D’EST (Chantal Äkerman, 1993)

The most brilliant film from anywhere in the 1990s, D’Est (From the East) is the work of Chantal Äkerman, the world’s greatest Belgian-born filmmaker, the world’s greatest woman filmmaker, and the world’s greatest living Jewish filmmaker. Along with Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Äkerman is cinema’s reigning humanist, and for more than thirty years she has been going back and forth between documentary and fiction, although her documentaries are highly dramatic and her fictions sometimes seem documentary, and she often lands in some magical space in-between. Like Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934), D’Est is a photographic essay, a visual survey, of humanity.

Although Äkerman’s masterpiece defies categorization, it is a kind of “road picture.” For it, Äkerman herself took to the road, traveling from Germany to Poland to Moscow, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She explains that she had always wanted to make a film about “the diaspora of the Eastern European Jews,” and that, in a transfigured form, D’Est became for her that film, for, in each human face she encountered along the way, she felt the history with which she was investing it—a history including the Jewish ordeal of Hitler and the death camps and of Josef Stalin, the former candidate for priesthood whose anti-Semitism was actually more authentic (by which I mean less politically motivated) than Hitler’s. Road pictures are drifty things reflecting the impermanence and uprootedness of human lives, and in the sustained ironical technique by which Äkerman’s film proceeds it’s the “impermanence” and “uprootedness” of her own traveling and tracking camera that, destabilizing figures in often stationary positions, transforms them into a metaphor for lost and scattered Jewry—the most moving use of a moving camera I have ever encountered. Äkerman also films people walking, and this motion of theirs contributes to the same thematic result. It doesn’t matter how few, if any, of these people are actually Jewish, for Äkerman’s own Jewishness, and her reflections on the historic plight of European Jews, invest what she sees as a visionary with the thematic import she pursues as an artist.

Another aspect to this is the darkness of night in which Äkerman films much of what she sees, for instance, in Moscow streets. Headed for home carrying packages that imply rootedness and deliberation, people seem by the determination of their stride to be doing their best to push their way out of the darkness that nevertheless dogs them and is enveloping them. If one is of a literal mind, one can watch this and see little or nothing; but, once drawn into the film’s metaphorical, which is to say, spiritual life, one is overwhelmed by a circumstance so enormous it’s as if one were “feeling history” for the first time. The black of night in this film resonates with a sense of the eternal tragedy of Jewry: the home or even the life always being taken away—the nothingness to which the rest of the world is ever poised to consign Jews by scattering either them or their ashes to the winds. Äkerman’s irony embraces the idea that those whom she films here, who are seemingly hewing to a sure, steady course, are contesting their fate as wanderers or are in denial that this is their fate and their history. Closer to the surface, the Soviet Union has ended but its former citizens, apparently unfazed, go on with their mundane lives. They also are scattered to the winds, and therefore the continuation of ordinary existence cocoons them from this sea-change while Äkerman’s camera penetrates and deconstructs the event of their survival.

For the most part, Äkerman employs two kinds of shots in D’Est, tracking shots and static shots. Her long tracking shots, among the most beautiful I have seen, are correlative both to her own (topographic, emotional, spiritual) journey and to the uprootedness of her camera subjects, which, by ironic dint of her travels, she shares. Äkerman tracks through railway depots and through streets, alternating between humans in a kind of limbo, between their lives, as it were, and people, as Carl Sandburg would have it in his great American poem “Limited,” who are certain they are headed, by train, for Omaha, which in fact is only their most immediate destination. Perhaps the most piercing element in these trackings arrives very late in the film, on a Moscow street, when the camera passes a young boy (at one point the boy stretches back from the extreme right of the frame as if unsure about continuing on his way screen-left), finds him again, alongside a woman we also have seen before, and then loses him forever as we strain in anticipation to see him again, as if his future and ours depended on our reunion. Nothing so crystallizes the sense of impermanence that permeates this film than this little drama which is embedded in the flux of urban pedestrians all making their way to Sandburg’s Omaha. D’Est is a film populated by ghosts whose substantial reality provides an index of the depth of humanity that, metaphorically, has been lost.

Most of the static shots are interior shots, in people’s homes, and some of these find people, including children, in fixed poses, while others are engaged in repetitive activities. One such scene recalls similarly obsessive kitchen scenes from both Äkerman’s Je tu il elle (1974) and her tremendous Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975): a woman, seated at a kitchen table, slices a salami and some bread, slicing and slicing, and intermittently eating only a little bit (but with relish!). Do people do this? Perhaps rarely, if at all; but much of what we do amounts to doing this and things like this, and in all these interior shots Äkerman captures a sense of the routines and compulsive behaviors that people employ to curb frustrations and uncertainties and assuage loneliness. In line with this, a television set, usually playing, appears in these interior scenes.

One of the earliest static shots in D’Est—it comes close to opening the film—shows a boy in his late teens or twenties seated on a roadside bench, presumably waiting for a bus. He is wearing a red tank top, and behind him, on the vertical slats of a wooden fence framing his head, are painted red markings. Throughout the film, dabs of red punctuate nearly every shot, appearing quite often as an item of apparel, for instance. (In the film’s rural scenes, fluttering trees, in long shot, evoke the ephemeral and evanescent nature of existence.) Late in the film, the seemingly purposeless boy has been replaced by a concert cellist, who, after her seated performance, is gifted from the audience with bouquet after bouquet of red roses. Numerous nighttime shots in the film are bathed in a reddish glow, while others favor dusky blues that stress the film’s twilit sense of the eternal. (The film’s two principal color cinematographers are Bernard Deville and Raymond Fromont, and their work is wondrous.) On one level, Äkerman’s repeated use of red suggests the lifeblood of the people she essays, their determination to persist and survive, if not quite their ability to prevail. This is another way of saying, perhaps, that red is armament against the drabness and crushing oppressiveness of life. On the other hand, in ironic counterpoint to this, red evokes a sense of spilt blood, suggesting as much the forces arrayed against humanity as humanity’s quickened response to these. And, of course, red throughout, by its association with Communism, continually reminds us of time and place, and the end of the Soviet Union.

Time is a strange thing in this film. Some visual points of punctuation disclose the time in which the film was shot, the early 1990s, but for the most part there is washing over everything a sense that the human lives we see haven’t budged from the 1930s. D’Est is saturated with a sense of the past, implying that a connection with the past has in some sense held people back from their future. On the level of Soviet reference, this may suggest an ideological nostalgia contesting a nation’s ability to adapt and grow. On the level of Jewish reference, a more dire suggestion arises: the extent to which, by isolating and targeting Jews, the world has helped create a community whose insularity became a defense against eradication. On the other hand, some moments vividly juxtapose time references. In one scene, for instance, a pop singer, wearing a mini-skirt, performs on stage with a band while couples below dance in tentative rock fashion, among them a woman whose very long skirt seems to belong to a time of long-since abandoned modesty. In D’Est time yields to unspecified time yields to intimations of timelessness.

There is almost no dialogue in the film (and least in the VHS version I own), and what dialogue there is isn’t translated, allowing us to share Äkerman’s foreign journey. It’s a solemn world we enter, one certainly not without joy, but a world caught somewhere in between earth and eternity, hope and hopelessness, despair and fortitude. It’s a world of sounds and background noise, but the camera records the silence of faces—the gap between what they show and what they hide. On Yasujiro Ozu’s tombstone, American maverick filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has informed us, Chinese characters appear whose “rough translation” is “the space between all things.” Äkerman’s camera captures the space between all people, even when they are jostling one another in a crowd, as well as the space between all things that make up a person, an identity, or the elusive, perhaps illusionary appearance of identity. There is no rhetoric of humanity in Äkerman’s films; somehow, like Ozu, in fact, Äkerman is peculiarly capable of showing us in each person whom her camera passes over the individual’s silent participation in the aggregate of humanity. There is a universe in each grain of humanity.

Äkerman’s extraordinary use of camera would appear to stylize the humanity that her camera discovers, but, to an unprecedented degree, her human subjects react to the camera in their midst in all kinds of self-dramatizing ways. The net result is a film that is, at once, pure cinema and pure humanity. Post-D’Est, no one can be so foolish as to think that one precludes the other. Perhaps the fullest measure of the humane film that Äkerman has wrought is this: we keenly feel the loss of each face, each soul, the camera passes by, and, because there are so many of these souls in the film, we are never passive in watching the film, for we are always catching up with it.

Äkerman has given us such wonderful films: Hotel Monterey (1972), Jeanne Dielman, News from Home (1977), Toute une nuit (1982), La captive (2000). But D’Est towers over these and almost everything else by everyone else.

It is from Belgium, France and Portugal.

UNDER THE SAND (François Ozon, 2000)

Recently I viewed for the first time The Hours (2002), an excruciating film that, in order to express (according to the filmmaker, Stephen Daldrey) the power of books, had all sorts of characters making decisions and living their lives under the influence of characters in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Among other things, I thought the premise stupid and farfetched; I locate the power of literature elsewhere. Part of the problem with the film, it seems to me, is that the “relationship” between Woolf’s novel and these later fictional lives is either (or both) far too self-aware and selfconscious or deterministic and fatalistic. Also, a good deal of contrivance has enabled the script and the film to conjure these echoes of Mrs. Dalloway in the lives of characters unpenned by Woolf. A more ridiculous film I haven’t seen in many a moon.

Now I’ve viewed a slightly earlier film that marvelously integrates a Woolf novel, in this case the 1931 The Waves, with the film’s present-day main character and her very complicated emotional life. This is François Ozon’s Sous le sable, or Under the Sand, which, like The Hours, prominently refers to Woolf’s own suicide by drowning. However, Ozon’s film is as subtle and complex, and delicate and elusive, as Daldrey’s Hours is literal, shallow and in-your-face. Moreover, while Daldrey’s Hours is as cold as a corpse’s forehead, Ozon’s Under the Sand is thrillingly alive. It’s the most sensual and erotic film I’ve seen since Christopher Miles’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970)—and, this time, there isn’t a virgin in sight. Indeed, Under the Sand, also, is as smart and grown-up as The Hours is adolescent. It draws us in, as do the ocean waves—a motif punctuating the film possibly indicating the suicides of both main characters.

The protagonist is Marie Drillon, a British-born woman living in France with her husband of more than 25 years, Jean Drillon, who is French. Virginia Woolf’s life and work, the film implies, help bridge the cultural uprooting and transplantation. Marie is a college English professor; currently she is teaching Woolf’s The Waves, which she reads aloud, in English, with passion. The Waves is an experimental book, what one might call a subliminal novel, whose characters are represented by interior monologues over a breadth of time, from childhood schooldays to old age. One of these characters is Bernard, at this point middle-aged, as Marie translates the following to her class:

‘And time,’ said Bernard, ‘lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, “What is lost? What is over?” And “Over and done with,” I muttered, “over and done with,” solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, “I have lost my youth.”

Like Bernard, Marie is past the middle of her life, and she has another reason, besides, to be in private turmoil. Something has happened to Jean. Something has happened to her marriage.

On vacation, at the beach, while Marie was sunning and napping, Jean went for a swim. When she awoke, Marie couldn’t find him. Neither could anyone else. Had Jean drowned? If so, was it accidental, or was it suicide? Did Jean, as his mother maliciously opines, simply disappear in order to start a new life elsewhere, having grown “bored” with Marie and their childless union? Talk about an absence of closure.

Nor is that all. Marie’s friends, especially her best friend, another transplanted Brit, Amanda, have good cause to be very worried about Marie. Marie admits to hearing voices lately. She refuses to accept that Jean almost certainly drowned. She continues to speak of themselves as a couple; she continues to refer to Jean in the present tense, noting that he “travels a lot” for his job and they still have an active sex life. Indeed, we ourselves see Jean materialize at home in Marie’s midst. Sometimes she closes her eyes tight to will his appearance; sometimes he is just there, waiting for Marie. Marie is dating someone now, Vincent, but she rationalizes this as her first extramarital affair. One night, it’s Jean’s disembodied hands that are all over Marie, who is lying on their bed. He is taking off her shoes, caressing her feet and her legs, and then her face, with a pair of hands, somehow, on both sides, while her own hands dig at her dress between her legs. A thus strangely doubled Jean, as well as the masturbatory implication in effect tripling him, reflects Marie’s insistence on contesting the reality of his absence. (Marie’s dress is red. A motif throughout the film, red represents Marie’s assertion of will.) In childhood, Rhoda, one of the “voices” in The Waves, speaks of having “thin” dreams, in which she is “fearless” and “defiant,” that others, for instance her classroom teacher, have the power to interrupt and “knock down.” Tenacious, Marie is holding onto her Jean, which is often translated as his holding onto her. “Hold me tight,” she says to Jean in bed one night after his disappearance. She insists on Jean in the present tense so that her friends won’t interrupt and knock down the “reality” of him that she has reconstructed. Only Amanda has dared to suggest to Marie that she should see a psychiatrist.

I do not much like the emphasis given in the U.S. to the concept of denial. This psychological idea reduces the range of possible interpretations of an action or instance of behavior to a single interpretation. Thus if some woman says she has committed a cruel act, she has done so; if, in response to an accusation that she has done so, she denies having done so, her denial reveals that she cannot cope with the truth that she has committed this cruel act. The possibility that she in fact did not commit the act in question has been eliminated. This is absurd—as absurd as the notion that someone’s declaration of some act is tantamount to his or her actual culpability; people say all the time that they have done “bad” things that they haven’t done, out of guilt, confusion, uncertainty, a need or desire to accommodate their accuser, a desire simply to end the discussion or dispute. Neither confession nor denial escapes ambiguity. But people sometimes are “in denial” of something that either they have done or has happened to them. In our sane opposition to the emphasis given this idea of “denial” in some quarters (for instance, the very confused, self-serving realm of American television talk show host Oprah Winfrey), though, we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Sometimes, the notion that someone is “in denial” applies. Such is the case with Marie Drillon in Under the Sand.

But of what is she in denial? Her husband’s almost certain death. But is that all? Is it possible that this denial is the outward sign of a series, a complex, of denials?

The film opens with a quickly, emphatically sketched portrait of the Drillons as a wonderfully happy, compatible couple. No wonder they have been married for so long. Two partners couldn’t be more “meant” for one another. This is the best of all possible unions. Surely you get the point. Ozon opens the film by implying a troubled marriage; his strategy is irony, in particular, too great an insistence on the contrary. He has also established the subjectivity of his presentation of the material. What we see at the beginning of the film may be Marie’s view of her and Jean’s wedded bliss. Truths will tumble out during her emotional journey following Jean’s disappearance—for instance, unbeknownst to her, Jean was feeling depressed and taking prescribed medication. (Did these pills, if taken before his last swim, play a part similar to that of the stones in Virginia Woolf’s pockets during her watery suicide?) Under the Sand, though, isn’t primarily about Jean’s state of mind. Is it possible that Jean’s depression is, at some level, the projection of Marie’s?

Marie seems so happy; what reason would there be for unhappiness beneath the surface—as it were, under the sand? (At times, The Hours or no, Ozon’s film seems to be about a couple like the Dalloways.) For starters, since Jean’s mother points out Jean’s disappointment at not having a family, might not Marie, beneath her persistent smile and ready chuckle, be similarly disappointed? This is a film without children, except for a photograph in Vincent’s apartment, of him and someone who is likely his daughter, and the young persons who assist in the search for the missing Jean. One of these persons, perhaps twenty years old, sits in her class one day, perhaps accompanying his girlfriend. Once she notices the boy’s presence, Marie, discombobulated, ends class early. Outside the lecture hall, in the hallway, the boy addresses her, reminding her of their earlier acquaintance. She will have none of it. She denies she is that person; not once has she ever been on that beach. This is an emotionally complex event, for Marie is, in effect, denying her connection to Jean, the center of her life. (At least, after his disappearance!) One might add as well that Marie’s students, visible in the one classroom scene, may be child substitutes for her, in addition, of course, to everything else that they are, including her idolizers and champions.

Incidentally, the boy is gorgeous; he is the one handsome male character in the film. Given the film’s subjectivism, isn’t it possible that his good looks and trim, fit physique owe their origins to this connection between him and Jean, for whom he helped search? Isn’t his healthy, handsome appearance, on one level, Marie’s reconstruction of homely, overweight Jean in a youthful, attractive form?

This kid isn’t the only one who looks fit. So does Marie. Almost every morning, before work, Marie works out in a local gym. At one point she discloses that in her youth she was an athlete, but, when she married Jean, she had to adjust to the lifestyle of a Frenchman, who loves good food and good wine. The comment, on the surface, reveals Marie’s loving capacity to adopt a new country and to adapt to it. Marie, currently, is spectacularly trim and fit; no middle-age sagging here, let me tell you. To me, this is telling; her working out connects her with her earlier self—and with England, from which her marriage to Jean has separated her. Thus I hear in her acceptance of Jean’s lifestyle of generous food and drink, however faintly, a note of discontent. Indeed, I find it representing Marie’s rupture from her homeland and all the familiarity that this encompassed. Under the surface, Marie may have been treading water, constantly coping with the wrenched nature of her circumstance. There was probably no discussion about this matter from the start of the marriage. Marie, in marrying Jean, would almost certainly move to his country; and, in any case, it would have been a hardship for whoever moved. But Jean, I think, would not have shrunk from expressing the hardship; as a woman, Marie would have had to be Virginia Woolf, or someone very straightforward like Woolf, to voice her difficulty, her constant struggle to assimilate. Marie has kept a great deal in, covering it with a smile. I think that we may put it this way: Marie has been in denial of a very difficult circumstance in her life for a very long time.

Marie’s teaching English in France is, of course, another way for her to patch over this rupture between homeland and adopted homeland. Moreover, each time Marie reverts to English, we are reminded of her fractured existence.

Marie’s keeping fit does more than reconnect her, imaginatively, with her birth country. Isn’t it also at some level a rebuke to Jean? Keep in mind that we are speaking here of a loving woman who wouldn’t for the world deride her spouse for his going to seed. After his disappearance, however, she does mention that Jean promised to join her at the gym; and, in one of those post-disappearance encounters of theirs, when she asks if she can fix him something to eat, and he says he isn’t hungry, she responds: “Good. You will lose a little weight.” Given the connection drawn between her current fitness and her athletic past (incidentally, as a competitive swimmer!) in England, isn’t this a revelation of Marie’s unhappiness—not misery; unhappiness—in her marriage?

Obviously, I’m not suggesting these possibilities because I think the contrary is the case. At one (glorious) point in the film, Marie, making love with Vincent, breaks into laughter, explaining that he is so light and she is not used to this. She is referring to Jean’s heft. When she later tells Vincent that he “doesn’t measure up” to Jean, the irony struck me that Marie has expended great energy in rationalizing her unexpressed difficulties with Jean as a lover. (Of course, this is not how Vincent could possibly “receive” any of this.) This is the point: Marie, here, is rating sex not according to the pleasure of the lovemaking, whatever that might be (how can we judge? we’re watching people in a movie), but according to other issues in her life. More generally, the film is suggesting, happiness is a state of mind that renders events “happy” or otherwise. How we experience things may have little or nothing to do with whatever we experience. Sex is an especially sore point because its physicality argues that the mind may be excluded, but the question persists whether the mind can be excluded from any human activity, including sex. I think not. I also think that every consideration of sex jeopardizes and reduces every experience of sex. Sex may be one thing that we should just let be.

The joy of sex for the Drillons is not irrelevant here; it’s important. It’s in fact more important than usual because of the difficulties that it must overcome. While women are hankering after that perfect experience with a buff body, men just want to love, and make love, and get close. Of course, women are often reacting to what they believe, erroneously, are the contrary feelings of men, and their error is almost totally due to the wrong impression that men stupidly convey. Let’s say that Marie’s discontent may be grounded in what she perceives to be Jean’s discontent, and his discontent may be grounded in what he perceives to be her discontent. A couple cannot “work on” love together when each partner insists that there is no problem and claims contentment for herself or himself.

Marie, it seems to me, is dealing with another problem. Jean’s afterlife appearances, while satisfying, present problems. One, obviously, is this: how real is he and, by contrast, how unreal might he have been before his disappearance? We must ask here at least two questions: (1) How much is Jean, now, a function of Marie’s desire for him to be what she wants him to be?—ironically, one of the eternal questions men have regarding their beloveds; and (2) Where is Marie in control of Jean’s appearances and where is she not? The thing about these appearances for the viewer, whenever or however they occur, is how material—how corporeal—they are. To be sure, this befits Jean’s animal girth. But it leads elsewhere, besides.

After his disappearance, each time we see Jean we may be seeing him in an even more fleshly manifestation than Marie does; and each time this happens, we are more and more drawn into the “reality” of her current existence. We, of course, retain a measure of objectivity to counter this subjectivity; but that’s not the point. Increasingly, we have to call upon this objectivity to restore to the film what we regard as a sense of reality. This peculiarly implicates us in “Marie’s world,” into which, like Rhoda’s schoolteacher in Woolf’s novel, we must constantly intrude ourselves in order to achieve a “correction” of Marie’s reception of reality.

In a sense, then, we the viewers are at odds with Marie; she and the rest of us are engaged in a contest for primacy of interpretation. Marie wins. Let me explain how this occurs and what the occurrence ultimately means.

When the police telephone her to let her know that they have finally uncovered the drowned body that they believe establishes Jean’s death, Marie is once again “thrown.” How can her willed world of reconstructed reality continue? Simply, it can’t and, momentarily, it doesn’t. Where is Jean? Suddenly, Marie cannot conjure him or invoke his presence in their home. It is this development that precipitates her visit to her mother-in-law, whom she has been avoiding for months. At the police station, however, Marie has her day. Jean’s body, she is informed, is putrefied beyond identification; the head, green like the rest of whatever the police have now, has also swollen beyond recognition. However, the match-up of her mother-in-law’s and Jean’s DNA, as well as Jean’s dental records, establishes to a point of 90% certainty that the thing—it can’t even be called a corpse anymore—once belonged to Jean. The police ask: Will you identify the shorts and the wristwatch that were found on Jean that you have already described to us in detail? Marie will do this, but only after she views the swollen, autopsied, partially mutilated cadaver—a sight, deemed as being likely traumatic for her, that the police had wished to spare her. Surgically masked, Marie views the no-longer-Jean; she is visibly shaken, disgusted, sickened, and the two police officials, responding both to the cadaver and to her, act in this instance as our surrogates. (It should be noted, however, that Ozon, showing good taste, doesn’t show the cadaver.) Marie, having thus harrowed hell, is poised to reassert her paradise. The blue trunks? Yes, they look like Jean’s. The wristwatch? She laughs. It’s not Jean’s! The police counter: Look again, Mme Drillon; the watch matches exactly the description you gave us. Marie counter-counters: I ought to know; I bought Jean his watch. Officially, then, the identification sinks. As the potential widow, Marie holds the decisive measure of power. It will cost her. At the bank, Jean’s assets will remain frozen, inaccessible to her. She will continue not being able to get on with her life. Marie’s shocking announcement at the police station will cost her even more than that.

One of the themes of The Waves, one that is especially relevant to Rhoda, the character in the novel with which Marie most closely identifies (if often finding in her, ironically, a negative role model that she must resist becoming), is this: the extinction of self with which life can threaten one. Since childhood, Rhoda’s defensive strategy has been to “lie” and “prevaricate”—deny, if you will. Indeed, Rhoda has always felt that she had much to defend herself against. She explains: “The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!’” A childhood experience of Rhoda’s connects with the use in the film of the word cadaver, at the police station, with reference to the drowned Jean. It isn’t at the beach but in a garden: “in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.” Seeing herself as vulnerable, Rhoda thus imagines a means of negotiating with her weakness to take some measure of control of her life. This is Rhoda’s way; it’s also Marie’s way. Since childhood, Rhoda has felt unable to assert an identity because of the others, even in her own group of friends, with whom her identity had to contend. In middle age, she abandons her sometime lover, and the group to which they both belong, in order to pursue a path of travel. By denying Jean’s death, and in particular by doing so officially in front of authorities, Marie, however differently, is also going her own way.

Because the film has implicated us in her fantasies, Marie’s way turns out to be our own. The film ends brilliantly, with Marie again on the beach. Squeezing a handful of sand, and thus discovering there is nothing “under the sand” but more sand (more lies, more illusions, more need to apply will to arrive at “substance”), Marie turns her head to espy, down the beach, a figure that attracts and draws her. It’s Jean; surely it’s Jean. But really now there is no question, for the final shot—a long shot of Marie running down the beach to whoever—represents Marie’s drop down the rabbit hole, her passage to the realm of Jean’s reconstructed materiality. Ozon doesn’t complete the action, retaining an element of ambiguity, I suppose, but the upshot is that Marie is captured in the expression of her will and desire to reinvent reality according to her fantasy of an untroubled marriage.

This is a terrific film. Working from a script by himself and three female collaborators, Emmanuèle Bernheim, Marina de Van and Marcia Romano (hence, the conviction of the female perspective woefully absent from the piece of crap that Daldrey slapped together), Ozon has managed the seemingly impossible, sustaining (at the heartfelt level) the theme of loss of a loved one while also exploring blissfully lovelier, more intricate possibilities. Indeed, loss isn’t even a necessary part of the ideas that this remarkable film generates; any occasion is relevant where we believe we receive reality when in fact we are calling upon a wishful substitute in order to pursue our prerogatives or sense of things. This takes in a huge amount of human territory.

All the actors are fine, but Charlotte Rampling, light-sensitive in her scale of emotions, achieves here the peak of her artistry. She is superb. Even her (pardon) haggard appearance contributes to the expressiveness of her work, for it suggests the toll that Marie’s mental manipulations require. Throughout the film, it’s Rampling down the beach that every adult male viewer has been perpetually running towards. Perfect, this, in terms of the film’s theme; however things appear, Marie is in pursuit of Marie and identity. Rampling makes her our irreplaceable surrogate.

LAN YU (Stanley Kwan, 2001)

I find myself short of comprehending Lan Yu, especially with regards to recent and current Chinese legal and political practices, as becomes strikingly clear near the end of the film when, viewing it, I literally gasped aloud “Death penalty!” at the revelation that this is what the protagonist, Chen Handong, the head of a trading company, faces from the state because of some questionable business practices. Perhaps this is the Communist Chinese government’s guilty exaggerated response for having allowed capitalism within its borders in the first place; before the revelation, let me tell you, I thought Chen was facing, at worst, hefty fines and a few years in the pokey. At least, though, the legal system there isn’t overly self-righteous; after a few days in jail, Chen takes happy advantage of the prevailing level of systemic corruption and buys his way out of everything but the monetary penalties. If only the rest of his woes could be so smoothly resolved.

Chen is a homosexual—and, as we know from Yuan Zhang’s East Palace, West Palace (1996), as repellent a film as Lan Yu is an appealing one, this isn’t a good thing to be in China, where, although homosexuality isn’t illegal, gays are brutally targeted both by street gangs and the police. It’s a cultural madness that gays in China are regarded as “unnatural,” although, I’m sorry to say, communism’s own puritanical streak may also be contributing to the cruelty and violence. (Goodness knows, the European thinkers who invented communism weren’t puritans.) Indeed, I wonder whether the makers of the film intend that we suspect that the state’s financial ruination of Chen is motivated, at least in part, by official distaste for his sexual orientation. Kwan, who is gay himself, directed from a screenplay by Jimmy Ngai, who in turn based the script on an anonymous e-novel. (This time, I don’t think the author is Joe Klein.) In any case, it makes sense that Kwan would be reflecting on his own vulnerability as a highly visible, openly gay person in a nation hostile to gayness, which it identifies with effeminacy. This would explain the admirable sense that the film conveys of a deeply personal statement—one whose single note of self-pity, a blemish rather than a bruise, arrives only as the film is about to make its exit.

The film, which is set in Beijing, covers a period of about a dozen years starting in 1988. It proceeds by vignettes, most often with substantial gaps of time in between as they separate and reunite, charting the course of the relationship between Chen and Lan Yu, who begins as a teenaged college student, a financially struggling, impoverished boy from the country. Chen is older, and, by comparison, a sophisticate. In a pool-hall, Lan, who will claim to be sexually inexperienced, is nevertheless about to prostitute himself for money with the establishment’s owner when Chen, a patron, intervenes and takes the boy home. Thus Handong begins as Yu’s protector. He showers his new lover with money and gifts, while all the while insisting that their relationship be kept short of a life-commitment. On the occasion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Handong searches frantically for Yu, but in the end it is Yu who finds him, asleep from exhaustion behind the wheel of his parked car. Handong shatters Yu twice. Forgetting his date with Yu, he beds with another pickup, and Yu walks in on this. But the worst beating is to come. Believing that this is the proper thing to do, Handong marries, severing all ties with Yu, with whom he had been living in the suburbs in a seemingly deepening and mutually loving relationship. Indeed, the night before their parting, each confesses his love for the other. After Chen divorces, he and Lan meet by chance again; and, although Lan is terribly wary, their love affair—marriage, really—resumes, with Chen moving into Lan’s tiny apartment. It is the money from the sale of the suburban house that the two had shared that spares Chen the ordeal of prison. Another separation follows, however, when Yu, about thirty now, is killed at his job at a construction site. In the last of his numerous voiceovers, however, Handong confides that he feels that Yu’s spirit is with him always.

Yu’s death seems, certainly on first reaction, a bit of melodrama; it is the blemish to which I earlier referred. Yet I must be ambivalent in some sense, because I don’t regard Handong’s seemingly ridiculous final comment in the same way. On the contrary, it’s psychologically precise. After all, it is only now, now that he has the consolation of Yu’s abiding spirit, that the seesaw of Chen’s life—the separations from and reunions with Lan—has been put to rest. Yu wanted love most of all—to give it and receive it; Handong, comfort and stability. One introduced the other (we presume) to gay love; but it was the inductee who opened his heart to this mentor, prying more and more tenderness from him, but also, always, unintentionally shaming him with his own greater devotion and capacity to love. Implicitly, this reflects Chen’s tethers to the past, with its emphasis on a prescribed way of living. Lan was the future, with which Chen could never quite catch up. In retrospect, then, Yu’s death may be dictated by the film’s core argument.

Mirrors, reflections: the frames are full of these, and in part they visually convey the varying degrees to which neither of the lead characters can completely relax into his own life. Our seeing them so often in reflection is correlative to this fact about their separate existences and mutual existence. Indeed, four things are dominant in the impression that Kwan’s film makes, one of them being the intricately fascinating nature of the mise-en-scène, to which the use of mirrors and reflections in particular contributes. Another is the narrative discontinuity I’ve mentioned, the lurching ahead over gaps of time as brilliantly correlative to the personal, social and even political impediments to the integrity and continuity of the central relationship. A third is a fact about Handong that constantly moderates our view of him, shifting our attention from any issue of his behavioral flaws to the larger context of a narrow culture and oppressive system that are limiting his human capacities. This fact is the loyalty and love he draws almost universally, whether from employees, his sister and her spouse, whoever. Finally, one must note, in addition to Yu’s sweetness and vulnerability, the unexpected emotional complexity with which the superb young actor who plays Yu, Ye Liu, invests his personality. This isn’t an “everything-on-display” performance such as Johnny Depp or Sean Penn might give; on the contrary, Yu is more private, even more mysterious, than Handong. We’re not sure he is as innocent as he initially claims; we’re not sure, when Chen re-enters his life after divorce, whether he, Lan, really has the new lover he claims, the one who is constantly “overseas.” Ye’s eyes, so open one moment, seem bottomless at other moments. “I’m just a simple boy from the country,” he says, in effect, at one point—like Clifford Odets’s “the country girl.” He, too, now finds himself in the city, where his alleged innocence can be a means of negotiating a daunting, unfamiliar environment. Anyhow, the reach of Ye’s acting is so extraordinary that something critical arises from it that I presume wasn’t a part of the script. We are left wondering just a bit if Yu’s worksite tragedy is in fact a suicide. I cannot praise Ye’s acting enough; both its openness and not-so-openness, its revelations and its secrets, suggest a depth of human reality that readjusts whatever else in the film seems borderline schematic. Jun Hu, from East Palace, West Palace, is very good as Handong.

Lan Yu was named best film at the 2003 International Gay Film Festival. At the Golden Horse Film Festival, Kwan, Ngai and Ye were named best director, best scenarist and best actor. (Ye—yes!)

Kwan is a prolific filmmaker. Lan Yu was imported strictly because it’s a gay love story. It’s a pity that works of Kwan’s that are reputedly of greater interest to those who care about films aren’t likewise allowed into America, which remains the world’s greatest bastion of film censorship and suppression. What the marketplace accomplishes in the U.S. (by allowing so few films in that people aren’t free to choose to see what they want to see), China accomplishes, on its much smaller scale, by committee fiat. We can see Lan Yu here, but it has yet to be shown in China.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

The two most magical films in existence may be Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), the first one light-magical, and the second, darkly magical. Both came out of Germany, although Dreyer, one of cinema’s three or four greatest artists, was a Dane; both films fully exploit the almost primitive capacity of cinema to realize strange, dreamlike worlds of the imagination. Destiny is, perhaps, the most spiritually refined film ever made, while Vampyr remains cinema’s most profound study of humanity’s mortal anxiety, the twilight where the soul of the living touches the outermost garment of the regions of the dead. Regrettably, few if any films nowadays are adventurous enough to explore this kind of emotional or spiritual territory, and special effects use of late has crashed into the crass and blatant, quelling the imagination rather than delighting or inspiring it. (Advanced computer technology may have sounded the death knell for imaginative special effects in films.) Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête), based on the eighteenth-century fairy tale by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont, is an example of the kind of truly magical film that, for whatever combination of reasons, no longer seems possible, or is no longer attempted by current filmmakers, with only the fewest exceptions, the Brothers Quay and—Muses, keep visiting him!—David Lynch among them. Too, it’s a film that keeps looking better and better.

Cocteau’s Beauty derives from a complex of motives. To understand these, one must understand a little its maker, the French poet, painter, playwright and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. His father, a lawyer, committed suicide when Cocteau was not yet ten years old; the event proved a training ground for him in human vulnerability while throwing his immediate circumstance into chaos (school expulsion; running away from home). Another, equal blow awaited Cocteau: after serving in World War I, he fell in love with Raymond Radiguet, the future author of Le diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh), whose death at twenty from typhoid freshly shattered Cocteau, addicting him to opium and resulting in his hospitalization in 1929. But Cocteau fell in love again, with Jean Marais, about fifteen years his junior, in the 1930s; thereafter, his stage and film involvements existed in part to show off Marais in the best possible light. Cocteau had long been identified with the progressive and the avant-garde when he made an error in judgment during the German Occupation in the 1940s: he praised in print a fascist artist, Arno Becker. The praise may have been heartfelt, or it might have been in nervous response to the fact that the Vichy government was branding Cocteau as “decadent.” Perhaps, then, he was trying to be conciliatory for the sake of professional survival. If the latter is the case, the opposite of the aim he sought now fell upon him as the press used the occasion of his slip to condemn him for his homosexuality. The Germans shut down his plays. After the war, therefore, Cocteau was ripe for rehabilitating his image, and if he could do this while at the same time giving Marais a tremendous role, all the better. The result was Beauty and the Beast.

Fellow members of the avant-garde chided Cocteau for what they regarded as the apolitical nature of his work. Cocteau thus opens the film with a written and signed defense of art which reconnects adults to their childhoods and to the wonder of childhood. Cocteau here is being devious and ironic; Beauty and the Beast is both historical allegory and a hymn to freedom. It renders the fairy tale in such terms that the film becomes, allegorically and symbolically, about the Occupation and the Liberation of France. It’s a national work—an epic—in addition to being a highly poetic and personal one. And it did the trick, restoring Cocteau to his cultural throne, now additionally elevated, in a grateful nation. Elsewhere (such as in the United States), Beauty and the Beast came to epitomize, even define, the soul of France.

Cocteau’s passionate love story can stand on its own, but the film’s great power derives from its thrilling allegory. The Beast is trapped between two modes of existence, that of a free man and that of a beast (to be exact, a big, upright cat) which, one of nature’s hunters, even as it approaches the woman it loves finds its quarry, a slain deer, at its feet. Neither-here-nor-there, this being-one-thing-but-desirous-of-being-fully-something-else: from this Cocteau fashions the Beast into an embodiment of France’s Occupation. In love with Belle, that is, Beauty, the Beast suffers afresh an unfree nature despite owning the Enchanted Castle and its spectacular grounds and the trappings of wealth, that is, the magnificence of France. One can go mad trying to determine to what degree, if any, the filmmaker was conscious of his decision to find in the fairy tale such vibrantly recent historical matter, but without doubt the Beast’s predicament evolved from Cocteau’s artistic use of it as the perfect symbol. (One suspects that on this one glorious occasion Cocteau submitted entirely to the Muse, since selfconsciousness so often mars even his otherwise estimable work.) The Beast is a majestic creature, its emotions as it pines for Belle suggesting the anguish of a fettered France recalling her freedom and the enormous struggle by which that freedom had been achieved. The Beast’s shame at being a beast is the withering projection of Occupied France’s monumental shame, over both the Occupation itself and those collaborationist elements that additionally burdened the national psyche. The Beast calls up these dire national associations effortlessly. This is not, elsewhere, the case with Cocteauvian symbolism pertaining to the creative process (such as in the 1930 Blood of a Poet), which can seem too determined on his part, too literary. In Beauty and the Beast, the primary symbols seem to spring up naturally, and those pertaining to artistic process are pleasantly subdued amidst the fabulous atmosphere. While Orphée’s dips into the underworld (1949) constitute Cocteau’s most brilliant (and darkest) flights of imagination, all in all, in film, Beauty and the Beast is his most satisfying, fully realized piece of work.

No less perfect a symbol as the Beast is Beauty, who, through the agency of her knit-browed suitor, Avenant, also played by Marais, is connected to the Beast. Belle (Josette Day, wonderful) is imprisoned in two ways. One of these finds her the prisoner of an hilariously cluttered domesticity dominated by two selfish sisters who treat her with contempt as they might Cinderella, in part because her humility has made her their father’s favorite. For all her beauty, Belle is something of a drudge, her existence one of self-sacrifice so that her sisters may indulge their vanity; she is the embodiment of Christian sacrifice, in her case, not for the sake of her sisters, who are immediate beneficiaries, but for the sake of her father, whose life is made simpler by the subordinate way in which she chooses to behave. In this sense, Belle parodies bourgeois self-rationalization, much as her sisters parody the pursuit of bourgeois materialism by asking their father for every nonsensical thing under the sun (such as furs, jewels and a pet monkey) while Belle asks only for a thing of simple, natural beauty: a rose. Cocteau, here adhering to the original story, is being more than ironic when, on a business trip attempting to save their home and possessions (their bourgeois existence), the girls’ father is condemned to death by the Beast when he stops to snap off a rose from a bush on the grounds of the Enchanted Castle; he means for us to grasp that Belle’s request is, beneath the appearance of virtue, inseparable from her sisters’ bourgeois motives. One props up and rationalizes the other. Thus the Beast asks the father for any of the three daughters to take his place at the Castle in order to spare his—the father’s—life. It scarcely matters which.

The other way in which Belle is a prisoner, inextricable from the other, is harder to define. Let us say she isn’t fully herself. She is the prisoner of her appearance of virtue; she is the victim that France has become under the Occupation. She is the still perfect appearance of France cut off from the living, breathing free soul of France. It is in this context that numerous shots, particularly at the Enchanted Castle and on its grounds, comparing her (within the same frames) with statues and sculptured figures are best understood. There is irony in the fact that some of the statues and other sculptures are animated—at least as much “human” as Belle herself; for, very often, Belle appears passive and elegantly statuesque. Belle, then, isn’t exactly, or fully, human. Freedom is necessary to complete her humanity. At present, she is under constraint—the constraints of history, on one level; the constraints of the fairy tale, of art, on another. The film ends with the deaths of both the Beast and Avenant, signaling the rebirth of France in the form of a dashing, handsome prince (again, Marais—here, as beautiful as Cocteau can make him*) with whom, released at last from her constrained and statuesque existence, Beauty suddenly sparks into warm, breathing life. The film is profoundly moving precisely because of the political and recent historical associations it activates.

In addition, the film is formally wondrous, a visual poem, especially inside and about the Enchanted Castle. The staircase indoors seems to appear from out of the darkness enrobing it just to guide Belle’s light steps up or down; outdoors, an open pathway cloaked by massive, exquisitely detailed foliage evokes the engravings of Gustave Doré illustrating fairy tales. The sensuous slow motion applied to Belle’s first entrance into the castle, with its transformation of her heavy outfit into seemingly eternal waves and folds, is among the film’s most beauteous techniques; but all things wait on the film’s most ecstatic moment: at the end, the slight dip down to the ground and then the flight to the heavens as the Prince takes his Beauty to his castle, where her sisters will attend to her for a change. It’s a moment fitting the monumental theme—France’s liberation—to which it’s attuned.

Cocteau’s collaborators richly contribute to the film’s triumphant character and beauty: black-and-white cinematographer Henri Alëkan (who forty-one years later would apply his skills to another magical film, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire); production designer Christian Bérard, and art directors René Moulaërt and Lucien Carré; Georges Auric, whose original score is one of the finest ever composed; Marcel Escoffier and Antonio Castillo, whose costumes for Belle and Beast, and Hagop Arakelian, whose makeup for the Beast constitute the highest attainments in these fields, without exception; and René Clément, whose technical assistance enriched Cocteau’s ideas. (The year before, Clément had made the extraordinary neorealist film about the Resistance, Battle of the Rails, and he brought Alëkan with him from that.)

The 1991 animated film version, by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, borrows many details from the Cocteau film that aren’t in the original story. However, it’s a vastly inferior film whose postmodernist Belle becomes the strained vehicle for cute, arch feminism. And, of course, Robby Benson is no Jean Marais.

* Depending on who is telling the story, either Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich is nonetheless supposed to have said in a movie theater when the Prince takes its place, “Give me back my Beast!”

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (Dick Richards, 1975)

So often it is the case that Hollywood films exploit the audience’s penchant for escape that it is an especial pleasure when a few of these films engage this impulse of ours. The pull of nostalgia has become a mainstay in American culture; Orson Welles’s beautiful The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) finds this “culture,” like fashion, unstable, manufacturing nostalgia almost instantly: here today; gone tomorrow; already missed the day after. Much of this has to do with the gradual bankruptcy of U.S. myths such as the American Dream, the social and political disappointment and disenchantment that U.S. realities have engendered. (Consult Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 Greed.) But there is also a component that relates to something more omnipresent in human nature: our abiding, sometimes nagging, mortal awareness. Often our escapist tendencies, inside a movie theater and out, attempt to cope with that. An analytical film of the 1970s that is key in this regard is Farewell, My Lovely—a film that its star, almost apologetically, once described as a mere opportunity to get out of the summer heat, but which today, in retrospect, makes a real contribution to our understanding the wave of nostalgia that, following on the heels of the youth rebellions of the 1960s and gripping the national psyche, helps explain the appeal of a reactionary Ronald Reagan that led the U.S. down such a disastrous, pathological course, culminating in the presidency of George W. Bush.

Taken from Raymond Chandler’s novel written 35 years earlier (David Zelag Goodman did the fine adaptation), the movie Farewell, My Lovely suggests that commitment to one’s work, at least if the job requires risking your life for those who urgently need your help, is one weapon we have against growing old towards death. We can remain morally fresh, Dick Richards, the director, says through the example of an aging private eye, if only we put in our dutifully long hours before the big sleep. In order to help client Moose Malloy find the prostitute whom Malloy has kept on loving from behind bars for eight years, Philip Marlowe risks himself and others. Bit by bit, his search for Velma unearths a complicated scheme of corruption and double-dealing, bringing death or injury to a host of individuals along the way.

This noir nightmare Marlowe must bring to waking light, whatever the human cost, while the world through which he languidly moves confuses reality and dream. Accepting full responsibility for the outcome of what he must do to earn his retainer (as the egotistical detective in Roman Polanski’s vastly inferior Chinatown, 1975, does not), Marlowe is without self-pity even while growing old in a criminal, that is to say, fallen world. At his age, Robert Mitchum, who seemlessly plays Marlowe, himself embodied Marlowe’s acceptance; it is a Pirandellian performance, one that completes the performance that Mitchum gave thirty years earlier in Jacques Tourneur’s postwar Out of the Past, 1947, and one that allows Richards, a younger man, to project himself into an incidence of graceful aging in order to contest his own mortal anxiety. Through age’s other side, that of youth, Richards had done something of the same thing in The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), where, having left home to become a cowboy on a cattle drive, an adolescent reaches maturity by accepting responsibility for the impossible defense of an imperilled commune of religious pacifists. In the ensuing holocaust that claims the lives of all those from the drive who joined him in this noble endeavor, the sole survivor—and through this boy, Richards; and through them both, each of us—confronts the awesomeness of human mortality and the counterveiling graciousness of the human spirit. The film ends with a rendition on the soundtrack of “Amazing Grace” sung heart-piercingly by Joan Baez.

Similarly, Mitchum-Marlowe offers Richards hope that the horror of increasingly imminent death can be transcended through personal style and moral commitment. In Marlowe’s case, risking death for a living asserts his general refusal to submit to the great fear that dogs all our lives (”I am afraid of death and despair,” says Marlowe in Chandler’s book, linking these). Although a dead-end dreaminess imbues everything in the film with a mortal flavor and a sense of the past, Marlowe himself neither looks back nor bemoans time lost. He seems instead to be living out a dream or memory—if you will, what our lives have become since becoming soiled by selfconsciousness. Both visual texture and dramatic structure reinforce our sense of this dream; the present to which Marlowe returns after an extended flashback sustains the flashback’s drugged, hung-over feeling, memory and actual experience now being equally a dream, a fever dream eerily vague yet at times supernally clear, as embodied (through John A. Alonzo’s velvety color cinematography) in the Los Angeles half-world, a phosphorescent inferno.

The forties, which the film evokes, intimates time’s passage, that is to say, the nearing of death for each of us. However, the appeal of such nostalgia is quite the opposite. By viewing a stylish re-creation or evocation of the past, we hope to escape the past’s mortal tentacles; as we watch time and memory becoming objectified and stylized, our own deaths, seemingly receding, are distanced from us. Our escape into the past, if you will, our aging into the past, helps release us from the mortal meaning that the present imparts to the past merely by coming after. Imaginatively, we divert chronology. Indeed, the confusion of past, present, dream and reality in Farewell, My Lovely repeats the ancient theater’s therapeutic illusion of immortality that actors shared with the audiences they represented by crossing back and forth between roles of human and god, man and woman, man and beast. (This theatrical purpose survives, to some extent, in the ritual of the Christian mass.) The imaginative fusion of opposite natures aims to eliminate those exclusive boundaries which define and confine us to our mortal condition. This cross-over is pervasive in Richards’s film; it occurs in the atmosphere and the mise-en-scène themselves as a fusion of past and present, the present being, finally, indistinguishable from a dream of the past.

Derived from what experience has taught Marlowe about the world, his characteristic acceptance does not betoken indifference. Marlowe simply knows too well the toll that mortality takes on us all; this is why he stakes only a small, obligatory sum of money on the possibility that Joe DiMaggio, then riding high, will remain invincible as a ballplayer. Nevertheless, Marlowe is concerned about people, not complacent. (Moreover, he generates concern and commitment in others.) In an episode that doesn’t appear in the novel, Marlowe in effect adopts a boy by offering the Malloy fee to the child’s mother, who likely will become his mistress or wife. After all, his relentless investigation helped bring about the murder of this woman’s spouse. Too, as Shakespeare might counsel, Marlowe needs a son; surely the boy now needs a father. Only by assuming the deceased’s role vis-à-vis wife and child can Marlowe fully meet responsibility for the man’s death, an atonement that promises redemption. The woman and the boy may provide Marlowe’s life with its final, fullest grace.

Miraculously diverting our fearful mortal dreams, this resolution may be the sweetest illusion of all.