of holy oils,
He finds the clock, his bed, the tisanes while
He coughs; and when the evening bleeds on tiles
His eye, gorged on horizon's brightness, toils.

He sees fine golden galleys there asleep,
A purple river's swans in perfume's haze,
The rich and tawny flash of their lines sways 
In unimportant waves of sights he'll keep.

Thus seized by horror for an austere soul,
Now wallowing in joy and met desires, 
I stubbornly pick through the refuse mires
To aid the woman suckling her young foal.

I flee and hang upon these windows bare    
From which I turn my back to life and news, 
In their glass blessed, washed with eternal dews
Which gild the chaste and endless morning glare.

Angelic in mirrors, I love and die –
And may these panes be mystic or be art –
To be reborn, a crown of dreams apart 
Where beauty blooms in tender bygone sky!

Alas, the earth is master here; its dread 
Will sicken me, safe from my nemesis, 
And foolish musings' impure emesis
Obliges me to hold my breath instead.

And I, whom bitterness knows well, should I
Then break the crystal, break the monster's toy
Escape on unplumed wings in search of joy,
And risk eternal fall in darkest sky?

Une Vieille Maîtresse

It is said that every man has one woman who destroyed him; what this destruction precisely entails and whether or not the man is the better for this havoc is left to the imagination of the listener.  What is interesting about such an observation is that it has held true despite the overt sexual liberation of the postwar period.  Once upon a time a poet's soul was devastated by a princesse lointaine who remained lointaine; now it is a unclothed body he cannot forsake.  The reasons for such mutability are probably many, but the most likely is man's desire for a muse.  Of the two genders, men are most definitely the greater idealists, with the fact that they endure fewer reminders of their mortal frame throughout a lifetime contributing to this luxury of perspective.  Men will write an ode to a woman's beauty, or her voluptuousness, or the love that he cannot overcome or replace, and that woman will more often than not still be in the throes of youthful perfection, every curve unjagged, every corpuscle unblemished.  With this repining for glory gone comes a certain nonchalance towards present time actions, namely relationships following upon this destruction.  In fact, his thralldom to a former mistress might provide him with a convenient excuse for his lack of commitment, or worse, for his lack of faithfulness, which in most of us is nothing more than a fear of commitment.  Old themes, yes, but nicely packaged and ribboned in this recent film. 

The plot is simplicity itself, which in these types of tales is usually a good sign. 1835, Paris: a dashing young rake, Ryno de Marigny (first-timer Fu'ad Ait Aattou) has been chosen to marry the delicate, virginal and unmistakably wealthy Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida).  Before the wedding, Hermangarde's grandmother decides to have a fireside chat with Ryno regarding his past affairs and smartly leaves her whole night unbooked.  Ryno proceeds with his studied guile, flirting gently with the woman almost three times his age, and finally avers that he could not marry Hermangarde if he did not love her so passionately.  The grandmother and the viewer know, however, exactly what passions Ryno has been harboring: according to rumor and the brief scenes that preface this long conversation, Ryno has been involved for ten years with an illegitimate Spanish woman (Asia Argento) who, in the year of our Lord 1835, is now thirty-six and past a respectable age for that type of behavior.  She is a product of the previous century ("the age of Laclos," quip a few characters at different junctures) and therefore not subject to the same rules and expectations that might bind, say, the artless Hermangarde.  Ridiculous details are added as they become available: the mistress, known only as Vellini, was born to a Spanish bullfighter and an Italian duchess, and is married to an old English nobleman whose failing hearing and sight make her extracurricular activities that much easier.  Ryno's first encounter with her has the touch of cinematic coincidence, and the sudden hatred that can only yield to carnality also suggests more modern conduct.  Yet we are convinced in the film's first half (the wedding comes exactly at the midway point) that our story has been garnished with the details that all storytellers permit themselves to amuse their audience.  Moreover, the grandmother, an old fool who is madly taken with Ryno and his full Roman lips, has already made up her mind to allow the two to wed well before Ryno concludes his story at daybreak with the avowal that he has not been with Vellini in a very long time.  She is completely satisfied, but we are not.  After the wedding, a somber and drab interlude with a hurried reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians on the place of women, Hermangarde and Ryno retreat to the seaside to one of her family's many stations and plan a life without Vellini or anyone else.  A third act with a couple of twists convinces us, however, of the validity of that aphorism about old habits.

Unsurprisingly, this wealth of absurd detail has led many critics to deem the film pornography in period piece guise, which is both rash and as absurd as the tidbits they feel sully the screen.  And while we quickly catch on to the simple dichotomy in this author's novel on which the film was based – good girl, bad girl; sexless, sexpot; nice, naughty (all Ryno gets to do to Hermangarde before they are wed is plant a wet kiss on her raised brow) – our expectations are challenged by the format the film assumes.  There are admittedly a few scenes of candid intimacy; but given the subject matter they are interspersed between verbose narratives which seem to feed off one another like the near-incantations of this famous storyteller.  There is almost no violence, no hysterics (other than upon the sudden death of a child), no pulsating passion that would resolve itself in more conventional films into an ungodly amount of bloodletting, no pretension towards sublimating the film into some sort of moral tragedy backed by a cloying soundtrack.  In fact, every scene is longer, simpler and closer than we expect.  Widely praised for her performance by the film's admirers, Argento overacts continuously because her character is the epitome of overacting: she is compensating for the fact that she is neither beautiful nor rich nor intelligent nor, as it were, particularly interesting.  What she does offer is a lull from the icy rituals of everyday life among the elite, but she could never be someone a person of right mind would want to keep as his own.  Is that a reason to criticize the film?  Not at all, it is a reason to applaud the casting.  Had Vellini been a true knockout, there would have been no appeal whatsoever to Ryno, who has seen and done everything with everyone.  If she didn't have two curls like intertwined lovers or some satanic symbol on her forehead; if she didn't pray one minute and cackle in defiance the next; if she didn't disguise herself as the devil to a masked ball by dressing exactly the way she always does; if she didn't remind us of another unstable Spanish girl who might be the harbinger of doom, we would not be inclined to believe that ten years of lovemaking (with the "average marriage in Paris nowadays lasting only seven") could be at all riveting.  "I am afraid of a part of my destiny," says a beleaguered Ryno at one point, but we don't believe he's afraid of anything except his own weakness.  And more than once in the film are we reminded of an old Arabic proverb: only the scorpion gives things for free.

The Invitation

There is a style no longer in circulation among our literary works because we no longer wish to merge with eternity.  We have come to entertain notions of a beyond as an unknowable consequence of very knowable processes, and the inevitable outcome of billions of years of inevitable outcomes.  In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum all sounds very nice, but now we have moved past God – and sometimes it seems like He has returned the favor – and into the much more tenable field of hard science.  Our verbs (or words, as verba means both) bestowed upon us by a benevolent Creator who willed the universe into shape have been evicted from their cozy domiciles and replaced with volatile and complicated droids owing their allegiance solely to the latest whims of the latest wizards.  These wizards would advise me – if I ever bothered listening to them instead of just humming a happy tune whose melody I cannot quite explain – that our life is simply a collection of detail and we are simply collectors.  The best observers are those who leave no stone unturned, no star unnamed, no fossil uncarbondated, and no deity unblasphemed.  Come now, ignoramus, who could be smarter than we are?  After all, we've almost got everything figured out except where we came from and where we go, if anywhere.  All the intermediary steps, however, are as crystal clear as the ice on the planet billions of miles away that we can make out at times but which has to exist because, unlike our eyes, our machines are manmade and can be trusted to the ultimate degree.  When has our reason ever failed us?  Only, I suppose, all those centuries as conspiring sacerdotal agents blinded us, piling up lie after lie so that we remain enslaved to their evil and all-encompassing plan.   Yet we have finally broken free.  Now when we gaze upon nature's contours, all we see is a composite of data, molecules, light particles, atoms, quarks, and the potpourri and whatever other blandishments time has coaxed out of that endless and unswerving metal rod, evolution.  With this fact now happily proven, let us rejoice and examine this superb novel.    

The site of our novel's events is a place near the border of two large, powerful and mysterious countries.  One of them has since crumbled beneath the falsehoods of its imposed doctrines; the other, once party to those same doctrines, has growled and beaten its chest and moved on to the much more justifiable plan of unbridled capitalism, albeit with a few political restrictions.  And as is appropriate given the host country's dimensions, the titular invitation involves fifteen dignitaries from around our lonely planet, a motley assortment of men of power:  two preachers from Harlem, one of whom turns out to be an actor; another American who scribbles indignant notes as the speakers hold forth; a priest from the local church who serves as a sort of co-host; military representatives from more than one country; a Russian, "the Nero of cinema," now a naturalized subject of the British queen; and the ostensible master of ceremonies, a man "with the massive head of a mountain dweller."  What they talk about is, apart from the occasional aside, never expressed directly; instead, they are described in detail which the average reader will find intolerable.  Take, for example, the approach to the invitation site:

Now the procession of heavy cars preceded by the police car crossed through the town (and the town rose from the steppe, whose language was once Chinese, then Chinese transcribed in Latin characters, then Chinese transcribed into Cyrillic characters; where without counting a good twenty languages – languages of the sons of camel drivers, of Mongol horsemen, of inhabitants descended from those monstrous mountains, of caravaning Tartars, Afghans, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, ancient slaves, newly arrived peoples ... there was even, the interpreter said, a German colony – two official languages were now spoken, both in Cyrillic characters) which sixty years ago had been nothing more than a simple village (or maybe not even that: a stopover, a point at the end of the endless steppes and before the passage to those terrifying mountains) and which now had a population of almost one million people of all races.

Those races are then qualified, and followed by other links in a chain of qualifications which extends through many pages and an incredible range of sensory perceptions.  We are dealing with the repetitions and surfaces of a very particular brand of writing, one that came about and shook its readers shortly after the Second World War and which has lost some of its reputation by virtue of our readily shrinking attention spans.  True enough, without a brilliant architect behind its towers the nouveau roman can become a dreary exercise in concatenation; at its best, however, it is as close as literature can get to painting its own picture.  No image exists without the wealth of otherness in its vicinity; and no person can be an island unto himself without the tidal wave of sensation from the millions of other living beings breathing his air and distracting him from the solipsistic extremes to which, we are told, he is naturally prone.

As opposed to other proponents within the movement (with the notable exception of this recently deceased French writer, its greatest representative), Simon is much more cohesive and allegorical than one would first imagine.  Yes, his world is fractured along the aleatory whims of association, proximity and pure chance.  But from among these pieces he fashions an alternative reality that is richer than that of his contemporaries or, for that matter, the silly ramblings of so many modern writers who eschew plot in favor of an old shoebox of scattered observations that are neither interesting nor artistic.  On every page Simon's artistry prevents him from slipping into such easy victories of style.  His parenthetical commentary (the second word of the novel is already trapped within its bubble) often supersedes the plain text before and after it, and we come to see that it is the circumjacent detail that outranks the prime focus.  Even a funeral can seem fragmented along the numerous storylines that it obliges to intersect:

(... the bust of the new General Secretary now cut off by the parapet at the top of the cube of red marble at that place where, before him, so many old men were kept, surrounded by the highest dignitaries with, to his immediate left, looking at him, a man with a fur hat atop a pensive face, devastated, akin perhaps to an old and tired wolf (maybe not old exactly, just devastated; maybe not interested, just pensive), whereas the new General Secretary had his head uncovered, with his baldness, his surprisingly young almost doll-like features, scrutinized and evaluated by millions of men, women, diplomats, journalists, and creators of theories) ... and now, seated at the end of that table which so resembled the table of some dull administrative board of some joint stock company or perhaps didn't, or that of an international bank or perhaps not that of an international bank, with its tray waxed like a mirror, its glasses and bottles of mineral water, in that room of bare walls without a single portrait, neither of his predecessors nor of him.

There is so much to admire about this passage and countless others, all perfectly waxed and reflecting each and every other page like a perverse hall of mirrors.  Simon is read less than he should be precisely because we have grown allergic to longer paragraphs (such as the book-long masterpieces of this Austrian writer) and prefer our literature like our scotch: neat and plain.  But then again, the truth is rarely as neat or plain as we might hope.

Private Fears in Public Places

The slow but systematic demolition of cultural stereotypes has been heralded as one of the great benefits of the unstoppable force known as globalization, a point which  I will not belabor.  However you may feel about this development (and this will truly depend on your cultural heritage and station in life), we would all do well not to make simple assumptions about other traditions, nations, and peoples, even if we are somewhat obliged to do so to gain some preliminary understanding of how we might have to adjust.   In this respect, admittedly, I am an old-fashioned prig.  I advocate and will continue to advocate immersion into the foreign culture without surfacing for air until the seafloor has been sufficiently investigated.  Perhaps it is obvious that spending a week in a hotel in Florence with scant knowledge of the language and no interest in anything save this museum does not qualify you as an expert in all things Italian.  But many scholars of languages and cultures consider themselves well-versed in their field after a frivolous summer sipping malted beverages, reading some overexposed popular novel, and cavorting with the local party people.  For many, this will be the only time they will have to enjoy world travel, a privilege that we tend to take for granted, and experience the grandeur of cultural Meccas that have enthralled visitors for centuries.  We cannot blame them for being socially labile, and, in point of fact, we won't.

Nevertheless, over time, devoted students of a discipline will come to certain provisional theories about their passion; the really good ones will continue to subject that passion to repeated scrutiny.  Take, for example, French film.  If you had to come up with one short sentence to stereotype the very rich tradition of cinema in France, what would come to mind?  Jaded philosophers sitting for hours in cafés, arguing about the abstract but doing nothing particularly active?  Frisky love affairs and romantic walks by the Seine?  You might find a lot of this, I suppose; but the true indicator of French cinema is something terribly French: attention to the details of character (commercially-driven directors think the "details of character" entail a lunchbox of petty neuroses, as if neurosis has ever made anyone more interesting).  Details of character are revealed by what people do, but really more by what they say.  The French, they will tell you themselves, enjoy arguing and build rapport through arguing; they have few problems communicating how they feel; and they do not shy away from grandiose approaches to everyday issues.  For that reason, if you watch this recent film set in the 13th arrondissement of the City of Lights, you may wonder why the six characters – five of whom are French-born, the other being Italian – behave so curiously.

Without peeking at the credits we might also consider other oddities.  The characters are paired off according to romantic interest or familial obligation and, for the sake of narrative, permitted to overlap to make each member of the sextet significant.  We have Dan, the discharged soldier (Lambert Wilson); his Italian-born girlfriend Nicole (the ever-stunning Laura Morante); Thierry (André Dussollier, who recently appeared in another French film that has nothing French about it), the real estate agent who shows the unhappy couple a few apartments they probably couldn't afford; Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré), Thierry's much younger sister and flatmate; Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), a religious fanatic who happens to work with Thierry; and Lionel (Pierre Arditi), the bartender who lends Dan a half-cocked ear, a much better proposition than coming home to his ill and belligerent father.  This may all sound like a lovely soap opera setup – yet there are a few kinks.  Charlotte may indeed have found God, but she has not lost much of the sex appeal that allowed her to pursue other professions prior to her conversion.  Lionel, on the other hand, is completely oblivious to any women in his immediate vicinity.  In our modern age, the personalities of these once-gagged characters are given full vent, which shows us exactly how far we've come.  The problem is, there is little more to them than that.  Charlotte is enlisted to care for Lionel's father while he works, and comes up with some energetic methods to entertain her patient.  And Lionel, for his part, doesn't do much at all.  He listens to Dan, who has no money, spiraling interest in his bossy girlfriend, and plenty of self-doubt following his dishonorable release from the armed forces.  Is he attracted to Dan?  Clues from the film promote such a reading.  And yet, how can any character be developed if his only trait is his non-vanilla sexuality?

Herein lies our problem.  Private fears in public places (unfortunately rechristened as "Hearts" in French) was originally a British stage production by this famous playwright,  a fact which should surprise us about as much as Dan's insufferable lack of self-awareness.  All six characters are unhappy in some way: antsy, presumptuous, hesitant, almost repressed, their thoughts and emotions reflect nothing of the mix of warmth and arrogance that typically color the figures of French cinema.  That's not to say that France does not or could not contain such people, but rather that they exhibit more typically Anglo-Saxon behavior.  To put it another way: you would be hard-pressed to find a Danish film where everyone is warm, friendly, physically affectionate and devoid of that special brand of wry humor that only seems to exist in Northern Europe.  When I watch a Danish film, I expect a certain restraint, a certain formality of emotion, a certain yearning that cannot quite be expressed.  These expectations are reinforced by experience, yet they also tell you a bit about why you like one country more than another.  I have always loved Northern Europe precisely because when emotion is expressed, it is invariably sincere.  It might be hard to make a Dane ebullient or effusive, but once turned on, you have something very valuable.

That said, the film is exquisitely acted and shot, which, given Resnais's previous masterpieces, we might tend to overlook.  And there is something quaint about trapping the characters in a British play, forcing them onstage in Noah's Ark pairs, and asking them to spout off cultural witticisms that the French language is unaccustomed to holding.  Dan's sour grapes routine propels him to the forefront of the sextet, perhaps because the most important character will necessarily be the one exhibiting the broadest range of flaws.  But we should not forget Thierry, who seems old enough to be Gaëlle's father (as it were, the actors are twenty-five years apart in age), and his marvelous misinterpretation of Charlotte's intentions, nor Dan and Gaëlle's date, nor Nicole's attempt to make something useful out of her boyfriend, an exercise in futility typified by their discussion of Dan's "study" (Dan is a non-reader).  And the tone is set perfectly by Paris and softly falling snow, at once reminders of paradise and slow extinction.  How strange to think that one of the few features of Ayckbourn's play not retained is the most fitting: the name.  Ah, but the French always have to do things their way.

La Moustache

Our souls have little recourse these days: we neither believe in anything greater than ourselves nor have faith in our own jaded path.  From one side we are assailed by the backwash of persons who interpret religion (and, it should be said, everything else) for the solitary purpose of lining their pockets, while speaking with the righteousness of men who have endured the worst of human atrocities.  From the other side we are faced with the nihilist materialism of indifference and moral irresponsibility that has become the calling card of twentieth− and twenty−first century philosophizing.  Everyone is inherently evil; everyone is always selfish; we are all ants on a hill, slaving and bowing before phantom rules; we can know nothing except that there is no God, because if there were, He would surely have made things much easier on the world.  Between these two trenches one finds a group of ecumenical optimists, steeped in learning and aimed at abolishing pain in the world regardless of creed, gender, race, or any other category that, in the end, means nothing at all.  There are, of course, other groups.  But one has a choice, as a privileged citizen in a privileged land, to make a difference, even if the difference is simply noticeable in how we feel and think about our universe and how we treat one another.  Among all of mankind’s disgraces, our treatment of those who might be mad or not socially commendable is one of the greatest abominations.  We see this from an early age, when the weaker and more vulnerable are immediately targeted by resident bullies; when we laugh at the humiliation of others who cannot seem to fit the pattern of acceptable mediocrity that society promotes; when we put down everyone and everything that tells us of history’s triumphs — and its lessons.  One thing that history has indeed made clear is that we are not islands: we need others to formulate our identity.  We may think of ourselves in a certain way, but we are free to change our opinion as the winds might shift and flounder.  Others do not have this luxury, however, which brings us to this unusual film.

The titular whiskers belong to Marc (Vincent Lindon), a strapping if dull Frenchman in his early forties preoccupied with the normal tasks that a man his age might find interesting with the important exception of children.  He and his wife Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) talk in the normal manner so commonly incident to married people who know every last thing about one another.  One day, Marc suggests shaving his mustache, to which Agnès replies: “I like you with it; I wouldn’t recognize you without it.”  Just another humdrum exchange in a life long since liberated from spontaneity and surprise?  We are led to believe this is so until a dispute arises between the couple on a most ridiculous subject: whether Marc had a mustache to begin with.  Thereby is launched a sticky little game that may not make sense initially and may seem even more baffling as the film rolls to its concluding scene.  We get a variety of conflicting information: Agnès claims Marc has never sported facial hair; Marc finds mustached pictures of him in Bali which Agnès pretends never existed; a policewoman (representing, we suppose, both legal authority and objectivity) whom he meets on the street tells Marc he does have a mustache in his identification card photo; and, most revealingly, Marc makes two mistakes.  He forgets — if that is the right word here — that his father passed away a year ago, and goes on and on about two very good friends of theirs, Serge and Nadia, that Agnès does not know in the least.  There are more telltale signs of unhingement, and then Marc overhears Agnès talking to her friend Bruno (Hippolyte Girardot) about committing Marc to an asylum, at which point the film’s pulse quickens.

You will not discover my interpretation on this page, but I will say that Marc is not mad.  Nor, I hasten to add, is the director on whose novel the film is based.  There is a sad red thread through all the events that suggests a connection between the death of Marc’s father, his own lack of offspring, and the befuddling omnipresence of Bruno in which computerized minds might detect something altogether sinister.  Yet the key detail is that different people are divided on a facial feature that is so difficult to miss as to suggest that anyone who cannot see it must indeed be insane.  The only person who does not waver is Marc himself, because we are not really talking about his mustache but about Marc.  And who is Marc, anyway?  A remarkable final scene that goes against everything else in the film except one important sliver of evidence might shed some light.  And if not, at least you will become very familiar with Hong Kong ferries.