"There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all"
(IN MY LIFE, The Beatles, Rubber Soul, 1965)
... one afternoon in Paris, some time between 1981 and 1982, after returning from London where I had been looking for funding and “casting” for a new film project, I was taken by the hand, almost literally, by a well-experienced agent lady to the apartment of the Icon herself. I had met the agent at a dinner at John Kobal’s* house in London a few weeks earlier where he was whipping up some spaghetti for a few good friends. We talked about my “casting” woes, me with all of 25ish years of naïveté and dreams, at the very cosy and relaxed table with well-seasoned pros and legends (Paul Morrissey was as happy with John’s pasta as I was). Between the salade and the parmesan, not only did John come up with the incredible coincidence of having just returned from the home of the German actor top on my wishlist (some weeks later I had the surreal feeling of this person coming down from the screen and walking through my front door, just as the scene in a PopEye cartoon that most impressed me as a kid: PopEye came out of his frame and took a can of spinach from the hands of a kid in the cinema), but the famous agent also joined in the enthusiastic chorus to suggest asking the Icon, the “Catherine” of my childhood, for the role of the mother in the story of a complicated father-mother-daughter relationship in an English family in Paris in the 1900’s. “It’d be perfect, her mother was English, you know that,” says she.
That’s how, one afternoon in Paris, this 20-something Hong-Kong-born Canada-schooled ex-student and new-filmmaker, was face to face with the Icon who also seemed to have, surrealistically, walked down from the screen. She came out of a frame of the Jules and Jim that so impressed me while I was of an age to get to every single European film offered by the ciné-club at the HK City Hall. The agent lady had brought me there, having called me earlier in the day, very excited, saying that my idol, indeed "Catherine" herself, had read the script, agreed to do it and wanted to meet me.
If Jeanne was shocked to find herself with a potential “director” all of 25 years of age, a shy awkward Asian girl, too pretty to be taken seriously (I distinctly remember having worn a violet gypsy skirt which had a great swinging movement, with a sheer pastel purple tunic top over a body stocking very popular that year, a look that was decidedly “young film student trying to look chic”), she had the grace and elegance not to show it at all. Instead she spoke in a warm sisterly feminist manner, talking about the films she had directed: Lumière and l’Adolescente, saying frankly, “I was a success because as a woman, I managed to find the financial support to direct these films, but I am also a failure because these films didn’t find their audience and didn’t succeed at the box office.”
Then, I talked about Marguerite Duras and India Song. She sprang to her feet, half-whispering half-gasping dramatically “wait!", ran to the next room and came back with a 45’ record...
“Chanson
Toi qui ne veux rien dire
Toi qui me parles d'elle Et toi qui me dis tout Ô toi Que nous dansions ensemble Toi qui me parlais d'elle D'elle qui te chantait Toi qui me parle d'elle De son nom oublié De son corps de mon corps De cet amour là De cet amour mort..."
It was a record of Carlos d’Alessio’s music which also contains her rendition of the song not in the film itself. “It’s for you”, she says, thrusting it into my hands.
A full circle was closed from the Jules and Jim of the City Hall screenings where “Catherine” haunted my nights through the months before the heartbreak of uprooting from my birthplace, to this instant standing on the impeccably-polished wooden floor of an apartment off the Champs-Elysées, with the mythical lady in flesh and blood calling herself my “sister-in-arms”, insisting on a solidarity between women who were "mad and brave enough" to enter this male bastion of film-directing and producing.
(*) John Kobal : The last year of University in Montreal before I left, in the Communication Arts program in which I chose a focus on Film, John was a special guest lecturer one semester for “Hollywood musicals” which I had always loved. A renowned specialist in the genre, John Kobal was a native Canadian who had settled in London for many decades, famous for books and his incredible collection of photographs of Hollywood icons. For his last evening class, my classmates and I organised a small party in the basement of my parents’ home, where John was invited for drinks. My friends and I arranged to put on a record of a well-known Fred Astaire song as soon as John arrived at the house. I was waiting at the foot of the stairs in a ballgown to sweep John into a Fred and Ginger dance number. Delighted, John signed his book “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance” for me and wrote on the first page, “thanks for making my last night so joyful” which was a typical naughty John wink adding a little spice and intrigue for anyone opening the book afterwards.
(first published in https://filmalert101.blogspot.com/2017/08/vale-jeanne-moreau-cinephiles-around.html)
1) (July 30th, 2017) about chance meetings online/offline and a memory 40 years ago ...
We live in a surreal/unreal/real time when dream/reality/memory/invented-memory melt together in this big dream-catcher of an inner/outer/inter-net. Where, having breakfast coffee and idly looking up my own name in the “image” section to check whether something had made its way into this net, this video and others linked with this lady come up.
How… but how in hell does this inter/extra-net get into one’s most intimate memories and whip it out to link it with one’s other facts and fake news on its pages?
One day, probably within a month of arriving in France, our splinter group of exchange students from a University of Wisconsin “One Year In Paris” film department master’s program, had already had a quiet revolution, had broken away from the semiology-accented cursus and had promptly decided to make a film, like the" French New Wave romantics" that we emulated so much at the time. A film, “Ombres de soie”, my homage-dialogue from an Asian p.o.v. with “India Song” which, even on the 10th almost-consecutive viewing, blew this young proper conservative HK girl fresh off the plane from Montreal off her seat. How to get help for our French/Mandarin voix-off script à la Duras? … but of course, let’s ask for help from the impressive tall lady with flaming hair in her impeccable burgundy ensemble who swept into our Reid Hall classroom each week, dispensing wisdom and mystery surrounding Proust and Duras, and accessoirement teaching us how to speak French like a romantic intellectual native that we imagined Paris streets to be littered with.
To our great joy, the lady said yes, and gave us a rendezvous in her small loft on the top floor of a Rue de Buci “antique” building. So...deliriously romantic.
As she goes through the “text” of this group of starry-eyed 20-something girls from the puritanical other side of the sea (Canada, US California, US Colorado), on a Sunday morning almost 40 years ago, giving us amused looks when we passed our papers from hand to hand, obviously not completely grasping what she is saying, a man … yes, A MAN … comes out of the woodworks (a bedroom? The very thought made these young girls’ brains go mushy), apparently going off to walk a dog. Memory goes blinkety-blink, probably he was tall, with gruffy hair, maybe a beard? maybe not? obviously has to add a Gaulois cigarette dangling from his fingers in this picture …
Our flame-haired lady, a crescent-moon of a smile blossoming on the corner of her lips, looks up at him and says, half-mocking, half-affectionate, anything-but-mundane (and évidemment, so sinfully French, to our ears: “bonjour, monsieur”…
ruf, ruf, grunts the object of attention, and off he goes with the dog.
And here it is, 40 years later, the same flaming hair in a video on this very cold medium of a net. Thrown up in an offering while I’m looking for an image of my own name.
Quoi qui en soit, the re-invented memory, sketched and revised and re-sketched throughout the years, is a lovely gift on this windy mid-summer Sunday morning with coffee and work-in-progress and un-opened boxes from a past life, after the umpteenth déménagement …
2) (June 14, 2020) about chance revisits and ongoing conversations through space and time
And … like a film with a lot of ellipses, life has a way of opening random doors; in you glide finding scenes inside that will dance seamlessly with the scene before.
Another random Sunday, some years later than the last one …
I’m lost in a space in which my own reinvented memories and a filmmaker’s recorded real-time memory merge.
I see her pensive, in the shadows of a stationary car interior, lit up from time to time by the headlights of a passing vehicle like in some well-rehearsed black-and-white film noir. She says, murmuring and blurring her words, « life …. life is a dream, a funny kind of dream … a little skimpy nevertheless… not everyone is lucky enough… they just try to do what they can. (silence) Yes it’s strange, this life. »
There’s a lot of melancholy in the shadows. The vagueness in her voice, somewhere lost in space, sounds so familiar, as if I remember this too from my own veçu.
It’s been 40 years since I saw that lady with the flame hair smiling up at the monsieur she sends away with her dog, because her students have come calling with a Durasien text in hand, trying to turn it into a film. The Rue de Buci morning must have been a Sunday too, I’m convinced of it .
40 years later, a Romanian photographer/filmmaker* Stefan Michalachi, wants to film the lady’s words. She was obviously not done yet with people who wished to turn the words out of her mouth into cinema.
I seem to remember everything about the lady, from the film’s images. That’s how memory works : there is a fuzzy picture in the mind … or perhaps rather, a fuzzy spread of colour, a specific colour. The colour of flame… somewhere between red and burgundy. Here it is again, this colour, in the hair of a woman, and from time to time, in the patterns of a sweater she wears. The voice too, reminds me of something. But the part of the brain where memory rests (in peace, supposedly) is perhaps simply an illusionist’s theatre where sounds and colours are deposited to make me imagine I’ve seen them before. Nevertheless, that crescent-moon of a smile blossoming on a face, now lined with more doses of sorrows and disappointments, surely it is the real echo of a memory ? It is by chance, again (« there’s no such thing as chance/hasard » liked to say ER) that I’m spending a Sunday watching the flamed-hair lady talk to the camera, between light and shadow, between pensiveness and hoarse laughter, telling the camera with unfinished sentences the pain of being, the décalage between how one feels (« eternally young ») and how one is (« so peeved to see on the images that i walk around bent »), the forgetfulness of one’s supposed registered age and the unhappy cohabitation of that pragmatic number with desire (« all this to say that, this girl (that you filmed coming alone at night with the headlights on her car, struggling to open the door in front of the cats) this girl still has a body that I can feel, the softness of the skin, ... men's shoulders because it's most of all their shoulders, but also their smile, the look in their eyes, what can I tell you, not being excessive but I love men and it would not surprise me at all if it all happens again, meeting someone … that’s what I’m saying, I’m not Mother Teresa ! »).
Seeing her in her elements, in the big leather armchairs with little gold studs on the rims, in the rustic wooden surroundings, the piano, the big oak table where she puts her glass and her piles of papers, always the piles of papers, it’s so déjà vu as if I’ve lived it in her real presence a thousand times. And yet, in our « reality » clock, I had hardly met her more than a few hours in the course of a month, through language classes and a "daring" request for a meeting that she granted in her own private space. Now the re-invented memory of that day in the Rue de Buci loft is complete with the big reddish-brown armchair with gold studs and the wooden table where we put our Durasien scripts. The dog is extra. It is not in this wooden interior space. But wait, yes, there is a dog . It is outside. There must have been a dog.
The man to walk it is not there, not in the filmed images, only in my mind’s eyes.
But the filming gave her the shock of confronting reality with her own fantasy of herself. At almost 80 years old, when the film was made, she said, « I thought of my back, of what Virginia Woolf wrote about Melancholy and what Professor Oury also says about Melancholia. For example, there are 2 things : my way of loving clothes, it’s a form of Melancholia, because as Oury says, Melancholia patients try to manage, put up a front, and pretend. Facing the world, they try to compensate for an image of themselves that they don’t have. But in Virginia Woolf’s writings, all her heroines hold themselves tall and straight. And here I get a huge shock when I see what you’ve filmed, that I am bent. I say to myself, you buy all these clothes and you stand up bent ? What’s going on ? I mean, it’s an insult ! It goes further than that : I dress up for men, I take care of my appearance when I go out, so there’s really a melancholic side of me that’s hit to the core of my dignity, of my honour, of my defensiveness. We can go as far as to deduce that, it’s exactly because I never see images of myself that I believe myself to be (still) young. »
It’s obviously an ongoing conversation of 40 years we could have been having. Evolving from that starry-eyed young girl sitting with Duras dreams during her first year in the City of Romantic Lights, to the grandmother now sitting in front of a monitor on another random Sunday watching the dyed flame-hair turn into blond at a whim ("I like this, deciding to change my hair color, this is part of it"), both Watcher and Speaker embracing eternal youth and never noticing that the natural fires of dream and desire grow incongruous with the addition of passing years. Incongruous, that is, to passers-by, those who look at us from the sidebars, not having yet reached this point in life. Years ago, one day suddenly I understood this with ER. Now seeing Marie, the « ageless woman» as she calls herself in the film, it confirms my thought that our exterior envelope (if I could conjure up Buddhist spiritual imageries with such carnal physical realities) may gradually wear out sitting outside too long with too much sun and dust and rain and snow, whereas the interior does not change. What’s inside does not age. The décalage, if lived badly, can become very sad, but if embraced almost recklessly, Marie confirms, it glows with a deep flame colour, beautiful to a fault, and deeply melancholic. Bright happy beauty never manages to touch me, a beauty tinged with wounds and sadness, however, always moves me to tears.
I simply cannot imagine not conversing with Marie D., this Sunday or another, from 40 years ago sitting on that couch, young woman intrigued with adventure and romance, to 40 years on, me having finally reached this station in life where Marie has stepped through a while ago. Chatting and laughing about the movement of love and desire not hinged on a number denoting age on a civil document. About loss : nothing but the other side of the coin of the lust for life. About the healing powers of words. About silence. About rain, light, wind, elements. And then maybe also, about pain from which you never quite recover, though you cover the scar up with pieces and pieces of bandages and scotch tape. It is no coïncidence that I should come across this film on the inter-outer-net. At this part of my route, she wanted to conjure me up, not to scold me, but to sit down with my script, go through every word, modify one here, enhance another there, make it coherent, give it sense, dare it to be unafraid of emotions, teach it to embrace personal truths regardless of stares of mockery or incomprehension. She had to do the conjuring because me, moving too blindly in a fast-forward world, forgot to conjure her up all this time; now, she reminds me from another dimension.
It doesn't surprise me that everything she turned out to be in the film's capturings, which I did but glimpse furtively so long ago, is everything I touched already under the surface of those few sightings, is everything that I sensed would be there, elements with the potential of a long exchange that actually never took place, well, at least, not here, not in this world. On a screen, in a night, the exchange did finally happen. The teacher was once again there, but now with all the vulnerabilities of an ageless woman having trodden a long and arduous road. Now we are two. Now we can pursue this ongoing conversation, and there is so much to talk about.
3) a little night music somewhere between 1) and 2) in a non-linear space, seemingly with no connection with 1) and 2)
« This vague and familiar sensation », she thought.
« i must simply be in love again ».
Just so simple. So banal.
Eight days ago she was having this thought, about how she would never ever feel this spark again over someone, with someone. Her mind went through all those she had been meeting, frequently or infrequently, here there and everywhere, and couldn’t fix on any face who could inspire this fraction-of-a-second pause in the breath, this jump in the heartbeat. « No, simply never again. No one can ever inspire that physical chemical awe in the body again. »
Now she is trying to remember where she was when she had this thought. A café in Hong Kong ? A hotel room ? Looking out the window at night ? In the middle of a doctor’s visit ?
This morning she wakes to the light on the lake. Then she says to herself, « it’s just as simple as light. This is how it felt to fall in love. It’s just happening again. »
So why the absolute certainty eight days ago ? How can we ever be certain again about anything at any point of our lives, she thinks to herself now.
Then she muses, « the problem with this state of mind is that you don’t want to do anything, you just want to sit in a corner and mull over every detail and wallow in your own misery. It is delicious misery. »
4) bouncing off 2) "About loss: nothing but the other side of the coin of the lust for love. About the healing powers of words. About silence. About rain, light, wind, elements. About pain from which you never quite recover, though you cover the scar up with pieces and pieces of bandages and scotch tape."
She's standing, a little distance away from the silent camera. Some describe certain beings as having a resemblance to paintings, or heroines from movies. But she bursts on the scene (or the shot, if I may borrow a quote from a favourite song Diamonds and Rust) like Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness-writing embodied in a flesh-and-blood woman, with rambling words, and pauses and transitions which dissolve into another stream of thought, but maybe related to the first one, now up to the reader/listener/watcher to fill in the blanks or imagine the passerelles.
"There was my brother Jean. Jean came sometimes to this cabin which just got renovated. And then he died. And then, there is a "when". There is a "when" when you are filming me, that I'll call "After Jean". So the girl you filmed, arriving alone by the headlights on her car, struggling to get in the door in front of these cats, that's a girl "After Jean". Then also, don't forget, there's this young man who loved him like no other being could be capable of loving, I think, his name was Dominique, and this guy too, he was dead two years after Jean. It's a lot.... And after these two deaths, to get my mind off things, because it was a necessity, I was told "you should get your heart operated on", I said to myself, that's a good idea, it'd give me a good break ! So there was an open heart surgery, and that also took a lot of time ... "
5) bouncing off 4) one year in autumn
There was a complete cleansing. First, adminstratively and logistically... as any self-respecting pragmatic person would do. Update of documents especially the one listing passwords for everything from unlocking computers to Facebook page to bank accounts, cold rendering of other docs entitled, for example, "En cas de pépin" with detailed instructions down to whom to inform first, and preference for where the dust-to-dust should take place. Notes on calendar to make sure all is done properly, systematically, efficiently: "empty fridge, take out garbage from kitchen, bathroom, under desk; give Su's number to concierge; format absence note on G-Mail."
Later, strategically: it puts everyone in ingenious negociation-cheating-anything-goes-to-get-what-you-want mode, Julien going off to tell the floor staff that mother is likely to become very "strange" when she is stressed, so it is a necessity to give her a single room if you don't want any trouble for the "roommate", with Jonathan staring menacingly nearby making supportive scary agreeing noises. Meanwhile, Julie brings a big box of chocolates for the staff; in Chinese strategy, it is called mixing Tough measures with the Soft touch.
Emotionally, it starts the evening they left. Down from my window I could see them shuffling things around in the car so that everyone could fit in for the ride home. There is a photo they took which they sent to my phone from below, as a contrechamp: the little person against the big window.
Physically. It starts the day before, with all the tests, the emptying of the system. The thorough cleaning.
Then it begins.
There is cheating.
The girl around the anaesthetist's chair says: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah ... " (something about the weather and the morning and the breakfast or whatever, but nothing about when the anaesthetist will arrive)
It was a short Blah blah. She was the anaesthetist.
Then she says, "Your daughter called. We told her it went well. They can come tomorrow."
I thought, but she hasn't finished her Blah blah story yet, how come? How long has it been? Did I doze off for a bit?
But it wasn't the same girl. This was the nurse at Intensive Care. What seemed like a few minutes of dozing-off was a gap of many hours in which something had happened, specialists had been working their meticulous magic and it went smoothly, so said the nurse.
It is already evening.
And there on the screen is Blade Runner. He runs everywhere, why not here.
In the morning there was breakfast. I am sure I dreamt it up but I think there was croissant on the table. Julien says, entering the room in head-to-toe protective gear, "look, how amazing, she's sitting up having breakfast just a few hours later."
Not even 24 hours after they've achieved a "good break" under the skin, now bandaged.
Some days later, when they moved me up to my single room, as the children's soft-and-tough strategy worked, I looked out the window and found a breathtaking sight.
Not a fantastically beautiful landscape, but a karmatic one.
Beyond the helicopter landing pad right in front of my window... some streets beyond, was a hillside with residential buildings. I recognised them to be the residence where I had lived all the years bringing up those tough-and-soft kids now tall strong adults, capable of fending for themselves and of getting a damned single ward for their mom. Karmatic because, of all the landscapes that this room can open up to, this has to be - between the tic-tic-tic sounds of heartbeat and the mesmerising visuals of the perfusion drip - the view of contemplation, imposed upon me for the long days I will spend here. Obviously I'm being asked to review and relearn the lessons of two and a half decades of juggling jobs while keeping a sense of freedom, of feeding food while stimulating young minds, of living in denial of any 'sacrifice' others may good-heartedly point out, of miraculously flying high in the company of exceptional and inspiring beings: mentors, friends and lovers while stooping low, low, low in how-do-I-get-to-the-end-of-the-month mundane details, with harrowing or ridiculous plots of credit-cards-now-you-see-me-now-you-don't histrionics or getting an extra pile of cash doing impromptu interpretation for an American film crew interviewing the owner ("it's a mercenary" whisper-whisper) of a S/M nightclub off the Champs-Elysées, while three innocent kiddies sleep soundly at home with their babysitter. Why now? Why insist that I should look at this building where we lived, when we have all moved on years ago, to city center, to other lives? Coïncidence? "There's no such thing as coïncidence/hasard," liked to say ER.
