The evening was cold and crisp, with a full moon. Here and there a dark windowpane gleamed with its ghostly reflected light.
He stopped, raised his hand and looked at his watch. A quarter to eight. Perfect, he thought. He put on his dark glasses, took the newspaper out of his pocket and began walking slowly towards his destiny . . .
In front of the cinema, as well as inside the doors and in the lobby, an animated crowd was already gathering. As before, at the Zacheta Gallery and at the theatre, there was much excited gesturing and chattering. The sound of French, interspersed with peals of pearly laughter, mingled with the smell of Gauloises and Gitanes, cigars and Western perfume; there was some eccentric dress, and quite a bit of posturing and showing off. And, again, a few familiar faces: people from the theatre and film world, the diplomatic corps, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Department of Romance Languages.
She was already in the audience when I went inside. She sat more or less in the middle, in the company of . . . Freddy.
Well, well, this is something new, I thought with an inward smile, and sat down two rows behind them.
She was wearing a chic jacket of deep scarlet, with a blue-and-white scarf around her neck. Her dark-brown sheepskin was thrown loosely from her back, its collar and shoulders hanging, inside out, over the back of her seat. Freddy was wearing a suit and held his coat over his knees.
They were talking. But it was an odd sort of conversation. They didn’t look at each other, and she fidgeted nervously all the time, twisting and turning in her seat to look around the auditorium (rather as the Tapeworm had at the celebration of the anniversary of the Spanish civil war).
I raised a folded-over sheet of L’Humanité in front of my face and, sheltered by this splendid organ of the French Communist Party, continued to observe them.
There was tension between them, evident in their voices and body movements. They were unnatural. He was stiff and gloomy, she nervously on edge. But I couldn’t discover the reasons for this inner turmoil, for the chattering around me was so noisy that I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying.
Bother this din, I thought crossly, and allowed myself to drift – on a sea of speculation. Why were they here together? What did it mean? Had they been reconciled at the theatre? Did they meet at Phèdre and decide to renew their acquaintance? Or somewhere else? Or maybe they didn’t come here together at all – maybe Freddy simply came and joined her, seeing the free place? (I didn’t even consider a different sequence of events.) And now they were having a hard time of it. Were they bringing up past quarrels? Flinging accusations back and forth? Was he pestering her with amorous advances?
The auditorium, meanwhile, was filling up. Every seat was taken, and people were still flowing in, standing at the back or sitting on the floor in the front. Finally the doors were closed and the director of the Service Culturel, straightening his bow tie, mounted the low stage. There was a round of applause.
He raised his hand, pointed to his watch (it was a quarter past eight) and jokingly reassured the audience they had nothing to fear: no speeches. (This was greeted with laughter and more applause.) Only a few sentences, by way of introduction. In a moment we would see a film that had taken the world by storm. He didn’t mean the Palme d’Or at Cannes or other, lesser awards; he meant its success with the public. Since its release over a year earlier, hundreds of thousands of people had flocked to see it. Film critics, sociologists, even philosophers were all asking themselves why. What was the reason for its astounding popular success? And they concluded that it was simply because this film expresses the longings of man in the modern world: his disenchantment with the philosophy of negation, doubt and absurdity, with nihilism, alienation and frustration, and his desire to return to a faith in love and simplicity of feeling. ‘Man wants to be ordinary,’ says Claude Lelouch. ‘He wants to love, to rediscover his joy in life. He’s had enough of Kierkegaard!’ (More laughter and applause.) ‘After years of pretending to be what he is not, years of posturing and hiding under a false façade, he wants to be himself again: to be . . . a man and a woman!’
I looked at Freddy. The expression on his face – at least its right profile, all that was visible to me from where I sat – was an eloquent mixture of pity and contempt, as if he were thinking, My God, what a moron!
‘Attention, s’il vous plaît!’ the director shouted over the hubbub after the last round of applause. ‘After the film, the Cultural Section of the French Embassy invites you all to a modest reception and a glass of wine. I look forward to seeing you there. À bientôt!’ He disappeared behind the screen.
After a few seconds the lights dimmed.
Modern man’s longings and dreams about an ‘ordinary’ existence were embodied in the figures of a script girl and a rally driver. He spends his days putting racing cars through their paces at the track and after work rides around in a white Mustang; she parades around a film set with a script, constantly fiddling with her hair. Their naturalness and lack of pretension are expressed in their behaviour and dress. She, for example, on location in the tropics (her film is set in Africa: camels in the desert), is clad in a sheepskin coat with a wide collar and knee-length boots; he is seen behind the wheel of his Mustang, amusing himself by executing controlled skids on a sandy stretch of shore while smoking a fat cigar and reading Time, all this in dark glasses.
The lives of these two perfectly ordinary thirty-somethings, Anne and Jean-Louis, are equally straightforward. Each has been through a typical, mundane marriage, and both have lost their spouses. Jean-Louis’s wife, when she heard that he’d had a serious track accident and might never regain his former vigour (sportswise? physically? as a man?), succumbed to depression and committed suicide. Anne’s husband, an actor and a fearless stuntman rolled into one, fell ‘in the line of duty’ during a film stunt. Until then, however, the couple’s life was simple and happy. They spent a lot of time in their country house (horses, bulls, sheep and hunting dogs), sitting companionably together on a huge unmade bed and cultivating the arts of music and poetry: the agile, multitalented stuntsman, his wife by his side, would compose a song, strumming his guitar and singing with a cigar stuck in his mouth, squinting as he blew smoke into his eyes; then he’d write down the lyrics he had lightly tossed off on a typewriter that lay casually among the cream-coloured folds of the bedclothes. They also liked to roll around in the snow in the Alps, clad in large white sheepskins, or to kiss in the jagged ruins of a medieval castle.
Widow and widower are brought together in the most natural way: through their children, who are at a boarding school in Deauville, a picturesque resort on the Normandy coast also frequented by Marcel Proust. They meet at the school one Sunday while visiting their children, and strike up an acquaintance: since it is raining, the thoughtful Jean-Louis offers to take Anne back to Paris in his Mustang. And that’s how it all begins.
A week later they meet again in the same circumstances. This time they spend the whole day together as a family. They eat together at a local restaurant, take a boat trip and go for a walk along the beach, revealing their familiarity with the work of . . . Giacometti. Several times Jean-Louis is a hair’s-breadth away from touching Anne, but each time he restrains himself – doubtless because of the children. He overcomes his restraint only when they have drawn up in front of her house (number 14, in Montmartre) and Anne is about to get out of the car. She doesn’t pull back her hand, but nor does she abandon herself to his tender caresses, and Jean-Louis, regretful but not too bitter, sets off for Monte Carlo to compete in the Grand Prix.
In Paris, Anne leads the life of a working woman. She can be seen bravely clearing a path for herself through the crowds on the Champs-Elysées, weaving her way among the cars in the road (she never crosses at the lights) and hailing taxis; for psychological balance she contemplates a swan gliding across a lake and an empty bench in a park; finally, to relax after the breathless pace and turmoil of her day, she goes to the hairdresser’s.
Meanwhile, Jean-Louis just happens, in the most ordinary, natural way in the world, and without really trying, to win the Grand Prix. Anne’s spontaneous reaction when she hears this news on television is to send him a telegram with this simple message: ‘Well done! I love you! Anne.’ Although the address she gives (‘Monte Carlo Racetrack’) is perhaps not as precise as it might be, the telegram happily finds its way into the hands of its intended recipient: it is delivered to him – again, in the most natural way – at a formal banquet, on a silver-plated salver, by a waiter in full livery.
At this Jean-Louis – hero of the day and guest of honour at the banquet – instantly casts away the world of luxury and decadence, fashion and pretence, and races (clearly above the speed limit) in his old Mustang towards an ordinary but real love. He drives with one hand, while with the other he shaves himself carefully with an electric razor.
Anne, however, is not in Paris. He races back to Deauville. Yes! His intuition was right: there she is, walking along the beach with her children.
There is a joyful reunion. They are ecstatically, drunkenly happy. They have dinner at a hotel restaurant, and then take a room.
But then – what’s this? In the arms of her lover, who spares no efforts to make her swoon with rapture, Anne is suddenly tense and constrained; instead of co-operating, she frowns tragically and starts to fiddle with her hair again. It clearly isn’t going to work; there will be no conjugation of these two bodies.
‘Why?’ the Man whispers, bewildered.
‘A cause de mon mari,’ replies the Woman.
‘Mais il est mort!’ objects the Man, refusing to give up.
This makes no difference. There is nothing to be done. Clearly it’s still too soon.
She is torn. They suffer. There is much inner turmoil. A ‘grain of bitterness’ in the humdrum lives of Ordinary People . . .
Since they accept it meekly, however, they deserve a reward. It duly comes – not in heaven but here on earth, and quite soon, too. After a gloomy morning in the hotel and a painful parting on the platform at Deauville, the Man tears off in his Mustang to race the train speeding away with the Woman. He catches up with it; he overtakes it. He waits for her in Paris.
The outcome is certain: ‘love is stronger than both of them’.
That, at any rate, was the claim made by Francis Lai’s song.
I watched this at first with a scornful smile, then with mounting irritation and incredulity.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was pure kitsch! Corny trash, sentimental rubbish in the worst petit-bourgeois taste! Its success with the masses was one thing, but its popularity with the élite, the haute société, the beau monde, was beyond me. This had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes? This had been nominated for an Oscar? Why? For what reason? Pourquoi? They must be mad!
As I was thinking this, a creeping anxiety mingled with my disappointment and shock. What was Madame’s reaction to the film? Could she have liked it? Was it possible that she, too, saw merit in it? No – that would be dreadful. That would be catastrophic!
I concentrated with all my strength and tried to send her desperate telepathic entreaties and pleas for confirmation: Don’t you think it’s awful? Aren’t you repelled by it? You can’t like it! You can’t possibly feel anything but contempt for it. Can you? Please tell me that you don’t; give me some sign – something, anything. A shrug of the shoulders, a grimace of distaste . . . I know you can.
But her behaviour was inscrutable. She sat quite motionless, gazing at the screen, and her face (again, I had a profile view) expressed nothing whatsoever, neither approval nor revulsion. This was all the more striking because of the contrast with Freddy, who not only made no effort to conceal his disgust but displayed it openly, indeed ostentatiously, to the great annoyance of his neighbours. He shook his head pityingly, he snorted and clucked with disgust, he writhed in his seat and covered his face with his hands.
This led me to think that if they were, as I suspected, quarrelling, and especially if she had a bone to pick with him, then that could be the reason for her behaviour. In other words, it might be sheer contrariness on her part; his unrestrained and unconcealed aversion to the film might be driving her to take the opposite view out of spite, just to get at him. This possibility frightened me so much that I sent silent entreaties to him as well: Dr Monten – Freddy – please! For God’s sake, stop! Calm down! Consider what you’re doing! Restrain your commendable disapproval! If there is some disagreement between you, your behaviour, instead of turning her away from evil, will only push her further and further towards it. Your high-mindedness will lead her into error and bring about her downfall!
Alas, my appeals had no effect. Freddy continued his furious hissing and writhing and exasperated clucking. And who knows, perhaps it really was his relentlessness that finally provoked what happened.
But I shouldn’t run ahead of the story. All in good time.
When the film ended and the lights came on, the most difficult moment of my mission had arrived. I had to manoeuvre so as not to lose sight of them while remaining unseen myself. This wasn’t easy. The Skarb Cinema was small. After a protracted series of about-turns, sudden surges of speed and abrupt decreases of pace, a lot of dodging about under cover of the crowd and some stealthy skulking along the walls, I managed, when everyone had gone through to the lobby and congregated into well-defined groups, to find a safe and fairly convenient spot from which to observe them further.
Madame and Freddy were standing together near the ‘buffet’ – three tables draped in black plush – on which stood an array of glasses with white wine.
My mentor couldn’t stop talking. He went on and on, like a machine, laughing and gesticulating. There was no doubt he was making fun of the film. Madame was listening to him with visibly increasing ennui. She stared in front of her or watched the people around her, and on the rare occasions when she spoke it was curtly and with an edge of irritation, as if she were sick and tired of his carping. My God, her lips seemed to be saying, how much longer are you going to go on about it? What are you so worked up about? But he wouldn’t stop. And when two caustic Frenchmen (his friends, not hers, for he introduced her) joined them and the defender of Racine’s poetry launched into an even more fervent denunciation of the foul betrayer of Great French Culture, his beloved – la belle Victoire, Madame – made her excuses and took her leave.
Only then did I see the bottom half of her outfit. Below the jacket of deep scarlet she had on a pleated black skirt, slightly longer than knee-length, and her legs were encased in a pair of tight-fitting, dark-brown zip-up boots.
It was evident, as she walked across the room, that she had no particular aim in mind, for at the tinkle of knife tapping on wineglass and the sound of the director’s sonorous voice she halted immediately and changed direction.
Silence fell.
The director thanked everyone for being there and giving the film such a warm reception and added a few snippets of information about it, interspersing his dossier with quotations from an interview with Lelouch that had appeared in the review Arts. The gist of the ‘brilliant Lelouch’s’ comments was roughly as follows:
‘I have told a story about a man and a woman: the story of their love. In a way it’s a sort of answer to the fiasco that was my first film, which was also about love, but between much younger people, barely past the age of twenty. This film is about mature people, in their thirties: the best age, the age of flourishing; the age when one really soars, when one is already experienced but still fresh, when anything is possible: a brilliant career, money, love . . . the prime of life! The prime! I even thought about calling this film La Mi-temps. And I think that thirty-two’ – here the director paused, raised his eyes from the text and surveyed the audience with a smile, as if trying to catch someone’s eye, then bent back over the open page – ‘that thirty-two is the best, the most wonderful, the perfect age for a woman. That’s when she’s at her most beautiful and most intelligent.
’
He put down the magazine, took up a wineglass and, once again scanning the assembled guests, proposed a toast: to the force de l’âge.
I was dumbfounded.
You’re mad! I upbraided myself, trying to rationalise my way out of the shock. You’re completely out of your mind! It’s an obsession! It’s ridiculous to interpret everything as an allusion to her.
On the other hand, I thought, the coincidence was significant. She was exactly thirty-two today. And then that ‘force de l’âge’, straight out of Beauvoir – could that be coincidence, too? And what, or rather whom, had he been seeking when his eyes had roved about the room like that? Was he merely playing to the audience? It strained credulity. On the other hand, if he was looking for her, he certainly hadn’t found her or caught her eye; I’d been watching her all the time, and I would have noticed.
The thought of that coincidence would not leave me. With the utmost caution, my face shielded by L’Humanité, I strolled over to the buffet, ostensibly in search of a drink, and in picking up my glass cast a casual-seeming glance at the magazine lying there, open to the interview. The comments the director had quoted weren’t hard to find, since they were underlined. It was all there, just as he’d said. Except for one thing: the age. The wunderkind of the cinema had said ‘trente’. The director had added two years.
I was right after all. It had been a deliberate performance, put on for her. He could easily have found out her date of birth and the title of her thesis by looking at the documents she’d handed in with her course application.
And then I remembered that moment during the opening at the Zacheta Gallery when the director had broken off in the middle of Antony’s speech and looked up in that curious way. At what point had it been? I concentrated, trying to remember. Surely just after the words, ‘When such a mutual pair . . .’
Madame Page 36
