Pulp

That bizarre adventure which put five people in the cemetery and ruled me out as a customer for laxatives. Mickey King

I watched TCM Remembers just before Christmas, a look back at all of the movie lights that have gone out this year. The British filmmaker Mike Hodges died too late - December 17 - to make the cut. He was 90. I've written about his work before on this blog, but I haven't devoted a post to what is my favorite of all his films, Pulp (1972), which he made after his first film Get Carter became a huge hit. Pulp, however, was a financial failure, and it sent Hodges's career in a different direction. Moving easily between film and television, a career spanning forty years had its surprises and disappointments.

The claims I'm going to make for Pulp are largely personal. Since I first watched the film, on a late night television airing in the late 1970s, every time I had an opportunity to see it again over the fifty years since, I did so happily. By now I must have seen it seven or eight times. I became a part of its cult following.

Pulp is an odd, one-off, and rather self-indulgent film, the work of a young filmmaker who had a rare opportunity to make a personal statement with resources he wouldn't otherwise have had at his disposal. And Mike Hodges did dispose of them, as surely as if he had misplaced them. The Three Mikes production company (Michael Klinger, Michael Caine, and Hodges) would dissolve and Michael Caine would never work with Hodges again. 

The stodgy plot is uneventful. In a publishing house typing pool "somewhere in the Mediterranean," a writer of low-grade novels crammed with vicarious crime and sex - otherwise known as "pulp," named Mickey King turns up for an appointment with the representative of a mysterious client who wants Mickey to ghost-write his life story. King is played by Michael Caine, coiffed and bespectacled in 70s style, and he narrates the story with characteristic deadpan humor. 

The mysterious client turns out to be former Hollywood star and associate of gangsters, Preston Gilbert, played by Mickey Rooney, now retired and living in a secluded villa. (The locale feels like Italy, but shooting was done entirely on the island of Malta.) Gilbert wants Mickey to write his tell-all biography, but before Mickey can even commit an opening sentence to paper, Gilbert is murdered at a party. Feeling cheated out of a lucrative fee, Mickey proceeds to investigate the crime on his own, and almost gets killed following clues to a dead end. He winds up the captive of a corrupt prince, recuperating from a gunshot wound to his shin. Sitting on a terrace and writing of his imagined revenge on his captors, he mutters, "I'll get the bastards yet!"

As Mickey, Michael Caine is engaged with the material, even when the material isn't engaging. Mickey Rooney is typecast as a Hollywood has-been, showing off even when no one is watching. He's killed in the middle of a painful slapstick routine, posing as an incompetent waiter. When he falls dead, the crowd applauds. Lionel Stander, always playing heavies, is at least authentic, even if nothing he says or does is. Micky's noirish one-liners are used as a counterpoint to the action, which accentuates their falsity. Hodges is spoofing his own spoof. The cast is dotted with Italian actors, notably Leopoldo Trieste. Pulp was partly an homage to John Huston, and in fact the Italian actor Giulio Donnini appeared in Beat the Devil nineteen years before Pulp.

Having seen the film so many times, I was curious to know what Michael Caine had to say about it in his memoir, What's It All About? Having met Shakira, his wife-to-be, shortly before shooting in Malta, his memory of it is rose-tinted:

Pulp was the second film that I produced with Michael Klinger after Get Carter, and Mike Hodges was again the director. It was a strange little piece and it had also been written by Mike as a sort of homage to John Huston. It was a real oddball of a movie that never really quite worked. Its heart was in the right place, but in a business where wallets are kept over the heart it did not count for much. Pulp never made any real money, but I again had a wonderful experience making it so I remember it with affection. It was winter in England when we arrived in Malta, where it was beautifully warm so we were ahead already. Shakira eventually joined me and the temperature got even hotter as we embarked on an idyll of really discovering each other in a hotel on the beach, which couldn’t have been better had we planned it. Being absolutely besotted by this lady I don’t remember much of the actual film-making, even though I was supposed to be the associate producer, but Mike Klinger held it all together and gave us his blessing. He was a small rotund man with a perpetual smile on his face, and what with this look and his benevolent attitude towards Shakira and me, he always seemed like an elderly and slightly sinful Cupid.(1)

I recently found some remarks made by Mike Hodges in a Foreword to a book about Get Carter that apply equally to Pulp:

It is salutary to be reminded of the process of creativity. For film makers of my age influences have often become obscured. Ghosts in the machine. Pentimento. A film seen just once in the distant past – and I mean just ‘once’ – for this was long before videos. Then you will come across it decades later – usually on  – and recognise where some ‘moment’ in one of your films has come from. It is always startling fact and fiction occupying the same territory in one’s brain – recognising our amazing ability to collect and store slivers of time. With that comes the realisation that originality is not quite what it seems.(2)

It's difficult for me to properly assess the qualities that I like so much in Pulp, since it's become such a private place. "Everyone walking this earth," Mickey wrote, "has a secret closet he'd rather left closed. Stop." Having no one with whom to share this little film suits me just fine. Again, I won't call it a work of art, since I'm quite capable of distinguishing between what I like and what is demonstrably good. Pulp falls considerably short of greatness, but I love it. Every time I remember the film I think of the bittersweet theme music composed by George Martin. Like the film, it's stuck in my head on eternal repeat.

Remember that thou art pulp and unto pulp thou shalt return.

Cheerio, Mike Hodges.

1 Caine, Michael, What's It All About? (London: Arrow Books, 2010)

2 Chibnall, Steve, Get Carter (London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2003)

Christmas Evil

Some movies are done a double disservice by publicity campaigns that never seem to understand them. Christmas Evil is a good example of this. Marketed as a slasher movie on its first release in 1980, which contributed to its being a box office flop, it has lately - since 2000 - been repackaged as a psychological drama rather like the Joaquin Phoenix movie Joker, which has contributed to the movie's new, albeit modest, lease on life. But Christmas Evil is neither a slasher movie nor a psychological drama. It's very slight on gore (only four corpses) and its psychological depth is shallow. Why, then, has it acquired a cult following? In the DVD commentary, an enthusiastic John Waters called it the "greatest Christmas movie ever made."

Professional clowns have been having a tough time of it for the past few decades, because of a cultural shift - brought on by fact, the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, who was also a professional clown, and fiction, Stephen King's supernatural clown character Pennywise - have combined to make clowns into creepy figures. Santa Claus has been subject to the same treatment in American popular culture for at least as long, if Christmas Evil is anything to go by.

When we first meet Harry Stadling, the hero of the movie, he's a little boy who, with his big brother Philly and his mother, is sitting on the stairs watching as someone dressed as Santa Claus comes down the chimney, eats some bread and honey and drinks milk left out for him, places gifts under their Christmas tree and in their stockings on the mantle, and then, just as in the Clement Moore poem, "laying his finger aside of his nose,/And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose." Back in their bedroom, Philly tells Harry it was their dad dressed up as Santa, and calls Harry "crazy" for thinking it was really Santa. Harry insists that it was Santa, and sneaks back downstairs to discover Santa and his mother making out. Harry angrily runs upstairs to the attic where he takes a glass snow globe and smashes it, a la Citizen Kane, on the floor. He takes a piece of the broken glass and cuts his hand. The blood falls on the roof of the broken snow globe house and the credits roll. (1)

Segue to "the present," a man dressed as Santa wakes and goes about his morning routine to the accompaniment of Christmas records through rooms filled with Santa paraphernalia. Next we see him on the roof looking through binoculars at windows across the street, but he isn't exactly a pervert - he's spying on children doing their chores, playing with dolls (the good ones) and one who is cutting centerfolds out of a Penthouse magazine (a bad one). The music suddenly turns into jarring electronica as Harry runs to two big books, one for good children and one for bad, in which he inscribes the names of the children he just spied on. 

Harry has a desk job at the Jolly Dream toy factory, which makes perfect sense knowing his fixation on Santa Claus, but he misses working on the assembly line. He lectures employees on their lunch break about making quality toys. They look at one another and grin. The assembly line workers don't care that their toys are poorly made. Another assembly line worker named Frank needs someone to cover his night shift so, knowing that Harry misses the line, he talks him into covering for him.

Later that night, on his way home from the factory, Harry sees Frank in a bar and overhears him calling him a schmuck for taking his shift. Harry rushes home and, almost apoplectic with anger, he takes a small doll in his hands and, humming "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" slowly crushes it. Harry is clearly becoming unglued, but this is just the beginning. It's almost as if, when he finally dresses up as Santa Claus, which happens at the 40 minute mark, Harry becomes an avenging Christmas angel. 

Harry goes to a mental hospital for children and, despite some initial resistance from the staff, hands over a van-load of toys for the children. The nurses cheer him as he drives away in a van with a sleigh painted on the side. His euphoria changes when he stops at the church where his boss is attending Midnight Mass. As soon as they see Harry on the sidewalk still dressed as Santa, some of the exiting worshippers begin to taunt him. He responds by stabbing one of them in the eye and striking three of them in the head with a hatchet. 

The entire scene of Harry's visit to co-worker Frank's house - beginning with his attempt to fit down his chimney (he gets stuck and only extricates himself after strenuous effort), his attempt to smother Frank with his sack of toys, with his wife asleep beside him, finally slashing his throat with the star atop a bedside Christmas tree, his wife waking and her breathless scream, and Harry's flight through a glass door that slowly closes - is utterly macabre. 

Christmas Evil is a movie with insurmountable problems. The biggest problem is the obvious psychotic who is the center of the story. We're given clues to indicate what drove Harry over the edge, but not what got him to the edge in the first place. And we're not even sure where the edge occurs. He switches from being jolly St. Nick to a homicidal maniac without any apparent transition. There is no connective tissue between these two Harrys. It's as if the director simply decided that he'd shown us enough of Harry being subsumed in the character of Santa Claus and it was time for him to go berserk. 

The movie muddles its way to whatever point it's trying to make, which has something vaguely to do with the corruption of Christmas into the meaningless commercial circus that we have to endure today. The cast has several familiar faces, including Brandon Maggart, whose performance as Harry has been lauded by a lot of people who clearly don't understand how easy it is for an actor to play a mentally unbalanced character. (Practically everyone still swoons over Adam Sandler's psycho impersonation in the terrible Punch Drunk Love.) When an actor acts as if he has lost his mind, who other than someone with experience with lunatics can tell if he's getting it right? At first, Harry comes across as a fairly common functioning sociopath. Then, for no apparent reason, the movie veers into criminal insanity. 

I can sympathize with the desire of apparently so many to see Santa made into a sinister figure - a supernatural being who spies on children to learn if they're naughty or nice, who invades people's homes when they're sleeping and who invariably disappoints them with gifts they hadn't asked for. Christmas Evil has its moments, as when an angry crowd chases Santa down a nocturnal street with flaming torches. And Harry's final apotheosis is almost poetic. Having followed him thus far into his delusions, we are as amazed as he apparently is when his sleigh/van takes flight, turning left towards the moon, "ere he drove out of sight." 

Merry Christmas!

(1) The title of the version I watched was You Better Watch Out. 

Three

And then all he could think was, It's my fault. I let the summer go on one day too long.

What an incredible mythology modern culture has constructed around the summer season, which is the season of school vacations, family holidays to the beach, and a momentary pause in our working lives. Somehow, love affairs flame and are extinguished, friendships grow sharper, knowledge and wisdom are attained - all in the space of three fleeting months. It is exactly as Karl Marx defined the alienated man, who can only relax and feel alive in his time away from work.

Occasionally on this blog I take a moment to notice a film that suffers an obscurity that I feel is undeserved. A few weeks ago, while gathering information about the American writer James Salter, I came across a film I was utterly unaware of called simply Three that Salter wrote - based on Irwin Shaw's short story "Then We Were Three" - and directed that is a kind of variation on a theme that he explored in his novel A Sport and a Pastime, namely what used to be called a love triangle, or three dimensions that are resisting the pressure of gravity to become two. The story of Three is remarkably simple: near the end of summer two young American men are wandering together from Italy to France, celebrating the last great days of their youth, when they meet a beautiful girl who agrees to accompany them on condition that she doesn't choose one of them and ruin their friendship. But, of course, she does, and the story ends with the departure of one of the men while his friend and the girl are sleeping - together. 

Something of the same conflict appears, albeit in the imagination of the narrator, in Salter's novel, which is often intensely erotic, and suggests a kind of jealous desire that he could be a stand-in for one or the other subjects of his narrative. But whether he is jealous of Dean's intimacy with Anne-Marie or jealous of Anne-Marie's intimacy with Dean is left to the reader to speculate. I knew that Salter had worked as a screenwriter, most notably for Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, but that, according to Wikipedia, he became "disdainful of it" - likely because of his failure to achieve commercial success in the medium. 

The "three" in Irwin Shaw's story are Munnie, Bert, and Martha, who become in the film Taylor, Bert, and Marty. It shouldn't have taken much effort for Salter to improve on Shaw's story, which is a straightforward portrait of childhood's last fling before responsibilities are imposed. The film's tagline, which appears on its poster (see attached), is "... but at the same time?" which is a salacious promise that the film doesn't come close to delivering. 

In my book report on A Sport and a Pastime, I suggested that, if the book were made into a film, it would be directed by Éric Rohmer. I failed to remember that a quite similar story had already been adapted to film by François Truffaut called Jules and Jim, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. One of the themes explored in the Truffaut film was the threesome - a personal relationship between two people expanded to include a third. As its title suggests, in the case of Jules and Jim the central relationship is the one between two men, a German and a Frenchman. When they meet and become mutually fascinated with a woman named Catherine, their friendship is tested when the woman chooses to sleep with Jules. Despite her marrying Jules, and having his child, Catherine is unhappy and the two friends agree that the solution to the problem would be for Jules and Jim and Catherine to cohabit. 

In Three it becomes too obvious which of the two friends will break their pact with Marty and sleep with her. Though he is achingly sincere and at one point Marty even asks him into her room (he demurs for the sake of his friendship with Bert), Taylor is the one who is cheated. 27-year-old Sam Waterston was cast as Taylor, and an Australian singer named Robie Porter, who is actually quite good, was cast as Bert. But whatever interest the film holds today was the casting of 22-year-old Charlotte Rampling (even her name is erotic) as Marty. 

Waterston is a shy, and rather forced presence throughout the film. As an actor, he really didn't develop much throughout his long subsequent career. (He was a terrible choice for Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields.) He was 27 during shooting, but looks much younger. He is tall but physically quite unimposing, even when he appears bare-arsed in an attempted sea rescue. Charlotte is eminently sexier, for reasons that are hard to identify. After all these years, the allure of the young Charlotte Rampling is something of a mystery. She made quite a career for herself by appearing in arty Italian films like The Damned and The Night Porter that she improved with her nudity. 

Every now and then, Salter shows us, from a distance, Bert and Marty walking or playing together like contented children, while Taylor looks on forlornly. I waited for a spark that would ignite the story, but I waited in vain. Only at the very end does a strong emotion appear, but it's Taylor's dejection and disappointment at Bert and Marty violating the terms of their arrangement. Just after dawn, he stealthily takes his leave of them, asleep together upstairs, and drives the old Peugeot down the tree-lined street. Once the car is safely out of sight, Salter shows Bert and Marty walking to a café table and taking their seats - a duet now instead of a trio. 

A word about the cinematography by Etienne Becker, who was the son of the marvelous filmmaker Jacques Becker. He started his career with Chris Marker and Éric Rohmer. He was responsible, just prior to shooting Three, for the haunting imagery of Louis Malle's Phantom India. In Three, we are treated to glimpses of Florence from refreshing angles and scenes shot in the south of France by night and early morning light. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, I enjoy directing attention to films whose obscurity is undeserved. Three failed to convince me that it's one of those films. Florence, Antibes and Biarritz are eternally alluring, but the three people chosen to walk around them are not.

The Revenge of the Herd

The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

One of the not so novel ideas underpinning Ken Kesey's novel - and Miloš Formans movie - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that we put the wrong people in our insane asylums. The real loonies are the ones in charge. How could anyone have a glance at Sight and Sound's brand new list of the Greatest Films of All Time without coming to the same conclusion about the contemporary film world? 

I once believed that the whole point of doing this sort of thing once a decade was to establish a canon for fledgling film goers to use as a serious guide through the entirely unserious carnival world of movies. For the last 40 years, however, its seriousness has been challenged by a generation of critics that is growing in numbers and influence who seem much more like fans than critics. 

A canon is something like a baton or a torch that is passed from one generation to the next that celebrates the best work of the past - whether the past is many centuries old, in the case of poetry and music or, in the case of film, only a single century plus 27 years. Standards, especially standards of excellence, are always evolving, but the last three Sight and Sound polls have named a different film as the Greatest of All Time. The latest, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, was made 47 years ago. Clearly, it hasn't taken critics that long to decide that it's a great film. 

In the Autumn 1952 issue of Sight and Sound, the editors published an introduction that was really a sort of disclaimer. The editors voiced some of the reservations that the "nearly 100" critics (of whom 69 responded to the poll) had made, the most crucial of which was

our request was for personal references – “the films that have impressed you most personally” – and many critics were quick and right to answer that the films one thought best (in the history of the cinema, etc.), were not necessarily the films one liked best.

This has become the real sticking point in any kind of criticism: learning to distinguish between what one likes and what one believes is good. They can sometimes agree, but they are not at all interchangeable and every competent critic must always keep one from interfering with the other. 

But something else has come to light in the few days since the latest Poll was published. In an effort to be more inclusive of works that were made by people outside the mainstream - the mainstream being white males - and, in some cases, bending over backwards in the process - the pollsters reportedly hired a consultant whose mission was to deliberately toss all the usual criteria for compiling the list - like the films that appeared consistently higher on voters' lists - and push another agenda that accommodates the viewpoints of people who are clearly unacquainted with film history. They have succeeded, but not only in foisting a heretofore film outlier to the top of the heap; they accomplished the feat of standing on their own necks.  

A few months ago I listened to an episode from the podcast Against the Rules in which Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Fifth Risk, examined the importance of referees, expert mediators in all fields, and how their function can be subverted when the stakes are conspicuously high. He used the discovery of a hitherto unknown painting that some authenticators, hand picked by the owners of the painting, declared was "the last Leonardo" - painted at least partially by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting had been heavily restored in secret and was eventually auctioned at Christie's for a record $450M to an unidentified Saudi prince. The painting has since disappeared, the Paris Louvre refused to attribute it to Leonardo, and it has been widely repudiated as a fake. So now, thanks to the tampering with vetted authentication, some Saudi prince is in possession of a worthless fake that will go down in history as an enormous hoax. 

In an article about Lewis's podcast, Tim Schneider wrote something that has bearing on the current Sight and Sound fuore:

art authenticators…are heavily incentivized to declare competent if not necessarily spectacular works to be masterpieces by canonical talents, even in the face of legitimate doubt.

The incentives motivating many of the 1600 people who were polled by BFI, nearly twice as many as in 2012, are clearly in conflict with people who have seen every film in the canon, and tens of thousands besides, and who have an understanding of cinematic greatness - an understanding that has been tempered by decades of re-viewing and reappraisal. 

I haven't liked the results of these polls before now. These lists are probably the result of the stupefying effects of capitalism on culture, reducing everything to a monetary value (like a Leonardo) giving comfort to people who read best-sellers and who will like something only when they are assured of its popularity. Ranking films or books or songs represents a deeply philistine misunderstanding of quality, despite Richard Brody's claims to the contrary:

Lists are no substitute for criticism, but those who take them as inimical to criticism are pharisaical. Lists are solo acts of personal passion; voting acknowledges that one is part of a community. While there’s no allegiance or deference invoked by the results of a poll (as there is in an election), the poll’s outcomes are a satisfying reminder that it isn’t only family and friends who share one’s strongest enthusiasms. If a critic feels confident going out on a limb, it’s because of the implicit understanding that there’s a tree.

But the tree is rotten and needs to be pulled down. How do I know this? Think about it for a moment. Jeanne Dielman is a great film that deserves more attention. I can't complain that it's at #1 because at least it knocked Hitchcock's silly Vertigo into the #2 spot. I can understand Richard Brody being tickled by its miraculous appearance at #1. His incentive in voting for it was doubtless to maintain his street creds, such as they are, and his strenuous effort to avoid the charge of being "pharisaical" (a pharisaical word if ever there was one - and isn't it the very height of pharisaism to call a 3 ½ hour film that scrupulously avoids anything close to entertainment value the GOAT?). 

Ordinarily, I would spend a long time deconstructing the new poll, as I have done with past polls. I'm not going to this time. Besides, I'd rather any day be a pharisee than a philistine.

[Postscript December 11: the photo of an old Sight and Sound cover I chose to illustrate this piece shows the front door of the British Film Institute, bombed out during the Blitz. The coincidence was inadvertent, but nonetheless pertinent.]

Book Report: A Sport and a Pastime

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design. 

An old friend chose to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Paris with his family. And I was reading, coincidentally, James Salter's novel about Americans kicking around France, A Sport and a Pastime. Salter was an unabashed francophile. What one encounters most vividly in his novel is his love of France, in the beauties of its civic design, of cities laid out like dreamscapes, people living out their lives in the shadows of monuments from an ancient past, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic. The novel's narrator takes up residence in a house “built right on the Roman wall,” on a street behind a 12th-century cathedral. 

Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in the blue of autumn, it reappears, this old town, provincial autumn that touches the bone. The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four–the years turn dry as leaves. 

In Autun, a city in Burgundy overlooked by tourists, we meet two American men, a 34-year-old anonymous narrator who takes photographs and lives in a house on loan from Parisians, and Dean, who recently quit Yale, whose father is rich, but who is now at ends so loose that a weekend visit to Autun turns into months. Dean meets Anne-Marie, a young French shopgirl, in a nightclub, accompanied by some black American soldiers. 

She’s a girl from the country who works here on weekends, I’ve seen her before. She wears a turtleneck sweater, black skirt, a leather belt cinched tightly around her waist dividing her into two erotic zones. 

Effectively stealing her away from the black men, Dean begins a long, doomed affair with her that involves a great deal of driving from town to town in a 1952 Delage convertible. He cashes in his return plane ticket to extend his stay. But the narration, relating details about Dean and Anne-Marie's affair that are daringly intimate, engages in imaginative invention. Dean, in fact, becomes the narrator's fantasy hero - exactly why we can only guess. The erotic details of Dean's lovemaking suggests something more than friendly interest. Is the narrator fucking Anne-Marie by proxy? Or is he merely using the sex scenes to get closer to Dean, to assume Dean's sexual attractiveness, his success with women? As the loving and lovely narration proceeds, I began to ask "what is he seeking?" and "what has he found?" The Dean/Anne-Marie affair can only go so far, requiring Dean to make promises he can't keep. Sooner or later, he runs out of cash, must borrow from his sister so that he can get away clean from Anne-Marie. There is a last excursion in the Delage, along the River Loire to the coast at Perros-Guirec, a sort of honeymoon built on promises. Dean talks of bringing her to the States. 

When they get back to Autun, there is a long-anticipated goodbye. Dean even borrows from the narrator, using the Delage, which isn't his, as collateral. A last look, then the train to Paris, the plane leaving from Orly. The pang of regrets. The lies that do more harm than they're meant to. But isn't it a sort of dance, after all? A melodrama written by others, imposed on Dean and Ann-Marie? The climax is anti-climactic. The end arrives off stage. 

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move. 

I'm no Dean, but I've said goodbyes to enough women to know the special sweetness of the moment, and the bruises it always leaves. Saying goodbye on a sidewalk outside a club, going to my car around the corner, looking back at her as she seems to dissolve on the sidewalk. Or climbing out of the backseat of a taxi at the curb of a airport terminal, pulling my luggage out of the trunk, kissing another one goodbye. And the look on her face from the rear window as the taxi pulls away, knowing she will never see me again. Or watching her, my wife, leave for work, not knowing the Ryder van parked below is one that I rented, as she gets into her car and drives out of sight. Then the methodical packing of boxes, moving everything that's mine down to the van, then, a final touch, attaching a note to the TV screen explaining - but not explaining - my absence when she gets home later that evening. An absence that became forever. 

If A Sport and a Pastime had been a film, a French film, it would be made by Éric Rohmer. Two years after A Sport and a Pastime was published, Rohmer's third Moral Tale, My Night at Maud's, was released. It tells the story of an egoist named Jean-Louis who knows what he wants - a good Catholic girl (who only appears to be good) - who finds himself at the end of a long day alone with Maud in her one-room flat in Clermont-Ferrand. They engage in a silly moral argument that ends with Maud asking Jean-Louis to stay the night with her. Though finding her extremely attractive (she is played by the great beauty Françoise Fabian), he ruins everything by first insisting they only sleep together, with a heavy blanket between their bodies, but then trying to make love to her. She rebuffs him, asking him archly what became of his morality. Though they remain friends, circumstances pull them apart. 

Years pass and Jean-Louis is strolling down a path to a beach when who should pass by him but Maud. But Jean-Louis is accompanied by his good Catholic girl and their child. As I wrote in my review of the film in 2009:

Something happened at Maud's. Even Maud talks about that night with unabashed nostalgia. Near the end of the film, Jean-Louis refers to it as "that evening," and Maud corrects him: "Evening? Night, you mean. Our night." By so italicizing that wintry night in Clermont, in which two people attract, but ultimately fail, each other, Rohmer comes close to the rueful, fate-streaked universe of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy: 

The Afternoon Sun 

This room, how well I know it. 

Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door, 

for commercial offices. The entire house has now become 

offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies. 

Ah, this room, how familiar it is. 

Near the door, here, was the sofa, 

and in front of it a Turkish rug; 

Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases. 

On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror. 

In the middle, the table where he’d write; 

and the three big wicker chairs. 

Near the window was the bed 

where we made love so many times. 

They must be somewhere still, poor things.

Near the window was the bed: 

the afternoon sun came halfway up. 

… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted 

for one week only … Alas, that week became an eternity. 

[1918; 1919] 

(Daniel Mendelsohn translation)