As Time Goes By: Terence Davies' Own Private Liverpool

Terence Davies' idiosyncratic ode to his hometown of Liverpool, has the kind of barbed relation to mass box office appeal that its titular soundalike Sex and the City has to art cinema.  Released in 2009, Of Time and the City employs Davies' trademark meditative touchstones in a manner closer to the work of Steve Reich than say Madonna.

So how does a working class misfit like Davies develop a peculiarly inward iconography against, say, the more polemical approach of contemporaries like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach?  Two words: sex and movies.  Fondly recalling his teenage seduction by the silver screen, Davies pays homage to glories past in an opening montage set within a long-gone movie palace proscenium, archival footage giving way to brightly sunlit shots of neoclassical architecture (Kenneth Clark Civilization-style).  Davies proceeds to serve up a lyrical interior travelogue of Liverpool the dowdy, a parochial hotbed, its sonorous tour guide snidely dismissive of mass culture.  Landmark events such as Queen Elizabeth's coronation are scoffed at as "the Betty Windsor show", the city's favourite sons the Beatles and their rise to fame brushed aside with undisguised disdain or grudging acknowledgment, at best.

It's tempting to regard Davies' rueful jibes — of slags and the city —  as a defiant gesture at his producers' perverse hire of a downbeat auteur for a commercial take on civic shine.  But Davies is no slumming esthete or class-conscious contrarian.  Where his better known contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh attack working class experience with overtly political agendas, Davies adopts an approach closer to chamber music: setting the fleeting yet telling images of working class existence to period notes that paradoxically transcend time.

It's not surprising to learn — given his talent for transcendence — of Davies' Catholic background.  Offering up cherished relics of a Catholic, working class childhood, Davies rejects doctrinaire reverence for a healthy embrace of his new-found homosexuality. This crisis of faith leads Davies to embrace a new altar in the movies' large-than-life stars and escapist fantasies.  Rather than casting Liverpool as a town on the verge of becoming hip post-Beatles' explosion, Davies celebrates Liverpool's down market character, without romanticizing its hardships.  Small shared pleasures — gathering to listen to favourite announcers on the beeb, ferrying across the Mersey en masse to the lilt of “Dirty Old Town” —  shape the post-war Liverpool of Davies’ recall.  At the centre of the film, Peggy Lee sings "The Family that Lived on the Hill" to archival footage of housing projects under demolition.   This sequence was the catalyst for Davies to launch his meditative anti-travelogue.  

In revealing the shadows and light of his own private Liverpool, Davies returns to the strategy of his earliest narratives, Distant Voices/Still Lives and its follow-up The Long Day Closes.  Music propels Davies' storytelling, regardless of textual narrative.  Of Time and the City layers poetic text —his own and others’— to the score of largely period music that provides the narrative arc.  In features like The Neon Bible or The House of Mirth, his signature visual style — luminous, painterly colour, unhurried pacing — is allied to his selective sampling of popular song.  The catch is that Davies’ taste in music, as with most choices, follows a backward trajectory: to classics and period jazz, skipping past the vibrant immediacy of the Beatles and anyone after for the pop music of his parents' bygone era.  Here as elsewhere, Davies reveals himself as a filmmaker whose subject may appear musty — à la Proust — whose persona may be stubbornly unfashionable, whose audience may never grow past the boundaries of the sartorially challenged.  Yet whose command of time lost and found resonates long after even the most cursory viewing.

My Left Eye or Diving after devotion

January 22, 2010
Watching Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) situates the viewer in author/subject Jean-Dominque Bauby's often excruciating, ultimately exhilarating, present. Opening to the sights and sounds of a hospital room, Schnabel's camera immediately puts the viewer in Bauby's uncomfortable skin. His eye becomes the frame through which we view experience.  Initially confined to the terms of Bauby's condition of "locked-in syndrome" (an active mind within a paralyzed body), we see exactly and only as he does. His helpless immobility is graphically brought home in a scene reminiscent of Buñuel: Bauby's right eye is shown close-up as the camera's lens (his "eye") is gradually sewn shut causing the screen to go black.

The claustrophobia of Bauby's condition is relieved by the introduction of two therapists who prove crucial to his resurgence. Through the determination of Henriette, a speech therapist armed with a technique for isolating the most frequently used letters in French, Bauby learns he can communicate in the blink of an eye.  With painstaking effort and concentration, Bauby is able to prise open a window of his physical prison, eventually dictating the text that becomes the basis of his memoir.  In his confinement, Bauby suffers an acute loss of liberty and agency in his own life.  He is cared for and completely dependent on others.  In summoning his imagination and powers of recall, he accesses the freedom his temporal existence denies him.

Freedom from the body's restrictions and mortal functions has long been an abiding goal of religious faith, east and west.   Techniques for transcending ordinary physical responses to sensory stimuli — mostly associated with pain — have been practised and recorded by mystics of many faiths.  The attainment of trance-like, visionary states of consciousness — whereby the physical body is transcended and rendered almost immaterial — have also been well documented.  The urge to escape the confines of our physical selves — bound by limitations of time and space, to say nothing of race, culture, class, ability, and more — has held an enduring fascination.  It is a need all too familiar to policing authorities and social workers dealing with the trade and usage of narcotics worldwide.

The overwhelming urge fuelling this common drive to overcome corporeal restrictions is the experience of suffering and mortality.  Suffering and misery are the trope against which mysticism and hallucinogens arise.  Involuntary confinement — echoed in the title of Assigné au Residence, Jean-Jacques Beineix's record of the real Bauby in hospital — becomes Bauby's defining experience.   In his position of suspended animation, he is both sufferer and hero.  Like the fictional counterpart he aspired to revisit, the Count of Montecristo, enforced confinement prompts Bauby to examine his life  and outlook.  His refusal to succumb to despair — not however without recourse to moments of defeat and self-pity — appears to follow an established arc of incarceration or privation narratives: physical captivity or deprivation opening up soaring imaginative possibilities.

In many respects, Schnabel's film falls into and delivers a standard triumph-of-the-human-spirit storyline.  It fulfills the uplift promised by the genre's true-life origins. On second viewing, it also provides a surprising glimpse at devotion, secular-style.  Deprived of the capacity to sin,  Bauby exists in a quasi state of grace.  His bodily confinement and prominence in popular intellectual circles combine to transform him into something of a secular sacred object: a hero whose suffering becomes a focus of prayerful petition.  After initial resistance, Bauby acquiesces to the hospital's mission, cooperating with his devoted therapists and adapting to the institution's routines.  While his conscious self experiences the indignity of requiring help with basic bodily functions, his corporal body comes to be regarded as something of a living relic: a precious object through which petitioners are able to reach the remote spirit associated with it.  Bauby's interactions with his therapists partake of this spirit.  When Marie the physical therapist demonstrates actions with her tongue for him to practice in order to swallow, Bauby reacts with understandable erotic frustration. Marie's suggestive action is innocent sacrilege: at once urging animation of the spirit trapped within while simultaneously underlining its carnal denial.   Later, following up on the disclosure of her religious devotion, Marie takes Bauby to mass where the priest also treats him as something of a venerate presence.  Bauby's connection to relics is explicitly depicted in flashback: a weekend tryst with a mistress at the unlikely lovers destination of Lourdes.  To his suprise, Bauby's paramour insists her lover accompany her to visit the Madonna.  A highlight of their unlikely pilgrimage is Bauby's purchase of a Madonna figure, whose relentless, battery-powered radiance assists in the couple's dissolution.

For his part, Bauby responds to his celebrity freak status with equanimity, recounting the seemingly worldwide campaign of prayers on his behalf.  His mockery of the marginal role he occupies in the lives of colleagues and loved ones is in contrast to scenes with his children where his inner thoughts reveal remorse and helpless chagrin.  In one particularly devastating scene, he is "visited" by the single individual he has sought the most: his lover, Inès.  Not daring to appear in the flesh, she enters Bauby's hospital room by phone during a visit from Céline, his children's mother. The awkwardness of this unhappy triangle is complicated by Inès immediate insistence on privacy against the practical requirement for an interpreter.  The camera records Bauby's painful inertia as he listens to his lover confess her tearful grief.  Fed up being the unwilling go-between, Céline hangs up on Inès.  The lover's absence and her narcissism are contrasted against Céline's insistent presence.

None of this is in Bauby's memoir, at least not explicitly.  In a 2008 television interview with David Frost leading up to that year's Academy Awards, screenwriter Ronald Harwood describes how he went about adapting the book.  The breakthrough came with his decision to tell the story literally from Bauby's cramped perspective, forcing the camera to be its subject's eye.  Finding a structure for conveying both the harsh austerity of Bauby's condition and his butterfly mind seems to have given Schnabel license to also find visual equivalents for Bauby's roving inner eye.  It's no surprise —given Bauby's professional and personal history — that Harwood's screenplay celebrates women.  From the neglected Céline — anonymous in the memoir — to the tirelessly devoted Claude Mendibil, to the mistresses, therapists and colleagues, women appear as constants: unassuming angels, fugitive apparitions, fleeting partners in love, even the Blessed Virgin.  Unlike Bauby's sutured right eye, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly illuminates the feat of his wilfull assertion of intellect and imagination against paralysing inertia through gorgeous, often lyrical images that in turn speak eloquently of inadvertent devotion.
(See Luke Davies' Eyewitness account for another account and comparison.)

Oracles & Elegy

Winter-Spring, 2009
For my mother, it's fortune tellers; she consults them to have her hopes confirmed. For me, it's movies, literature, theatre.

Tonight I saw Elegy, with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley. I'd read about it in the New Yorker over the summer, and the reviewer had classed it within a minor genre of movies about academics, noting that usually the type is portrayed as genial, somewhat bumbling, generally harmless. He also noted that in recent years a different, less benign portrait had emerged — combative (The Squid & the Whale) or aging icon (Starting Out in the Evening).  Elegy falls into the latter category, with the added frisson of carnality.

An intellectual who's built his reputation on critiquing social mores, David Nekesh (Ben Kingsley) is a man who prizes freedom and independence above all. He arranges his life in order to be free of entanglements. Sex comes in the form of occasional encounters with an attractive former student (gamely played by Patricia Clarkson) close to his age, equally attached to detachment. Exercise is provided via regular games of squash with George O'Hearn (Dennis Hopper), prize-winning poet and fellow cynic who nevertheless remains married, serial infidelities notwithstanding.

Into Nekesh's sterile orbit strays Consuelo (Penelope Cruz), a young Cuban woman determined to achieve her parents' dream of academic success. David's credentials, his apparently boundless command of all things cultural and artistic ensnare Consuelo, who is not so much tabula rasa as  emotionally porous. She has the misfortune to fall in love with David, and to expect a response from him. When he inevitably fails her by standing her up at her graduation party, she is crushed and the affair from which David has long sought to extricate himself is over.  He consoles himself at her loss by accepting O'Hearn's invitation to introduce him at a high profile reading, only to have this emotional pillar pulled from under when O'Hearn collapses onstage. His friend's eventual degeneration and death leave David depleted, somewhat lost, but not so vulnerable as to unseat his carefully cultivated stance of detachment.

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Consuelo contacts David shortly after O'Hearn's death. She wants to meet him in order to relate what cannot be said otherwise. After he agrees and she comes up to his apartment as of old, Consuelo reveals that she is sick with cancer, and that she has to have an operation that will remove her breasts. She challenges David who was smitten with her body to be as enthralled with her following surgery. She comes to him to be photographed; she wants him to picture her as she was, as she wants to be for him, perfect.

The scene is heartbreaking; earlier the poet insists that "beautiful women are invisible." David protests it's impossible, yet the poet persists: "we don't see the woman, we are blinded by her physical beauty." As Penelope Cruz stares unblinkingly at David, camera in hand, slowly and deliberately removing her clothes to reveal her beautiful breasts, she dares David to look at her and see her at last, all of her.

Later in the hospital after the operation, David listens to Consuelo regret how much of her life she feels she's wasted. He does not contradict her, but simply affirms his presence. It is the closest he comes to giving of and revealing himself. Despite the melodrama of Consuelo's reappearance and sickness-unto-death, Elegy is no latter day Love Story. Her death isn't the "point" of the story; it's the catalyst for David's long-delayed maturity. Yet the ending is inconclusive. We are back at the beach where David and Consuelo had gone earlier, where David had promised to take Consuelo, to reveal the great cities of Europe to her. Sensibly, perhaps knowingly, Consuelo demurs. This time the sky is overcast, and the lovers have their backs to us. Is this a flashback to earlier times, or a flash forward to a hoped for future?

Like The Savages earlier this year and Venus last year, Elegy looks at how we put off growing up/growing old by refusing to recognize our age. In Elegy, David's elixir is zipless fucks, the promise of eternal youth (or at least the staying of age) through a lifetime of arrested adolescence. The poet alludes to this when he challenges David to admit to their both engaging in endless immaturity. He also reveals, surprisingly, that he and his long-suffering wife have now, despite each other, discovered one other anew. For all David's vaunted need for unfettered experience and independence, this kind of intimacy eludes him. But not entirely. At the end in Consuelo's hospital room, David finally lets down his guard enough to let Consuelo in.