Blok, "Разгадал я, какие цветы"

A work ("I have guessed which flowers you keep") by this Russian poet. You can read the original here.

Up above on that window most white
I have guessed which flowers you keep.
You’re afraid, I suppose, that you might
Catch me wandering through sweetest sleep.

Now I walk amidst flowers most white
And behold the bright flashes of day,
May it be one of joy or of plight,
All the same will your kisses come play.

No sun’s love will you gain from afar,
For you fear to approach it and cheat.
That all-burning, all-wandering star
Cannot love you like my passion’s heat.

And this morn I came forth and I sang,
Pretend not you were deaf to your knight.
A voice lonely, replying, then rang,
And, aquiver, your flowers turned white.

12:08 East of Bucharest

"Accounting," says a character in this film, "is a respectable profession regardless of the political system."  That may well be true.  But when the political system is an impassive fifty-year-old oak and you are a leaf on that oak, distant from the trunk yet still subject to the same wind and weather, you may at times find it easier to be a little less than respectable.  So often has the infantryman or flunky excused his complicity by claiming he was just following orders that we wondered how all those unruly classmates we had known over the years could have turned out to be such dutiful adults.  Now we have the answer: they were simply waiting for the masses to speak. 

The Romanian title, as clarified in just about every review, literally means "Was there or wasn't there," and the subject of that pair of verbs is revolution. Revolution, mind you, in the humble hamlet of Vaslui which, I was disappointed to learn, actually exists. Not surprisingly, my research tells me that Vaslui (now home to roughly 70,000 inhabitants) is also the birthplace of the film's director. Demographic studies have the population peaking shortly after the December 1989 putsch that saw the overthrow and public shooting of this reviled autocrat, then contracting in the last fifteen years to its current size. Not that you would be able to obtain an accurate head count from watching the film, since some municipal code apparently prohibits more than fifty people from leaving their homes at any given time. In fact, four people assembled in front of a public statue would constitute, on a Vasluian scale, not only a crowd but a threat to governmental stability. The only question remaining is whether those four people arrived at the scene of democratic liberation before or after Ceauşescu's escape by helicopter had been announced. 

Tiberiu Mănescu (Ion Sapdaru), the only living member of this heroic quartet, is a teacher and a raging alcoholic, not necessarily in that order.  He is also, for one special day, a guest on the very low-budget television news program of a textile engineer-turned-journalist by the name of Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban).  The original Vergil did a bang-up job leading Dante through a possible variant of hell, and this Virgil has similar expository ambitions: he will prove once and for all whether a town east of Bucharest was indeed the site of revolution before the 12:08 helicopter lift-off.   To this end, he has invited Mănescu, who cannot remember the orgiastic events of the previous evening but allegedly has total recall of his movements on that fateful day sixteen years ago, and a retiree, Emanoil Pişcoci (Mirea Andreescu), to get to the bottom of the mystery.  A harmless vulgarian (and, at Christmas, a Santa impersonator) who detests the whole investigative charade, Pişcoci admits from the very beginning that he did not have the testicular wherewithal to challenge a healthy Ceauşescu regime.  He is a coward, but so is everyone else who waited it out and flooded the square once the news broke.  A whole country of cowards, he says.  On the other hand, Mănescu maintains that he and his cohorts drank themselves brave then proceeded to march on town hall with Robespierrian fervor.  Yet the select few who call in to the miserable show (including a former state security officer who assures viewers he was just an accountant at the time) refute this claim.   Mănescu is a drunk, and could there be a less reliable eyewitness than a drunk?  And who would believe this sad sack anyway given that a sentry, a neighbor, and a silver-tongued accountant-turned-entrepreneur (who apparently punched him in the face then shoved him into a sentry booth) all vividly recollect that there was not a soul in front of town hall before at least 12:30 pm?  Then, the disembodied voices concur, a crowd certainly appeared and it "only took ten minutes for the entire square to fill up."  Most revolutions, they imply, are bandwagon affairs.

Apart from some nice banter among the panelists and callers, there is also the recurring character of Chen, the town's most conspicuous (and perhaps lone) Chinese citizen.  The immigrant shopkeeper is the only one of the six callers to defend Mănescu, even though Mănescu abused him verbally in a drunken stupor and owes him a large sum of money.  With appropriate philosophical distance, Chen confesses that he does "not like the way Romanians treat each other."  After a predictable xenophobic barrage from Virgil, Chen adds, almost with a sigh: "I just say what I see."  If only Virgil, who quotes (but hasn't a clue about) Plato and Heraclitus, could follow this advice himself.  But, he argues, his line of work limits him to echoing what others say, and as a journalist he cannot possibly be held responsible for the opinions of the general public.  Vox populi, vox dei, Vaslui.  Or something like that.

Frailty

What you believe and what you know: some envision these two sources in confluence like the twin mouths of a river.  Amidst the thankless difficulties incumbent upon those of us who do believe to prove that our beliefs are justified (belief by definition cannot be proven, but no one seems to listen to that argument), we are confronted by moments of terror and, I daresay, hallucinatory images.  For brief interstices in time we sense what is in others, what makes them tick, what they see as right and wrong; in short, we see their dreams, wishes, fears, and hopes.  These glimpses into our fellow men and women are necessarily rapid, almost flash-like.  Are they the truth about that person? 

This device is old hat in fiction, especially in short stories where characters are often defined by a single gesture, a repeated word, a facial expression when no one else is supposed to be looking.  And what do we think we see, deluded beasts that we are?  That will depend on a number of factors, most of which can be easily dispelled by modern science as irrational or unreal.  Perhaps that nice middle-aged neighbor who always sports a crooked smile in the window of her nice middle-aged house has a different agenda when handling her children, or talking to her sister, or dealing with the much younger and prettier woman who just pinched her husband.  And that high school dropout, a young man who listens to violent music and wears violent clothes, perhaps he is just a lonely soul in search of acceptance, even if acceptance means leaping into the bottomless cesspool of nonconformity.  Which of these two would law enforcement authorities have an easier time picturing as a criminal?  Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?  Using a most original format, this film attempts to answer that strange question.

There are four characters of note, two brothers, Fenton and Adam Meiks, their widower Father (Bill Paxton), and the FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who one warm night is approached in his office by a grownup Fenton (Matthew McConaughey).  Fenton has a rather nasty confession to make: he knows the identity of the serial murderer known as the God’s Hand Killer because that person is none other than his own brother.  The film alternates between flashbacks, as recounted by Fenton to Doyle, of the boys’ childhood with their Father and the present day, where the two men sit gaming details out of one another that could only be known by the police, the killer, or someone who, like Fenton, abetted his brother by not stopping him.  Doyle asks and receives pertinent information, but never considers the possibility that the person sitting in front of him might be much smarter than he is.  But the thought crosses our mind, as do other thoughts.  And knowing that we may be missing something, we turn our attention to the flashbacks.

This is where Frailty distinguishes itself from all other films of its genre, if it can fairly stuffed into just one pigeonhole.  Fenton tells Doyle about his Father, a man of great faith who was informed by God that he had a mission: to seek out those who have grossly violated divine law and to mete out punishment with an axe.  When their Father touches someone, he can see within their conscience and determine what if any crimes lie hidden.  The kicker is that Father Meiks also enlists his two young boys, who could not possibly wield as tempered a sense of right and wrong, to help him in his vigilante pursuits.  At this point, the viewer has a choice.  Either the Father is mad and we must look on this production as thinly-veiled satire or misled manipulation, or the director, writer, and protagonist (all of whom happen to be Paxton) are obsessed with showing us a side of man that is so primal as to be forgotten in our modern day of hedging, relativity, and cultural sensitivity: that of moral justice.  There is no trick dialogue or occultism.  What we witness is theurgy in its extreme form, as the film proposes a storyline ingrained in an impossible belief and then follows that trail into darkness from which there cannot be any return.  One image, an image above all other images, is seen towards the end that justifies the actions of one of the characters, and I have never been able to remove that image from my head.  Nor have I tried.

Borges, "El hacedor"

A prose poem by this Argentine normally rendered as "The Maker," although in the native language of its subject it can also mean "The Poet."  You can read the original here. 

 
Never had he wallowed in the pleasures of memory.  Impressions slipped over him, vivid and evanescent; the vermillion of a potter, the sultry vault of stars which were also gods, the moon from which a lion had fallen, the smoothness of the marble below his slow and sensitive fingertips, the smell of boar flesh which he enjoyed tearing in sudden clean bites, a Phoenician word, the black shadow of a lance tossed into the yellow sand, the nearness of the sea or of women, the heavy wine whose roughness was alleviated by honey — these took complete dominion of the ambit of his soul.  He knew terror, but he also knew wrath and braveness; he had once been the first to scale an enemy rampart.  Greedy, curious, informal, bound by no law save that of immediate delight and immediate indifference, he walked through the varied grounds and saw, on both margins of the sea, the cities of men and their palaces.  In overcrowded markets or at the foot of a mountain of uncertain summit in which satyrs might well roam, he had listened to intricately woven tales that he accepted as he accepted reality, without indagation as to their veracity or their falseness.

Gradually the beautiful universe left, abandoning him.  A stubborn fog erased the lines of his hand, night depopulated itself of stars, and the ground beneath his feet grew less sure.  Everything was becoming more distant and confused.  When he knew that was going blind, he screamed; Stoic shame had yet to be invented and Hector would be able to flee without harm.  Never will I see again, he thought, the sky full of mythic fright, nor this face which the years will transform.  Days and nights passed in desperation of his flesh, but one morning he awoke and looked (now without astonishment) at those blurred things which surrounded him and inexplicably felt, just like someone recognizing a piece of music or a voice, that all of this had already occurred and that he had met the challenge, but not without fear.  But there was jubilation in that fear, there was hope, there was curiosity.  Then he descended into his memory which seemed to him endless, and managed to extract from that whirlpool that lost remembrance which illuminated anew like a coin beneath the rain.  Maybe this was why he had never looked so carefully at memory, except perhaps in a dream.

His remembrance was this.  Another boy had slandered him, and he had run to his father and told him the story.  His father let him talk as if he weren’t listening or didn’t understand, then he removed from the wall a bronze dagger, beautiful and laden with power, which the boy had secretly coveted.  Now he had it in his hands and the surprise upon such possession annulled the injurious talk.  But his father’s voice was saying: may someone know that you are a man, and there was an order in the voice.  Night blinded the roads; cradling the dagger which emitted a certain magic force, he went down the steep slope which engirded the house and ran to the shore of the sea, dreaming himself to be Ajax and Perseus and sprinkling the salted darkness with wounds and battles.  The exact taste of that moment was what he now sought; nothing else mattered: the affronts of the challenge, the torpid combat, the return with bloodied blade.

From that memory sprouted another of night and imminent adventure.  A woman, the first the gods provided him, had waited for him in the shade of a hypogeum, and he had looked for her in gallery after gallery, which were like stone webs, and in ramp after ramp which fled into shadow.  Why did these memories reach him and why did they arrive without bitterness as if they were a mere prefiguration of the present?

With grave amazement he understood.  In the night of his mortal eyes into which he had descended, both love and risk had awaited him.  Ares and Aphrodite, because he had already divined (because he was already being surrounded) a rumor of men who defended a temple which the gods would not save and of black ships who sought a beloved isle amidst the sea, a rumor of the Odysseys and Iliads which were his destiny to sing and let resound concave in human memory.  We know these things, but not what he felt when he descended into final darkness.

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.