spatch

The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.

I started the afternoon by sitting under the shade of some kind of ornamental cherry while my godchild pruned and weeded the sprawling twenty-one-gourd salute of a vine that has taken over the lawn, but then the sun moved to reflect itself directly into my eyes and I relocated to the fire lane on the grounds that technically I was not parked in it.



Highlights of the later afternoon included napping for at least an hour, Japanese-style egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fleurdelis41 notifying me of the identification of the Sanday Wreck and its four decades of service in the Royal Navy and the Arctic fishery. My godson spent most of the evening repainting and rebuilding a chair, partly by lantern-light out on the deck where he looked like some DIY Tarot draw of the Star.

Wildcat Bus (1940) is the definition of a programmer in that its premise of a small commercial bus line suffering a mysterious string of sabotage is reasonably disposable and in execution it is a thorough delight, starting with third-billed Paul Guilfoyle for once not playing a sleaze, a stooge, or any kind of crook at all, but the steadfast and sarcastic, textually acknowledged heterosexual life partner of the hero, the former oil heir played by Charles Lang who cracked up so badly in the wake of personal tragedy that the film opens with his spectacular eviction from the penthouse he couldn't afford on an installment plan, burrowed avoidantly into his bedclothes until spilled out onto the floor blinking at the receiver like the repossession of Bertie Wooster. Technically the chauffeur even when that 1937 Packard Twelve represents the totality of their possessions, Guilfoyle's Donovan is generally the person in the room with the brain cell, although Fay Wray gives him fair competition as the mechanically minded general manager of Federated Bus Lines who if she has a more feminine given name than "Ted" is never once addressed by it, while Leona Roberts' Ma Talbot does almost as good a bait-and-switch as Why Girls Leave Home (1945) as a criminal mastermind camouflaged as a little old charlady. What looks like a comic bit with a voluble Mexican turns into the lesson that if you want to drive a bus in southern California, you had better be fluent in Spanish. When a Chinese-American passenger sounds like a houseboy, he's doing it to razz Lang's Jerry Waters. There's some sweet if rear-projected footage of the Golden Gate International Exposition, a climactically left-field donnybrook, and the breezily Code-blowing demurral, "Why, no, Mr. Casey, I do my entertaining at the Athletic Club." It's not quite Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but when asked point-blank by Ted about the man he's pulled through more than one wipeout, "You really like him, don't you?" I'll take Donovan's thoughtfully frank, "Yeah, I guess I do." He has eloquently mordant eyebrows and an absentminded habit of tidying any office he's left to his own devices in. The whole thing came off the shop floor of RKO in a month and barely clears an hour in runtime and its attractions are unpretentious but satisfying, especially where character actors are perennially concerned. Guilfoyle may always have had a case of resting hangdog face, but come on, it worked for Walter Matthau. "I've taken an awful lot of guff from you for six years, you can take ten minutes from me."

I made landfall chez selkie around three o'clock in the afternoon and my godchild almost instantly wanted to show me the reorganization of his bedroom and take me for a walk as he biked with his familiar in his backpack and for the first time reciprocate in our time-honored ritual of my weightlifting him which I have been doing since he was a lankily small child and it took no effort at all.

( Well, no one except you and me. )

My early birthday present from Selkie is a rare copy of Leib Spizman's Women in the Ghettos (פרויען אין די געטאס ,1946) in timeworn but otherwise astonishingly sound condition plus a Gol/Them sticker which I am using as a bookmark. I have been fed chopped liver and lime-yuzu soda and a variety of proteinaceous snacks. I even managed to doze a little on the train once my seatmate disembarked at New York and left me room to stretch my legs out in. I could have done without lightly hitting my head on a chair likely out of sheer exhaustion, but I plan to get as much sleep out of the windowless pit as I can. As a last grace note of the night, I did not expect to find my flash fiction "Teinds" (2007) listed among Maria Haskins' "A Short Fiction Treasures Special: 2 x 25 Gems from Strange Horizons' Archives." May all of it be some kind of template for the year to come.

For so very few people will I haul myself out of bed before the mourning doves have even woken up, but since some of them live in the D.C. metro area, I am once again watching the world in dawn-flashed geometries of catenaries and crossties slide past me from a rear-facing seat of the Northeast Corridor. There were some excellent mussel-streaks over the Mystic and the brick-boxed windows are gilt-glinting even now. A milk of mist is actually hovering over the green spaces. I still feel a teleporter would be healthier on my sleep schedule.

Every time I watch Heat and Dust (1983), I want to write about its beautifully patterned expectations and ironies, its women who confront or evade them, its last extraordinary melding of time done with nothing more than a window that contains one decade and reflects another while the snow-flanked mountains stand behind them both, and it seems that I am writing about Harry Hamilton-Paul.

I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."

The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.