Les Parapluies du Cinéma

#20

   For Fathers’ Day last weekend I received from Charlie, my eldest son, a card he had made using a fragment of dialogue from the film ‘No Country for Old Men’[1].  Two lawmen survey the scene of a shoot-out in the desert where an illicit drugs deal has gone badly wrong. All those involved have been killed; bodies lie scattered in and around their cars and pick-up trucks.

Deputy Wendell: “It’s a mess ain’t it Sheriff?”

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess gets here.”

   Charlie is a graphic designer and has a special interest in typography. The words on the card were beautifully typeset. He knew I had enjoyed this exchange in the film and how the dry humour of the ageing Sheriff serves periodically to restore some element of hope and humanity against the prevailing menace and mayhem.

   “…it’ll do ‘til the mess gets here,” pretty much summarises this past week. Locally, it rained all over mid-summer’s day and although I may aspire to being stoical, I remain a glass half-empty person at the best of times. And these are not the best of times. I have a persistent foreboding that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably a train coming the other way. Despair is the easy option and difficult to avoid. Yesterday, for instance, I switched on the car radio for company only to hear some top man in the military talking blithely of “the fighting season” in Afghanistan. Give me strength; it’s a bloody war, not a game of cricket! Do the Afghans have different seasons set aside for each of their other traditional pastimes? Are there particular months for corruption, the oppression of women and unconstrained religious bigotry?  It’s enlightenment they really need not more guns and bullets.

   Meanwhile, in Syria and in Libya other armies continue to oppress the people they should be protecting. It’s long past time for someone to remind the world that, for crimes against humanity, “I was only obeying orders” is not an acceptable defence. The burden of guilt for the Holocaust lay not just with the camp guards and the SS who herded terrified families into cattle-trucks. Auschwitz could not have functioned for more than a fortnight if there had been no one willing to drive the trains, or set the points, or alter the railway signals to “Go”…

   But it’s not easy to refuse or disobey. Ai Weiwei could testify to that. Like you, I was glad to hear that he had been released on bail after - what is it now? – Eighty one days? He will have “confessed”, we can assume, to a necessary catalogue of crimes and misdemeanours dictated by the Chinese authorities. Knowing he has an artist’s imagination makes him the more vulnerable. Even Beijing’s dumbest cop can’t have needed eighty days to take him on a guided tour of the torments they have available. It would have been enough to show him a print of something like Hieronymus Bosch’s Image of Hell [2], then it’s “case solved”. But hang-on, what’s this? – Surprise! - The release of Ai Weiwei coincides neatly with the visit to Europe of senior Chinese Numpty Wen Jiabao. Stone me, what are the chances of that?

   Let’s go back to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Charlie’s typeset card. What do we do until the big mess gets here? For me, one broad avenue of distraction is cinema. Watching a movie is like standing under an umbrella on a rainy day. The deluge persists down all around but you don’t get a soaking yourself. And I saw a good example last week…

   First, imagine they had made a sequel to Belle de Jour[3]. The icy Séverine might have been bulked-up by self-indulgence and dutiful childbearing. Then she would require sedation beneath mind-numbing doses of Nembutal and Prozac. And by 1977 she could be jogging through the woods transformed into Suzanne, the perfect bourgeois ‘trophy wife’.

   In François Ozon’s new movie Potiche[4] an un-reconstructed ‘real’ man of the 1970s has reduced the previously unattainable Belle de Jour to his very own bland, domesticated, Belle de bric-a-brac. She has become the ‘potiche’ of the film’s title - literally an ornamental vase intended for display purposes only.

   Potiche – hopefully still showing at a cinema near you – also has strange echoes of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 film ‘Tout va Bien’. In both, a factory manager is held captive while everyone’s political, social, sexual and economic relationships go into crisis. The Godard film was, as you might expect, altogether more inaccessible than the mainstream Potiche. Jean-Luc, preferring analysis to narrative, relied heavily on talking heads. Regrettably, this produced mainly nodding heads in the audience. Ozon, by contrast, has chosen to parody Romantic Comedy and adopts the style and pace typical of the genre. Both films go for a fantastical climax. Godard used a seemingly endless tracking shot to reveal a riot developing at the checkouts of some vast hypermarket. Ozon glides the made-over Suzanne into an extraordinary musical number; suggesting that something very bizarre is afoot in the domestic politics of the Fifth Republic.

   Godard, ever the determined cineaste, had earlier tracked his camera across a set depicting the sausage factory in a cut-away section. (More recently, Wes Anderson did something similar with the good-ship ‘Belafonte’ in The Life Aquatic[5]). Different characters and their dilemmas are seen simultaneously but always isolated from one another in separate rooms on the various floors of the building. A voice describes the roles of various trades which contribute to the output of the factory; along the lines of “Engineers – engineer, plumbers – plumb…” The list continues until we come to the bourgeoisie. If the role of the workers is, essentially, to work, what then is the role of the bourgeoisie? Simple really; what the bourgeoisie do is to bourgeois. And in Potiche Catherine Deneuve, as Suzanne Pujol, does her bourgeois-ing to perfection.

   The film opens with Suzanne busy being the sweetly vacant, suburban bourgeois housewife. She flits through her days writing saccharine verses about squirrels and fawns. All her domestic and conjugal duties were long ago sub-contracted out. She has a Spanish couple to cook and clean, her husband’s secretary labours under him as mistress and confidante, the lethargic sex-workers at Club Badaboum satisfy his negligible cultural needs.

   Madame’s supposed idyll of domestic bliss continues until her appalling husband finally drives the workers in the umbrella factory to rebellion and himself to cardiac arrest. Suzanne, liberated by this awakening, seems suddenly to remember just who she might have been without him. Deneuve then sails majestically and comically to the rescue of the factory, her husband and the family fortune. Along the way, she casts off the vacuity of her previous existence and the burden of her loveless marriage. Negotiating with the factory workers, she briefly re-ignites an old flame, the Communist heavy-weight, Babin, played by the appropriately massive Gérard Depardieu. Babin was the truck-driver involved in Suzanne’s earlier, secret, infidelity and has now become the local Mayor and MP. He turns out to be at least as possessive and manipulative as her husband ever was. The problem is his gender – stupid; not the politics he espouses.

   The colours, décor, fashions and hairstyles of the 1970s are all lavishly recreated for the film, but Deneuve and Depardieu perform independently of such contrivances. In the role of Suzanne Pujol, Catherine Deneuve is enchanting, statuesque and happily timeless. She also retains that special gaze of unspoken bewilderment she first invented for Belle de Jour.

   The title No Country for Old Men was taken from the first line of a poem by W. B. Yeats[6]. The last three lines of that same poem might, at a stretch, belong to Mlle Deneuve, transformed into a new fantasy, de nos jours, as La Belle des Parapluies:

…set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.[7]

What does it all mean? I clearly have absolutely no idea but I loved every minute of it – the Yeats and the film. But come; let us join Catherine, under her brolly, watching the rain. That’s what the movies are for…

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[1] No Country for Old Men. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen. 2007

[2] Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) The Garden of Earthly Delights. Triptych, 1490-1510. Prado Museum, Madrid.

[3] Belle de Jour. Dir. Luis Buñuel. 1967

[4] Potiche. Dir. François Ozon. 2010

[5] The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Dir. Wes Anderson. 2004

[6] Sailing to Byzantium W. B. Yeats. 1928

[7] Ibid.

Easing the Spring

#19

‘They call it easing the Spring’. The phrase comes from a poem written in 1941 by Henry Reed[1]. Confined to a military classroom, World War II army conscripts are being drilled in the mysteries of the bolt-action rifle. While the instructor drones on about upper and lower sling swivels and opening the breech and sliding the bolt rapidly backwards and forwards, Reed’s attention wanders to the Japonica in the neighbouring gardens where he imagines a different droning;

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

     They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

      For to-day we have naming of parts.

The poem uses two contrasting voices. The first tediously reciting the deadly anatomy of the standard issue .303 Enfield rifle, the second celebrating springtime in the natural world. And the ’spring’ being eased is both the season of awakening and the mechanical linkage by which the bolt opens the breech, thereby loading the next round from the ammunition-clip below.

I hear again this poem whenever ‘The Arab Spring’ gets mentioned – and that, at the moment – is practically every hour, on the hour. If only any of us knew how easing the Arab Spring might be achieved. Use of the term ‘spring’ is more than a convenient marker for the time of year. For me, it carries an intentional reference back to the Prague Spring of 1968 - when it first became possible to imagine that the Stalinist hegemony over Eastern Europe might one day be repudiated by the collective discontent of the people who lived under it.

When my children were much younger, they played with a deceptively simple device which consisted of a helical spring that could stretch and bounce. Our house – then as now - seems to consist mainly of stairs and the spring could be made to progress down a long flight of stairs, tumbling end-over-end with a seemingly unstoppable deliberation. You could hear its slightly chilling rattle as the pent-up steel coils stretched, lunged and then re-formed themselves entirely with the aid of gravity and their own impounded energy. That long-lost spring knew only one direction of travel, once released it could not be made to reverse.

The ‘Arab Spring’ – aka ‘The Jasmine Revolution’ – began with the suicide of a single Tunisian street-trader in December 2010. This led to a protest demonstration, which was broken-up by the police, and then another and another… The Arab Spring and our lost toy both seem to gain momentum from one place and let it carry them to another. Events are suddenly able to bounce across borders impelled by the idea that authority can be challenged by sheer weight of numbers. Our toy was reliant upon gravity to travel down a flight of stairs. Long established dictators in Tunisia, then Libya, then Egypt, then Bahrain, then Syria and Yemen have sought to defy gravity with results we are still seeing. The agonies are particularly prolonged because ‘opposition’ parties have been cruelly suppressed for so long.

One crystal clear advantage of the parliamentary democracies is that they have, in waiting, an alternative government ready to take power when the incumbents are removed. If – like Libya, Egypt, Syria etcetera – a country has a regime which for decades has stunned, silenced, murdered, imprisoned, tortured, exiled or ‘disappeared’ its opponents then, when the regime totters, there is only a cauldron of revenge into which it can fall. What happens after the unspeakable Gaddafi and the chinless but aptly named Basher al-Assad is anyone’s guess. This weekend, tanks of the Syrian army are boldly saving the people of Jisr al-Shughour from – err – the – err – people of - err - Jisr al-Shughour… and blowing away any dissident crops, cattle or olive groves that try to resist.

A few days ago I heard on Radio 4 the words of ‘Abu Sham’, (surely not his real name) a Syrian protestor talking on a cell-phone after Friday prayers. With a voice of despair Abu was saying, “We are afraid to speak even to ourselves”. It could be that he spoke those words at the lowest trough in the waves of protest. Since then, the oppression has continued but now it is possible that a tipping-point may have been reached. Repression by the Syrian regime has been so harsh, so brutal and has continued for so long that it has paradoxically strengthened the resistance rather than crushing it. Dare we believe that oppression only succeeds in the short run? Apart from the grim recognition that in the long run we are all dead, is it possible that the spring will be eased for Abu Sham before much longer?

Most countries suffer from a dearth of wisdom in their public life and nowhere suffers more than the Middle East. Wise men have been in notably short supply in the politics of that region ever since a certain fabled trio of publicity-happy star-gazers wandered through about two thousand years ago. We wouldn't call them 'Wisemen' [or Wisewomen] would we, if they were the norm? They are scarce, but not entirely unknown. One sadly-missed soothsayer was the late Abba Eban. He was not an Arab; he was a Jew – a South African by birth and an Israeli citizen by choice. He is sometimes remembered for his 1973 observation at a failed – (obviously!) - Peace Conference in Geneva:

‘Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’.

This clever remark might now more usefully be re-written as;

‘Authoritarian Governments never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’

Eban is also remembered for what he said at the time of the Six-Day war in 1967. When the prospects for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis were at least as bleak as they are today, Eban remained confident that one day a lasting peace would be achieved. As he put it:

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”

This applies to all of us, not just the Palestinians and the Israelis. No one is exempt. Al-Assad is busy exhausting the alternatives. For the sake of the Syrians, we have to hope that wisdom will descend upon their country sooner rather than never. And if a blinding light should illuminate a humble Bus Lane on the road to Damascus, who knows where it might lead?

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[1]  ‘Lessons of the War, 1. NAMING OF PARTS’ by Henry Reed from A Map of Verona, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1946.