Total Eclipse

“Dogs are all liberals” – Rimbaud

“He [Rimbaud] was my great and radiant sin” – Verlaine

“I’m faithful to all my loves, because once I love them, I will always love them” – Verlaine

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Rimbaud

A favorite topic among bibliophiles is what one literary figure might have said to another (see above) had they ever met.  Writers and philosophers living far apart on our history’s spectrum are particularly popular themes, with one writer even gaining eternal renown for a work composed of conversations between famous writers and philosophers that reads more like opposing editorials.  Other students of literature like to spend an inordinate amount of time imagining the private lives of the writers they admire.  For them, the being of a famous writer cannot emerge solely from his works as a rosebush may not live without its thorns, topsoil, or weeds.  It is not enough that we must subject great works upon their copyright’s expiration to editorial whims, we must also find new and silly ways to enter the lives of people whom we could not know and whose legacy is a pile of books that we often cannot bring ourselves to read attentively.  We must understand them as people first and writers later.  If how they talked, how they ate, and how they showed each other affection are more important than their literary production, so be it.  Their legacies will be forever tainted and we share only part of the blame.  Which brings us to this fine film about two legendary French poets, Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The year, we are told, is 1871.  Germany unites into the most powerful state Continental Europe has seen since the Romans; Verlaine is twenty-seven but already fading in poetic authority (poets then were like tennis stars now, washed up at thirty); Rimbaud is ten years his junior and the most phenomenal of Wunderkinder.  This is not a love story, or at least not one in which there is any tenderness or caring.  A poet of genius in his own right if more a product of his era, Verlaine cannot do much more than get viciously intoxicated, vent on his ugly but very rich wife, and gaze at the beautiful lad who keeps asking him for small favor after small favor.  He loves Rimbaud as a younger, more gifted version of himself, one unafraid to challenge society’s mores.  Nevertheless, it is remarkable how humdrum Rimbaud’s notions of novelty seem, and how consistently a man of such talent is portrayed as a boor and a bully.  The two while away their time in absinthe bars (roughly a barrel gets consumed during the film), smoking, flirting, and obviously planning something that will ruin both of their lives.  They shift and totter between hatred and symbiotic need, and finally separate once Verlaine, in his umpteenth booze-ridden fit, decides to play William Tell with dear Arthur, who of course has too little respect for Verlaine’s promises to pay his threats any attention.  Verlaine is arrested, charged with being a sodomite, and jailed for two years.  He is released having served his full sentence and become a devout Catholic.  And at this point, Rimbaud is far away in both body and spirit.

One might suppose that the whole endeavor would sink into melodrama in a gooey, nauseating way.  Yet a certain dignity obtains throughout.  And whatever our knowledge of the times and, more importantly, of the poetic oeuvres of the two men, we are compelled to watch even if nothing really happens.  Did what is depicted really take place?  Should we alter our impressions of the oeuvres of the two artists accordingly?  A more celebrated film employs the same technique of portraying a young ingénue as a sort of rock star, the difference being that Rimbaud’s upstart irreverence curiously resembles the ignorant kitsch of Soviet and hippie manifestos.  Amadeus was a rock star, insofar as he was worshiped as a celebrity who could do no wrong upon the stage.  Methinks the problem lies with the fiction, not the reality.  I am duly aware that the intent of the film was to be authentic and that the happenings portrayed have their basis in the correspondence between the poets.  Even so, the characters, especially Rimbaud, are too one-sided, evincing modern cinema’s endemic aversion to subtlety.  The deep and recurrent problem with such recreations, as in so many historical novels, is that the literary revivalist has no inkling of the inner lives of the artistic creatures he re-imagines because he has little relationship to their work, where their true biography is found.  The result is that extraordinary persons are obliged to be understood in our terms, not theirs, and live out the plainest of soap opera ditherings. 

That being said, Thewlis and DiCaprio are marvelously cast in terms of looks and gestures.  Yet time and again they are superceded by Rimbaud's bohemian vulgarities which, as could be expected, devolve into ridiculous showmanship.  By many indications, Rimbaud was mild-mannered (some sources do portray him as the prototypical enfant terrible), if impetuous and all too ready to enthrall people with his genius.  The Rimbaud of Total Eclipse is only obnoxious, only self-absorbed, only prone to immediate gratification like all of the young and the guileful.  Verlaine, on the other hand, is without exception a sniveling, pathetic meatball of middle-age insecurities battling issues of sexual identity and creative choices.  But you cannot be a great poet if you are completely and utterly immoral.  The on-screen Rimbaud hasn’t a redeeming quality about him and temporizes awkwardly whenever asked to express any of his verse.  Such does not a poet make.  In the end, Rimbaud comes off acting his age – although his compositions are of an artist of much broader experience – with the manipulative properties of a pretty woman rather than a man of letters (most evident in his lament that he has never seen the sea).  Come to think of it, perhaps that might not be terribly distant from the truth.

The Count of Monte Cristo

The moral law within us is certain — as we are as well in our stronger moments — that there exist no benefits to revenge.  What do we learn from harboring resentment and spite?  What good does it serve to inflict upon others what we or our loved ones have suffered?  We may lead decent, unfettered lives with nary an affront, and yet this old debate continues to burn as our petty justification of redemption.  Now redemption is a great thing.  Justice for all is what we all seek in one way or another, and its fairness not only makes being moral worthwhile, it also removes all other approaches to reality.  For all the cruelty and evil perpetrated in the world, there will always be hope for those who want justice for others as much as they want it (most naturally) for themselves.  We know that a true artist’s sincerest wish is the chance to fulfill his potential, a magnanimity that he extends to every downtrodden and miserable wretch in his vicinity.  This is why the artist, perhaps the most pacific of all souls, enacts in his mind a violent revenge upon the responsible, searing them with his thoughts and banishing them to eternal cognition of their wickedness.  And if you know anything about the literature of revenge, you know the name of Edmond Dantès.

The story is one of the classics, remade into plays, films, and rewritten as the thinly−veiled plot of more recent books.  And like all such tales, its longevity can be attributed to its fundamental moral: the meek shall triumph over the blasphemous and inherit the earth.  Or in this case, a large trove of loot buried in the earth.  As it would do us little good to review the original book, a melodramatic farrago at times both charming and schmaltzy (the sure sign of a serial), we should instead turn to the most recent film adaptation.  Dantès (James Caviezel) is an illiterate French sailor in the year eighteen−fourteen, as is his chum Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce).  Students of language will immediately note that Mondego contains the French word for “world,” while Dantès reminds us of some lesser realm.  More perspicacious readers will see a bizarre homogeneity in the fact that the first syllable of each surname contains the last syllable of the other’s first name.  To be sure, the men are mirror images, but they are also two parts of the same soul, a device mentioned earlier with regard to this book.  Mondego is so irrevocably evil and unscrupulous that no God or gremlin could hope to rescue him from speeding doom.  And Dantès, who will rise from lowliest pauper to holiest prince, has much of the avenging angel in him, vigilantism which we are supposed to cheer on like the triumphant Jacobin trains.  In this world there is no grey, no off−white, no mauve, no lilac, no azure.  Only black, white, and the red of Dantès’s flesh as he is whipped every year on the anniversary of his incarceration.

There is more to this, of course.  We have the requisite female (Dagmara Dominczyk) who loves one man but marries the other; the dying priest who cannot understand how to burrow out of a prison but knows the secret of El Dorado itself; the maniacal jailer who enjoys thrashing his wards and cackling; the disappointed father who does something particularly desperate when Edmond is convicted; the corrupt official who barefacedly ignores one man’s innocence in favor of his career; and the ingenuous teenage son who seems to remind us of someone else.  I vaguely recollect some ridiculous attempt at symbolism involving a chess piece and a quip about all of us being either kings or pawns, but that’s for those viewers who think historical figures become historical by uttering such rot.  Yet, despite its predictability (you will guess each intrigue one scene before it occurs), the film is a rousing, swashbuckling pleasure.  Dantès’s redemption is as pure as the wanton betrayal of his friend Mondego, played with sadistic relish by Pearce in what must be considered the performance of his career.  We also remember that the motto of the film, conveniently painted in bold on the wall of Dantès’s cell, is God will give me justice.  And if He doesn’t, snarls Dantès, I might just take it myself.

Roman de Gare

Perhaps the most identifiable difference between an artistic film and one made with primarily commercial ends in mind is character development.  After all, life is short and we really cannot afford to get to know too many people in great depth, lest we pass up other opportunities and other people.  This silly paradigm has plagued all forms of artistic expression since their inceptions, a parallel and quick-fix alternative to a true masterpiece.  Whereas the latter takes its time to talk about a few things, most commercial outings superficially touch on everything and everyone under the glorious and beneficent star we call the sun.  In this regard, French cinema, to use a casual generalization, tends to be particularly offensive.  French film is all about doing little and saying even less, of blustering about petty details in an urban sprawl that has already jaded every personage to varying degrees.  Indeed, for that sweltering mass among us (I happily have never been a joiner) who needs action, explosions, preposterous plots and characters that could not, on this planet or any other, possibly exist without collapsing under the weight of their own disingenuity, the French noir, neo-noir, and B-noir are to be avoided like the misanthropic types who compose these works.  Which brings us to this recently released film.

Some reviewers have translated the title as "airport fiction," or what you would buy in an airport before a long trip, a cultural equivalent albeit liberated from the play on words.  As it were, the best translation of “train station novel” or "train station fiction" (as in a pack of lies) is suggested in the dialogues; why its own subtitles refer to the book and film which contains it as “Tracks” is not ours to know (the American name “Crossed Tracks” is a bit more implicational if equally inaccurate).  Unlike most films of its kind, Roman de gare introduces us to a large slew of characters before focusing on three: Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon), Huguette (Audrey Dana), and the epicenter herself, Judith Ralitzer (the ageless Fanny Ardent).  Who these people really are becomes the true mystery of the film, and each one of them has at least two identities to hide behind.  Identities, mind you, not in the secret agent sense, but as distinct slices of the same personality. Being the (somewhat diminutive) man in this threesome, Laclos also appears to be the most enigmatic, and he may very well have the wherewithal to prove it.  If you believe what he has to say, he has been ghosting for Ralitzer, a novelist of millions and millions of accolades, for the past seven years.  One note to the politically correct: the unfortunate French term for “ghost writer” (also present in other European languages) is used in a pun for the period of, ahem, indentured servitude that Laclos apparently took upon himself before deciding his talents had been concealed for far too long.  The term crops up a good three dozen times in the film, so however often you sneer, it’s not going away.

That is, of course, if you buy Laclos’s story (and if that is his real name).  There are other possible façades.  These include Huguette’s actual line of work and strange obsession with celebrity hair, as well as her bucolic family living in the true middle of the middle of nowhere, where trout fishing and pig slaughtering are major events.  Alas and alack, we are also supposed to revel in the lurking presence of an escaped serial killer, which has quietly become the biggest cliché in thriller fiction.  I will generously impute this ranking to our age-old need to find and combat evil in its purest form.  Once upon a time we had Old Nick; now we have salivating monsters who take days to murder their victims by the most macabre and revolting methods ever devised.  As it were, our killer, whose name is George, likes magic tricks.  He uses them to enthrall his adolescent victims and has even been dubbed “The Magician” by the ever-imaginative press.  And Pierre − small, inefficacious, sexually ambiguous Pierre − just so happens to carry a pack of trick cards around.

What is particularly good about films like these is precisely what is lacking in more action-based variants.  The twists do not make the characters; instead, the characters remain in the personas that have been developed for them and make decisions based on what we know of these personas.  If we are really surprised by what happens, it is generally owing to our own inattention.  Watch all the puppets and their strings and you will not be surprised: each occurrence is perfectly logical, if at times bordering ever so slightly on the overwrought.  But we are dealing here with writers and their monolithic egos, so don’t expect a modest variation on a familiar theme.

Red

You and I both know red as death and revolution.  It is the most elusive color, the most eye–catching and ornamental, the symbol both of decadence and, in latter days, of the earthbound proletariat.  And if we discard the small cross in the center of the Helvetian banner, red is the one hue common to the flags of this trilogy’s three settings, France, Poland and Switzerland.  But what distinguishes red is its general lack of natural occurrence.  Apart from our blood exposed to oxygen and a few random fruit and animal species, true nonsynthetic red is always the exception or locus of exception.  Our eyes, accustomed to blues, whites, greens, and browns, immediately veer towards such patches of brightness.  And when red surrounds Irène Jacob, the star of this film, they tend to stay there.  

She may from certain angles remind you of Juliette Binoche, but bears an uncanny likeness to this British actress.  She is Valentine Dussaut, wafting through the aptly named Swiss town of Carouge, attending college and ballet classes and modeling shoots, and ending up on a billboard for chewing gum.  The billboard, a profile surrounded by a swirling red mantilla and the reddest of backgrounds, boasts the inscription: “Whatever the occasion, the freshness of life.”  She is indeed like the chewing gum she advertises: fresh, sweet, untouched, and magnetically alluring in her ingenuousness.  She has a boyfriend who doesn’t love her, probably because she picked the one man who would not lie prone at her feet, and she exudes a loneliness that belies her youth and opportunity.  She is in many ways magnificent; what she is not, however, is convincing as a character since her small worries do not translate into tragicness.  So to keep our attention rapt, she must encounter someone who knows much about loss and pain, and she must become his heavenly foil.    

Ironically, it is she not the viewer who commits a clumsy crime by staring red down.  Her car injures a dog who happens to belong to an old judge (Jean–Louis Trintignant), a crusty curmudgeon in whom youthful passions flicker only rarely.  She brings the dog to its owner who suggests, to her humanitarian chagrin, that she keep it.  Although I shall maintain my policy of non–disclosure, I add that we come to see that this meeting is not coincidental.  She and the judge, whose name is later revealed to be Kern (German for “core” or “nucleus”), strike up a relationship that cannot be anything more than paternal on his part, yet she can certainly help him overcome his cynicism and hatred for the petty malice that usurps real life.  Since he has been hurt by a past betrayal, his vice is spying on others and finding out their secrets, a very consistent psychological phenomenon.  Most of his victims he treats as test animals and removes himself entirely from any threats of compassion. Yet he has a bit of empathy for one of his neighbors, a young law student named Auguste.  When Auguste, who of course drives a red jeep, catches his girlfriend with someone else (this is a long and dramatic scene, and unintentionally comedic), this faithlessness brings Kern to admit his crimes and throw himself at the mercy of those whose lives he has invaded.             

While the judge is the engine of the film, Valentine is its throbbing red heart.  Unlike the trilogy's other young female protagonists, she does not have sexual urges, but pants and bends to her ballet lessons while following some disturbing news in the papers, first about her brother then about the man whose dog she almost kills one night.  Kern intuits that one of the two junkies shooting horse (under the rubric of “After Zurich, Geneva,” referring to this rather unfortunate social experiment) is her brother, and also guesses why he might have resorted to such escapism.  Throughout the film, Kern knows precisely what he shouldn’t know, and his hunches invariably turn out to be correct.  How is it that someone so brilliant could possibly have missed the infidelity that took place right under his very nose many years ago?  Did he learn from this experience and become an astute emotional detective?  That is one explanation; but the film proffers another which shall not be mentioned here.         

While Valentine is a red, February 14th–type of a name, her last name may be (very) loosely rendered as “of the leap.”  The leap of faith one makes in believing in someone and giving oneself to that person soul and soul cage?  Whatever the symbolism, making her a model, albeit somewhat of a clueless one, viciously jars our reality because runway models do not elicit much sympathy.  There is also the dream that Kern has of her being happy at forty or fifty and her fears that he might be a clairvoyant.  “I have the impression,” she says as innocently as possible, “that something important is happening around me.  That scares me.”  Then a frightful storm breaks out and something or someone seems damned.  She crushes her plastic cup and realizes something very important is being kept from her.  Kern finally divulges what has made him tick all these years, and concludes that, despite the massive age gap, Valentine might be the woman he was destined to meet.  How curious it would be if she were this woman and then ran right into the young, recently dumped law student!  Is this an overlap of time and space?  Whatever it is, the result is harmonic and euphoric, as stunning as the poster of Valentine that collapses under the weight of the hail that threatens Carouge in the final scene.  There, a fire starts, as if God were casting plagues down upon the land.  And if not He, then maybe some other, lesser hegemon.   

Damage

Love and war are old pastimes; obsession brings forth much more interesting data.  Some may reply that love itself is an obsession, a maniacal urge to experience life’s greatest reward regardless of the personal cost (and as you can see, that last sentence makes as much sense as love).  True enough, obsession often comprises many facets of love, but it is a selfish love, a bitter, corrosive lust that lurks in both the good and the wicked.  Love is always nauséabond; obsession cannot lead to anything good.  We know this and yet, as we watch this magnificent film unravel, as so many reviewers have put it, like a slow-motion car wreck, we cannot look away although (or maybe because) doom for all is veritably assured.

There are no ugly people, scenery, or moments in Damage, as the film itself is obsessed with obsession, with caring about something so much that it slowly engulfs everything else.  For an aesthetic project, this means beauty, and often what accompanies beauty – youth, lust, irreverence, irresponsibility, betrayal, and pain.  Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a rising deputy minister who will likely be promoted to the cabinet.  His life has everything a plain, material mind could wish for as well as those things that most every soul needs: a loving spouse (Miranda Richardson), two well–adjusted children (Rupert Graves and Gemma Clark), and a solid marriage based on admiration, respect, and love.  But he has been a responsible and driven workaholic for too many years, ever since he was a "young doctor, doing simple things well."  One day, his son Martyn, a young, handsome newspaper editor, announces he has a new girlfriend, apparently nothing more than the flavor of the month.  This woman is Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), whose alphabetic name already suggests her primordial importance, and before Martyn can even introduce her to his parents, she approaches Stephen at an official reception.  The look they exchange is one of the most impressive bits of understatement in recent cinematic history.  It says absolutely everything about their relationship, about Anna’s mind and personality, as well as about Stephen’s hard-won position of influence and what he has had to give up to get there.  Their first physical encounter is wordless, the phone call that abets their urges almost as taciturn, and we understand the weird chemical processes programmed into each of us, for many never to be truly unleashed.  This is brute force, animalistic and unstoppable, but there is also much more to this than meets the eye.

For Anna, Stephen is safe.  Apart from being twenty years her senior and married, he is the father of her boyfriend, so they cannot possibly have a relationship glazed with sweet nothings.  He also allows her to indulge her lifelong therapeutic need of fighting possessiveness by cheating.  If you don’t see this unbelievably selfish streak, and how she instigates everything then wants no responsibility for her actions because of the cruel fate of her young brother (a back story that I will not spoil), your ethical standards may need some ironing.  "Damaged people are dangerous," she says with some gusto, "they know they can survive."  Throughout the film, Anna thinks of herself as a tragic figure even though she has enjoyed a privileged if itinerant life, and her mother’s numerous marriages do nothing to dispel her cynicism.  No less culpable but much more idealistic, Stephen is taken by her for reasons we can and cannot understand.  Surely Martyn is reveling in the freedoms of youth that presumably eluded Stephen owing to his career and long marriage, and Stephen is sentimental for those times when his whole life lay before him, unread, undetermined, but very promising.  The less transparent reason is his own, something that he makes light of at the end of the film, and has to do with Anna as the person he was always meant to covet, to have, and perhaps to keep.  The two of them conspire on an affair that only gets more heated once Martyn and Anna announce their engagement.

Reviews of the film tend to sprinkle their compliments on the fine acting (Irons and Richardson in particular are more than perfect, they are unforgettable), beautiful decor, and straight road of destiny that each of the characters follows.  Yet among these same reviews, one finds numerous concerns about the plausibility of the whole endeavor.  Anna is not the type of woman that drives a man to passion or obsession say a few critics, apparently experts on both subjects;  there are, others point out, additional character issues apart from the extramarital affair that remain unexplored (a valid observation were it not for the fact that the movie is about monomania and the extinction of everything else); then there are the numerous sex scenes which critics tell us, with no small disappointment, are simply not sexy; finally, since this is a film about passion, an emotion to which Stephen is famously accused of being immune, the alleged sparks between the two main characters are, they are sorry to say, decidedly cold and, well, passionless.  All in all an attractive picture if a fairy tale. 

How curious it is that the same reviewers who suspend their disbelief for giant extraterrestrials, ghosts, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, and sharp-witted, benevolent teenagers find the circumstances in Damage, as well as the particular casting, unlikely.  True enough, there are certain assumptions made of artistic melodramas that confine them to the realm of the real and preclude supernatural or otherworldly intervention.  Yet how can we judge what is, in essence, a fairy tale with modern princes and princesses living in the upper echelon of early 1990s London?  This is hardly a realistic slice of life for the majority of viewers.  Why should their tastes and emotions (and the strange way in which they express these emotions) be any more familiar to us than their lifestyles?  They are not.  Nothing seems real because the whole film is a wild dream that sees its end in its beginning and rambles forth undeterred hoping that it will survive.  It is Stephen’s second youth and his death, although we pity him more than anyone else in the film.  He is lost, utterly lost, utterly without a center or a pole or gravity itself.  He cannot crash down to earth, and because he cannot let go of one woman who doesn't seem so different from anyone else, he is exiled to hover forever in space and watch his innermost desires from afar.  And, unlike Anna, he does not know whether he can survive.