Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ all those unknown folk whom we meet through a glance as they shuttle toward something we will never see.

A DIRECTOR IN PORTOFINO

       Before

      A film director (John Malkovich), who talks to himself rather articulately about a film he is thinking of making, goes to Portofino with a character in mind, and one morning in a little shop by the water, where the choppy green Ligurian sea is slopping onto a quay, and when the shutter has been lifted and the door unlocked, he finds a young woman (Sophie Marceau). She is, we must say, “perfect.” Her eyes are hazel, her hair long and evanescent; she wears a taupe suit, she looks at him looking at her and shows anticipation, as though his gaze has made her catch her breath. Later, they talk at a pink café spread with green-and-white chairs under lush green trees, and it’s misty. She’s arrived in blue slacks and a beige coat over a fisherman’s sweater, having told an English boyfriend in a yellow slicker to get lost. “It’s better that I speak to you plainly. whatever you have in mind, I’d better tell you who I am,” says she, announcing a little sententiously that she stabbed her father twelve times. She holds her breath some, speaks without any particular expression. We hear the water splashing in. She is looking out to sea. She walks away a few paces, and a cat sits and placidly watches her. “When?—” he asks calmly. Far too calmly. Only John Malkovich ever exhibits this calm in the face of horror, onscreen. For three months, she replies, they kept her in prison, and then she was acquitted. She will not say why she did it, but he surmises that he knows, and also that twelve times is “more domestic” and “more familiar” than two or three would have been. All the while we see the charming little village, its houses piled vertically up the lush green hill all the way out of this world, the crisp but at the same time overcast sky, the jiggling sailboats at anchor. He cannot get over the magnitude of her crime, the twelve stabs: “You counted them?” “They did,” says she. She runs off and dances on a pier beside the jade green water: “Are you going or staying? Do you want to see me to night?” She almost touches his face. He reaches out and almost touches hers, but playfully, like a cat, she runs off. Slowly, thoughtfully, he follows, as only John Malkovich does. “You remind me of … somebody,” she teases. He wants to know whom. “I’m not sure yet,” she answers, in a riddling and slightly pretentious voice.

       During

      At prodigious length they make love—“the body never lies” (Feeney)—twisting and coiling and groping for something in one another that no one ever has a real hope of finding, a lovemaking that recalls the Alexandria Quartet in its hunger and its hopelessness. “It was never in the lover that I really met her” (Durrell 63).

       After

      Without much satisfaction they part, and for a moment he looks back at her through the window of her cottage, unable to get out of his mind that she stabbed her father twelve times. The sun is shining, they wave to one another amicably, she leaps up and stands naked looking after him. The fact that she stabbed her father does not, alone, intrigue him, but again, and still: why twelve times? No doubt the father raped her, and thrust himself into her twelve times before finishing. Or: he raped her, month after month, every month in the year. Or: twelve different times she was raped by this man. Or: she did not count and did not know. Since it was the police who determined and made it public, she learned as everyone else learned what it was that she had done. We do not know what it is that we do, we are apprised by listening and watching. When in modern life we do something, we are lost in the panic of our action, and in this way she was lost.

      There is no signal that the girl’s life is changed by her meeting with this director, no signal that his is changed by meeting her, except in this one respect, that, having come to this place in search of a character, he found a story, and now “the story let me think of nothing else, not even of my own.” The familiarity of that chilling number twelve! He sits thinking/talking beside a turquoise swimming pool—a turquoise that one can taste!—bitterly minty—sliced by the camera so that we see only a triangle of it, stretching away from him. There is no point staying in this place.

      Stories wait everywhere to speak through the voices of their characters, and we can have no idea when one of them will speak to us.

CARLO, PATRIZIA, HER HUSBAND, AND HIS LOVER

       Un Café

      On the Right Bank of Paris, in a plush little café, a young woman in pink (Chiara Caselli) introduces herself to a man who is caught up in a newspaper (Peter Weller) by saying that she has just been reading something fascinating in her magazine and wants to talk with someone about it. “J’avais envie d’en parler avec quelqu’un”—very polite, sweet, formal. He is American, she is Italian, so they speak in a deliciously awkward French that makes it easy for us to understand. “C’est moi que vous avez choisi?” he asks: “And you chose me?” She tells him a story of how in Mexico some scientists hired porters to carry bags for them to an Incan city in the mountains. At one point the porters suddenly stopped in their places and wouldn’t move. The scientists got angry and tried to rouse them, unable to understand the delay. After some hours, the porters started up again. The leader decided to explain. (She looks at the American, and he smiles, now beginning to be engaged.) He said they had been “marching too fast. They’d left their souls behind.” It’s terrific, says she, because the way we run through our affairs we are in peril of losing our own souls. “We should wait for them.” Now the man is skeptical. “To do what?” And she pauses before answering, letting a modest smile, an embarrassed smile, itself a little pink, creep into her face. “Everything that is pointless.” Surely this is a come-on, an approach? She is so young, suffused with such an air of innocence that covers her like a talc. Or, she is acting out of civility and a little loneliness, the quintessentially withdrawn European. Given that in this bustling world attraction is based on what is presented immediately to the eye, there is probably little difference between civility and flirting: either way the impression will not, cannot, last.

      The man comes home to his (much less effervescent) wife, Patrizia (Fanny Ardant), who is strained with both boredom and anxiety in their lavish modern apartment. Tall and wraithlike, she sits in a dove-gray dress with her legs crossed nervously, in front of a painting of a ballerina standing in second position and bending over to massage her shin. Have you been with her again?, she asks wearily: it’s been three years since that story in the café about the souls. Some things, says he in irritation, can’t be called off overnight: the old, old story. Patrizia strides away, the tails of her swank garment fluttering like those of an undertaker’s tuxedo. “It’s her or me.”

      Since at least in cinema we have come to accept interactions like this as commonplace, the torn, desiccated marriages of the monied class, we can move quickly through the chess that these two play, his breathless expressions of ennui, her increasingly taut fear of loss, his swelling apathy, her anger, all reactions to the central fact of impermanence (or that blurry prospect visible from a moving train), which is what the experience of life amounts to for these movers and shakers. Swiftly now, after a cut, the young lover pulls him into her apartment with a voluptuous (and starved) kiss. “We have to talk,” says he: the old, old story. He wears gray, she wears red: cardinal red, poppy red. On her kelp green velvet sofa she straddles him. “Talk … but caress me.” He closes his eyes: “I forget …”

      It is telling the way we bounce back and forth between the different habitats that seem to occupy a single cultural and experiential space, without observing (engaging in) the transportation that leads from one to the other, as though locomotion is so prevalent as to be invisible. Did he walk to the lover’s place, did he drive, did he take the Métro or bus N° 72? Now, we look down from a balcony in their foyer as, coming home, the husband calls out for Patrizia, plays a few bars of something vaguely baroque on his jet black grand piano, and methodically climbs the stairs, a man in motion but without prospect. In the bedroom she is happily, drunkenly СКАЧАТЬ