The Admiralty Spire

Once upon a time a now-forgotten Italian art critic called this city "Russia's window to Europe," a platitude not meant wholly as a compliment. Through the turmoil of the last couple of centuries and Moscow's usurping of its place as the governmental capital, the term "window to Europe" has appended itself to St. Petersburg's many titles. These inevitably include "the northern capital," "Leningrad," its name for sixty-seven inglorious years, "Russia's capital of culture," and "The Venice of the North" (a name also bestowed upon both this German city and this Scandinavian capital), among a few more local variants. Whatever the name chosen, the point remains: Petersburg is an imitation. Yet if you have ever been to Petersburg, one of the most magnificent metropolises on this planet, you may well disagree. There are elements that can be hastily categorized as Italian-influenced – after all, Italians did design the city in the form it assumed three hundred and twelve years ago – but these have been transformed by time and empire to reflect a very different understanding of human nature. Some more cynical minds may sneer at the sleaze and corruption that have always composed the foreigner's guidebook to Soviet and post-Soviet territory; others may claim that Russia's enduring struggle to gain religious autonomy makes their pseudo-Roman architecture a particularly lurid form of blasphemy. But we will leave behind these negative hordes to their misbegotten agendas and proceed to a tale of mild salacity and great nostalgia.

The story purports to be a letter by an unnamed Russian émigré residing in Berlin to a Soviet writer called Serge Solntsev, which etymologically suggests "a vassal to the sun." Yet for the entirety of the story apart from the very last line, our writer will address Solntsev as "madam," a conceit that devolves into his identification of the writer's novel, The Admiralty Spire, with the narrator's love affair with Katya, his first love in a Russia that seems lost forever ("since the day of our last meeting there has been a lapse of sixteen years – the age of a bride, an old dog, or the Soviet Republic"). Hence is derived a litany of small everyday objects that can only gain significance in the memory of an exile. We see resurrected, inter alia, a porcelain ballerina with lifted leg, hautbois berries, a breast-pocket handkerchief, the part in his hair right down the middle, and beautiful scenes of young love:

And when night finally fell, and the house was asleep, Katya and I would look at the dark house from the park where we kept huddled on a hard, cold, invisible bench until our bones ached, and it all seemed to us like something that had already once happened long ago: the outline of the house against the pale-green sky, the sleepy movements of the foliage, our prolonged, blind kisses.

The narrator's initial accusation is one of theft: the novelist, like so many predatory hacks, is alleged to have met Katya at some point in the not-so-distant past and become enraptured with her tale of first love, ecstatic and radiant as it must have been, and so much brighter than her own mishandled and lowly affairs. Well, at least that last part is implied. Over the course of the narrator's rantings the events and shades of meaning begin, however, to take a different turn. Our Soviet novelist has been transformed again into the very source of this love affair which doesn't really resemble the storyline one bit. It is here that we sense the narrator is reading one story and imagining another:

In your elegant description, with profuse dots, of that summer, you naturally do not forget for a minute – as we used to forget – that since February of that year the nation was "under the rule of the Provisional government," and you oblige Katya and me to follow revolutionary events with keen concern, that is, to conduct (for dozens of pages) political and mystical conversations that – I assure you – we never had. In the first place, I would have been embarrassed to speak, with the righteous pathos you lend me, of Russia's destiny, and in the second place, Katya and I were too absorbed in each other to pay attention to the Revolution.

Thereupon follows a Petersburg anecdote about a cat, a "truck packed with jolly rioters" (a dead giveaway in any tale by Nabokov), a fateful swerve, and then the repetition of the same sequence in Spain, which deprives the event of any "deep occult meaning." It also hints at another type of story, the very core of which the narrator ingresses as his memories float further and further away from unfriendly and rather parochial shores.

As for the eponymous spire: this sits atop a naval building and is one of the most renowned members of the Petersburg skyline. There are countless references to it in Russian literature, and some critics have even adopted the rather faddish interpretation of its presence to denote the architectonic and structural acme towards which all poets strive (perhaps not all poets; critics often tend to gaze upon poets like sheep). Yet there is a more plausible spin provided near the beginning of Nabokov's tale that relates to the introduction of this famous poem by Pushkin, a monumental work literally and figuratively, in which "admiralty spire" is given, in Russian at least, a line of its own:

I love thee, City Peter built,                                 
I love thy harsh and horrid gaze;
The mighty flow of Neva silt
The shoreline granite by thy haze;
Thy filigreed wall iron-cast,                                      
Тhy lucid dusk and moonless shine
Of pensive days that ever last,
While I, room-bound, my thoughts untwine;
And read and write bereft of lamp, 
As clear and sleeping masses ramp
Up empty streets beneath the fire
Of thy taut admiralty spire. 
Without the gloaming to corrupt
The gilded clouds that linger long,
Til hasty dawn shall interrupt
Brief night's half-hour twilit song.

Should night bring us our notions of mortality and dread, endless day might inspire us to overcome our fears and hope for a fairer destiny. Nabokov's political leanings were always quite evident in his works, with his bitterness towards two loud and brutal regimes peaking for a solid decade between 1937 and 1947 (thankfully, one at least was extinguished). Not that one needs the political background to enjoy what is said; only the most unimaginative reader requires history and dogma to frame his fiction. But those of us who have the opportunity now can look back and smile at the prescience of his insight, given that he never supposed he would see his hometown again, and if he did, only ravaged and naked in nightmares without sense or end. Windows, we recall, often let us look in as well as out.

Bunin, "В Москве"

A poem ("In Moscow") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Behind the Arbat's ancient alleys' dust,
Lies a most special city – now it's March.  
The mezzanine feels lowly, cold, and parch'd,
No few rats roam, but nights are marvelous. 

A daytime thaw, some drops, a scorching sun, 
A nighttime freeze, yet this air will be clean, 
A dawn that so resembles Moscow's sheen, 
So distant, ancient.  I will sit undone 

By unlit hearth, beside the window frame
Of moonlight's flood, and thence will gaze so far
Upon the garden and the seldom star ...
How gentle is the spring night sky!  How tame 

The springtime moon!  And crosses glimmer warm,
Like candles on a country church. Blue sky   
Descends through tender branches softly pried; 
And like gold helmets forg'd against all storm, 
The cupolas at smallest tips will shine ...

Memento

Although previously mentioned on these pages, this film should not qualify as one of the best films you or I will ever see for one good reason: it decides to explain its genesis and leave us with no remainder. This approach would hardly matter in a detective story that craves climax, full explication, and a neat and tidy vacuuming of all the pertinent details. But in a film that challenges our very perception of what we can and cannot keep of this evanescent existence, you would venture that a tell-all revelation would not be appropriate. Not that, mind you, the production is wholly philosophical – it is nothing of the kind. It is noir told backwards, as if we were examining the origin of prime evil through the eyes of a fundamentally innocent man who is so cerebrally damaged he cannot recollect very much, and what he does remember only lasts long enough for him to write a coded message to himself. He voices over certain parts of the film as if he were the narrator and we listen, knowing all the while that he is either mad or sick. I tend to shy away from such films because illness deprives the character of a moral structure, allowing the writer or director to explore options in an immoral world – options that inevitably get drawn into the most banal and squalid of dark alleys. But we do not swim in the cesspool that this setup might have become. This is because the whole world is represented as a satanic maze, a multiple-choice of several levels of misdoing, and we must watch all this with a worried eye. The result is intoxicating and authentic, a cinematic experience that, despite its structure, can be enjoyed more than once.

You might ask how he remembers the code. Well, the person in question, a certain Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) still speaks English very well, and language is nothing if not a code. As any conscientious review will tell you, Leonard is a victim of anterograde amnesia, which etymologically involves a step forward, exactly the affliction that our poor Leonard must deal with: brutalized by two intruders who raped and killed his wife, he has great difficulty in creating new memories following this event. Instead, he must rely on notes, tattoos, and other immediate mnemonic devices to aid him in his quest, which of course has to do with murdering the person responsible (Leonard shot one of the intruders dead, the other smashed his head in and escaped). The grunting Hammurabic implications notwithstanding, the goal is a noble one if only because we know that Leonard could not wittingly amass enough information to locate the real person involved. His only clue (and ours) is a tattoo that says "John or James G." Since we know our plot conventions, we know that Leonard will eventually find this person and have a chance, however fleeting, of murdering him. The only thing we don't know is whether Leonard will recognize this opportunity or whether, in the film's brilliant moral quandary, some gnaw of conscience will prevent him from sinking to the level of those people who have fed his hate. Since we see him gunning down a helpless man (Joe Pantoliano) in the opening scene, one might suspect that Leonard has always been of this nature. Killing is as natural to an insurance fraud inspector as it is to a soldier of fortune (which Pearce, lean and ferocious, seems to resemble), that is to say, it is hardly natural at all. There is nothing, nothing at all, that can make us truly commiserate with Leonard's condition, and that is why he is so amazingly pitiable.

The person he kills turns out to be a man called Teddy. Teddy has a nasty way of bossing Leonard around, and displays more than a little gumption in taking advantage of his handicap. He has all kinds of ways to goad Leonard: he knows who killed his wife; he knows precisely why Leonard can't remember anything for a sustained amount of time; he even knows about Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky). Sammy Jankis is the last person that Leonard investigated in his capacity as a fraud inspector. Sammy, just like Leonard, also suffered from anterograde amnesia, but Leonard was convinced that Sammy's illness was nothing more than an act designed to collect on his generous policy. In a series of flashbacks we see a healthy Leonard testing Sammy with some primitive memory games that would quickly bore a three-year-old. When Sammy hesitates and resists forming new memories, Leonard suspects that the whole business is for show, since anterograde amnesiacs can indeed form new memories, if only for short periods of time. Sammy's claim is rejected, which makes no difference to Sammy since he can't remember anything about any sort of legal proceeding, but which does impact on the life of Sammy's spouse. So Mrs. Jankis, like many other characters in the film, goes to an extreme to prove a point. Whether she is actually mistaken about her husband's affliction is not as essential as what happens to her, a strange parallel to another couple's fate, and I will stop my remarks right there.

Amidst this ruin and moral degeneration lurks a fantastic allegory, that of the memory of the human soul. So often in both film and literature we are regaled with the story of a man without a past, a Frankenstein's monster who can be molded into whatever his creator – in this case, Teddy – chooses. Yet Leonard has a past:  he remembers as much as anyone could remember up to the horrific night on which assailants robbed him of his love and his future, and this fact makes him much more dangerous than any brainwashed beast. He knows right from wrong but opts for the unethical route for vengeance and for the basic reason that he knows he will not be able to remember the difference anyway, which lowers him into an abyss with all those (mostly modern) people who believe that our actions needn't have any moral consequences. If there is nothing beyond this life we are liberated from all burden of guilt, or something along those lines. And Leonard is certainly liberated from such pangs although his existence is as close to a living hell as one could possibly imagine. Is it a coincidence that Teddy, which happens to be short for Edward in the film's context, could also be a diminutive of Theodore, as in this famous story? Is it significant, as some critics have indicated, that a person suffering from anterograde amnesia should not be able to know he has this affliction since this is necessarily a new memory? We might be getting ahead of ourselves here, although Leonard, poor Leonard, never will.

La escritura del dios

A short story ("The God's Inscription") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

The prison was deep and made of stone; its form, that of an almost perfect hemisphere, as well as the floor (likewise of stone) measure somewhat less than a full circle, made in such a way as to aggravate the feelings of oppression and vastness. A median wall cuts through it; this wall, although extremely high, does not touch the farthest part of the vault. On one side am I, Tzinacán, magus of the pyramid of Qaholom which Pedro de Alvarado set to flame; on the other is a jaguar, measuring with even and secret steps the dimensions and date of capture. Level with the floor, a long barred window cuts through the central wall. At the hour without shadow (midday) a trap opens above and a jailer whom the years have erased operates an iron pulley and lowers down to us, on the tip of the rope, jugs with water and pieces of meat. Light enters the vault, and at this moment I can see the jaguar.

I lost track of the number of years I lay in the darkness; I, who once was young and able to walk through this prison, do nothing but maintain, in my death pose, the end that the gods have planned for me. With the deep flint knife I opened the chests of the victims and now would not be capable of raising myself from the dust without magic.

On the evening of the burning of the Pyramid, the men who descended from towering steeds punished me with burning metals so that I would tell them the location of the hidden treasure. Before my very eyes they knocked over the idol of my god, but my god did not abandon me and I remained silent between each set of torments. I was lacerated, beaten, deformed, and then I awoke in this jail which I shall not leave for the rest of my mortal life.

Urged on by the fatality of doing something, of populating the hours in some fashion, I sought to recall in these shadows everything I had ever known. Entire nights were wasted in remembering the order and number of certain stone serpents or the shape of a medicinal tree. In this way I conquered the years; in this way I entered into the possession of that which was mine. Before catching sight of the ocean, the passenger senses an agitation in his blood; and one night I felt that a precise memory was approaching. Hours later I began to perceive the memory: it was one of the traditions of my god. Foreseeing that at the end of all ages there would occur countless misfortunes and ruin, he wrote on that first day of Creation a magic sentence for conjuring up evil. He wrote it in such a way that it befell the most distant of generations and was untouched by chance. No one knows how much he wrote nor what characters he used, but we have evidence that the sentence persists in secret and one chosen person will read it. As always, I thought that we were already at the end of all ages and that my destiny as last priest of my god would give me access to the privilege of intuiting this writing. The fact that I was surrounded by a jail did not deprive me of such a hope; perhaps I had seen the inscription of Qaholom thousands of times and simply failed to divine its meaning.

This thought gave me strength which later turned into a type of vertigo. In the ambit of the soil there were old forms, incorruptible and eternal forms; any of them could have been the symbol so desired. A mountain could have been the word of god, or a river or the empire or the configuration of the stars. But in the course of the centuries the mountains level out, and the path of a river tends to deviate; empires are bound to encounter mutations and havoc and the configuration and shape of the stars vary. There is movement in the firmament. The mountain and the star are individuals and individuals expire. I searched for something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations of grains, of pastures, of birds, of men. Perhaps this magic was written on my face, perhaps it was I who was the completion of my search. It was when I was immersed in such zeal that I remembered that the jaguar was one of the attributes of my god.

And so did piety fill my soul. I imagined the first morning of time; I imagined my god confiding the message in the live skin of jaguars who would copulate and breed their species endlessly in caves, in reed-beds, on islands, so that the last men would receive that message. I imagined a web of tigers, a hot labyrinth of tigers terrorizing the fields and flocks, all in order to conserve a sketch. There was a jaguar in the other cell; in his vicinity I espied a confirmation of my conjecture and a secret favor.

Long years did I devote to learning the order and configuration of its spots. Every blind day conceded a moment of light, and so my mind became able to discern the black forms which smeared its gilded fur. Some were circular dots; others were transverse stripes on the inner part of its legs; others were rings repeating themselves. Perhaps they were all the same sound or the same word. Many were trimmed in red.

I will not mention the fatigues of my labor. More than once I screamed at the vault that it was impossible to decipher any text. Gradually the concrete enigma with which I had tasked myself began to bother me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence, I asked myself, would constitute an absolute mind? I mused that even in the human languages there was no proposition that did not imply the entire universe; saying tiger meant the tigers that bred him, the deer and turtles that he devoured, the field on which the deer grazed, the land which was the mother of this field, the sky which shone upon this land. I mused that in the language of a god every word would announce this infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but rather an explicit way, and not progressively but immediately. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I thought, only needs to say one word and in this word resides the plenitude. No voice articulated by him could be inferior to the universe or less than the sum of all ages. Shadows and simulacra of this voice which equates to a language and how much one can understand a language are the ambitions and poor human voices, everything, world, universe.

One day or one night – what difference was there then between my days and nights? – I dreamt that the floor of my prison had a grain of sand. Indifferent, I went back to sleep; then I dreamt that I had woken up and that there were now two grains of sand. I went back to sleep; and I dreamt that the grains of sand had become three. They multiplied in this way until the prison was brimming and I was dying beneath this hemisphere of sand. I understood that I was dreaming; with supreme effort I woke myself up. Waking up was useless; the swarm of sand was suffocating me. Someone said: "You have not opened your eyes to wakefulness, but to your previous dream. This dream is within you, and will go on in infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path you will have to retrace is interminable and you will die before you really wake."

I felt lost. Sand was penetrating my mouth, and yet I cried: "Not a single dreamed grain can kill me nor are there dreams within dreams." A flash woke me. In the upper darkness a circle of light threatened to break. I saw the face and hands of my jailer, the pulley, the meat and the jugs.

A man gradually becomes commingled with the signature of his destiny; over time a man becomes his circumstances. More than a decipherer or avenger, more than a priest of the god, I was a prisoner. I returned from the tireless labyrinth of dreams to the hard prison as if I were returning home. I gave thanks for the humidity, its tiger, the tiny hole of light; I gave thanks for my old pain-ridden body; I gave thanks for the darkness and the stone.

Then something occurred which I cannot forget nor communicate. What occurred was the union with the divinity, with the universe (I don't know whether these words contain any difference). The ecstasy did not repeat its symbols; there was someone who saw God in a flash; there was someone who saw Him in a sword or the spirals of a rose. I saw the highest Wheel, which was not before my eyes nor behind them, not at their sides, but everywhere all at once. This Wheel was made of water but also of fire, and was (although its edge was visible) infinite. Interwoven, it formed all things that could be, are and were, and I was one of the strands of this long thread, and Pedro de Alvarado who had tormented me was another. Here were the causes and effects and it was enough for me to see this Wheel to understand everything, everything without end. O serendipity of understanding, so much greater than that of imagining or sensing! I saw the universe and the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins which the Popol Vuh narrates. I saw the mountains which surged from the water, I saw the first tree men, I saw the earthenware jars that turned against men, I saw the dogs that destroyed their faces. I saw the god without a face who sat behind all the other gods. I saw infinite processes which formed one single happiness, and understanding all of this, I also came to understand the writing of the tiger.

It was a formula of fourteen unadorned words (at least they seemed unadorned) and I would only need to say them aloud to become omnipotent. I would only need to say them for this stone prison to be obliterated, for day to enter into my night, for me to be young, for me to be immortal, for the tiger to destroy Alvarado, for the sacred knife to plunge into Spanish chests, for the pyramid and empire to be reconstructed. Forty syllables, fourteen words and I, Tzinacán, would rule the lands that Moctezuma ruled. But I know that I will never utter these words because I no longer remember Tzinacán.

May the mystery that is written in the tigers perish with me. He who has seen through the universe, he who has seen through the ardent designs of the universe cannot think of a man, of his trivial joys and misfortunes, even if he is that same man. This man has been this man and now it no longer matters. What does he care about any other's luck and happiness, what does he care about any other's nation if he, now, is no one? For that reason I do not utter the formula, for that reason I allow my days to be forgotten, laid to rest in the darkness.

Certified Copy

We begin this film with an Italian book on display before a plain gray wall. The book is entitled Copia conforme, and its companions are an unmanned table, an unmanned microphone, a dirty chimney, and the aura of an imminent press conference. This is indeed what occurs. A man with some resemblance to this Italian-American director addresses us (we still cannot see the audience) in Italian about a British scholar with the plain name of James Miller, whose apparent tardiness "cannot be excused because of the traffic since his room is upstairs." Miller appears at last, to a small group, about forty people, most of whom are women. At this talk, conducted in English, Miller makes almost the same joke as his predecessor but says he "walked here." He also comments perfunctorily on the weather because Italians would expect no less of an Anglo-Saxon. Then he takes a swipe at the literary taste of his fellow Englishmen and we understand that his book, which won "best international essay of the year," has been a limited success. In fact, "limited success" may be the best caption for James Miller (William Shimell).

Suave-looking, if considerably more attractive from far than from up close, Miller quickly decides he has already lost his audience and begins luxuriating in pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo ("It is difficult to write about art: there are no fixed points of reference, there are no immutable truths"). As he is about to deliver a prepared statement in Italian thanking Marco Lenzi – the man who introduced him and translated his book – a woman comes and sits in one of the two front row seats marked riservato (Lenzi took the first one), and is shot a look by Lenzi that acknowledges the decorum of such an act. We do not know this at the time, but this may be the film's most important moment since it safely excludes one interpretation that the plot will come to suggest. Soon thereafter a young boy of maybe twelve enters the room and begins to bug the woman (Juliette Binoche), who is very obviously his mother. The boy will spend a long time looking over at his mother, who jokes with Lenzi and pendulates from subrisive attention to Miller to fiddling with her handbag in that unique way a woman has of signaling her boredom. 

In the meantime, Miller drones on about "the authenticity of art" (a tired modern topos): he mentions the origin of the word 'origin' (the Latin orīrī, 'to arise, be born'); compares our art productions to us since we are "DNA replicas of our forebears"; and underscores that certifying the authenticity of the work of great artists in all epochs and disciplines has become a most important vocation – and I think you get the idea. But when our pontificating expert lists the four criteria by which a work of art can be certified, the woman is beckoned to leave the room by her son, which she does, all the while looking back in mocking amusement at our speaker. In a marvelous twist, Miller has only listed two criteria ("the form and shape of the artefact"; "the material of which it is made") when the presentation is interrupted by a cell phone's ring – Miller's phone – that he actually answers. We shift scenes and see the woman outside in the Tuscan streets walking several yards in front of her son, who barely looks up from his handheld game console. They sit down for a cheeseburger and the son, still not looking up, asks her casually how many of Miller's books she bought. "Six," she replies, as if the number held some significance. The interrogation continues in that vein that drives teenagers crazy, to wit, when they know that their parents are hiding something from them and won't divulge it – precisely what teenagers do all day to their parents, but anyway. The woman states she will give a copy to a friend, her son protests that the friend already has it, and she mentions an "autographed copy" (exemplaire dédicacé) as her aim. Then the son knows that she simply wants to see the fellow again and calls her on it. She does not deny the charge, and we have our plot.

With Lanzi's help Miller visits the woman in her underground store, very much a Roman catacomb replete with busts and other antiques. Something bothers him about this place – perhaps simply that it so resembles a crypt – so he spurns her repeated offer to remain there and ejects both of them into "the fresh air." "Your invitation," he reminds her, "said nothing about an antiques shop." She is visibly upset by this whole sequence, strangely reminiscent of a man's failed attempt to keep a desired woman in what he believes is his irresistible bachelor pad, but which to her seems very much like a trap. They then set off on one of those surreal drives so popular in the work of some directors (Kiarostami is no exception) where certain peculiar aspects of the two interlocutors will be revealed. From this first isolated exchange we can deduce one thing (a few other things will be deduced later on): the woman, who is never named, is not trying to impress Miller by allowing him to prattle on about aesthetics; she is trying to become his muse. Every time he speaks abstractly, she slips him a concrete example, usually something simpler and more grounded. She accuses him of trying to prove the unprovable not to nettle him but to see whether he might indeed listen and come down to earth next to her. Of course, he rebuts such accusations soundly and consistently. "I'm afraid," he says with the tone of an emergency room surgeon breaking some bad news, "there's nothing very simple about being simple." This implies that it is harder for someone of impeccable taste to debase himself with everyday culture than for someone ensconced in that same mundane rubbish to be elevated towards the sublime, an argument in favor of art's transformative power upon the human soul. Miller then promises her his favorite joke, whose punchline about a soda bottle she guesses and which, anyway, is so insipid we truly hope that his calling it his "favorite joke" was the real attempt at humor (his sour reaction suggests it wasn't). They arrive in a small town renowned for weddings, young couples, and a painting that was once thought to date to Roman times then exposed fifty years ago as an eighteenth-century forgery, and somehow we sense that although Miller has a train at nine that night, we will not be leaving that small town any time soon.

It is here as well that the film begins to hint at another plot, at the resemblance of this nameless woman's son to this bleary-eyed Englishman, at the consequences of raising a family, at the omission of the son's surname in the dedication of that autographed tome. Is the son a "certified copy" of the father? Are we witnessing a long-suffering married couple fallen out of love? The indentured servitude to a one-night-stand that bequeathed a child? Two people having fun while playing fantasy roles that have no kinship with their realities? The rest of the film predicates this unusual indeterminacy, yet the first fifteen minutes of Certified Copy ensure only one plausible explanation to its subsequent events, which will not be revealed here. Suffice it to say that those who love ambiguity may love this film, even if there is no real ambiguity at all – that is, unless the characters are asylum-ripe. The broad boilerplate notions of art are belied by the petty, private hell, or facsimile of a petty, private hell, unleashed by its second half, which, we suppose, is meant to show how little aesthetic theory has to do with life or art. Many internet sources indicate some professional actors were considered for the role of Miller (Shimell is no stranger to the limelight being a well-known opera singer, but is not a trained actor), which would have made the whole affair incredibly pretentious and melodramatic. As it is, the balance is perfect: Binoche, who flutters among English, French, and Italian at a hummingbird's pace, maintains her mildly histrionic posturings; whereas Shimell must simply find a way to handle them without the ease of someone long accustomed to disguise. The result is that we come to think that the woman is not being truthful and that Miller, for all his ridiculous aphorisms (the most quoted will surely be from a "Persian poem" he supposedly happens to know), may be the victim of a harridan's whims. Towards the dead center of the film, a supporting character detects that husband and wife are indeed seated in her café and offers some well-meant advice about what makes a man tick ("Men need work: it distracts them and we can lead our lives"; "It can't be all that bad if your only complaint is that your husband works too much"; "When there's no other woman we begin to see work as our rival") and we believe her because old women, especially old women in movies, tend to be conduits of the truth. And what about what happened five years ago near the replica of a famous statue? After all, without that revelation in Florence, there would have been no original to copy.