Baudelaire, "Les chats"

A work ("Cats") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

The fervent rake, the austere sage,                    
Both grow enamored, as years pass,                          
With cats' soft force in proud home's cage,                      
Like they, oft cold in sloth's morass.                       

With knowledge carnal and of book,                        
They seek the silent shadow's gloom,  
Where Erebus their thralldom took             
For messengers of coming doom.    

And when asleep, their noblesse beams          
As Sphinxes stretched in lonesome night,       
Who seem to rest in endless dreams;   

And magic sparks caress their spine,              
And mystic pupils are gilded bright                                
With obscure hints of pelage fine.

The Closet

One of the most puzzling things about adolescence is the division between the in-crowd and the rabble. Puzzling, I should add, only when you are a confirmed member of the latter grouping; the popular and the admired comport themselves as if their unquestionable status were captioned by this famous motto. The more attentive among the uncool, however, quickly notice that the difference lies in not what is said and done but in the actor himself. The silliest pun can become a shibboleth, the stupidest gesture a signal, the cruelest prank an indication of superiority. What is particularly remarkable about adolescence and its conspiracies is how uncompromisingly bland the stratagems behind them seem once we reach adulthood. Not one joke, not a single sadistic moment will be worth a farthing to a mature and confident twentysomething who sees through cliques and clucks as any of us now should. How odd then that so many of adolescence's wicked games continue undeterred well into our greying years, and how many poor saps remain the subject of their colleagues' scorn. Which brings us to this charming film.

Our hero is François Pignon (the perfectly cast Daniel Auteuil), even if his heroism should be immediately questioned and harpooned. Though a cognate with "pinion," there is a certain contempt with which his surname is pronounced that English does not quite contain, but which suggests a cross between an irritating clink and an onion. Pignon is divorced from a loathsome shrew (Alexandra Vandernoot), whose one good deed in her entire existence may very well have been the birth of their son, Franck. The problem is that Franck, like the rest of humanity apparently, is convinced his father is an incorrigible loser. For his part Pignon definitely provides him with ample evidence. His job at a rubber factory in the accounting department has been for twenty years his only steady beam in a life of avalanches and cave-ins, if one considers his daily parking and coffee debacles to constitute a success. Nevertheless, it is not hard to detect that Pignon is a kind man, as are most pariahs if only because they cannot afford or do not know how to effectuate any other type of behavior. Pignon grins and bears his cruel fate because he has never really managed to succeed at anything. Were he in some isolated, underdeveloped village in an impoverished or war-ravaged nation with little hope of escape, we would hardly begrudge him his despair; but with a fine income, a modest but nice apartment, and a healthy existence in one of the richest countries in the world, the problem lies to a great extent with him. 

Why does Pignon come to the office every day and succumb to his co-workers' sneers and taunts as if he deserved them? Why do all the men at his job think him unmanly and all the women think him boring? Perhaps because when one is insecure but wishes to conceal such misgivings and fears – and most of us huddle under that large circus tent – nothing makes one more liverish than a fool who accepts his insecurities and does nothing to combat or hide them. In other words, we hate this person because he comes off as the worst and most cowardly manifestation of ourselves. Pignon draws the ire most readily of the neckless thug Félix Santini (Gérard Dépardieu). Santini mysteriously holds the position of head of personnel, something akin to a human resources director, even though his hobbies are rugby and the belittlement of lesser beings. Since sports and cruelty are the time-honored pursuits of all high school jock bullies, Santini fulfils a stereotype that allows us to despise him and gravitate towards Pignon. While Santini smashes in his co-workers' teeth in another bone-crushing practice session, Pignon finds and adopts an adorable kitten who turns up one day on his balcony – just as, I might add, he was considering an unforgivable sin. And why such self-loathing? Because Pignon just discovered that, after twenty servile years, his neck is slated for the guillotine. 

The kitten will be traced to a new neighbor, Jean-Pierre Belone (Michel Aumont), who just so happens to be a retired labor psychologist. For some people, work and its associated routines are coterminous, in which case retirement results in complete severance from the tasks of yesteryear; for others, of course, they will always practice what they have practiced until their last, wheezing breaths. Belone is someone who likes listening to people's problems because he truly believes there is no quandary he cannot solve. He understands Pignon's predicament all too well, having likely sat through months of such twaddle in humoring whiny patients, but this time something about the misery of his neighbor summons the altruist from within him and he offers Pignon a very odd piece of advice: spread the rumor that he is gay. The reasoning, in our politically correct days, might be obvious enough; but a rubber factory by definition boasts a clientele that, well, likes its rubbers: firing a man who has just outed himself would then be nothing less than a public relations nightmare. Belone goes one giant step further when he recommends that Pignon anonymously send touched-up photos to his workplace (Belone already has a template in mind). The gambit is taken, the pawn sacrificed (Pignon also has some affinity with the French word for this least powerful of chess-pieces), and Pignon goes into work not having changed a hair on his pointy head yet having assumed a shift of mythic proportions. The women at work, especially the dishy Ms. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), are irrationally drawn to the clandestine Pignon as if he were an island to be discovered. Santini's transformation is even more radical and provides the film with some of its most impeccable humor, as does a certain parade that Franck happens to catch on television, imbuing him with newly-found respect for his father – and further complications need not be mentioned.     

The Closet exploits one of the great premises of fiction: that the person so easily pigeonholed might be playing a master role. In past times, the secret involved subterfuge and espionage, but we have moved on from such undeservedly romantic notions of what lies in the heart of men. Now the secret may be sexuality; it may even be, as a metaphor for the wickedness of the twentieth century, that the person in question is actually of another religion, whose revelation would transform his public image irreversibly. A literary critic might underscore the need for any ambitious work to sustain at least two wholly plausible readings to be memorable and worthwhile, yet to the skeptical mind another question surely arises. Is not every human form a mixture of multiple themes, multiple vices, regret and joy, or are we all just simple beasts consigned to simple boxes for future filing? How about the erstwhile cool cats that all too often seem to have peaked during those same dominating years? Filed away in a factory closet that, presumably, no one would ever find.

Bech in Czech

Nineteen years ago I took advantage of a scantness of interest among my fellow grad students and began learning this language. That same year I devoted five glorious weeks to Czech grammar, Prague cobblestones, and a host of books that could only really be read at high summer, when the sun set reluctantly and the clear paved streets reflected the immaculate evenings of our eternity. And an early autumn later – the thirtieth anniversary of this watershed – roaming around this bookstore, I happened upon a copy of this "quasi-novel" whose first tale generously blends fact into its fiction.

Our protagonist is the mildly esteemed Henry Bech, a Jew, a sexagenarian, and, if he were to have died upon arriving in 1986 Prague, an odd practicant of twentieth-century American literature. Bech has had one recent and now-failed marriage, written many books including one bestseller, and bumbled about various parts of the world for book signings and conferences in that mediocre and inoffensive way unique to minor writers. Why is Bech a minor writer? Because he cannot relate in the least to the famous quote by this Argentine about the writer of genius and being right? Because he believes "the purpose of the writer is to amuse himself, to indulge himself, [and] to get his books into print with as little editorial smudging as he can"? Perhaps because each of his novels, by his own attestation, feeds off a trend of the time, or at least an historically successful trend that allows it to appear timely and topical? Without fear of perjury, it can be said that all these factors apply to one degree or another. When Bech meets a Czech man of letters once tortured and jailed for writing "like Saki, arch harmless little things," he can "think of nothing he had ever written that he would not eagerly recant." When he considers his own works, he finds them all as plain and aseptic as his own life. Therein lies no danger, no regret, no anxiety. His books all linger untouched on shelves, like dust and termites – or, for that matter, Bech himself. For that reason Bech becomes quite excited, if that is really the right word, about his visit to the American Ambassador and his trophy wife only a couple of years before the Velvet Revolution.

The plot unravels as do so many works of Updike's: by a permanent discomfort between life's givers and life's takers. While Bech is most certainly the giver – he has committed his every moment to inscribing the world with its little tragedies – the Ambassador belongs to that boisterous back-slapping network of executives and executors from which many political appointments are drawn. Normally one might scoff at a businessman's ability to run an embassy since an embassy is neither moneymaking nor subject to the same elastic mobility that defines the private sector. But this Ambassador has one distinct qualification for the job: he speaks Czech, albeit humorously, a remnant of his childhood. Those who delve into the relationship between historical fact and the lilac bubble of fiction will surely note that the U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s was indeed a businessman of Czech descent. In the story, the conceit allows for one very telling circumstance: Henry Bech, an emotional and absent-minded intellectual, if a bit ignorant about medieval Europe, often finds himself at the linguistic mercy of a man whom his liberal sensibilities would never allow him to approach. Bech is also the guest of the Ambassador's dishy blonde wife, and their conversations, awkward owing to her attractiveness and Bech's lack of sexual gumption, indicate that money really does make some people happy. The Ambassador, "an exceptionally short and peppy man," takes Bech to a Jewish cemetery, where his ebullient manners lead both his wife and his distinguished guest to blush. And we also get at some of Bech's malaise:

For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all – up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides. In the center of old Prague the clock of the Jewish Town Hall .... still runs backwards, to the amusement of tourists from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Later, Bech will address a student forum of eager English-speaking fans and learn that they do not value his longest and most difficult novel because, well, it is too greatly about his ethnicity and less about the rest of the world. An undertaker will also remind him, in what might easily have been a chat in Soviet Russia, that Kafka was not Czech, at least not by the strict Socialist categories that some people recall all too easily.

As Bech at Bay progresses – the five parts thrive alone, yet form an oddly cohesive whole – a startling announcement is made about our protagonist's career. The announcement is stunning because hitherto few had really heard of Henry Bech, and his general anonymity was for him more soothing than a symbol of frustration. His Czech book signings are characterized by long, unpronounceable names laden with every diacritic imaginable, and he dreams of moments when everyone in this small and delicate country could simply read his books in the original English, write him loving fan mail, and dispense with this whole Iron Curtain charade. A charade because everyone knew that hope and freedom would eventually triumph, that the whole wall would crumble and be trampled underfoot, and that once-proscribed writers would regain their rightful spots within the Czech canon. One fan, of Roma stock, even gives him a copy of a tome from samizdat:

It felt lighter, placed in Bech's hands, that he had expected from the thickness of it. Only the right-hand pages held words; the left-hand held mirrored ghosts of words, the other side showing through. He had been returned to some archetypal sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand.   

Bech falls in love with the book without being able to read a word, and even lusts briefly after this young gypsy, the opposite of another lust, the Ambassador's leggy wife. The only difference between this Bech, now sixty-three and hardly spry, and a younger Bech is in physical prowess since Bech has never been one to collect women like a philatelist pursues stamps. "To live a week with Henry Bech is to fall in love with him," says the Ambassador's wife. What a shame no one ever grants him that much time.

Rimbaud, "Les corbeaux"

A work ("The ravens") by this French poet.  You can read the original here. 

When prairies, Lord, breathe but cold words,
And ravaged hamlets sleep in peace,            
And angelus bells hang unheard,   
Upon unflowered, waning leas, 
Let fall from your grey monstrous skies                 
That dear and tasty raven flesh.

Strange army of malicious cries,             
The frigid winds attack your nests!
Along the yellowed rivers' roll  
Upon the Calvary's broad bend,
Above the gullies and the holes,          
Disperse and rally, foe or friend!

Upon the fields of France they feed,
Where sleep the dead of yesteryear, 
And thousands swirl in wintry greed                        
So that each passer-by may fear!    
Be now the herald of our yoke,              
Our black funereal bird of harm!

O holy saints atop the oak,     
Lost masts amidst the evening charm,
Leave warblers of the month of May                          
To those led on by woods' retreat, 
Bestride the grass they aim to stay         
A sad and futureless defeat.

Terribly Happy

This film may initially strike us as little more than a compost of noir elements, yet we will be proven wrong. It begins with a cow legend, a half-beast, half-child tale of parturition with elements that once might have suggested a demonic presence and are now only translated by computerized minds as a provincial kind of sexism. Some cleansing acts are carried out and then we are assured: "Since that time there has been no trouble with cows or women." After this odd introduction we are subsequently informed that the story is based on true events. If this is so, gentle reader, let me be the first to cancel any future trips to southern Denmark. True enough, I don't really mean that last part (Denmark has always been for me a heaven on our brittle earth), so maybe I can simply eliminate a few select swampy patches on the Jutland map.  

Our protagonist is Robert (Jakob Cedergren), a handsome, lonesome, still youngish Copenhagen cop with a broad suggestible streak. Suggestibility implies a certain absence of self-confidence, common enough in someone attractive (perhaps his appearance has long since masked his foolishness; perhaps he has pursued his sensual privileges and neglected his mind). Nevertheless, we tend to think that his looks emerged well after adolescence, which explains why he has never really exited that period. In keeping with noir prototypes, Robert is introduced to us with a checkered past that no one, he least of all, wishes to talk about. His infraction will be clarified to some extent much later in the film, but his penance will be as a small-town bailiff. "Nothing really happens here," says his superior as he drives Robert to his temporary new home, "and if something does happen, you just report it to me." Robert gives that nervous nod endemic among people who tend to talk themselves into trouble and lets the comment sit. Importantly, the village in question also lies next to a hateful bog – a pit of sin in more than one sense – although one wonders whether any bog has ever enjoyed a glittering reputation.   

Ah yes, southern Denmark. As a long-time speaker of what may be termed rigsdansk (standard Danish), I am still astounded by the panoply of dialects in such a snug little place. Robert's shibboleth is the squeaky greeting "morning" (møjn), a noise which at one point even the cat seems to produce. And certainly, a conspiracy of noir circumstances seems to be afoot: suspicious locals on every corner stare at Robert as if he were a pink elephant; his bike is almost run over more than once by a determined truck; the stillness of the always-deserted streets screams western with, in good western tradition, Robert as both lawmaker and outlaw; and, of course, the appearance of the requisite femme fatale Ingerlise (Lene Maria Christensen). Ingerlise is walking and talking bad news; she is also, by Danish standards, not particularly fetching. Yet she is alluring in that way that some women have of being able to be completely enthralled by what a man is saying. Ingerlise seems to confirm our fears of genre compliance with a litany of femme fatale characteristics: the implication that she is undersexed; the further implication that she is misunderstood, if not reviled by the community (Ingerlise is from Åbenrå, and thus also an outsider) for her sensuality or other careless lusts; and the very direct declaration that her bloated boar of a husband Jørgen (Kim Bodnia) batters her whenever he thinks she deserves it. Scars suggest this might be a weekly event. Just when Robert, who is very intrigued despite his better judgment, asks for more information about a certain bicycle dealer who disappeared a few years back, Ingerlise overtly pauses then lets her bike tumble to the ground for Robert to retrieve (in romances past, this may have been a glove or handkerchief). We now know for certain that Robert will eventually possess Ingerlise, that the boar will eventually learn of their little escapade one way or another, and that all this could have been rather easily avoided if Robert weren't so predisposed to cutting corners.

Which brings us to another dirty little secret. It is no spoiler to reveal that Robert has a wife in Copenhagen, as well as a beloved daughter whom he hasn't seen in months. "And why haven't you," asks a perfectly logical Ingerlise, who also has a daughter in the eight-to-ten-year range. That would be because Robert's daughter believes her father to be in Australia, "the farthest possible country," and also very much a symbolic southernmost purgatory. As our film skids down some curious slopes, we cannot but notice Robert compensating for his own estranged family by seeking to aid another wife and child in need of a good father (one could even imagine Ingerlise's daughter's ubiquitous red jacket making Jørgen into more of a wolf than a boar). Jørgen, a natural-born bully, senses the fear and vulnerability in the newcomer and pushes him to the usual lengths of oneupmanship until one incredibly unfortunate (and improbable) night almost leads the men to join forces. Ingerlise finds every public meeting place possible to carry on their intensifying flirtation, and tongues wag because this is some of the juiciest scandal in, well, perhaps weeks now. The details and double-talk propel the players to the middle of the film and the turning point in everyone's existence. I can't remember the last time I ever saw anyone withdraw ignition keys from a moving car, but the thoughtful viewer might wish to consider the vehicle and its driver with similar empathy.

There is also a quack of a doctor who "barked up Ingerlise's tree" a while back, a store owner who has a special storage area for his long-fingered clients, and a priest who can be identified only by his frilly collar. In a town this small, however, the intervention of any one of the characters cannot be considered anything less than formulary. Terribly Happy plays as the best type of western, that is, the kind that forsakes the silly invincibility of isolation that informs most films of that genre for the ravenous despair of noir. And while the twanging nonsense of its soundtrack jangles the nerves and earns it a half to three-quarters demerit, the tone is correct: Robert has been shipped to a zone of amoral actions and players. It will become his task to determine whether these persons are immoral, which involves consistency, or whether they do actually propone an ad hoc understanding of human motives and words. If they are structurally evil, they can be judged and, in principle, reformed; on the other hand, should they be merely anarchic hoodlums ready for a scrap to the death at any given moment, then there is little Robert or anyone else can do for them. The worst part about this type of noir is not that you cannot know the truth, but that no one wishes you to know it; you are not an initiate into the global conspiracy, and this little village might as well be its own planet orbiting our greater realm. Even if its main inhabitant and actor might be a large pool of slime.