2046 as Christmas

My Christmases sound like Mark Kozelek's "Have You Forgotten," Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown and Nat King Cole where holiday cheer is washed with a certain aching nostalgia.

These Christmases look like Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, a film featuring a recurrence of December 24ths I've watched more or less every winter since it came out in 2004. I saw it first almost by myself at Landmark La Jolla, slicing Haribo gold-bears bilaterally with my incisors and looking contentedly at the reds and greens onscreen. It was a less a sequel than a coda to In the Mood for Love and I always prefer codas, a fluidity of time instead of a march, circles instead of lines.

Intervening years have, of course, changed me and now, watching Tony Leung's dapper newspaperman Chow Mo-wan, I'm gutted (I notice I've even started wearing sweatervests like he does). It's not just the suspicion that romance might be dead in our culture. It's that even in the best, most symphonic partnership the question "Why can't it be like it was before?" is always coming. That's what Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi, astonishing every time) asks Chow-san again and again until he has to turn away. He walks around with his hurt smile every day with the same question in mind, not that it helps, as "before" is quite a different place for him.

I like to identify with Chow, his omnipresent memories of Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung in ITMFL, Gong Li in 2046, that one) and the power of atmospheric noodle stalls in the rain.  Then I look down the way to Fremont where some fluorescently minded person has installed the exact opposite.

The movie also proves writing itself is like the train to 2046, the paradoxical future location where everything is as perfect as it was in the remembered past. The hours spin away as you move closer and closer to an ideal past tense reflection where nothing ever changes. A past perfection that must be there, even if no one has ever taken the train back.

This Christmas I decided that, if I had a moment with Chow, I would read to him Liam Rector's "Song Years" and it would go like this.

Song Years

For years I lived in a kind
Of wistful song world where
One foot was always out

The door, almost like a sailor
Ready, anxious even, to decamp
Once more for the sea,

And always the American highway
And its great story calling, built by
The American restless and all

Its subsequent moving. Loosely
Around the seasons I moved
Looking for what I thought of

As a natural life, and looked back
At anyone who stayed put as if
They had given up,

Given up something
That should never be
Given up,

Ever.
No sooner
Would I get some place

Than I'd begin
To check train schedules
And other venues of departure.

I hated the notion
Of insurance and never
Had any. I gave

Myself no place to fall.
I thought of all this as keeping
Myself clean, keeping

Myself honest. It really
Wasn't a variant
Of the old high school

Locker-room chant of find 'em,
Feel 'em, fuck 'em,
And forget 'em, I told myself,

But sometimes,
Especially when I was packing,
It surely felt that way.

I was always leaving one
For the next one. I wished them
Well and remained friends

With most of them. I hoped
A right one one would come along
For them, and they would be

More ready for their lasting lover
Given the lessons, good and bad,
We'd taught each other.

Fall would come
And I'd head north
For apple-picking, winter

Would find me holed up
In Vermont for a moment,
Working on some chilly construction,

And spring was always
A sure-fired scamper south.
Summer mostly meant

Going out west for, I suppose, hope.
Change is slow and hope is violent.
I wanted the speed and handling

Of a good sports car; I wanted
Things not as they should be
But things as they are.

Most songs are sad and most people
Do not want to live in song world,
Except when some loved one leaves

Or maybe over a drink, alone, at home,
Or perhaps in a car, ever more alone.
Someone is always falling or being thrown.

Most songs say
But one thing:
"My heart aches,"

And if you doubt this
Listen to the songs.
And tonight

Let us all together send out
Our love to the songwriters
For moving us.

I moved this way
Until the cruelty of it
Overwhelmed me.

*

Merry Christmas Chow-san. Tell Wong Kar-Wai I need you in just one more film. Maybe set in spring?

Paintings in Proust

I just picked up Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust and it's as sumptuous as I was promised. A sort of catalogue raisonne of a most interesting private collection. Here is Proust himself on Antoine Watteau:

I often think with a mixture of sympathy and pity about the life of the painter Watteau, in whose work lives the painting, the allegory, the apotheosis of love and pleasure....It has been said that he was the first to have painted modern love, meaning by this, no doubt, a love of conversation, the pleasures of the table, promenading, the sadness of masquerading, fleeting water and time, all hold a higher place than pleasure itself, a sort of gilded impotence.

 

I do think that the book will help me see a fuller picture when I reread In Search of Lost Time (I plan to start again immediately after winning the lottery, quitting my job and lining my studio with cork).

Three Times: Black Swan

Three reasons to see Black Swan:

1. You have to wait an unconscionably long time, but when Nina (Natalie Portman showing every vein in her neck) breaks out as the Black Swan it is a breathtaking five minutes. The fantasia of the music and the Swan's phantasmal feathers had me on the edge of applause.

2. I think Darren Aronofsky has found his calling card (like Hitchcock appearing in all his films). He will always use an actor or actress who has undergone horrible plastic surgery and use them to scare the audience straight. As many others have pointed out, Barbara Hershey (as Nina's smother) has far too little skin in parts of her face and too much in others--a deadringer for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

3. Mila Kunis is a pleasant diversion from the relentless tightness in the rest of the film. It's amazing how she sounds exactly like she does in Forgetting Sarah Marshall or That 70's Show or anything she's ever been in and it somehow works as Nina's "liberated" rival Lily.

Three reasons to miss Black Swan:

1. For the cuticle obsessed, like myself, this is a hard movie to watch. I wanted to scream at Nina to, for the love of god, use some moisturizer. Some really expensive Norwegian hand cream. Despite Ms. Hershey's best efforts, the scariest thing in Black Swan is the scene where Nina tears a strip of skin from her cuticle down to the second knuckle of her finger. The horror, the horror.

2. It feels like Aronofsky went about the casting with cruelty in mind. In addition to the Hershey freakshow, there is Winona Ryder as a washed up dancer in the troupe who later becomes a crippled washed up dancer. And Vincent Cassel is wasted with the insultingly repetitive lines he is forced to spit out as ballet director Thomas (pronounced toe-MA) Leroy.

3. The whole film, in fact, is terribly repetitive. Nina goes to practice, comes home, has a freakout in her teenybopper bedroom then wakes up to go back to practice. There's no narrative propulsion to the project, just anticipation for the next lurid activity.

Three things to know about that Portman/Kunis "hot lesbian sex scene" in Black Swan:

1. There's no nudity.

2. Any eroticism is mitigated by the CGI goosebumps spreading over Portman's skin the whole time.

3. And it's all in Nina's imagination (as Lily delicately puts it, "you had a lezzie wet dream about me?"). The more diverting scene is the one where Nina wakes up and starts masturbating until she realizes that her gargoyle mother is the room with her.

Three reasons you might want to just watch The Red Shoes instead:

1. Powell and Pressburger understood that a dance film is more entertaining if you actually get to see dances being performed. The Red Shoes offers wide shots of entire pieces before audiences, instead of closeup fragments of pieces seen only in rehearsal. The demands of the profession are shown but the film is not about endless drudgery and dry skin.

2. While Black Swan has lots of creative shrugs and leg warmers over leg warmers, The Red Shoes has a much more impressive array of costumes. The impresario Boris Lermontov's green dressing gown outstrips anything the Mulleavys came up with.

3. The Red Shoes relies on a far better metaphor of performance. When the Swan Queen dies her martyr's death at the end of Swan Lake, it's really a relief for Nina because her life is torturous. Compare that to the story of the red shoes, as described by Lermontov: "Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on." Such is art as it should be, never tired.