The Celebration

Once upon a time in a small Nordic country of terrible beauty there lived a prince named Christian (Ulrich Thomsen). He was young, handsome, and intelligent and the future for him and his twin sister Linda seemed as bright as the Danish summer sky. He had two other siblings, Helen (Paprika Steen), who was a bit younger, and Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), the baby. But as much as their parents loved all four children, nothing could compare to the affection that their father, the beloved patriarch Helge (Henning Moritzen), showed the twins. He personally would take them into his study or into the largest bathroom of their country mansion and bathe them one by one. Since their father was equally affectionate to both twins, he couldn't bear the thought of favoritism, and would actually draw lots to see which one would be bathed first. Sometimes their mother Elsa (Birthe Neumann), who was infinitely deferential to the wishes of their father, would walk by the bathroom or the study and find her family members together and leave the room with nary a word. Linda so resembled her mother! The same long hair that in Spanish has a girl’s name, melena, the same piercing blue eyes! You could have practically mistaken one for the other! And when father and mother, who were among Denmark’s very social and financial elite, decided to add to their family, it happened that there was less time for the twins, now at school and less in touch with their ever-busy parents.

One of the world’s most beautiful countries, Denmark is also one of its most civilized. Its retirement age is lower than in other highly industrialized nations, and basic health care and schooling are practically free throughout a lifetime. Taxes are rather excessive, true enough, but how else can Denmark live up to its famous adage as “the country where few are rich and even fewer are poor”? So as Helge prepares to step down from his lifelong commitment to wealth, achievement, and prestige, it is only fitting that his family hold a party to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of this great man’s birth. Only the most important family members and friends are invited, although with such success, there are often a large number of candidates from which to choose. The whole endeavor is to take place on an early summer's day at the aforementioned mansion, which has a hotel-like feel to it. Perhaps this is a more recent acquisition? After all, Helge is an elder at one of the Masonic lodges that wield so much influence in Scandinavia, who knows what deceased count or baron's barks once echoed in these halls? “I might even get the lodge to consider you for membership,” whispers Helge in an aside to Michael, a budding chef who studied in Switzerland but who wasn’t actually invited to this year’s event because of extramarital behavior at last year’s event. There was such an event last year as well? For Helge’s fifty-ninth birthday? But what’s so special about that? This year must be more important. Christian has made the trek all the way from Paris for this so it cannot be just another birthday party. What happened between these two events? Ah yes, Linda, dearest Linda, decided that her privileged life could not go on.

How strange, then, to witness the merriment on the faces of the guests and hosts as they all pour into the foyer of this grand house, which with every passing second seems less real and more like a sham. It’s as if Linda never existed! As one would expect, it is Christian who feels the loss more than anyone else. Christian, who has been alive exactly as long as she has, conceived by their father in their mother’s womb, then cared for so tenderly by their parents despite the demands of success and society. So parallel have their lives been. And yet Christian cannot be bothered to take a flight in from the City of Lights to Copenhagen, arguably the most sumptuous and breathtaking city on earth, for Linda’s funeral a few weeks before the big birthday bash! How then is one to react to Christian when he appears, sullen and devoid of energy, and cannot bring his introverted self to get frisky with one of the many servers, a lovely girl named Pia (Trine Dyrholm) who has always had a thing for (and once briefly with) him, much less hobnob with the big shots? How then is one to react when Christian downs a few cocktails and then announces a toast in honor of his deceased sibling? Everyone seems quite relieved at this development, and impressed that Christian would have the foresight to have written two speeches and allow his beloved father, the patriarch, to choose which envelope to open. Just like, it is mentioned, his father once drew lots.

Christian does in fact address the matter of his late sister, but his focus quickly drifts to the patriarch. After all, who is paying for this shindig? To whom does Christian owe his career as a successful restaurateur? His father, of course! He should be eternally grateful for all the privileges that his father’s name and wealth have showered upon him and consider how many people, even in a civilized place like Northern Europe, never gain access to such opportunities. And what better way to talk about his father than to mention the affection of which Christian and his late sister were the exclusive beneficiaries as children! Once Helen and Michael came along, there were no more baths and frolicking, and you can see how this lack of parental tenderness has affected them. Michael is now a surly and underachieving adulterer who bellows at his unloved wife and children. Helen smokes continuously, leaps from the arms of one foreigner into the arms of another (she even has the audacity to bring her latest exotic conquest, a handsome African-American, to the party), and avoids conflict instead of trying to resolve it. No, Linda and Christian were the lucky ones, and now Linda is gone forever. But Christian will try as hard as he can to make sure people understand why she left. The result is one of the finest films ever made, in any language and at any time, and worth every second of its slow but believable derailment.

Spring in Fialta

I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola.

It is, one supposes, of paramount importance that the town named in the title of this story does not exist; well actually, if you subscribe to the opinions contained therein, that's not entirely true. Fialta represents the loving combination of geography and memory, the extirpation of a pleasant scene from a place now long forsaken to a greener pasture where real, forceful, and elegant life can bloom anew. And what time could be better to regain a lost love than amidst the fragrant fog of spring? That would depend, it seems, on the mnemonic forces at your disposal.

Our year is 1932 and our protagonist is a Russian-born businessman by the name of Victor. He may be handsome, obsequious,  wealthy, or intriguing – we're not quite sure. The only information available summarizes his family life ("I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being," one of the greatest sentences in the English language) and his intermittent fling with a thin, dark girl he calls Nina. Nina and he meet, he recalls with some certitude, amidst the upheaval of the year 1917, astride a wintry red barn belonging to nobility and the nineteenth-century storytellers that had poised Russia on the brink of becoming the world's greatest literary tradition. In that first encounter caresses are exchanged before names, their soundtrack being "that crunch-crunch-crunch which is the only comment that a taciturn winter night makes upon humans." The second tryst is at a Berlin cocktail party years later; Victor is now almost married, whereas Nina has left her "incredibly well-bred and stolid" fiancé. The third and fourth encounters are so boilerplate (a German train station where they barely touch; a Paris hotel room where they barely speak) that some readers might be repulsed by the treacly nature of the whole affair – and, as it were, they would not be wrong. Hints are generously sprinkled as to the fate of poor Nina, and among the imaginative hindsight is almost invariably clairvoyant. It is for that reason that, in Fialta, Victor takes Nina "back into the past, back into the past, as I did every time I met her." The past remains the only explanation for their intimacy ("How familiar to me were her hesitations, second thoughts, third thoughts mirroring first ones, ephemeral worries between trains"), for the difference between their interaction and that of two verbal strangers. Victor's recollections have at once the sheen of fiction and romanticized truth, a dichotomy that does not have to be as disparate as it sounds – but we will return to that point. And in that past, and sadly in the present as well, lurks a Franco-Hungarian writer, Ferdinand, who just so happens to be Nina's husband. 

As the man that Nina chooses, at least legally, as her companion, Ferdinand wallows in the ephemeral fame so commonly incident to the second-rate writer. In fact, the description furnished by Victor suggests that this needn't have been his fate:

At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose ... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one's shivering soul.

For those steeped in Nabokov's categories, the compartmentalization is painfully clear. Which makes an article on Spring in Fialta from an allegedly prominent source averring that – and here I paraphrase to throw off the Google hounds – we are supposed to sympathize with Ferdinand, that Victor is insanely jealous of this amazing writer who greatly resembles Nabokov, and that Victor might have concocted the whole affair with Nina in his mind, one of the most unfortunately misinformed reviews in recent memory. As it were, Ferdinand epitomizes the "healthy second-rater" whom Nabokov always lambasted for the former's intrusion into every possible field except literary excellence. His entourage is composed solely of other such frauds, in books and society, and his most recent publication exemplifies his lack of sincerity:

After a brief period of fashionable religious conversion, during which grace descended upon him and he undertook some rather ambiguous pilgrimages, which ended in a decidedly scandalous adventure, he had turned his dull eyes toward barbarous Moscow. Now, frankly speaking, I have always been irritated by the complacent conviction that a ripple of stream consciousness, a few healthy obscenities, and a dash of communism in any old slop pail will alchemically and automatically produce ultramodern literature; and I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash. In Ferdinand's case .... he didn't care a damn for the plight of the underdog; but because of certain obscurely mischievous undercurrents of that sort, his art had become still more repulsive.

One wonders what could possibly induce anyone to think kindly of such a beast, much less compare him to the staunchly anti-trend, anti-scatological, anti-communist Nabokov – but I fear that last reviewer has already effectively obliterated himself. 

What the tale accomplishes in its saltatory excuse for a plot cannot be retold or repenned: in terms of fluidity and sheen, it ranks among the finest short stories of the twentieth century. Nina is both as real as her body is real, and as fake and evanescent as any hope may be of owning her spirit. She is the perfect and the most dreadful of affairs, one that means everything because it always meant nothing, because it was always a matter of happenstance that congress or affection occurred. Victor reminisces about what appears to be his only extramarital activity, justifying it implicitly by the fact that its kernels antedated his wedding, and trying, with one feeble and belated attempt, to apotheosize the experience into something it could not possibly become. Memory, "that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth," will have to suffice; but Victor and we know that, for all its triumphs, memory is rarely enough. Nina, on the other lonely and now horribly withered hand, never seems to have bothered with such detail.

"I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola."

Verlaine, "Ô triste, triste était mon âme"

One of this poet's most famous poems ("O sad, so sad my soul").  You can read the original here.

O sad, so sad my soul,                                   
Because a woman, a woman stole.

My mind I cannot allay,
Although my heart is far away.

Although my heart, although my soul,              
Are far from her control.

My mind I cannot allay,
Although my heart is far away.

And my heart, so black and blue,                
Says to my soul: Can this be true?

Can this be true, could this be true?
This pride anew, this grief anew?

And my soul says to my heart: Lo!
What traps fate brings, I do not know.

At once in love and grief to sway,
Although we both are far away.

Raging Bull

Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I'm looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white I don't know, but it is. Not a good movie either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and some with no end. No musical score, just sometimes the sound of a police siren or a pistol shot. And almost all of it happens at night, as if I lived my whole life at night.  

                                                                                                                  Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull

As long as we possibly can, we must preserve the innocence of childhood. We must preserve it in our children, protecting them from the storms of age and agony, of the pain and cruelty so widespread in our world, of sin in its deceptive and myriad guise. But we must also preserve it in ourselves. So often are adults informed of their immaturity by wiser minds, usually as a means to explain why the world doesn't quite fit them like some oversized coat or shoe. Yet on occasion it is immaturity in the form of faultlessness, an inability to see the world for the den of iniquity it most certainly is, that can absolve a soul. And at other times, it is the expiation of sin in a troubled being that can restore a faint trace of childhood lost: a hand print on a window pane, a taste of cinnamon candy, a beautiful pink ribbon amidst beautiful curly locks. Something akin to an imposition of penance redeems the protagonist in this famous film.

The bull in question is Italian-American prizefighter Jake LaMotta (a marvelous Robert De Niro), twenty troubled years old as our film opens in 1941. In one of life's little ironies, an adolescence of crime and bare-knuckle brawling has left LaMotta medically exempt from military service but fit enough to become one of the most feared middleweight boxers in the world. His manager and only friend is his younger brother Joey (Joe Pesci), whose flabbiness, squeakiness, and insecurities embody what professors of literature like to term a "perfect foil." Joey does not come off as a particularly bad fellow until we hear his advice on how precisely LaMotta should extricate himself from his marriage. There is also the small matter of Joey's "friends," a relationship far less easily shed – yet I digress. In the opening scenes we begin to sense the undercurrent beneath the Bull: his ambition lies not with belts of silver and gold but with hearts and minds. Like any artist worth his salt, LaMotta's dream is to be acknowledged by true connoisseurs (including, of course, other fighters), by those who know his sport inside and out, by those who will inscribe his terrifying force into the annals of pugilism and make him eternal. A championship, the layman's understanding of who is the best at a given time, matters little to the Bull, as does, to some extent, the concomitant fortune and fame. All throughout our film, we are afforded glimpses into the ruthless rings in which LaMotta annihilates his enemies (as Joey boasts, "he knocked [an opponent's] nose from one side of his face to the other"). It is then perhaps not surprising that LaMotta's father exploited the teenage Jake as one might a gamecock: as a gladiatorial pawn against other child ruffians with a purse earmarked for the family's rent. It is equally predictable that LaMotta would develop a profound disdain for any sort of authority, be that authority a parent, brother, spouse, or promoter. What matters to the Bronx Bull, as he is often billed, is the understanding that no one has ever knocked him off his feet or hurt him: only he can do that to himself. Which brings us to his ruination in the tall and very blonde form of Vickie (Cathy Moriarty).

Many viewers will know that Beverly Thailer, dite Vickie or Vikki, will become the second of LaMotta's seven brides; it is up to the actors, therefore, to make an historical fact a dramatic inevitability. Vickie, for her part, doesn't express much initial interest – but someone of LaMotta's fitness, determination, and utter lack of fear can usually mate with whomever he chooses. That Vickie is but fifteen and LaMotta twenty at the time of their introduction is less remarkable than the fact that Moriarty was herself a teenager (De Niro, by contrast, was thirty-six), if one with innate poise and polish. Moriarty is perfectly cast for many reasons, but mostly because she is the lean mean De Niro's size (a petite leading lady would have been no match). When he calls her over to sit on his lap, she takes up more space than he expects. This equation is repeated in a Technicolor fast-forward when he tosses her into a pool, and when, after a scene of brief but vicious domestic violence, her face resembles his own post-fight countenance. They court the only way LaMotta knows how: by simple displays of what has made him a man. He drives her around in his convertible, takes her to mini-golf, and shows her his father's apartment with a lovely observation about a neglected cage ("That's a bird. It was a bird. It's dead now, I think."). In time, she will become both his inspiration – he is but a knight of the rubber gauntlet – and his distraction, and here I will permit myself an aside. It is a commonly held belief among viewers of Raging Bull that what propels LaMotta is jealousy: of a sexual nature as far as Vickie is concerned, and of a fraternal kind with Joey, especially given the attention Joey bestows upon his "friends," but yet again we must demur. As in most films by Scorsese and Schrader, the true focus is not upon an individual tragic flaw, but sin itself. LaMotta's only path to purity is in the ring, his trials and tribulations very similar to those of an artist who will not compromise (which makes his own sell-out, his one thrown fight to curry favor with power brokers, all the more painful, like a potboiler a true artist will forever rue). His life, his work, his thoughts, his ethics, should be pure, because he is pure, bottled rage, to be unleashed only on his opponents, whom he pummels with force available to few men. Artists also unreasonably expect their loved ones to be as true to them as the artists are to their own works, a near-impossible task that begets the most savage disappointment. That his rage spills out of the squared circle, and gets the better of him on more than occasion, means ultimately that he has failed to achieve his destiny – the worst nightmare any artist could ever imagine. And Jake LaMotta's nightmare will only begin in the ring. 

Raging Bull enjoyed a tepid reception upon its release in 1980, in no small part because it was very different from that Philadelphia story of four years earlier. Black-and-white like the real LaMotta's dream, the film was as tragic as its operatic soundtrack, which suits it perfectly and suggests the Bull's idealized vision of himself as a knight-errant. Although boxing's brutality does not lend itself to much enjoyment, especially since its long-term consequences are now properly understood, there is something Romantic about such a life. A life about combat, rigged or not by underworld krakens who drain betting pools, about being alone and fighting with one's hands, about becoming world-feared as well as famous. Underworld? Well, for Joey LaMotta they hover quite above the surface. Almost from our opening scenes, Joey's "friends" function as a third layer to the sport and life of Jake LaMotta, because it is they who steer bulls and other ringed beasts to their own greedy ends. LaMotta's refusal to kowtow to some very powerful and very dangerous characters would, in a far lesser film, result in cruel retribution; yet somehow the mafiosi are just as proud of their native son as they are puzzled at his recalcitrance ("The man's got a head of a rock"). Joey, of course, would never have the audacity to stand up to the mob, which is one of the many reasons he adores his older brother. An uncanny sibling rapport allows many things to be left unsaid, although Joey insists that he "always tells [LaMotta] the truth the first time." But LaMotta knows the company his brother keeps and weighs that claim repeatedly. It does not help matters that Vickie was plucked from the selfsame milieu and that LaMotta also ponders her "friends," especially when these "friends" keep showing up at inopportune times (which, for LaMotta, means any time at all). So when the much older LaMotta turns to stand-up comedy and a bon-vivant lifestyle, it is a wonderful – and completely logical – departure from the young LaMotta, so serious and so focused as to have become the proverbial agelast. And how are we to understand the final scene, ostensibly one of redemption, at least in LaMotta's eyes? Perhaps he's the only one to see the events as such. Or perhaps his eyes have simply been swollen shut for years. 

Blok, "Ты много жил – Негодованье"

A work ("So long, so long you've lived – yet still") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

So long, so long you've lived – yet still   
Remained indignant in your soul.           
Farewells your mortal lungs now fill         
To beauty pure that you once stole.       

Arrayed in loving palpitation,              
Give forth the source of your mad drive, 
To gods' implacable elation,  
For life's new seeds to grow and thrive. 

Impassively you ache and strain,     
On truest path your grave is met;  
Indignance only comes in vain,  
So die, revive, and then forget.