Homo Irrealis
Page 9
I like this sudden break from reality, this mini spell of freedom and silence at dusk that lets me feel one with this bright-lit city. Its people going places after work lead exciting lives, and, because I’ve almost crossed paths with theirs by stepping on the same sidewalk, some of their vitality has rubbed off on me. There’s something extremely grown-up about leaving work without needing to rush home. I like feeling grown-up. This, I suppose, is what adults do when they stop at a bar or sit at a café after work. You find an uncharted moment in the day, and, because it’s earmarked for nothing, rather than race through it, you allow it to linger and distend and slow things down, till this insignificant moment normally smuggled between sundown and nighttime and seldom lived through because it goes by so fast, from nothing becomes something, and from a vague hiatus in the evening finally unfolds into an instance of grace that could stay with you tonight, tomorrow, for the rest of your life—as this moment will, though I don’t know it yet.
* * *
I enter the movie theater. I hear voices on-screen. I have no sense of how much of the film I’ve missed or if coming in late might ruin it. The sudden disappointment of missing the beginning distracts me and gives the entire viewing an unreal, provisional feel, as though seeing the film now doesn’t really count, because it might need to be corrected by a second viewing. I like the option of a second viewing that is already implied in the first, the way I like to see places or hear tales told a second and a third time while I’m still experiencing them the first time—which is how I confront almost everything in life: as a dry run for the real thing to come. I’ll return, but this time with someone I love, and only then will the film matter and be real. This, after all, is how I went out on dates, answered job ads, picked my courses, made travel plans, found friends, sought out the new: with enthusiasm, a touch of panic, reluctance, and sloth—the whole occasionally bottled up in a brine of incipient resentment, perhaps disdain. I am almost hoping to be disappointed by the film. I am simply going through the motions of testing a film everyone has been raving about and which I’ve finally acquiesced to see, because this is its last run in New York.
I wasn’t planning to see My Night at Maud’s tonight. There had been such a to-do about it, especially after it was nominated a year earlier for best foreign film, that I wanted to let things die down a bit, put some distance between me and what others were all clamoring about. I liked what I’d read about the film and was intrigued by the story of the practicing Catholic played by Jean-Louis Trintignant who, owing to a snowstorm, finds himself forced to spend the night in Maud’s home and, despite her beguiling looks and unequivocal advances, refuses to have sex with her but instead wraps himself tightly in a blanket as in a metaphorical chastity belt and sleeps right next to her on her bed until dawn when, in mid sleep, he almost relents. The next morning, after he leaves Maud’s house, he runs into the woman he’ll eventually marry. Maud was like the rough sketch of the final version. I liked this view of things. There was order in the universe, at least a desire to see order—something so totally unlike what we’d been seeing in print and on-screen in those years.
I didn’t want to be yet another New Yorker eager to shower praise on the latest French film. I found myself resisting. Diffidence as an instance of desire. As a result, I was now perhaps the last New Yorker to see Éric Rohmer’s film.
Which explains why the theater on West Fifty-Seventh Street was nearly empty. I didn’t generally like going to the theater by myself. Always afraid people might see me, especially if I was alone and they weren’t. But tonight I felt different. I wasn’t even thinking of myself as a lonely, unwanted, ill-at-ease young man. Tonight I was another twenty-year-old with time on his hands, who, on a whim, decides to go to the movies and, seeing as he has no one to go with, buys one ticket instead of two. Nothing to it.
I lit a cigarette—in those days you could, and I always sat in the smoking section. I’d sit through this film for fifteen, twenty minutes. If it didn’t do it for me, I’d pick up and leave. Nothing to it either.
I put my raincoat on the seat next to mine and began to drift into the movie, because something about the film had already grabbed me. It must have started soon after I lit up and had as much to do with the film itself as with my watching it alone. The twining of the two—the film and I—was not incidental, but in an uncanny, perhaps untenable, way, essential to the film itself, as though who I was, alone at the age of twenty, craving love, not knowing where to find it, willing to take it from almost anyone, mattered to the film, as if everything happening in my private life mattered to the film. The ferment of lights in Midtown Manhattan suddenly mattered, my longing to be in Paris instead of New York mattered, the drab machinery shop I’d left behind in Long Island City, the passages I still needed to translate from the Apology, my misgivings each time I thought of the girl I’d met at a party in Washington Heights more than a year earlier, down to the brand of cigarettes I was smoking, and—let’s not forget—the prune Danish I had purchased on the fly to snack on, because something about prunes brings out a sheltered, old-world feel I continue to associate with my grandmother who was living in Paris at the time and who kept summoning me back there because life in France, she used to say, gave every semblance of extending life as she’d known it in Alexandria—all these had, like unpaid extras, chipped in and played their small part in Éric Rohmer’s film, as though Rohmer himself, like every great artist, had, without knowing exactly how, opened up a space in his film and asked me to furnish it with snippets from my life.
The personal lexicon we bring to a film or the way we misunderstand a novel because our mind drifted off a page and fantasized about something entirely superfluous to the novel is our surest and most trusted reason for claiming it a masterpiece. The spontaneous decision to head to the movies that night was now forever grafted to My Night at Maud’s, the way the impulse to head to a party in Washington Heights after deciding not to go there was itself woven into my sudden infatuation with the girl I met that night. Even walking into the theater halfway into the film seemed to cast a strangely premonitory if inscrutable, retrospective meaning to this evening.
* * *
Jean-Louis, the protagonist of My Night at Maud’s, lives alone and likes living alone, though he’ll tell Maud in the film that he wishes to be married. His life has been crowded with many people, many diversions, many women; he welcomes his recent, self-imposed reclusion, even if it comes off sounding a touch too urbane, too smug, to pass for an authentic retreat. This is a man who seems to have put his personal life on hold and taken time out in Ceyrat, near Clermont-Ferrand, where he works for Michelin. He is not sulking or brooding, just serenely withdrawn. No shame, no loneliness, no depression. This is not Dostoyevsky’s underground man, or Joseph K., or, for that matter, yet another jittery, self-hating, existential Frenchman. There was something so un-tormented, so cushy, so restorative in his desire to be left alone that I can’t help but suspect that what makes my loneliness unbearable by contrast is not so much solitude itself as my personal failure to overcome it. This might ultimately be the most insidious fiction of the film: the airbrushing of loneliness till it seems entirely voluntary. There was a big difference between Jean-Louis and me. He was not being deprived of company; he could have it any time he wanted. I could not. He could be lying to himself, of course, and he could be wearing a mask and moving in a dollhouse world from which the director had managed to purge all vestige of anxiety and dejection, the way some eighteenth-century comedies routinely removed all references to almshouses, suicide, syphilis, and crime. He may be totally self-deluded. But the world he steps into—and this world is made clear enough from the very first shot—is not the stark universe of action-driven films in which people hurt, suffer, or die; instead, it is inhabited by highly rarefied, well-spoken friends trying to figure out the meaning of conventional love with an unconventional mix of profound self-awareness and boundless self-delusion. There is no violence here, no poverty, no drug
s, no breakdowns, no safecracking thieves pursued by the police, no disease, no tragedy, seldom tears, no exchanges of fluids, not even abiding love or self-loathing. Everything is whitewashed with irony, tact, and that French perennial gêne, which is the chilling sense of awkwardness and unease we all feel when we’re tempted to cross a line but are held back. Youth shakes off gêne, doesn’t accept it; grown-ups savor it, like an impromptu blush, the undertow of desire, the conscience of sex, a concession to society.
Jean-Louis and Maud are adults. They are versed in affairs of the heart and in the sinuous course desires can take. They do not shun others, but they’re not compelled to seek them out either. Rohmer’s men, as I was later to find out from his other Moral Tales, are all on a hiatus from what appear to be thoroughly fulfilling lives. Soon they’ll return to the real world and to their one love awaiting them there. The mini vacation in a villa on the Mediterranean in The Collector, the return to a family villa in Claire’s Knee, or the adulterous afternoon fantasy in Chloe in the Afternoon—all these are interludes punctuated by women whom the male protagonist already knows he won’t really fall for.
Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales comprise nothing less than a series of what may be called unruffled psychological still lifes. The world may be at war—and the war in Vietnam was still raging when Maud was filmed (in fact, the night at Maud’s was originally conceived two decades earlier and was set to take place not during a snowstorm in the late 1960s but during World War II). Still, the characters in Rohmer’s world—like those seeking to escape the plague in Boccaccio’s Decameron, or like so many disenchanted courtiers in seventeenth-century France—have ways of fending off the uglier side of things for a while by talking of love. They speak not of their love for each other, but about the nature of love in general, which, in polite conversation, is perhaps a way of making love while claiming—or trying to claim—not to, of seducing by exposing all the wiles of seduction, of reaching out to someone with the option of not going all the way and of backing out at the last minute. Among the disabused seventeenth-century courtiers who lived in Paris, it was customary to sit around the bed of a hostess, who would entertain her friends from there. Under those circumstances, the conversation had to be intimate and candid—how could it not?—but always tempered by mirth, good judgment, and civility. Blaise Pascal, who wrote the Pensées, arguably the most spiritual and unsparingly incisive work in French literature, may also have been the apocryphal author of the no less probing but unflinchingly urbane Discours sur les passions de l’amour.
* * *
To a twenty-year-old, the thirty-four-year-old Jean-Louis of My Night at Maud’s seemed old, wise, and thoroughly experienced. Life was behind him; he had traveled to several continents, loved and been loved, didn’t mind loneliness, indeed, thrived on it. At twenty, I had loved one woman only. And I was just that spring beginning to recover from it all. The longing for her, the phone messages she never returned, the missed dates, her snubbing I’ve been busy, coupled with her evasive and dissembling I promise I won’t forget, and always my self-reproaches for not daring to tell her everything on the night I stood outside her building staring at her windows, wondering whether I should ring her buzzer downstairs, or the night I walked in the rain, because I needed an excuse to be out when she called—if she called, when she called, which she never did; our perfunctory kissing as we waited for the Broadway local one evening; the afternoon I spent at her place when I watched her change clothes in front of me but couldn’t bring myself to hold her because suddenly everything seemed unclear between us; and the afternoon many months later when I went to see her again and we sat on her rug and spoke of that time when I’d failed to read her meaning when she’d taken off her clothes, and, even after hearing her confide all this, I was still unable to bring myself to move but fribbled our time together with oblique double-talk about an us we both knew was never going to be an us—all of these, like untold arrows driven into Saint Sebastian, reminded me that if I’d never be able to forget loving the wrong girl, I should at least learn not to hate myself for it, because I also knew that it was far easier to blame myself for not seizing the moment that one afternoon than to question desire and not know what had held me back.
Jean-Louis, like almost all of Rohmer’s men, had already been there and come out on the other side seemingly unscathed. This was the first time that I got a hint there might even be another side. As bashful and tentative as I was, I saw that there was still hope for me. But watching Jean-Louis evade Maud’s advances, all the while leading her on, reminded me that what comes spontaneously to some is not necessarily impulse but deliberation, and that every spark of desire has a hiccup, a moment of deflection, a reflux of gêne, which cannot be dismissed, not just because some people are thinking in the heat of passion but because passion is itself a way of thinking. It is never blind. Watching the two think aloud about themselves and speak ever so eloquently about love on their one snowbound night together, I was reminded that thinking is at its very core erotic, almost prurient, because thinking is always thinking about Eros, because thinking is libidinous.
* * *
We first meet Jean-Louis in church. He is a devout Catholic. He is eyeing an attractive blonde. He has clearly never spoken to her before, but by the end of the sermon he decides that one day this very woman, whom he has probably not seen other than in church, will be his wife.
Nothing could sound more prescient or more deluded. But, once again, the braiding of the two is typical of Rohmer. Foresight and delusion are inseparable bedfellows. One feeds the other. Their collusion is not insignificant. The stars are aligned to our wishes or to what is best for us—but never as we think.
Outside the church one day, Jean-Louis tries to follow her but eventually loses track of her. A few days later, on the evening of December twenty-first, he suddenly spots her on her motorbike but once again loses sight of her in the narrow, busy, Christmas-decorated streets of Clermont-Ferrand. On the evening of December twenty-third, he is strolling about town in the hope of running into her.
And of course he will run into her. But not just yet.
He will, however, bump into someone else: his friend Vidal, whom he hasn’t seen since their student days. The men are so thrilled by their accidental encounter that, after spending time in the café, Jean-Louis suggests they have dinner together. Vidal cannot dine with his old friend that night, but he has an extra ticket for a concert. Jean-Louis accepts the invitation to join him—maybe another opportunity to run into his blonde, he thinks. But she is not at the concert. The men would like to do something the next night, but this time it’s Jean-Louis who cannot go: he’d like to attend the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Vidal joins him in church. The blonde is nowhere in sight there either. So Vidal invites Jean-Louis to dinner on the morrow, Christmas Day, at Maud’s house. Vidal is probably in love with Maud but, after what must have been a casual night together a while back, is resigned to a platonic friendship.
In the café on the night they first bumped into each other, the men had begun talking about, of all things, chance encounters and about, of all authors, Pascal, the writer most associated with chance, hasard, and, as chance would still have it, the very author Jean-Louis has been reading. Coincidence thrice removed.
These multitiered coincidences beguiled me and wouldn’t let go of me and kept insisting there was a greater design at work here, as though the convergence of so many coincidences, however far-fetched, underwrote the whole film, and that this conversation between the two men about coincidence was merely a prelude, a tuning of the instruments, for things to come. The confluence of three hasards in the film, added to my own hasard in happening to be seeing this and not any other film that night, plus the creeping realization that there was something uncannily personal each time I apprehended anything occurring at multiple removes, all these didn’t just stir me intellectually but in some inexplicable manner ignited an aesthetic, near-erotic charge, as if everything in Rohmer had to come ba
ck to sex, but only obliquely and ethereally, the way everything about Rohmer had to come back to me as well, but in an oblique and ethereal manner, because multiple removes kept reminding me that I too liked lifting the veil and looking under things, denuding one alleged truth after the other, layer after layer, deceit after deceit, because unless something wears a veil, I will not see it, because what I loved above everything else was not necessarily the truth but its surrogate, insight—insight into people, into things, into the machinations of life itself—because insight goes after the deeper truth, because insight is insidious and steals into the soul of things, because I myself was made of multiple removes and had more slippages than a mere, straightforward presence, because I also liked to see that the world was made up like me, in shifty layers and tiers that flirt and then give you the slip, that ask to be excavated but never hold still, because I and Rohmer and his characters were like drifters with many forwarding addresses but never a home, many selves folded together—selves we’d sloughed off, some we couldn’t outgrow, others we still longed to be—but never one, firm, identifiable self. I liked watching Rohmer uncoil his characters’ secrets; I was all whorled up myself and kept assuming that, contrary to what everyone claimed, others were as well. It was good to watch someone practice what I’d been tinkering with, sneaking into people’s private thoughts and intuiting their shameful little motives. People were two-faced, triple-faced. Nothing was as it seemed. I was not as I seemed. That evening I was confronted by the possibility that perhaps the truest thing about me was a coiled identity, my irrealis self, a might-have-been self that never really was but wasn’t unreal for not being and might still be real, though I feared it never would.