La Veneziana

To Alexandra on her birthday.

Readers of these pages are well-acquainted with what makes true art live and breathe: a clear and precise vision coupled with unshakable principles.  Few will ever contest that art, regardless of the medium, can survive bereft of vision, even though many current entries in modern museums have the arrogance to think that any form of expression is worth preserving as artistic (I once met an impressionable young woman who admitted that after traveling through Italy for three months and visiting the finest European museums, her favorite painter was still some splattering American mediocrity).  Of course, these modern museums cater to trends and box office receipts and have long since understood that the vast majority of us do not want to be intimidated by art.  The vast majority of us would like to waltz into any museum of the world and be able to grasp on some lazy Sunday afternoon with a vapid guide and a bunch of other clueless tourists the essence of all that we see – as if the nuances of the years of work of past masters can be gleaned by the hasty and uninitiated.  True art takes as much preparation on the part of the observer as on the part of the artist himself, a topic broached elegantly in this story.

Apart from a few wispy servants, our characters are five: a Colonel decorated for his forays in Afghanistan; his talented and somewhat cavalier son Frank; an art restorer by the name of McGore and his much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson, Frank's college roommate and complete opposite.  The site of their gathering is the Colonel's estate, which reeks of the liquor and stale glory that supposedly dignify old soldiers.  With minimal effort and secret smiles, Frank and Maureen demolish the Colonel and Simpson at lawn tennis (McGore does not or cannot participate), leading the Colonel down his habitual slope of gruff looks, overformality, and, of course, omnipresent booze.  The occasion for the McGores' visit is ostensibly for Mr. McGore, a cheerless old dog "who considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years," to work on La Veneziana, which is described thus:

The painting was very fine indeed.  Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background.  Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder.  With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas.  Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair.  On the left the black was interrupted by a large, right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

A more mature Nabokov would alter our expectations in a superior story, also about forgers and easels, which I will not spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the picture turns out to resemble wholly and strikingly a certain Maureen McGore, a fact noticed by the love-struck Simpson and the very indifferent Mr. McGore.  And so, after batting around a few impassioned ideas that could easily have been expanded into a novel (the story itself is Nabokov's longest), our eyes fall to Simpson, who is very much in love with Maureen but can do very little about his shy unattractiveness and her magnificence.

There are other details that often seem to dovetail in fiction.  Frank happens to be a stellar athlete, inattentive student, and, sub rosa, an artist.  But how this odd fact is introduced (Frank early on states, quite sarcastically to his father, that "paintings perturb me") seems a bit arbitrary:

[There were] occasional rumors that Frank was good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one.  He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to.  What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self.

It should be said that this set of characteristics is accurate: it describes, more or less, the poet who is embattled by societal circumstances and the plain nonsense of being a "public intellectual" (a ridiculous title and usually self-imposed).  In fact, true artists will often find the subject of art, which so carelessly devolves into oneupmanship, tedious and unbecoming of real interaction because most people – including numerous artists – cannot converse casually with the precision that such matters deserve.  And what do they deserve?  Perhaps more than McGore, a Philistine of occasional wit and endless platitudes, can offer.  Perhaps McGore, who speaks at length about people entering pictures as a rebuttal to Simpson's silly Gothic notion of portraits' coming to life, is not the type of person to pay any heed to true beauty, even beauty in his immediate vicinity.  That would explain, of course, a few things; yet the motivation behind the McGores' marriage is never fleshed out, apart from the hint of financial stability.  But Venetians have always had far too much art and culture to let money hold them back.

Blame it on Fidel

I think that Communists are those who do not fear the Lord and move houses all the time.

One of the great platitudes of modern discourse is that we have a lot to learn from children.  Children, we are told, can distinguish good from bad so easily that they will be able to sense when something or someone is secretly evil; children also allegedly possess an innate ability to perceive the truth amidst the ruins of lies and deceit.  Whatever you may think of our younger generations, they certainly do not distinguish good and evil unless they have experienced both to a sufficient extent – usually, one hopes, the mark of adulthood.  For them what is good is what keeps their life running in their favor, which invariably entails a happy family, a certain amount of fun, and a small assortment of odds and ends that do not appeal to adults but perhaps once did.  Evil, in their view, may be loosely construed as whatever prevents them from achieving these goals.  So when a bully mocks a coeval, he probably does not know that what he is doing is morally despicable because he needs to put someone down to make himself feel better (alas, such weaknesses often extend well past our school days).  Yet small children can only do so much harm.  It is from the cruel and conniving teenager, often quite aware of what he should and shouldn't do, that we often avert our eyes in discomfort because his schemes could already be so diabolical as to impress the most ruthless of despots.  So perhaps we should forget the idea of children's moral barometers and address a much more valid point, that of truth and lies – which brings us to this film.

The plot is shoddy for one very good reason: our protagonist is a child and children care little for plots.  That child is Anna De la Mesa (Nina Kervel-Bey), a precocious little busybody who is nine as the film begins in the fall of 1970.  Anna loves her Catholic girls' school and daily routine, and is in general quite pleased with the bourgeois existence provided by her French mother Marie (Julie Depardieu) and Spanish father Fernando (Stefano Accorsi).  Yet on the periphery of this blissful realm lurk a few characters whose motives she cannot quite fathom.  These would include the family's acerbic Cuban housekeeper, who keeps blaming every global malfeasance on her country's dictator, and Marga and Pilar, her father's sister and niece.  Marga and Pilar are refugees from Franco's Spain where Marga's never-seen husband Quino, a militant communist, is murdered as an enemy of the state, forcing Fernando to bring them to France.  That same autumn two political occurrences overshadow the De la Mesas' personal life: the death of this local leader and the rise of a much more distant one.

While De Gaulle's death ushered in the possibility of a more socially liberal France (the war-weary discontent of the 1970s did the rest), Frei's deposition by Allende seven thousand miles away from Paris resonates more strongly in Anna's household.  Allende, you see, is the first democratically elected Marxist president in the Western hemisphere, and although the atrocities of the Soviet bloc were known at this time through the diaspora and defection of many famous figures, there persisted the stubborn and half-blind hope that socialism could triumph.  Not the fantastic social democracy that pervaded Northern Europe and made it the model of political and social development for the world, but a throwback Das Kapital sham of superefficient factories, genteel laborers, and uprisings that had already been proven to be an opium pipe dream.  Marie and Fernando (suddenly sporting a Fidelian beard) radicalize themselves by trading their lovely home for a more proletarian apartment, reducing their diet to simpler and coarser meals, and fighting for women's right to choose and Allende's dusty agenda.  We can wax sentimental about Allende in light of the brutality of his successor, but at the time he was not expected to do quite as much as the film suggests.  Still, a watershed had been attained, and once the De la Mesas turn towards a life of greater freedom from old and tired authorities, there is hardly any way back.

Anna, of course, finds all this either appalling or just plain stupid.  She waits in the car with her younger brother as Fernando visits the Chilean embassy and, appropriately enough, accrues a parking violation; she stares at the hairy monsters, apparently all Chilean dissidents, who smoke, drink, and conspire in her apartment; and, most importantly, she watches her parents scream and rant as if they themselves were an insidious cabal and not a pair of squabbling fools.  The silly political debates are stymied by the director's felicitous decision rarely to elevate the camera.  Most of the world is seen at Anna's level, and for that reason appears big, cumbersome, and goofy – which slowly starts to look less and less coincidental.  Critics most frequently mention Fernando's imbecilic decision to bring his daughter to a rally that will conceivably be dispersed by tear gas, but there are many other instances of a child discerning the uselessness of sudden communal radicalization.  The irony feeds off the incessant bickering, Marie's odd and very public lie, and the origin of Fernando's surname, all of which completely escapes little Anna.  What does Anna understand about communism apart from the quote that begins this review?  That communists like facial hair, eschew hygiene whenever possible, are obsessed with red (perhaps explaining Anna's aversion to a series of red foods dumped on her plate), and are amazingly frugal.  To that last end Anna assumes responsibility for pathologically cutting heat and electricity, even in coldest winter and regardless of whether anyone is still using the utilities.  But the perfect political metaphor comes when Anna, her brother, and Pilar all play tag around a group of cocktailing adults.  The adult world is tall, old, stodgy, faceless, and distant and at the same time clumsy and overbearing, as well as a bit mysterious.  Mysterious, mind you, in the same way that a foreign ritual or game is mysterious, because once you know the rules it doesn't look nearly as profound or intriguing as it did initially.  Perhaps the real secret is that once you get to adulthood, the rules seem just as arbitrary.

Mulholland Drive

The title of this film, as one can easily verify, is a winding street in the Hollywood hills near which some of the most decadent residences of the moneyed and ballyhooed are located.  Despite the justifiable evanescence of stardom, there remains a handful of faces and voices that have endured the years' battering and acquired a reputation that time will be unable to diminish greatly.  Whether all this matters to the average person, however, is rather beside the point.  For all its excesses and silliness, Hollywood is a product of our own desires to see life in a different, fabulous and often sensationally lucid way – even if our own reality has little in common with this description.  We may love our lives but the lure of riches and fame digs its claws into all but the most austere and righteous among us.  The lifestyle of these screen deities is something else worth envying if you are of a certain disposition, and little will stop those who desire the most banal of hedonistic pursuits, not even the possibility of death.  Which brings us to the story of two lovely pairs, Rita and Betty, and Camilla and Diane.

We begin on Mulholland itself one dark night with an assassination attempt on a young woman whom we will call Rita (Laura Harring).  Rita escapes the car that would have been destroyed and cascades down the very hills that we know so well until she reaches a housing complex staffed by a series of odd people who will all appear in slightly different forms later in the film.  Rita is suffering from amnesia, that classic cinematic conceit that allows a character to rediscover who he really is, and the name Rita is culled from a poster of this film.  Rita finds her way into an apartment she has no business inhabiting; meanwhile another young woman, Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), arrives at the same apartment, one that she allegedly has rented.  Betty takes quickly to the helpless Rita and the two begin searching for answers regarding the mysterious hit, Rita's true identity, and an array of unusual objects which indicate that we may be dealing with something other than standard, waking life.  What happens from that point on is already betrayed by the vignettes from seemingly unattached storylines that are too numerous to mention in detail: two men eat at a diner and one claims that a monster lurks behind it; a hitman bungles a job and guns down a few innocent bystanders; a director (Justin Theroux) begins to lose hold of his movie, his wife and his financial assets; and another, parallel plot surreptitiously surfaces like the descant of a macabre choir involving two actresses called Camilla Rhodes (Harring) and Diane Selwyn (Watts).    

Diane and Camilla meet on or around the set of the same director who first appeared in dire straits.  The attraction between the two women is explicit and meant to convey, we suppose, two main threads of narrative: Hollywood's flexible and occasionally orgiastic behavioral standards (as well as the concomitant oneupmanship) and an explanation for our dénouement, which will be nasty.  Camilla flirts with Diane, maybe even sleeps with her (Betty and Rita are seen loving), but then forces her way onto the plate of director Adam Kesher who can do one very important thing that Diane can't: he can make her a star.  When Camilla spurns Diane for Adam, we are reminded of all the pulleys and joints that compose a viable screen career; as it were, another, less lawful party takes an interest in Camilla's rise and retrospectively we begin to discern a pattern.  The pattern is awful and diabolical, but it is indeed a pattern.  In one of the most striking sequences Betty and Rita, now fondling and cozy, go to a theater which may contain the film's only flaw in that the characters seem to speak in tongues.  There is a blue box in that scene that matches a blue key found before, and what that box contains – which is rather clear, and rather hideous – provides yet another hint as to the true relationship of our couples.

What is obfuscated and eerie the first half of the film becomes brutally obvious by its conclusion; in fact, there is only one plausible interpretation of all the images and themes treated.  Nevertheless, critics have varied in their approaches to why it takes two actresses to play four women, what is in that box, and why some violence in the waning minutes does not make much sense.  Ah, but it does.  Consider three matters: Diane has been excluded from Camilla's life; Diane has lost the role of a lifetime, or at least of a burgeoning career, to Camilla; and Diane has lost Camilla to Adam, to whom she also imputes her failed career.  Mulholland drive, the street, is about dreams; but Mulholland Drive is a nightmare of a very particular kind: it is a nightmare that doubles as a flashing review of one's life before death casts its shroud.  I should also mention another evil, a large bundle of money whose presence is not explained even though we might remember the abortive killing at the beginning and the sporadic cameos by that hitman whose dead eyes only gleam upon the sight of cold, hard cash.  Life has a price and someone is ready to commit to payment.  Whose life may be the only mystery.

The Return of Chorb

Perhaps the title character of this story is the typical Nabokovian hero ("destitute émigré and littérateur"); perhaps all such heroes are as doomed to misery and apotheosis as their creator was damned to fame.  Whatever you may think of our dear Chorb, the beginning of our tale has few equals in modern literature: 

The Kellers left the opera house at a late hour.  In that pacific German city, where the very air seemed a little lusterless and where a transverse row of ripples had kept shading gently the reflected cathedral for well over seven centuries, Wagner was a leisurely affair presented with relish so as to overgorge one with music.  After the opera Keller took his wife to a smart nightclub renowned for its white wine.  It was past one in the morning when their car, flippantly lit on the inside, sped through lifeless streets to deposit them at the iron wicket of their small but dignified private house.  Keller, a thickset old German, closely resembling Oom Paul Kruger, was the first to step down on the sidewalk, across which the loopy shadows of leaves stirred in the streetlamp's gray glimmer.  For an instant his starched shirtfront and the droplets of bugles trimming his wife's dress caught the light as she disengaged a stout leg and climbed out of the car in her turn.  The maid met them in the vestibule and, still carried by the momentum of the news, told them in a frightened whisper about Chorb's having called.

It takes a while to reach Chorb, who will prove to be anything but the picture of upper middle-class respectability sketched so sumptuously here.  Not one detail forgets the mores of the haute bourgeoisie; for not one moment are the Kellers out of character.  In fact, their inability to do anything not preprogrammed or measured in careful, flattened teaspoons will expose them as bereft of what may broadly be termed individualism and what may more precisely be called the nuts and bolts of an artistic temperament.  Chorb will grossly represent what may be accomplished through art; the Kellers what may be accomplished through the worship of rules, savings accounts, and cleanliness.  We will root for Chorb although we know very well that his return denotes his failure.

Their relationship to Chorb, we learn, is quite involuntary: he has gone and married their beloved daughter and absconded to the ends of an interbellum Europe with nature and romance as his lodestars.  As they travel (all in flashbacks; Chorb spends the bulk of the story alone in tortured memories) it is Chorb who points out the differences in flora and fauna in that storybook way, mimicked so awkwardly in films, through an occasional aside that discloses a whole library.  He will look back in vanquished emotions at his wife, whom he married just before her demise, and attempt to locate her parted spirit in the trail that they left together:

He passed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey.  In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels.  As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory.  And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist.

We have seen these droplets elsewhere: they were already the festive baubles on a certain dress of a certain opera-goer.  And those telegraph wires?  And that spider's web?  Our instincts suspect a solution that our voices are loath to pronounce for fear of trespassing into the overgrown lawn of symbolic weeds and far too many avid gardeners.  Maybe how Chorb's wife died – a detail that need not be mentioned on these pages – might imbue the reader with a clearer notion of life's traps and tricks, especially on those who happen to notice the loose stitches in its tapestry. 

There is a second act.  Chorb, whose name suggests an angel or something far less aerodynamic, decides in almost tawdry cinematic fashion to replace the memories of his wife, which he knows he will distort and mostly lose over the course of his life, with the corporal proximity of a woman of little virtue who bears her some resemblance.  They adjourn to a room in a filthy hotel where the couple once stayed by accident but do nothing that is expected in such rooms with such company.  The girl, a pretty thing but obviously obtuse, stands in near-nakedness at the window, a sign that she will now act as the telescope for what we might consider to be a key to interpreting this odd tale, if it truly requires any interpretation at all:

Behind the curtain the casement was open and one could make out, in the velvety depths, a corner of the opera house, the black shoulder of a stone Orpheus outlined against the blue of the night, and a row of light along the dim façade which slanted off into the darkness.  Down there, far away, diminutive dark silhouettes swarmed as they emerged from bright doorways onto the semicircular layers of illumined porch steps, to which glided up cars with shimmering headlights and smooth glistening tops.  Only when the breakup was over and the brightness gone did the girl close the curtain again.  She switched off the light and stretched on the bed beside Chorb.  Just before falling asleep she caught herself thinking that once or twice she had already been in that room; she remembered the pink picture on the wall.

It is important that this girl notices only a blotch of pink on the wall; her exposure to the opera, to the Greek myths and our modern renderings of those myths, is limited to the brief snatches that she gets of what lies directly across from this den of debasement and primitive joy.  In a way she will remind Chorb, who sleeps through her entire discovery, of his wife and what she did not get to have, as well as of his own ambitions and what they mean in relation to what society prescribes.  Society will always gather after an artistic event and pretend that they understood every moment of it; an artist will keep to himself and revel in the future possibilities of his understanding it; and some unfortunate souls will just stare and know not what they espy.  They might not even know that opera usually has three acts.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

One wonders why certain works of art attract us, and the common answer is that they respond to something that we lack in our own lives.  Desperate housewives will devour hunky, everlasting romances; pimply lads will become superheroes in the furrows of their imagination; old men will wax sentimental over movies contemporaneous to their youth.  Our modern fascination with tales of horror has provoked a slew of interpretations so banal that one cannot but impute this banality to the interpreters themselves, and the less said about these silly theories the better.  Yet this fascination is long-standing.  For those of faith, evil is as real as goodness – even realer in the sense that evil invariably predicates the destruction of good and cannot exist in any sort of vacuum.  The tangibility of the horrors of war, famine, pestilence, or ethnic cleansing cannot be mimicked in art, only referenced.  So as we let our fancies drift into ancient castles, unlock rusted wards, and pore over wicked tomes, we feel a need to confront these baleful shapes – and then something very odd occurs.  Amidst every malediction and ghoul that might infect our thoughts, we desire for a brief moment – indeed, perhaps even a while longer – the possession of that shape because that shape is power over the commonality of our existence.  Each of us wants to be not only a superior among men, but also privy to what lies on the other side of the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Evil, for whatever you might conceive it to be, offers us the straightest path to knowledge, even if what it teaches us is that we should appreciate every iota of our earthbound life and treat it like the flaxen stream it is.  Which explains our First Disobedience, as well as this immortal tale.

As one might expect from a production bold enough to invoke a deceased author's blessing, the plot closely follows that of the book.  At the acme of Victorian storytelling in the late nineteenth century, a young barrister by the name of Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) sits aboard an East European train on his way to meet a Romanian count (Gary Oldman) who needs little introduction.  His travels are true to the fantastic opening passages of the novel, and the aura of mystery and dread could not be richer or more imminent.  During this obvious precursor to very bad things Reeves remains unflurried and almost impassive, which led to some nastiness in the reviews of the film and whispers of mediocrity.  Whatever one may think of his thespian abilities, Reeves's casting is correct: his natural stiffness and timidity reflect the average citizen's view on unusual matters.  Harker may be the only one in the theater who does not find the wizened freakish count to resemble a grotesque, long-nailed cadaver, but he is also not in full possession of what else the count could be if not a human being.  The solipsistic age of reason (a most regrettable misnomer) bred a certain type of man: the skeptic who took the longest time to admit that he did not or could not know how to explain the phenomena of his immediate environment.  Harker is essential because as he overnights within the Count's lifeless walls, he will witness a host of terrible events and in some of them even be implicated.  These will include an abominable tower and moat, three vixens and a baby, a mirror and a razor, and a series of unspeakable occurrences that he confesses only to his diary and to us.

Whom he cannot inform is his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who awaits him in the company of her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) and Lucy's triptych of hapless suitors.  The difference between the book and the film is an element that could only be theatrical and which is actually revealed by Ryder's presence in the very first scene not as Mina Murray.  Whether this conceit simply panders to the juvenile whims of the target audience depends on rather subjective notions of coincidence in art, although it can be said that in context the addition does more good than harm.  I would even go as far to say that it solves, in an artistic fashion, the main structural weakness of the original: namely, why on earth Dracula wished to leave the country in which he was practically invulnerable to expose himself to constant danger in a city brimming with enemies.  Mina worries aloud, a tidy way of containing the novel's original epistolary format, whilst the Count approaches, communicating through former barrister Renfield (Tom Waits) as around Gibraltar heads a boat replete with crates of his native soil (perhaps never in cinematic history has there been a crew so doomed).  Upon landfall, the Count begins plotting and scheming his way into the lives of strangers, all of which serves an ulterior motive.  Lucy becomes very ill from a mysterious sickness unknown to conventional science; an old abbey is attorned to a certain tall, dark foreigner; Mina suspects that Jonathan has fallen on very black days in that distant kingdom even though he is forced to pre-write a number of calming if overly plain letters sporadically mailed by the Count; and Renfield, who languishes in an asylum, has been predicting the arrival of his Master.  And what happens next will involve a hunt of the implacable monster who will flash enough of his former humanity to inflate what could have been a unerring fable into something deeper and more plausible. 

The pleasantries of the film are so numerous that we forget how simple and operatic the plot machinations really are.  Apart from sumptuous wardrobes and effects that convince us we have entered another dimension, the casting of all the main characters betrays Coppola's intuition for harmony among actors whose looks could easily have them mistaken for the heartthrobs of a daytime soap.  The exception to these pretty people is Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), a grizzled Dutchman and specialist on obscure diseases, as well as a perfect foil to the monster he "has been pursuing all his life."  He hijacks the search for answers and is necessarily branded a mystagogue; in time the other parties concur with his outrageous conclusions and finally know almost as much as we do.  Van Helsing alters every aspect of the film's course while also becoming its true crusader and detective; in the book, by contrast, more is accomplished by the peripheral characters although this may be a function of its inflexible structure.  That we first meet the Dutchman as he is making an old academic pun on an unfortunate pair of near-homophones indicates we must change our perceptions accordingly, and his humor and foreignness are much needed in the otherwise morbid London alleyways.  Not that you would want to go anywhere near those places.