Le joli mai (Pierre Lhomme, Chris Marker, 1963)
Haut bas fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)
When Vittorio sat down at the table on the terrace at Le Hibou in Paris’s six arrondissement for our annual tête-à-tête, the first thing he wanted to get into as he worked on that first shimmering, golden cognac was actor, comedian, and needy populist Adam Sandler and how everybody knows he’s only given two really remarkable, superlative performances, first in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love from 2002 and then Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers from 2019. Looking thinner, more wiry, and more unkempt than I remember him being this time last year, Vittorio commenced to arguing in his winding way that anybody of sense would rather be Sandler in Uncut Gems as opposed to Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t want to wear that idiotic blue suit every single day, bow and scrape for tepid laughs, break the glass door with my fist in an impotent rage, or do semi-cannibalistic kink stuff with Emily Watson in Hawaii, says Vittorio. I told him he only likes Uncut Gems because he fences stollen jewelry. Touché, he said amiably, a young green-haired gal at the same moment setting down another cognac. I can see Vittorio slump down into a thoughtful meditative stupor. The scene near the beginning of the final act of Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler and Julia Fox make that hand-off window-to-window, says Vittorio with gravity, is the most romantic thing I have seen in my entire life.
My hotel is a block-and-a-half from Chanel and as I weaved through the human traffic, trying to keep a reasonable, steady pace, I contemplated the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. Whenever they send me in to do a cleanup job on some expensive, incoherent screenplay intended to go into production in a fortnight with an untested neophyte director and a cokehead production manager, I read the screenplay over and over for twelve days and twelve nights and then I slaughter a lamb in the bathtub with sage burning. Not in Paris. You can’t do that here. But they’re cool with it in the provinces, and they were cool with it back in Southern Ontario pig shit country. Solitude, malaise, creativity…the beast with two backs. I am not a self. I am not a name. I am to an extent what I survived. Roger that. Weary chronicler, where is your walking stick? I went looking in the vents and light fixtures for strange high-frequency sounds I was hearing and all I discovered was this fistful of sinewy wildebeest hairs. The hotel has an elderly lady with a wide grin in a proper French maid’s get-up who serves me coffee and breakfast while I watch Al Jazeera or the BBC. As soon as she comes around the corner my day brightens and I think of it as one of those “good indicators” the Scientologists in the yoga workshops talk about. Paris is my favourite city, but only for twelve days and twelve nights. I watched some porn on the hotel TV but wasn’t feeling it. All the formality and staging make me itchy. Some of these ladies are wearing far too much foundation. Pornography is just endless stimulation and release for today’s busy on-the-go consumer, but obscenity can be art.
After I got back from a quick, solitary lunch and extended gambol along the Seine, I received a text from my eldest daughter Mirilia: “Did you know that consciousness is extensive of physical brain structure?” I’ll have to sit with that one, I thought. Within the hour, Solange from the production department, the only steady and capable person around, or so it would appear, came up to the room and I pored us each some wine. The first time I met her, Solange told me that she’d had a film professor who when he lectured on the poetic realist strain in French cinema of the 1930s for three consecutive Fridays, kept a large map of Montmartre pinned over the blackboard and referred to it regularly in reference to scenes in important films that had been shot out on the streets. The film we’re supposed to be working on is an adaptation of James M. Cain’s lesser-known Galatea. It is set with distinct purpose in Southern Maryland. Holly Valenty is wife to farmer-restauranteur Val Valenty and the daughter of a prominent family, using “prowtocowl” for protocol and “hawndshake” for handshake. “You git, and git quick,” demands one character of another. The narrator is Duke Webster, a washed-up boxer and itinerant labourer who only really had any fight in him when he was seriously pissed off. We’re going to keep the voice-over or we’re fried. Holly’s husband would appear intent on feeding his wife to death, fattening her to an early grave. Foie gras metaphors are utilized. When Duke first lays eyes on Holly, what he sees instinctively horrifies and disgusts him. However, in short order Duke and Holly discover that they are able to be tender to one another as nobody has ever previously been to either party. The moral of the story is: tenderness and devotion will not save you. Love. Desire. Insanity. As Holly gets larger and larger and Duke more and more pissed off…somebody in Wisconsin is bound to die. Solange and I actually both like this story a lot. On paper. How are we supposed to put this up on the screen? How are we to credibly make the lead actress appear to grow fatter and fatter? Twice now producers have tried to explain this to me, but nothing I heard satisfied even remotely. Alas, I’m comfortable knowing I’ll receive my modest stipend before all the larceny and backstabbing starts to set in. As Solange left for her pilates class, I opened the Dalkey Archive edition of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point on the bedside table and read her the following pair of sentences aloud: “If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.” Yum, said Solange.
Is consciousness the electrical expression of physical, organic brain structure? Probably. I spent part of the morning Googling and surfing. There was a video about consciousness and birds. Vittorio, Brother Blunderbuss himself, sent a text and suggested we go catch a screening of John Sturges’s brilliant ‘50s Technicolor pressure-cooker Bad Day at Black Rock at the little repertory cinema on Rue Christine on account of he’s leaving for Johannesburg early in the A.M. Having sat dutifully until the maroon curtains closed, we retired to a minuscule tiki bar with Polynesian music that Vittorio said he likes and where extremely attractive young women from the Sorbonne apprised us with open contempt. I always look at them hard and cold like I’m Shylock here to turn in my pound of flesh. My wife told me she’s expecting a baby, confessed Vittorio. And I asked her: at what time is this baby expected to land? I was drinking a strange teal cocktail with orange peels floating in it, thinking that today was finally the day Gilles de Rais and the Latinate Primitives all finally shit the bed in revolting anticlimax.
"Give me your hand," entreats Clarice Lispector, or at least her looming and fastidious narrator G. H., addressing a reader who is no doubt lazy and bored, hurt ‘cause ignored. This morning I got up quite early, walked in the direction of Montmartre, and found myself at Sacré-Cœur before there were any more than three or four tourists milling about up there. It was foggy and slightly chilly but I wore my windbreaker. Sacré-Cœur was built as a supposed beacon on a hill in what was essentially a working class red light district immediately following France’s profound demoralization in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the brutally suppressed Paris Commune. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 were executed in the streets beneath that church during the suppression of the 1871 Commune. Sacré-Cœur is a paternalistic building. It was not meant to mourn or honour the dead. It was intended as a vehicle with which to restore decorum and good order to working class streets. And yet we splay ourselves out in the gutter—arms akimbo—like Oscar Wilde whether you Siamese please or Siamese don’t please. All I’m after is Clarice Lispector’s “opaque piece of thing.” Pardon me if I’m hunched over outside Sacré-Cœur like a tall pigeon with harsh angles and techno-semiotic backdrop. There’s some Scandinavian jazz luminaries playing at the the jazz bar from Rivette’s Haut bas fragile tonight. I’m going to see if Solange wants to go check that out.
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