Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

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       19

      Jeff Sawtell, the film critic of the Journal, was so much of a communist that he wore navy blue Cultural Revolution pyjamas all year round, adding only a scarf in winter. ‘If you like your brew in a mug,’ he said to my excited inquiry about Four Weddings and a Funeral, ‘then it won't be your cup of tea.’ One got the impression that Jeff thought Jean-Luc Godard was a lickspittle bourgeois dog. A liver disease was making him progressively weaker, however, and Eric had nowhere else to turn but to me. I was thrilled, a thrill vitiated only by the lingering suspicion I had learned reading Jeff that movie reviewing was a branch of Marxist socio-economic theory.

      ‘Will this do?’ I asked Jim, showing him my first ever review, of a Richard Gere movie called Mr Jones.

      It read:

      The screen persists in portraying the mentally ill as remarkably gifted on the side. Not only is Mr Jones a virtuoso pianist, he is also a whizzkid mathematician and mind-reader. This kind of publicity does mental health organizations like MIND no good whatsoever.

      Umbraged social comment, that was the thing. Plus the MIND charity shop was three doors down from the Journal. I practically killed myself trying to work out why the incontestable Pulp Fiction was somehow despicably pro-capitalist. Also, you had to write something about guns – God knows what, but something about how a gun was in some way very similar to a camera. I knew it was in that kind of area. And there was nobody I could ask at the screening-rooms, where the atmosphere seemed strangely furtive and even shameful, as if one were in a municipal library where near-derelicts came to get out of the cold, and lovingly fold the newspaper into columns. Always, there would be four or five very old critics no longer attached, as far as one could see, to any particular publication, always in macs, always carrying little briefcases as blazons of busyness, grey and indeterminate as pigeons and vigilant over their rations of the free chocolate digestives, with which the pockets of their macs bulged. The husks of critics.

      It was only to visit the screening-rooms that I left Jim's bed. There was the need to earn enough money not to be swallowed by London; and there was my lover telling me to stick a bottle of champagne on his tab at Liberties Bar on the High Street and get my arse round to the twenty-third floor. We didn't tell anyone at the Journal – although Eric, with his tactful omniscience, probably knew – and so we were wrapped up as close together as any adulterers. In bed, Jim always seemed doubly naked. It was the only place where he was divested of politics. Restored to his yellow coat, with a bottle of Teacher's, he was back on: ‘Have you ever noticed that the first screen on a cashpoint is actually pleading with you, saying PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD? Fucking beseeching you to spend your money?’ And I would attempt to reflect this kind of thing in my reviews of movies like The Little Mermaid.

      I came to know the pleasant tattiness of the Soho screening-rooms; the bulk of Philip French of the Observer's trainers, which he wore as though to speed himself breathlessly down Wardour Street from one classic to another. I came to know the little inset ashtrays that still survived like a memory of fifties luxury in the seats' armrests. The yellow cashmere scarf that the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker would wear with its admirable implication that a film deserved the compliment of your having dressed for it. I came to realise that nobody had one of those pens with a light that you always assume movie critics use. And then back through the winter to Jim's flat to wait for him.

      He drank all the time. What he was was a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, as they say. And even this, even the companionable imperfection of sleeping with someone who's a bit of a mess felt like a freedom, a liberation from the tyranny of physical perfection, so that I came to know him more fully than I would have otherwise. I was happy, and I thought Eric was maybe going to keep me.

      ‘That thing about the First World War you said. About John Reed,’ Jim said to me one night. ‘Do you really think that?’

      ‘Well, of course. It was all about prophets. People like Lenin, and Trotsky.’

      ‘Sorry, Lenin?’

      ‘Well, obviously. But even people like Wilfred Owen, you know. Marcel Duchamp.’

      ‘Profits, Sally. John Reed said the First World War was about profits’