Ae Fond Kiss

Once and rather peremptorily, I hypothesized to a young woman that the realization of love came upon reflection in old age.  And she, a fellow student at this German university, told me in no uncertain terms that I was an unfortunate soul who had not seen the bright side of life.  Well, she was quite wrong about what I had and hadn't seen; and as often happens when those of us prone to pondering come upon what they think is a piece of the truth, I repeated the same proposition to other people (that first student was someone I met and spoke to for thirty minutes who then vanished into oblivion).  Some were just as skeptical; others, more understanding of cranks and their speculation, nodded as if admitting that the plainest idea – and my idea was quite plain – sometimes juts forth like a crag of truth amidst the clouds of doubt.  Yet most of us do not want to find our alpha in our omega: we yearn for experiences of emotion akin to those in this world–famous play of star–crossed lovers, if without the final chapter.  Romance against impossible odds is the finest metaphor we have for forging lifelong human relationships, for beating time by engaging in something that is its superior.  Should you be a little along in years, or even just a particularly insightful if inexperienced person, you know how much easier it is to wait through an entire life for perfection than accept lapsarian shortcomings.  When luck prevails, we catch glimpses of paradise in the form of another mortal who appears as the answer to all the questions we never knew to ask.        

Now you may read a few thousand books and watch a few thousand films in your lifetime, derive from them expectations of plot, characters, and meaning, and then wonder whether we are all bound to certain role-playing modules.  Even for those of us who seek out cinema which (to paraphrase this fine author) alters the film machine and doesn't just feed it, there are a limited number of plausible scenarios.  I will not bore you with a disquisition on what themes arise most frequently, but you can be sure that one of them is forbidden love.  Forbidden not because it is perverse or in violation of some statute on indecency, but forbidden by much higher powers: by fate, by parents, by God.  The Montagues and the Capulets did not approve, and their children could not live in submission and so died in defiance.  Is love worth infringing upon your parents' ideals and dreams?   The question is so fundamental and at the same time so silly that only an example will suffice, which brings us to this fine film.
 

The title is not a misspelling but a quote from a poem by that most quoted of Scottish bards, Robert Burns.  It doesn't really matter what the title is anyway since the plot is formulaic and predictable and yet most of the time perfectly delightful.  The reason for our delight is the chemistry between Casim, the token Easterner (Atta Yaqub), and Roisin, the token Westerner (Eva Birthistle).  They meet in knightly fashion on her territory, a Catholic school where Roisin teaches Casim's younger sister music.  Nothing but the coincidence of location prepares the viewer for this relationship that will blossom, fade, then hopefully blossom again during the course of the film.  Casim’s family is Pakistani and Muslim, although both he and his younger sister, who dreams of studying journalism but will not be given the chance, are fully integrated, accentless natives of Scotland; their older sister is more traditional and already engaged to the son of other Pakistani immigrants on the straight path to becoming a physician.  What they wish for most of all, of course, is the right to choose how to live their lives.  For Casim that means the love of an Irishwoman and a Catholic.

They don’t get that right because that would deprive their parents of their very essence.  Love is great and wonderful and sometimes even blind, and romantic relationships are pieces of our soul that, at life’s end, form something particular, unique, and everlasting.  It may be that we have loved many or none; or maybe there was and will always be only one person for us.  Yet whatever final figure we reach, we will only have one set of parents and one life to make sure they know that we love and appreciate them (if they deserve love and appreciation, which most do).  Going headstrong against their wishes is as self-destructive as a parent’s insistence on being heeded simply because of seniority.  In either case, a reason must be presented and accepted, and if I’m getting a wee too philosophical about the whole matter, that’s because this is purely a matter of philosophy and how to deal with leaving our parents and starting our own life is one of our hardest projects.  Either extreme, complete rejection or compliance, should be avoided, which makes Juliet and her Romeo, while great poetry, a rather pathetic soap opera.

And where does that leave Roisin and Casim, the brainchildren of this fine director?  I cannot say I rightly know what to make of their relationship, improbable as it is because their attenuated music commonality (she is a music instructor, he a deejay) might be, apart from physical attraction, the only thing they share.  Loach loves his political statements and he usually makes them blunt, affable, and correct.  Roisin and Casim are certainly affable, blunt, and flawed, and that renders the whole affair less tragic and more substantial.  Yes, classic Greek tragedy is not real: it is an exaggeration of our emotions into the stratosphere of the gods.  These lovers thankfully don’t come anywhere near the stars.  

Nikolai Gogol

Ten years ago, I happened to attend a conference on the literature of this country whose name has been slightly amended since 1993.  One of the conference’s more spirited speakers, an ethnic Ukrainian, recalled a conversation he had had with a famous Russian–born writer at a cocktail party years before.  After the usual small talk on wind and weather, the Russian became curious:

Writer: You have an accent in English.  Are you from Europe?
Ukrainian: I’m from Ukraine.
Writer: From Urania?   [walks away]

Whether such an exchange ever occurred (the joke has the bitter flavor of truth) is not as interesting as the context.  Contempt for Ukrainian literature and the concept of Ukraine as a cultural and political entity independent of both Poland and Russia is still widespread, owing largely to its lack of famous men and women of letters.  Although the founder of the modern language was a poet and artist whose balding head, handlebar moustache, and resigned chin (to the fate of his native tongue, some would say) are engraved into numerous monuments worldwide, his existence is practically unacknowledged outside Slavic departments.  Even in those hallowed halls enthusiasts tend, after Russian, to study Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian before knitting their brows at the oddities of the Ukrainian alphabet, Cyrillic with a sprinkling of one–eyes and two–eyes.  Most Ukrainian writers, history regrets to inform us, chose other mediums in which to express themselves.  And none was weirder and more brilliant than this small dainty man, the subject of one of the English language's most succulent literary biographies.              

 

Succulent thanks to the slow, effortless circles which the biographer, himself one of the finest craftsman in both Russian and English, sketches around young Gogol.  We begin with Gogol’s death and end with his birth, and in–between we find that our long–standing impressions of nineteenth–century Russia owe much to his handiwork:

Symbolism with him [Gogol] took on a physiological aspect, in this case optical.  The mutterings of passers–by were again symbolic, this time an auditory effect which was meant to render the hectic loneliness of a poor man in an opulent crowd.  Gogol, and Gogol alone, spoke to himself as he walked, but the monologue was echoed and multiplied by the shadows of his mind.  Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century, losing it when it ceased to be the capital of an empire.

This is very much the oddness of Petersburg that pervades Russian literature from Pushkin to Bely, the incongruity of traditional European architecture and customs against the thoughts and rapturous originality of its natives.  I have not been to Petersburg in a few years, but little has changed.  Thirty years passed between Nabokov’s last spring in his hometown and the passage above, which, fifty years later felt like it had been culled from the evening edition of Argumenty i fakty.  The point is that Gogol, and Gogol alone, changed Russian literature both for its creators and its admirers, domestic and otherwise.  With the possible exception of Pushkin, he is more responsible than any author for how Slavic literary scholars have evaluated the last two hundred years.  

He did not, however, come about this brilliance by living the simple and successful life of an academically–minded writer who spends days in a library and nights behind his desk.  A soft, effeminate man, Gogol was completely impractical in mind and body: he was constantly impecunious, ill, or both; he loved to fib and exaggerate because, like all great writers, fiction was far richer than the worries of a mortal; he listened to no one but himself, fled from creditors and would–be benefactors alike, and traveled alone and aimlessly in Europe for years as if trying to absorb its culture by sponging its streets with his boots.  The results were few (Gogol would die, we are told immediately, in his early forties after an abortive leeching cure) but magnificent and his modest corpus is still studied with avidity by Russianists everywhere.  Nabokov demolishes some previous attempts at rendering Gogol’s eccentric prose (so badly, in fact, that I don’t think any publisher would have ever hired these poor dead souls ever again) and supplies his own passages, which display his own mastery and wit and swell and ebb with the same unmistakable rhythm of Nabokov’s discursive writings.  All of which, I may add, could probably not be written any more clearly or concisely, nor with more passion and understanding for his subject.

Yet Gogol’s most significant contribution may well be his obsession with a rather untranslatable word, poshlost’, about which Nabokov digresses for over twenty pages.  Poshlost’ has no precise English synonym (the German Kitsch is probably the closest, although this latter is strictly speaking an aesthetic term), but might be explained as the "the belief in or propagation of superficial, sentimental and populist values as true culture."  Examples would be pop and paparazzi shows and magazines or any Hollywood love or war story, but with a modicum of discipline these can be ignored.  Much more egregious offenders are books which might portray an earnest young man who, in an effort to "make it in the world," befriends some multicultural characters, falls in love with sunsets, dogs and soft jazz, repeats to himself that life is really not about the pursuit of material wealth — although he doesn't quite convince the reader of that — and, at the end of his "journey," metaphorically envisions humanity's fate in the hands of the scattered few around him.  Most books, as it were, fall into this disreputable category.  The word itself is in very common usage in modern Russian, and has come to signify the unshakeable twitch that surfaces upon hearing or seeing something so absolutely false and so infuriatingly pandering to common thought and common happiness that even pacifists like myself want to smack someone in the vicinity.  To Russians' great credit, the word is extremely old and consistently applied; and to Gogol’s credit, he is in every way the opposite of it, just like Tomas is a “monster in the kingdom of kitsch” in this novel.

And to Nabokov’s credit, he restrains himself for the most part from overtaking his beloved forerunner.  Yes, it is Nabokov’s show; but if you are familiar with his work, you know that he cannot share a stage to save his life and that his imprint is indelibly left on everything he touches.   He even has time to tell us about his deepest fears:

In his Dikanka and Taras Bulba phase .... Gogol was skirting a very dreadful precipice.  He almost became the writer of Ukrainian folklore tales and ‘colorful romances.’  We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost.  When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dneipr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

This alternative reality may sound terrifying to Gogol connoisseurs, but some Ukrainians probably would not have minded.  And they would have deeply resented any comments on their status as a minor literature just as much as crude puns, of which Nabokov was particularly fond.   Pity that young Ukrainian writer could only remember Nabokov's last two comments.

El milagro secreto

A rendering of another fabulous tale ("The Secret Miracle") by Borges.  You can read the original here.

And God had him die for one hundred years
And later revived him and asked:
‘How long have you been here?’
And he responded: ‘One day or part of one day.’

                                                                                        The Koran, II, 261

On the night of the fourteenth of March 1939, in an apartment on Zeltnergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladík, author of the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, of The Vindication of Eternity, and of an examination of the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, dreamt of a long chess game.  It was not, however, a dispute between two individuals, but between two illustrious families; the match had been started many centuries ago; no one was able to name the forgotten prize, but it was rumored to be enormous and perhaps infinite; the pieces and the board were in a secret tower; Jaromir (in his dream) was the firstborn of one of the hostile families; in the clocks resounded the hour of the unpostponable game; the dreamer ran through the sands of a rainy desert and could not manage to recall the figures nor the rules of chess.  A rhythmic and unanimous noise, cut off by certain voices of command, rose from Zeltnergasse.  It was daybreak; the armored vanguards of the Third Reich were entering Prague.
   
On the nineteenth, the authorities received a denunciation; that same nineteenth, at dusk, Jaromir Hladík was arrested.  They led him to an aseptic, white jail on the shore opposite the Moldau.  He could not refute a single one of the Gestapo’s charges: his mother’s maiden name was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study about Boehme was Judaizing, his signature was spreading the final census of a protest against the Anschluß.  In 1928, he had translated Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house Hermann Barsdorf; the effusive catalog of this publishing house had commercially exaggerated the renown of the translator; this catalog was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the bosses in whose hands Hladík’s fate lay.  There is no man, outside of his specialization, who is not credulous; two or three adjectives in Gothic lettering sufficed for Julius Rothe to admit Hladík’s preeminence and to argue that they condemn him to death, pour encourager les autres.  The day March 29th was fixed, at 9 a.m.  This delay (whose importance the reader will appreciate later) was owed to an administrative wish to act impersonally and deliberately, like vegetables and planets. 
   
Hladík’s first sentiment was that of sheer terror.  He thought that the gallows or decapitation would not frighten him, but being shot to death was intolerable.  In vain he repeated to himself that the pure and general act of dying was frightful, not the concrete circumstances.  Absurdly trying to exhaust all the variations, he never grew tired of imagining these circumstances.  He anticipated the process infinitely, from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious firing.  Before the day set by Julius Rothe, he died hundreds of deaths in courtyards whose forms and angles exhausted all geometry, machine-gunned by various soldiers, in a changing number which at times ended up quite far, other times very close.  In real terror (perhaps with real courage), he confronted these imaginary executions; each one lasted only a few seconds; the circle closed, Jaromir interminably returned to the tremulous eves of his death.  Later he mused that reality tended not to coincide with what one saw coming; with perverse logic, he inferred that to see a detail beforehand was to impede it from happening.  True to this feeble magic, he invented, so that they would not occur, atrocious features; naturally, he came to fear that these features would turn out to be prophetic.  Miserable in the night, he tried to convince himself of the fleeting substance of time.  He knew that this was all precipitating toward the white dawn of the day on the twenty-ninth; he reasoned aloud: today is the night of the twenty-second; during this night (and six more nights) I am invulnerable, immortal.  He thought that nights with dreams were deep, dark pools in which he could submerge.  Sometimes he longed for the actual firing, that it would redeem him, for worse or better, from his vain task of imagining.  On the twenty-eighth, when the last sunset reverberated in the metal bars, the image of his play The Enemies separated him from these abject considerations.
   
Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sepher Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy ... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art). 
   
This play observed the unities of time, place and action; it took place in Hradčany, in the library of Baron de Roemerstadt, on one of the last late afternoons of the nineteenth century.  In the first scene of the first act, an unknown person visits Roemerstadt.  (A clock shows seven, the vehemence of the last sun exalts the crystals, air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music).  After this visit, others follow; Roemerstadt does not know the persons who bother him, but he retains the discomforting impression of having seen them before, perhaps in a dream.  Everybody praises him lavishly, yet it is well known – first by the spectators, then later by the Baron himself – that they are secret enemies sworn to ruin him.  Roemerstadt succeeds in checking and eluding their complex intrigues; in dialogue, they refer to his fiancée Julia of Weidenau, and to a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who once importuned her with his love.  This one has now gone mad and believes himself to be Roemerstadt ... The dangers worsen; Roemerstadt, at the end of the second act, finds himself obliged to kill a conspirator.  Then the third, and last, act begins.  The incongruities gradually increase: actors return who appeared discarded from the plot; for a moment, the man that Roemerstadt killed returns.  Someone notices that it has not gotten dark: the clock shows seven, the western sun reverberates in the old crystals, the air carries a piece of passionate and familiar Hungarian music.  The first interlocutor appears and repeats the words he pronounced in the first scene of the first act.  Roemerstadt talks to him without astonishment; the spectator understands that Roemerstadt is the miserable Jaroslav Kubin.  The play has never taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives interminably.
   
Hladík had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was trivial or admirable, rigorously exact or happenstance.  In the argument that I have sketched, he guessed the means more apt for hiding his defects and bringing out his happiness, the possibility of rescuing (symbolically) the basis of his life.  He had already finished the first act and one scene from the third; the oeuvre’s metrical character allowed him to examine it continually, rectifying the hexameters without looking at the manuscript.  He believed that two acts were still missing and that he was soon going to die.  In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water.
   
Toward dawn, he dreamt that he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the library of the Clementinum.   A librarian with black eyeglasses asked him: What are you searching for?  Hladík answered him: I am searching for God.  The librarian said to him: God is one of the letters on one of the pages of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementinum.  My parents and their parents have searched for this letter; this searching has rendered me blind.  He removed his glasses and Hladík saw his eyes, which were dead.  A reader entered and gave an atlas back.  This atlas is useless, he said, and he gave it to Hladík.  The latter opened it at random.  He saw a map of India, a vertiginous map.  Suddenly sure, he touched one of the smallest letters.  A ubiquitous voice said to him: The time for your work has been granted.  Here Hladík woke up.
   
He remembered that man’s dreams belong to God and that Maimonides wrote that the words of a dream are divine when they are distinct and clear and when the person who says them cannot be seen.  He got dressed; two soldiers entered the cell and ordered him to follow them.
   
On the other side of the door Hladík had imagined a labyrinth of galleries, staircases and pavilions.  The reality was less rich: they descended to a back courtyard toward a sole iron staircase.  Various soldiers – some with their uniforms unbuttoned – were looking over and discussing a motorcycle.  The sergeant looked at the clock: it was eight forty-four.  He had to wait until it said nine.  Hladík, more insignificantly than unfortunately, felt that he was in a mound of firewood.  He noticed that the soldiers’ eyes avoided his own.  To alleviate the waiting, the sergeant handed him a cigarette.  Hladík did not smoke; he accepted it out of courtesy and humility.  As he lit it, he saw that his hands were shaking; the soldiers were speaking in a low voice as if he were already dead.  In vain he tried to remember the woman whose symbol was Julia of Weidenau ...
   
The squadron of soldiers mobilized and came to attention.  Hladík, his foot against the wall of the jail, awaited the firing.  Someone feared that the wall would remain stained with blood; so they ordered the criminal to advance a few steps.  Absurdly, Hladík recalled the preliminary vacillations of photographers.  A heavy drop of rain grazed one of Hladík’s temples and rolled down towards his cheek;  the sergeant shouted the final order.
   
The physical universe halted.
   
The weapons converged upon Hladík, but the men who were going to kill him were motionless.  The sergeant’s arm eternalized an unfinished gesture.  On a stone tile of the courtyard, a bee protected a fixed shadow.  The wind had ceased as in a painting.  Hladík attempted a scream, a syllable, a twist of one hand.  He understood that he was paralyzed.  Not even the most tenuous rumor of a hindered world was reaching him.  He thought: I am in hell, I am dead.  He thought: I am crazy.  He thought: time has stopped.  Then he reflected that, in such a case, his thoughts would also have stopped.  He wanted to put it to the test: he repeated (without moving his lips) Vergil’s mysterious fourth Eclogue.  He imagined that those soldiers who were already distant shared in his anguish; he yearned to communicate with them.  It astonished him not to feel any fatigue, nor even vertigo from his great immobility.  He slept, at the end of an undetermined time.   When he woke up, the world was still motionless and silent.  The drop of water was persisting on his cheek; in the courtyard, the shadow of the bee; the smoke of the cigarette which he had thrown away never stopped spreading.  Another “day” passed before Hladík understood.
   
He had asked God for an entire year to complete his work: His Omnipotence granted him one year.  God operated through a secret miracle: Germanic lead would kill him, at the determined hour; but in his mind, a year would pass between the order and its execution.  From perplexity he passed into stupor, from stupor into resignation, and from resignation to unexpected gratitude.
   
He had no other document at his disposal but his memory: the apprenticeship of each hexameter that he added gave him the fortunate vigor which those who risk or forget their ephemeral and vague paragraphs cannot suspect.  He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little.  Meticulous, motionless, secret, he made up in this time his old invisible labyrinth.  He redid the third act two times.  He erased the too obvious symbols: the repeated sounding of the clock and the music.  No circumstance bothered him.  He omitted, abbreviated, amplified: in some cases, he opted for the primitive version.  He came to love the courtyard and the jail; one of the faces in front of him modified his conception of the personage of Roemerstadt.  He discovered that the arduous cacophonies that so alarmed Flaubert were mere visual superstitions: the weaknesses and annoyances of the written, not the spoken word ... He brought his play to an end: and he managed to conclude it apart from a single epithet.  He found it; the drop of water slid down his cheek.  He began a mad scream, he moved his face, and the quadruple gunfire cut him down.           
   
Jaromir Hladík died on the twenty–ninth of March, at 9:02 in the morning.

Tycoon

For many among us, outlaws will always be heroes.  Not only because most people do not benefit from laws, regardless of the society in which these laws were created, but also because most people during their lifetime do not become fantastically rich, famous, or infamous.  There is little glamour to the quiet, average (and often very good) life which many brave souls are content to pass but which few find inspiring.  Throughout history we have hailed renegades, from Simon Magus to Robin Hood to Jesse James, to the gangsters and goons worshiped by current generations, as the triumph of the simple man over the elite, the rebellion of the downtrodden that halted the unending reign of supremely divine tyrants.  Yet there is nothing bold or revolutionary about the luxurious wealth or hedonistic pursuits which this outlaw eventually flaunts.  Once power has been attained, you will never find a more bourgeois, money-grubbing, rule-oriented manager, since now the laws protect him from, well, other potential revolutionaries.  He is self–serving to the point of justifying his actions by claiming he alone was strong enough to stand up to the authorities and bring them to their knees.  And he will use every legal stipulation and wile to keep his property and influence from the hungry masses whom he invariably shuns.  Since the last twenty years in Russia have seen the mercurial rise of more than one such individual it may be a fine time, on the occasion of the Russian elections, to review this film.

 

The film is based on a novel by Yuri Dubov, who was once the confidant of this billionaire in exile and public enemy of the Russian government denounced as having robbed his fellow citizens blind, deaf, and dumb.*  Whether such thievery actually occurred is less important than whether this life, romanticized as it surely must have been for the screen, could possibly provoke any aesthetic interest in us whatsoever.  The answer is yes, but not for the reasons one might think.  In this version, Berezovsky is given the first name of a philosopher, Platon (Vladimir Mashkov, above) and a last name that is almost that of a rather tremendous but troubled artist, Makovsky.  A little research would tell you that this shift in nomenclature, while elegant, is also not coincidental: in 2004 Berezovsky officially changed his name to Platon Elenin (again a letter shy of a poet’s name).  And all this shifting and guising has much to do with the subject matter, a traditional game of oneupmanship during the years in which the smart exploited what the law neglected, and found a way to circumvent the few stipulations it did contain.  So perhaps we should not be surprised that the novelty of unlimited capitalistic profit in post–glasnost Russia did not yield a new way of spinning an old greedy tale of young (and old) greedy men and the women who love them.  And in the same way, each action by Platon and his gang of cronies, a harmless bunch of smart but ostracized men, is given added weight by the revolution around them.  

The fictional Platon is a master of disguise, mood, and manipulation, as would be, we surmise, anyone moving in such dark and dangerous circles.  He emerges from this maelstrom in one piece thanks in no small part to his charisma, played up fabulously by Mashkov, a handsome and talented actor who exudes what one reviewer calls “reptilian charm” (there is no better description).  Detailing the plot might dissuade you from seeing the film, so I’ll just say that events do not unravel chronologically and, despite some half-hearted attempts, Platon’s love life remains secondary to his financial profile.  Nevertheless, the political implications of his rise to prominence and its rather minor subplots are not nearly as interesting as Platon’s own maneuvering, inevitable betrayal, and apotheosis – a story which, in the end, should sound extremely familiar.  Are the characters three-dimensional?  No, and for a very good reason: although one-man shows sometimes feature guest performers, these sidekicks only get billing far from the center and in very small print.  Tycoon is a upsized, occasionally preposterous tribute to one and only one of those magnates; everyone else is only important insofar as they help him achieve his goal.  

  

Unfortunately, nothing co-opts the spry and creative mind more than monetary success.  Even the wildest of imaginations considers, at least for a few moments, the life of material wealth and the ease and comfort such a life brings.  There is nothing wrong with ambition, nor with money per se; but when the goal of life and work and all your hours and minutes becomes a relentless hunt after greater and greater fortune, perspective on life’s best offerings is soon lost.  What Platon’s perspective is on the matter may be hard to say, because one gets the distinct impression that he really thinks of himself as some kind of artist.  And what you think of this tycoon, an oligarch in the original Russian, may reflect what you think of the new Russian revolution.  But then you may think of other riches – a live filled with goodness, love, laughter, curiosity, learning, and selflessness – and smile.  And you may gladly cede those outlaw desires to the Platon Makovskys and Charles Foster Kanes of the world.

* Note: Berezovsky ostensibly took his own life on March 23, 2013.

After the Wedding

There is a certain melancholy in seeing how the impoverished live that cannot be set aside when you get home like a scarf or coat.  It is not provoked by guilt, because guilt is simply feeling bad for yourself: it is provoked by shame.  Shame for participating in a society that allows millions to have nothing, not even hope, and going about your daily business without any plan for changing the situation.  Shame for smiling upon moneyed persons and defending their wealth by claiming that they worked harder than anyone else to get it.  For your information, no one works harder than those who have nothing to lose and will plough a field for a day’s ration of bread.  They have nothing but a slim chance of sustaining themselves past a certain age, and their children are doomed to the same cycle of poverty (which one courageous soul decided to break a few decades ago by founding this bank).  Shame for permitting your petty imperfections to justify your lashing out at loved ones and friends, thinking of yourself as some kind of victim because you can’t quite get the most beautiful young woman in the office to go out with you, and wallowing in the existential angst that is the calling card of selfish, bloated postwar Europe.  Shame for not giving a damn about distant and irretrievably estranged countries that produce your entire wardrobe and the coffee you spend hundreds of dollars on per year, and which have the gall and cheek to ask you to support their children for a third of that daily latte budget.  Shame for sitting back and thinking that you deserve these privileges and opportunities more than other human beings. You may not quite believe these statements, but you would do well to consider their seriousness.  Disparities in global wealth are rather staggering and will continue in the years to come to thunder past our ingenuous notions of equality.  Some of us, braver than any man of violence, actually uproot our easy lives and travel to the less fortunate nations of the world with more than just a heavy heart, but to live and work and help.  Oftentimes it does not even take a lengthy stay to convince someone to amend his perspective on aid (as in the case of this rather dashing fellow), and we realize that if just ten percent of us either propagandized against greed or helped onsite, we could work absolute wonders.  And all these statements – every last one of them – could have been uttered by Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), the protagonist of this recent film.

Jacob is so good that our knowledge of humanity tells us he is either not human or making up for some blemish on his conscience.  As it were, neither assessment does justice to the breadth of his personality, which is idealistic, stubborn (no one is more stubborn than an idealist), and toned in just the right way as to avoid sentimentality and gushing pathos.  You and I know Jacob is a good man: he runs an orphanage in one of the more miserable parts of India, and he runs it passionately because he knows that few others would or could.  That noble assumption of responsibility drives him to rather extreme categorizations (no one is more categorical than an idealist), with a contempt for luxury and the rich that borders on the homicidal.  He is tempered in his hatred by Pramod, his eight-year-old ward whose life spans precisely the same period as that of the orphanage’s financial decline.  This may or may not be a coincidence (many numbers within a work of art are often repeated accidentally, especially if they don’t really matter), but it is certain that Jacob’s shelter may be crushed by the eternal evil of insufficient bankrolling.  He is desperate but positive (no one is more positive than an idealist), and he reassures Pramod and us that he will find a way to keep helping the abandoned, the poor, and the very unlucky.

With this type of setup we know full well what will occur, but perhaps not quite how.  Jacob will be tempted by the money he needs to retain his orphanage, yet this wonderful beneficence may come at the cost of his generous soul.  So when he is summoned to his native Denmark by a billionaire (Rolf Lassgård) interested in supporting his charitable endeavors, we understand that this will be a most fatidic encounter, and that a series of intertwined decisions will cincture him like barbed wire.  He will endure a lot of soul-searching before he either accepts or recants the devilish proposal laid out before him, and these trials and tribulations will compose the suet of the film’s pudding.  If you are very familiar with these sorts of films, you will know something else: that Jacob has a secret or two, as does the Mephistophelian robber baron who tasks him with an ethical quandary.  I am loath to reveal even the first of these twists as it may lead you to derive the last of them, which would preclude sitting through to the rather melodramatic end.  There is value in these moral adventures, not because instantiating shame in all of us is necessarily art’s concern, but because meticulous casting and a strong epicenter (Jacob) allow us to see how a good man can reflect on his life, admit his mistakes, and become in some ways even better.  And the wedding in the title?  That would feature the billionaire’s twenty-year-old daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen) and one of his business protégés.  They don’t really need to get married to propel the plot forward, but, in addition to being a rather harmless contrivance, it does shed some light on a couple of characters.  And just as much takes place before the nuptials as after, which leads Jacob to do something he hasn’t done in over twenty years, but he's a better man for it.  And in his case that is saying a great deal indeed.