Portrait of a Woman With Gloves

[About halfway through John Banville’s novel, The Book of Evidence, the narrator, Freddie Montgomery steals a painting from Whitewater, an Irish manor house. Before he does, however, he invents the scene of the painting’s creation.]

     The painting is called, as everyone must know by now, Portrait of a Woman with Gloves. It measures eighty-two centimetres by sixty-five. From internal evidence – in particular the woman’s attire – it has been dated between 1655 and 1660. The black dress and broad white collar and cuffs of the woman are lightened only by a brooch and gold ornamentation on the gloves. The face has a slightly Eastern cast. (I am quoting from the guidebook to Whitewater House.) The picture has been variously attributed to Rembrandt and Frans Hals, even to Vermeer. However, it is safest to regard it as the work of an anonymous master. 

     None of this means anything. 

     I have stood in front of other, perhaps greater paintings, and not been moved as I am moved by this one. I have a reproduction of it on the wall above my table here – sent to me by, of all people, Anna Behrens – when I look at it my heart contracts. There is something in the way the woman regards me, the querulous, mute insistence of her eyes, which I can neither escape nor assuage. I squirm in the grasp of her gaze. She requires of me some great effort, some tremendous feat of scrutiny and attention, of which I do not think I am capable. It is as if she were asking me to let her live. 

     She. There is no she, of course. There is only an organisation of shapes and colours. Yet I try to make up a life for her. She is, I will say, thirty-five, thirty-six, though people without thinking still speak of her as a girl. She lives with her father, the merchant (tobacco, spices, and, in secret, slaves). She keeps house for him since her mother’s death. She did not like her mother. Her father dotes on her, his only child. She is, he proclaims, his treasure. She devises menus – father has a delicate stomach – inspects the kitchen, she even supervises his wine cellar. She keeps an inventory of the household linen in a little notebook attached to her belt by a fine gold chain, using a code of her own devising, for she has never learned to read or write. She is strict with the servants, and will permit no familiarities. Their dislike she takes for respect. The house is not enough to absorb her energies, she does good works besides: she visits the sick, and is on the board of visitors of the town’s almshouse. She is brisk, sometimes impatient, and there are mutterings against her among the alms-folk, especially the old women. At times, usually in spring and at the beginning of winter, everything becomes too much for her. Notice the clammy pallor of her skin: she is prey to obscure ailments. She takes to her bed and lies for days without speaking, hardly breathing, while outside in the silvery northern light the world goes about its busy way. She tries to pray, but God is distant. Her father comes to visit her at evening, walking on tiptoe. These periods of prostration frighten him, he remembers his wife dying, her terrible silence in the last weeks. If he were to lose his daughter too – But she gets up, wills herself to it, and very soon the servants are feeling the edge of her tongue again, and he cannot contain his relief, it comes out in little laughs, roguish endearments, a kind of clumsy skittishness. She considers him wryly, then turns back to her tasks. She cannot understand this notion he has got into his head: he wants to have her portrait painted. I’m old, is all he will say to her, I am an old man, look at me! And he laughs, awkwardly, and avoids her eye. My portrait? she says, mine? – I am no fit subject for a painter. He shrugs, at which she is first startled, then grimly amused: he might at least have attempted to contradict her. He seems to realise what is going through her mind, and tries to mend matters, but he becomes flustered, and, watching him fuss and fret and pluck at his cuffs, she realises with a pang that it’s true, he has aged. Her father, an old man. The thought has a touch of bleak comedy, which she cannot account for. You have fine hands, he says, growing testy, annoyed both at himself and her, your mother’s hands – we’ll tell him to make the hands prominent. And so, to humour him, but also because she is secretly curious, she goes along one morning to the studio. The squalor is what strikes her first of all. Dirt and daubs of paint everywhere, gnawed chicken bones on a smeared plate, a chamber-pot on the floor in the corner. The painter matches the place, with that filthy smock, and those fingernails. He has a drinker’s squashed and pitted nose. She thinks the general smell is bad until she catches a whiff of his breath. She discovers that she is relieved: she had expected someone young, dissolute, threatening, not this pot-bellied old soak. But then he fixes his little wet eyes on her, briefly, with a kind of impersonal intensity, and she flinches, as if caught in a burst of strong light. No one has ever looked at her like this before. So this is what it is to be known! It is almost indecent. First he puts her standing by the window, but it does not suit the light is wrong, he says. He shifts her about, grasping her by the upper arms and walking her backwards from one place to another. She feels she should be indignant, but the usual responses do not seem to function here. He is shorter than her by a head. He makes some sketches, scribbles a colour note or two, then tells her to come tomorrow at the same time. And wear a darker dress, he says. Well! She is about to give him a piece of her mind, but already he has turned aside to another task. Her maid, sitting by the door, is biting her lips and smirking. She lets the next day pass, and the next, just to show him. When she does return he says nothing about the broken appointment, only looks at her black dress – pure silk, with a broad collar of Spanish lace – and nods carelessly, and she is so vexed at him it surprises her, and she is shocked at herself. He has her stand before the couch. Remove your gloves, he says, I am to emphasise the hands. She hears the note of amused disdain in his voice. She refuses. (Her hands, indeed!) He insists. They engage in a brief, stiff little squabble, batting icy politenesses back and forth between them. In the end she consents to remove one glove, then promptly tries to hide the hand she has bared. He sighs, shrugs, but has to suppress a grin, as she notices. Rain streams down the windows, shreds of smoke fly over the rooftops. The sky has a huge silver hole in it. At first she is restless, standing there, then she seems to pass silently through some barrier, and a dreamy calm comes over her. It is the same, day after day, first there is agitation, then the breakthrough, then silence and a kind of softness, as if she were floating away away, out of herself. He mutters under his breath as he works. He is choleric, he swears, and clicks his tongue, sending up sighs and groans. There are long, fevered passages when he works close up against the canvas, and she can only see his stumpy legs and his old, misshapen boots. Even his feet seem busy. She wants to laugh when he pops his head out at the side of the easel and peers at her sharply, his potato nose twitching. He will not let her see what he is doing, she is not allowed even a peek. Then one day she senses a kind of soundless, settling crash at his end of the room, and he steps back with an expression of weary disgust and waves a hand dismissively at the canvas, and turns aside to clean his brush. She comes forward and looks. For a second she sees nothing, so taken is she by the mere sensation of stopping like this and turning: it is as if – as if somehow she had walked out of herself. A long moment passes. The brooch, she says, is wonderfully done. The sound of her own voice startles her, it is a stranger speaking, and she is cowed. He laughs, not bitterly, but with real amusement and, so she feels, a curious sort of sympathy. It is an acknowledgement, of – she does not know what. She looks and looks. She had expected it would be like looking in a mirror, but this is someone she does not recognise, and yet knows. The words come unbidden into her head: Now I know how to die. She puts on her glove, and signals to her maid. The painter is speaking behind her, something about her father, and money, of course, but she is not listening. She is calm. She is happy. She feels numbed, hollowed, a walking shell. She goes down the stairs, along the dingy hall, and steps out into a commonplace world. 

     Do not be fooled: none of this means anything either.

Canned Cannes

With this year’s Cannes Film Festival coming to a close, a few points about the import and export of films past and present. How would you feel if you tuned in to watch the red carpet at the Oscars and instead of the usual parade of stars and celebrities you saw Bulgarian and Finnish and Japanese and Egyptian actors and directors you never heard of sashay past the whizzing cameras? And none of them was even nominated for an Oscar? Yet this is what happens every year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival (the three biggest European festivals). Hollywood stars dominate the red carpet and the Hollywood films that are premiered there AREN'T EVEN IN COMPETITION AT THE FESTIVAL. Some film from Tunisia wins the Golden Palm/Bear/Lion but nobody sees it because they all came to see Tom Cruise, showing off his artfully augmented hair and his porcelain-crowned teeth. The cultural imperialism of Hollywood remains secure. 

The reasons for this are actually rather cut and dried. The U.S. has included the export of Hollywood films in their trade agreements with foreign countries for decades. This is in keeping with the common perception that a Hollywood film is an industrial product, no different from other commodities. But it is in direct conflict with other countries’ understanding that a film is a cultural, rather than a commercial product, that it both reflects a culture and is an integral part of it. 

Over the past century, the U.S. film industry in Hollywood has dominated the global entertainment industry. 

American films appear today in more than 150 countries, and the Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA"), the film industry's lobbying group, proudly proclaims that the "U.S. film industry provides the majority of home entertainment products seen in millions of homes throughout the world.” (1) 

Recent statistics are astonishing: "U.S. films represent approximately 80% of the films distributed in European theaters, and over 55% of the films shown on European television networks." Try to imagine if such trade were fair – resulting in 80% of American theaters showing films exclusively from foreign countries. The facts are that the number of foreign-language films exhibited in U.S. theaters is severely limited by the dearth of venues that support such films. The very term “art house” – which used to distinguish theaters that screened foreign films – has by now become the common designation, sometimes used to denigrate, for films not originating in Hollywood. 

Approximately 85% of worldwide ticket sales are directed toward Hollywood movies, and international sales generate approximately half of the U.S. film industry's revenues. At one point the audiovisual industry was the United States' second largest export industry, following the aerospace industry. The trade flow in film is entirely one-sided; American films dominate foreign markets, but foreign films have failed to establish a significant presence in the U.S. market, accounting for only 1% of movies shown. 

Given the ridiculously tiny number of foreign-made films that the English-speaking markets choose to import, foreign film festivals have traditionally been markets in which producers have sought distribution of their films to the English-speaking market. If the film wins an award in competition, so much the better. But if a foreign-language film makes it into competition at Cannes or Berlin or Venice and it fails to win an award (regardless of the quality of the film), its failure to get distribution to the UK and North America can haunt the film for decades. 

A case in point is André Delvaux’s superb film Belle, which was Belgium’s entry in competition at the 1973 Cannes Festival. That year’s Festival wasn’t much different from this year’s. 24 films were in competition, including Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, and Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy. All three of these got distribution to the U.S. Even the Swiss entry, Claude Goretta’s L’Invitation, landed a distribution deal. But this was because each of them won an award – for Best Actor or a Jury Prize. (La Grande Bouffe was booed during its screening and won an independent prize.) The Golden Palm was shared between the British film The Hireling, a fine adaptation of J. P. Hartley’s novel, and Scarecrow, a now forgotten starring vehicle for Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. 

Because Belle failed to either win an award or land a distribution deal, it is practically forgotten today. Of the few reviews of the film I could find online, none were very favorable, largely because no one seems to have understood it. I watched it by sheer chance some time in the early 1980s and it left such a lasting impression on me that I chose it as the subject for my very first published film essay. It was an extreme fluke that I saw it at all, since it never had a commercial release in the U.S. It was aired on a cable channel called TeleFrance. 

Belle is part domestic drama, part surrealist fantasy. It begins with Mathieu giving a lecture one night about the Belgian town called Spa and a nearby primeval forest called the Walloon Fagnard and its involvement in the lives and works of poets and other writers. His wife and daughter are in attendance and after the lecture they tell him they are catching a ride home with a mutual friend. Mathieu drives his Volvo home on a scenic route through the moors of the Grand Fagne, the very same woods about which he had been speaking. Rounding a curve, the Volvo strikes something on the road. Mathieu stops the car and gets out, checking for damage. Using a flashlight he finds drops of blood on the road. Making love to his wife, Jeanne, later that night, she tells him that he seems miles away. He tells her about what happened in the woods. 

In the morning over breakfast we learn that Mathieu’s daughter Marie is making preparations to get married. He objects to her short skirts and dark stockings. She wears them, she says, because “he” – her boyfriend John – likes them. Mathieu is a fastidious, exacting man, and his wife and daughter gently mock him. He works in the city archive, his desk directly across from a painting of a nude woman by Colette Bitker. 

After work, Mathieu drives into the forest to the spot where his collision occurred the night before. He hears the whimper of a dog from the nearby woods and fetches his shotgun from the trunk. The dog limps farther into the woods and Mathieu follows until he arrives at an abandoned farmhouse. A young woman emerges from the house and, assuring her that he won’t harm her, Mathieu stands the shotgun against the house and follows her inside. Before he knows it, she has slipped out again and seized the shotgun. Mathieu runs outside and falls when he hears a shotgun blast. Having shot the suffering dog, the woman throws the shotgun on the ground and, weeping, walks away. 

Thus initially quite straightforward, the story of Belle then cleverly bifurcates. Filmmaker Delvaux (no relation of the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux) carefully interweaves Mathieu’s domestic life with his fantasies, which, in the grand surrealist tradition, are deeply Freudian. In bald terms, Mathieu faces the imminent departure from his home of his daughter with as much stoic resignation as he is capable, but underneath this façade is passionate, anguished emotion that only shows itself in his increasingly emphatic lectures and in the fantasy life that he has constructed around the mysterious woman in the woods – who doesn’t speak his language – he calls “Belle.” How much of what Delvaux shows us is real and how much is fantasy could be the subject of more detailed study. I can only say that after many viewings, the film has got completely under my skin. As I wrote nearly 22 years ago, “It has infiltrated my dreams, both sleeping and waking, rather as Mathieu was ensnared by his strange Beauty.” But because it was passed over at Cannes in 1973 and didn’t find a distributor, Belle remains unavailable on DVD. I can just hear it, crying out from the vault in which it rots. Where is Criterion when we need them? 

(1) Lee, Kevin, "The Little State Department": Hollywood and the MPAA's Influence on U.S. Trade Relations, Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business, Volume 28 Issue 2 Winter, Winter 2008. 

[Dept. of Corrections: Belle is available in limited numbers on DVD from Amazon at $33.98 to $35.]

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

For what doth it profit a man if he gain his own soul and lose the whole world? (Anonymous) 

Karl Marx didn’t invent the alienated worker, capitalism did. Marx simply identified him. In George Orwell’s embittered, angry novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which has only been embraced because some critics have called it a comedy, the hero George Comstock has declared war on money, and he has accepted the consequences: “To spend your days in meaningless mechanical work, work that could be slovened through in a sort of coma...” 

In this, Orwell’s third novel, the word money appears 393 times. Published in 1936 and set in 1934, it presents to the reader one man’s struggle against the thrall of money. Plainly, Gordon Comstock, Orwell's hero, is a principled ass who is so committed to keeping away from a ‘good’ job that he finds a way to live on £2 a week that forces him to deprive himself of love and friendship because, in his circular reasoning, nobody could possibly love or be friends with a man with so little money. Orwell goes to some lengths giving the reader Gordon’s background and the origin of his feud with the money-god. 

In a crude, boyish way, he had begun to get the hang of this money-business. At an earlier age than most people he grasped that all modern commerce is a swindle. Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first brought it home to him. He little knew, as the biographers say, that he himself would one day have a job in an advertising firm. But there was more to it than the mere fact that business is a swindle. What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion--the only really felt religion--that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers--the elect, the money- priesthood as it were--'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed--the slaves and underlings--'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' 

Gordon thought it all out, in the naive selfish manner of a boy. There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it. He took it for granted that he himself would never be able to make money. It hardly even occurred to him that he might have talents which could be turned to account. That was what his schoolmasters had done for him; they had rubbed it into him that he was a seditious little nuisance and not likely to 'succeed' in life. He accepted this. Very well, then, he would refuse the whole business of 'succeeding'; he would make it his especial purpose not to 'succeed'. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven; better to serve in hell than serve in heaven, for that matter. Already, at sixteen, he knew which side he was on. He was against the money-god and all his swinish priesthood. He had declared war on money; but secretly, of course. At the back of his mind was the idea that he could somehow live by writing poetry; but that was too absurd even to be mentioned. But at any rate, he wasn't going into business, into the money-world. He would have a job, but not a 'good' job. It was said of him that he was worth his wages but wasn't the type that Makes Good. In a way the utter contempt that he had for his work made things easier for him. He could put up with this meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. Somehow, sometime, God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his 'writing'. Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by 'writing'; and you'd feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a 'writer', would you not? 

But, by the age of 30, Gordon has not managed to make a living as a writer. He must keep a dead-end job without the possibility of promotion or a raise in pay. His closest friend, Ravelston, and Rosemary, a girlfriend who obviously loves him listen to his diatribes against the money-code with patience but without understanding. In one chapter he is a few days away from payday and walks around London agonizing about all the things he cannot have for want of just a few pennies more in his pocket. Like the fool he is, when Rosemary consents to have sex with him on a sunny December day in the country, everything is perfect when the moment arrives – except Gordon neglected to purchase a condom. Fearing pregnancy, lying naked on the cold grass, Rosemary can’t go through with it. And, once again, Gordon blames money. 

Weeks later, after he finally lands a check for a published poem (a $50 check in 1936 was worth exactly £10), he squanders it in celebration of his re-birth. 

Why does one do these things? Money again, always money! The rich don't behave like that. The rich are graceful even in their vices. But if you have no money you don't even know how to spend it when you get it. You just splurge it frantically away, like a sailor in a bawdy-house his first night ashore. 

Two days later, fined £5 for drunk & disorderly (he punched a police sergeant in the ear) he is sober and wondering how he can take advantage of his misfortune by sinking still lower. Finally, after having sunk to his lowest point, down to a job paying 30 shillings a week (£1.50), and living in an attic with a dying aspidistra, Rosemary arrives out of nowhere and they make love – unprotected.

After all, she was too much for him. He had wanted her so long, and he could not stop to weigh the consequences. So it was done at last, without much pleasure, on Mother Meakin's dingy bed. 

The rest is predictable. Three months later Rosemary shows up in his shop to announce to him that she’s pregnant. Knowing only as much about Rosemary as Orwell tells us, her pregnancy clearly isn’t part of a plan on her part to trap Gordon into reforming. But it changes everything. Even when she mentions the alternative: 

'Not necessarily. That's what you've got to decide. Because after all there is another way.' 'What way?' 'Oh, you know. A girl at the studio gave me an address. A friend of hers had it done for only five pounds.' That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words 'a baby' took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers. They had a strange moment of sympathy such as they had never had before. For a moment he did feel that in some mysterious way they were one flesh. Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together--as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating--a blasphemy, if that word had any meaning. Yet if it had been put otherwise he might not have recoiled from it. It was the squalid detail of the five pounds that brought it home.

Of course, money supplies the one squalid detail that “pulled him up” and makes him regard aborting the pregnancy as unthinkable. Orwell shows him no pity: 

He looked back over the last two frightful years. He had blasphemed against money, rebelled against money, tried to live like an anchorite outside the money-world; and it had brought him not only misery, but also a frightful emptiness, an inescapable sense of futility. To abjure money is to abjure life. Be not righteous over much; why shouldst thou die before thy time? 

Regarding the 1997 film adaptation (called A Merry War in the US simply because Americans don't know what an aspidistra is), Stanley Kauffmann commented about Orwell’s novel: 

Why this Orwell novel now? Well, it's comic about a pertinent perennial theme. Toward the end, after his two-year flight from convention, Gordon reflects: "Everyone rebels against the money-code, and everyone sooner or later surrenders." That idea is still a consolation for many, although it's no more true now than it was then: everyone does not rebel, and not everyone who rebels surrenders. Gordon himself might not have gone back into harness if he had had a condom on a certain afternoon. Still, the novel and the film remind us that doubts about the Bitch Goddess, which seem so ultra-mod, are not. (1)

Where the novel completely fails is Orwell’s apparent blaming capitalism for all the preposterous and disgusting outrages that Gordon commits. Christopher Hitchens even likens Gordon to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. The scene in which Gordon gets roaring drunk and drags poor Ravelston to a hotel with two prostitutes is improbably funny, whether it’s supposed to be or not. Some Orwell readers have mistaken Gordon for some sort of hero, and that his capitulation at the novel’s end is somehow tragic. It shows just how pervasive Gordon’s attitude is. I should know, because I myself have spent my life backing away from the world of money. I never sought – and never held – a “good” job. And, consequently, I have known long periods of what most people would – quite rightly – call hardship. It's one of the reasons why I now find myself marooned on a foreign tropical island. I haven’t gained my soul in the bargain, but neither have I lost the whole world. 

Interestingly enough, Orwell didn’t like Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He didn’t want it and his previous novel A Clergyman’s Daughter republished even when his writing came into vogue. He’d only written them for the money!

(1) “From London to Louisiana,” The New Republic, September 7, 1998.

When I'm 64

When I get older losing my hair 

Many years from now 

Will you still be sending me a Valentine 

Birthday greetings bottle of wine? 

- Lennon-McCartney 

The longer thou livest, the more fool thou. 

- William Wager 

Now I’m 64. Paul McCartney was 64 in 2006. He’ll be 80 on June 18. Also born on May 16 were Henry Fonda in 1905, Liberace in 1919, and Pierce Brosnan in 1953. He’s 69 today, a very nice number. And Debra Winger, born on this day in 1955, is 67. 

On this day: in 1763 Samuel Johnson first met James Boswell. In 1866 root beer was invented by Charles Hires. In 1902 two deaf-mutes faced off for the first time in baseball history as Dummy Hoy of the Reds batted against Dummy Taylor (these were their professional names) of the Giants. The Reds won 5-3. And in 1927 the US Supreme Court ruled that bootleggers had to pay income tax. 

Also on this day in 1955 one of my heroes, James Agee was on his way to a doctor's appointment in a taxi in New York City when he died of a heart attack. He was just 45. 

In observance of my birthday, I took my companion to a restaurant in the nearby town – only because it had air conditioning, which is always a treat for someone in the tropics who has to live without it. She ordered chop suey and I ordered “spicy buffalo” – which was quite unspicy chicken wings in sweet & sour sauce. I also got an order of fries. (The waitress behind her mask was almost incomprehensible.) 

My companion took some selfies because she was wearing a nice dress and her costume jewelry. Then I reminded her that it was my day and she took some photos of us together. [see above] I got away with spending only about $12 for the two of us. Funny that the birthday boy was the one paying, but it’s always like that. I wanted to get ice cream but she told me that our freezer is packed with eight kilos of pork. 

We got home before 4. She changed clothes and attended to doing the laundry. I relaxed in my sala alone. I made it clear to her many years ago that I don’t want a cake or candles on my birthday and I hope I never hear that goddam birthday song ever again. But she doesn’t know that I didn’t mean it – not really. The day isn’t over just yet. She could still surprise me, but I don’t expect she ever will. 

I don’t want to be here for another birthday. I want to be somewhere Stateside for my 65th. 

One more person born on this day was Adrienne Rich in 1929. 

What Kind of Times Are These 

BY ADRIENNE RICH 

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill 

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows 

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted 

who disappeared into those shadows. 

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled 

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, 

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, 

its own ways of making people disappear. 

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods 

meeting the unmarked strip of light— 

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: 

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. 

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you 

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these 

to have you listen at all, it's necessary 

to talk about trees.

The Exterminating Angel

Reading Henry Green’s second novel, Party Going (1939) to the place where a group of moneyed boobs is gathered at a train station beset by thick fog. They are bound for the South of France, but the trains won’t move before the fog lifts. Stationing servants to guard their unchecked luggage, the group adjourn to a hotel overlooking the station. Soon, however, the crowd of stranded travelers outside, who don’t have the money to check in to the hotel, grows restless: 

'Robert, what on earth are they doing to the doors?' 'Oh that? They are putting up steel shutters over the main entrance so they told me when I came in.’...'But, my dear, they aren't going to shut us up in this awful place, surely? What do they want to put shutters up for and steel ones?' 'It's the fog, I believe. Last time there was bad fog and a lot of people were stuck here they made a rush for this place I believe to get something to eat. Good Lord! it doesn't make you nervous, does it?' The management had shut the steel doors down because when once before another fog had come as thick as this hundreds and hundreds of the crowd, unable to get home by train or bus, had pushed into this hotel and quietly clamoured for rooms, beds, meals, and more and more had pressed quietly, peaceably in until, although they had been most well behaved, by weight of numbers they had smashed everything, furniture, lounges, reception offices, the two bars, doors. Fifty-two had been injured and compensated and one of them was a little Tommy Tucker, now in a school for cripples, only fourteen years of age, and to be supported all his life at the railway company's expense by order of a High Court Judge. 'It's terrifying,' Julia said, 'I didn't know there were so many people in the world.'(1) 

A group of people effectively trapped in a hotel for an indefinite period is not without its metaphorical potential. It reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s exploration of a similar – but great deal more unusual – situation in his film The Exterminating Angel. While the characters in Henry Green’s novel are literally trapped inside the hotel, in Buñuel’s film there are no physical impediments to stop the characters from leaving. They simply find that they cannot. As Buñuel explained, “It's the story of a group of friends who have dinner together after seeing a play, but when they go into the living room after dinner, they find that for some inexplicable reason they can't leave.” What better movie plot for people who’ve gone through months of pandemic self-isolation? 

Buñuel is the only major film artist who managed to make masterpieces almost fifty years apart – Un chien Andalou (1929) and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). He is also perhaps the one who made the greatest number of stinkers – films that failed on a number of levels. Think of two films he made back-to-back, both literary adaptations: Abismos de Pasión, based on Wuthering Heights, and Robinson Crusoe. Neither film even begins to evoke the novels that inspired them (if “inspired” is the word for it). Of Buñuel’s nineteen Mexican films, only three still hold up. I have written elsewhere about Él, which has suffered the fate of gross overpraise, but I have also devoted space on this blog to Los Olvidados and Nazarin, two quite different but considerably better films from his Mexican period. 

One of the best qualities of Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh is his avoidance, even abhorrence, of cant. He hated the influence of film theory, which he attributed to French snobbery, and took a practical view of his own work, his successes and failures. For instance, he was always dissatisfied by the paucity of his Mexican films’ budgets. When he made Viridiana in Spain, he wrote, “I had a reasonable budget for once”. The low budgets of Los Olvidados and Nazarin actually helped those films, but The Exterminating Angel required some expense, which Buñuel was unable to do. 

When Buñuel mentioned The Exterminating Angel in his memoir, he was somewhat apologetic: [It] was made in Mexico, although I regret that I was unable to shoot it in Paris or London with European actors and adequate costumes. Despite the beauty of the house where it was shot and my effort to select actors who didn't look particularly Mexican, there was a certain tawdriness in many of its aspects... The Exterminating Angel is one of the rare films I've sat through more than once, and each time I regret its weaknesses, not to mention the very short time we had to work on it. Basically, I simply see a group of people who couldn't do what they wanted to – leave a room.(2) 

Almost from the outset of the film it becomes clear that something strange is happening inside a palatial house. Most of the servants are leaving or preparing to leave. Then the party guests arrive through the front doors and proceed upstairs – twice. Even before the party is underway, the chef and his assistant put on their coats and depart, apologizing to the mistress of the house, who tells them never to return. There is a small bear and a bunch of sheep in the kitchen, which were going to be used as part of the evening’s entertainment. They appear later in the film when the guests find they cannot leave the room to which they adjourned after dinner. Starving, the guests attack the sheep, slaughter them and roast them using wood from the floor. Eventually, an old man dies of natural causes, and a young couple close themselves in a cupboard and commit suicide. 

The problem with many of Buñuel’s films that have surrealist elements, but that aren’t entirely surrealist, is the narrative either overtakes them or is seriously disrupted by them. The gathering of dinner party guests in their gowns and tuxedoes follows a predictable course as night gives way to day and then to night again. Their manners deteriorate, their tempers flare, they undo their restrictive clothing and loosen their restrictive morals. The premise that some invisible force blocks them from getting out and everyone else outside from getting in works like a kind of extended Twilight Zone episode, or like a horror film. Buñuel had worked in horror films before. He had worked – uncredited – with Robert Florey on The Beast With Five Fingers, creating the scene in which a severed hand (one of Buñuel’s recurring fixations) moves through a library. A hand makes an appearance in Exterminating Angel, not to mention chicken feet. But even a horror film is ineffective if we aren’t given a reason to care about the characters. We aren’t given sufficient cause to care for any of Buñuel’s characters in The Exterminating Angel. Consequently, the degradations inflicted upon them by Buñuel’s invisible surrealist force become pointless all too quickly. 

After several tedious days, the victims of the invisible force figure out a way to release themselves from its power and leave the house. They celebrate their liberation with a thanksgiving mass, but soon discover that they are confined to the cathedral. The streets erupt in violence and a police crackdown and the film ends with a flock of sheep entering the church. Some critics found Buñuel’s apparent refusal to explain the film as audacious. But what is there to explain? However you choose to make sense of something as deliberately inexplicable as this film is justified.

Unfortunately, The Exterminating Angel has been the victim of a great deal of critical flapdoodle ever since its release. By now it’s practically received knowledge that it’s a “masterpiece.” Having first watched it in the 70s and watching it again this past week, its surrealist content now seems contrived and its jokes – always at our expense – are terribly dated. Uncomfortably poised between Viridiana and Simon of the Desert, two genuine masterpieces, The Exterminating Angel falls between two stools. 

(1) Party Going by Henry Green 2nd edition (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962). 

(2) My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).

Les Mauvais Coups

I have spent a lifetime of filmgoing resigned to the fact that I will probably never have a chance to see certain films that were recommended by film critics who are now all dead. Back when movies had to be physically hunted down in the American heartland before I could see them being screened on one or two days in some decrepit art house that’s no longer there or an auditorium on some university campus required an intrepid spirit and a full tank of gas. It was a bit like checking farmer’s almanacs so you could witness a natural phenomenon that only took place once a year in the middle of nowhere at night. Very often, the film you tracked down had been recommended by a film critic years before and you eventually saw it, based on his or her recommendation. That’s the only connection you could make in those days (in my case I’m talking about the 1970s) and your trust in that critic’s judgement was enough to risk the trip across town at eight o’clock with your dad driving you because your license was suspended. 

In an essay published in The Hudson Review in 1965, “Some Obiter Dicta on Recent French Films,” Vernon Young singled out four films for scrutiny: Claude Lelouch’s L’Amour Avec des si (he misidentified it Avec des si), Jacques Démy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Truffaut’s La Peau Douce, and Les Mauvais Coups. Only his last choice required explanation:

“My justification for introducing a five-year-old film is my belief that among the critic’s obligations is the salvaging of neglected films before they go softly into that dark night, a fate that appears to be overtaking François Leterrier’s Les Mauvais Coups.” 

Let’s just say that Leterrier’s film, despite Young’s valiant effort, was overtaken. The reason, Young pointed out, was probably because, at the time of its release, it wasn’t recognizably a product of the New Wave: 

"What should seem obvious to any filmgoer who is old enough to have a memory is that the similarities between the generation of filmmakers in France and the preceding ones are more numerous than the discrepancies. However exuberant, experimental, informal, or even disorderly the new contingent has insisted on being, with whatever degree of seriousness its members have tried out audacities of narration and cutting, it has been working, for the most part, in what might be called the classical tradition of French cinema. . . . I want to illustrate the range and the rich interdependence of French film-making with four films."

Sixty-one years later, I finally found Les Mauvais Coups, and I am pleased to announce that I wasn’t disappointed. The title is practically untranslatable. The Bad Knocks is a close approximation, but it doesn't work for a title, any more than The 400 Blows did. It's set in an especially soggy and bleak autumn, and the emotions on display are especially raw. But there is also an undressed Alexandra Stewart and a thinly disguised lesbian undercurrent; so an American distributor called it Naked Autumn and it had the usual limited release to arthouse cinemas across the U.S. 

As it happens, Naked Autumn is not a half-bad title. It captures the visual tone of the film, a quite unpicturesque setting – the eastern French department of Jura, near the Swiss border, a region of lakes and vineyards which, in September, gives way all too readily to autumnal gloom. A couple married for ten years, Milan and Roberte, live in a chateau with one servant, Radiguette, who cooks for them. Milan has retired from race car driving and appears to respond to living in a quiet nowhere better than Roberte, who has settled into a routine of alcohol consumption. 

After a panoramic introduction under the opening credits to a landscape of gnarled tree limbs against an antelucan sky, accompanied by discordant piano chords, we are set down at an old chateau (probably a tourist hotel by now) in which an alarm clock rings. A man, Milan, wakes, snuffs the alarm and turns on the lamp. He tries to rouse Roberte lying beside him but gets only a grumbling “leave me alone” out of her. He manages to get her attention with a few shots of the hair of the dog. They’re up early to go duck shooting. 

They arrive at a predetermined spot outdoors just as the sun is rising. Milan tells Roberte to watch as the morning mist lifts. “I always love that,” he says. “It’s like a girl undressing.“ He bags a jay. “A male,” he tells Roberte. “The female will be lonely,” she says. Milan is in his element. But Roberte, played by Simone Signoret as if her career were on the line, isn’t up for something so wholesome. A strong undercurrent of discontent is revealed between them. She reminds him of an infidelity and he tells her of a recurring dream of her with another man. 

Back in the chateau, Milan works on writing his reminiscences of Le Mans, ostensibly the reason they’ve come to live in such a remote place. Their pastime seems to be mutual torment – her jealousy versus his now jaded faithfulness. Hélène, an attractive young school teacher arrives in the village, and both Milan and Roberte see potential in her. He notices her youthful confidence, she sees in her a rival. Hélène is played by the Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart, who would soon become a siren of French cinema. (I will never forget her as Alain’s final, unobtainable love object Solange in Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet.) 

Reginald Kernan plays Milan. He was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1914 and died in Savannah, Georgia in 1983. In between he had been a doctor, a model, and an actor in four French films. Les Mauvais Coups was the first and by far the best. He is exceptionally tall, which makes him a very unlikely race car driver, but he has a distinguished face and bearing.

But then there is Signoret. She is fantastic. When she is in the shot she devours everything – the décor, the other actors – even the fetching Alexandra. Signoret plays a woman desperately clutching to the last remaining straws that make her feel alive – an obstinate man who gave up his only passion when a friend was killed in a racing accident. She allows Milan an occasional fling as long as he comes back to her when it’s over. What she doesn’t see – until he makes her see it – is that it’s over for her as well. 

In the small role of Luigi, Milan’s racing manager, it was marvelous to see Marcello Pagliero again. He played the Italian resistance leader tortured by Nazis in Rossellini’s Open City. 

Jean Badal, the cinematographer, contributes beautifully fluid black-and-white imagery of an uninspiring locality. The music supplied by Maurice Leroux is subtly atonal. It always strikes me that, while such music scrupulously avoids being programmatic, it’s used so often in films to evoke discord and darkness. Here it fits quite unobtrusively.  

I found Les Mauvais Coups to be better than most of Chabrol – not as cool, but more musical, less mannered, without "indications" pointing toward a bigger design. The trouble with genre movies is that they’re weighed down, forced into a pre-existing framework. Chabrol’s best films transcend genres, but they still keep one foot in genre. François Leterrier, who was discovered for the lead role in Bresson's A Man Escaped, wasn’t trying to make any personal statement or invent a new style. He wasn’t trying to shock or surprise the viewer. He was using all of his skills to realize a thankless tale of loveless love. The marriage depicted in the film is somewhat familiar to a divorcée like me. Returning to Vernon Young, he sums up the reason why Milan resists the love of Hélène: 

Long servitude to a lethal woman burns too much heart out of a man for him to believe he has enough left to risk on another.

Something New

In his review of Robert McCrum’s definitive biography of P. G. Wodehouse, James Wood insisted that what made the creator of so much light-hearted literary fun so important was his moral and philosophical innocence: 

"That the work can march so easily, morally speaking, on an empty stomach; that it can achieve so many traditionally literary things without ever daring the scandal of meaning; that it can be bottomless--ungrounded, unmoored by reality--but threaten no abysses whatsoever, is completely fascinating, because it seems so fatly happy with what, for most of us, would be hardship and starvation--a cosmos of eternal and relentless frivolity."*

I was  thinking the same thing when I took up Wodehouse’s first Blandings Castle novel, Something New (called Something Fresh in Britain), smiling all the way to the last pages of the penultimate (11th) chapter, when I came to a scene in which, to my surprise and delight, something like a philosophical statement appears. The novel’s hero, Ashe Marson, has triumphed and is looking for Joan Valentine, a woman with whom he’s been in undeclared love for most of the story: 

Joan was nowhere to be seen. In none of the spots where she might have been expected to be at such a time was she to be found. Ashe had almost given up the search when, going to the back door and looking out as a last chance, he perceived her walking slowly on the gravel drive. She greeted Ashe with a smile, but something was plainly troubling her. She did not speak for a moment and they walked side by side. 

“What is it?” said Ashe at length. “What is the matter?” 

 She looked at him gravely. 

“Gloom,” she said. “Despondency, Mr. Marson. A sort of flat feeling. Don’t you hate things happening?” 

“I don’t quite understand.” 

“Well, this affair of Aline, for instance. It’s so big. It makes one feel as though the whole world had altered. I should like nothing to happen ever, and life just to jog peacefully along. That’s not the gospel I preached to you in Arundel Street, is it! I thought I was an advanced apostle of action; but I seem to have changed. I’m afraid I shall never be able to make clear what I do mean. I only know I feel as though I have suddenly grown old. These things are such milestones. Already I am beginning to look on the time before Aline behaved so sensationally as terribly remote. To-morrow it will be worse, and the day after that worse still. I can see that you don’t in the least understand what I mean.” 

“Yes; I do—or I think I do. What it comes to, in a few words, is that somebody you were fond of has gone out of your life. Is that it?” Joan nodded. 

“Yes—at least, that is partly it. I didn’t really know Aline particularly well, beyond having been at school with her, but you’re right. It’s not so much what has happened as what it represents that matters. This elopement has marked the end of a phase of my life. I think I have it now. My life has been such a series of jerks. I dash along—then something happens which stops that bit of my life with a jerk; and then I have to start over again—a new bit. I think I’m getting tired of jerks. I want something stodgy and continuous. 

“I’m like one of the old bus horses that could go on forever if people got off without making them stop. It’s the having to get the bus moving again that wears one out. This little section of my life since we came here is over, and it is finished for good. I’ve got to start the bus going again on a new road and with a new set of passengers. I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one set of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?” 

What Joan is complaining about, in a roundabout way, is that she has reached the end of a wonderful experience – one from which she has derived a message, but which she, as a woman frozen in Wodehouse’s eternally frivolous universe, can’t articulate. It is the message Robert Frost wrote at the end of his poem “Reluctance”: 

Ah, when to the heart of man 

  Was it ever less than a treason 

To go with the drift of things, 

  To yield with a grace to reason, 

And bow and accept the end 

  Of a love or a season? 

But it’s that strange question she asks, “I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one set of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?” Joan is simply using a metaphor to help explain – especially to herself – how she feels, but suddenly she’s feeling sympathy for an old horse pulling a wagonload of people. She can manage the strenuous effort that one stretch of her life requires of her once she gets going, but it’s reaching the end of the stretch, the stopping and the having to start again that bothers her. And, as she makes clear to the reader, and hopefully to Ashe, it’s an existential bother. Joan is riven by the knowledge that something wonderful has ended and she can’t accept what would seem to be the inevitable outcome, which for her will mean a return to her life – her struggle – alone. Ashe senses this: 

A sudden dryness invaded Ashe’s throat. He tried to speak, but found no words. Joan went on: 

“Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It’s like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it’s about nothing—just a jumble.” 

“There is one thing,” said Ashe, “that knits it together.” 

“What is that?” 

“The love interest.” 

Their eyes met and suddenly there descended on Ashe confidence. He felt cool and alert, sure of himself, as in the old days he had felt when he ran races and, the nerve-racking hours of waiting past, he listened for the starter’s gun. Subconsciously he was aware he had always been a little afraid of Joan, and that now he was no longer afraid. 

“Joan, will you marry me?” Her eyes wandered from his face. He waited. 

“I wonder!” she said softly. “You think that is the solution?” 

“Yes.” 

“How can you tell?” she broke out. “We scarcely know each other. I shan’t always be in this mood. I may act restless again. I may find it is the jerks that I really like.” 

“You won’t!” 

“You’re very confident.” 

“I am absolutely confident.” 

“ ‘She travels fastest who travels alone,’ ” misquoted Joan. 

“What is the good,” said Ashe, “of traveling fast if you’re going round in a circle? I know how you feel. I’ve felt the same myself. You are an individualist. You think there is something tremendous just round the corner and that you can get it if you try hard enough. There isn’t—or if there is it isn’t worth getting. Life is nothing but a mutual aid association. I am going to help old Peters—you are going to help me—I am going to help you.” 

“Help me to do what?” 

“Make life coherent instead of a jumble.” 

“Mr. Marson -” 

“Don’t call me Mr. Marson.” 

“Ashe, you don’t know what you are doing. You don’t know me. I’ve been knocking about the world for five years and I’m hard—hard right through. I should make you wretched.” 

“You are not in the least hard—and you know it. Listen to me, Joan. Where’s your sense of fairness? You crash into my life, turn it upside down, dig me out of my quiet groove, revolutionize my whole existence; and now you propose to drop me and pay no further attention to me. Is it fair?” 

“But I don’t. We shall always be the best of friends.” 

“We shall—but we will get married first.” 

“You are determined?” 

“I am!” Joan laughed happily. 

“How perfectly splendid! I was terrified lest I might have made you change your mind. I had to say all I did to preserve my self-respect after proposing to you. Yes; I did. How strange it is that men never seem to understand a woman, however plainly she talks! You don’t think I was really worrying because I had lost Aline, do you? I thought I was going to lose you, and it made me miserable. You couldn’t expect me to say it in so many words; but I thought—I was hoping—you guessed. I practically said it. Ashe! What are you doing?” 

Ashe paused for a moment to reply. 

“I am kissing you,” he said. 

“But you mustn’t! There’s a scullery maid or somebody looking through the kitchen window. She will see us.” 

Ashe drew her to him. 

“Scullery maids have few pleasures,” he said. “Theirs is a dull life. Let her see us.” 

The last thing I would do is accuse Wodehouse of having a single philosophical bone in his body, but even at the moment of utmost fulfilment (in the sex-free Wodehouse universe, that is) for Ashe and Joan, there is a flash from an unknown life – that of a scullery maid – who might be windowgazing longingly on their happiness. It’s a beautiful, transcendent moment in an outpouring of whimsy.

* "The Moral Baby," The New Republic, Mar 13, 2005.