Crooken Sands

I am quite happy to report that according to the intergalactic weapon known as Google, the eponymous town of this story does not seem to exist. Why should I be so pleased? Because there is something wholesome about wholly devised fiction unfettered by the necessity of deferring to historical fact or, much more egregiously, of drawing its power from it. Admittedly, this sounds like a distinct paradox since what feeds fiction – real faces, real tones, real words, real emotions – is undoubtedly derived from the banalities of the everyday. The difference is that first-rate fiction tilts objects, obscures gestures, and drowns out voices to achieve the maximum aesthetic effect.  Some mechanized minds might interrupt at this point and spout off a long German word which they claim, with some pomposity, has 'no equivalent in English'; others, even less original, will drone on about a mysterious 'circle of thinkers' collectively summoned as the Russian structuralists, a name which always reminds me for some reason of a mechanical brassière. The truth is that these 'circles' invariably involve no thought whatsoever, being simply staffed by backslapping mediocrities huddled together like prepackaged ballot boxes, so their reinventions of many a wheel should not distract the discerning reader from his enjoyments. And in a lovely little work like Crooken Sands, we do not wish to be distracted at all.

Our protagonist is a certain Arthur Fernlee Markam, whom I ought to describe in extenso as his image will prove to be a monument amidst the plot's wafting winds. Markam is an English merchant ("essentially a cockney") whose abiding dream is "to provide an entire rig-out as a Highland chieftain." Markam is also a dutiful husband and father of three, if by dutiful one understands that while he needs his space and quiet every evening after a long and profitable business day, he buys his family all the best clothes and appurtenances so that they may join him in the glorification of their social status ("The prosperity of the business allowed them all sorts of personal luxuries, amongst which was a wide latitude in the way of dress"). Readers of these pages will know what I think of such persons, and they will also know what fate tends to befall them. In any case, Markam, as stereotypical a Philistine as one could possibly find in the annals of literature, decides that his crowning achievement as a man of culture is to don the tartan of a clan to which he has never belonged and parade around a Scots fishing village in full regalia. Some faint apprehension, however, prevents him from simply borrowing the Royal Stuart pattern – probably the only one Markam could ever distinguish from a pincushion. Instead, and just as appropriately, he orders for a "pretty stiff" check a custom design:

Mr. Markam foresaw difficulties if he should by chance find himself in the locality of the clan whose colours he had usurped. The MacCallum at last undertook to have, at Markam's expense, a special pattern woven which would not be exactly the same as any existing tartan, though partaking of the characteristics of many. It was based on the Royal Stuart, but contained suggestions as to simplicity of pattern from the Macalister and Ogilvie clans, and as to neutrality of colour from the clans of Buchanan, Macbeth, Chief of Macintosh and Macleod. When the specimen had been shown to Markam he had feared somewhat lest it should strike the eye of his domestic circle as gaudy; but as Roderick MacDhu fell into perfect ecstasies over its beauty he did not make any objection to the completion of the piece. He thought, and wisely, that if a genuine Scotchman like MacDhu liked it, it must be right—especially as the junior partner was a man very much of his own build and appearance.

"The MacCallum," by the way, is neither a pub nor an inn, but the "junior partner very much of" Markam's "build and appearance"; almost as importantly, the sartorial deputy also speaks "with a remarkable cockney accent." Markam makes his purchase but does not "take his family into his confidence regarding his new costume" as he could not be certain that he would remain "free from ridicule." Once at the sands, Markum does indeed insist on wearing his outfit and his children laugh their necks red about it. A tableware accident invites more mockery from his wife, and it is at this point that Markum, by all indications pig-headed in that manner particular to smug, clueless boors, decides that on all outings henceforth he and his martial dress shall not be parted.

That our description has barely passed the first page of the text of Crooken Sands is cogent testimony to Stoker's foresight. The story ambles at an easy pace – almost as a metronome of Markum's aimless strolls near and around the village cliffs – and concludes at precisely the same speed, although by then our (and our English merchant's) pulses are beating noticeably faster. Without slipping into sly hints at the story's arc, one would do well to brush up on one's Scots, both the tongue and the nomenclature, before tackling this tale. And while I generally abhor dialect as a stooge-like conceit of the uninspired author, a cat's paw to generate some ancient truism from infallible rustics, it earns its place here. In fact, the very likelihood that Markum does not quite fully comprehend the local speech seems to heighten the danger in which he soon finds himself. What sort of danger? Well, one of the sorts you associate with 'sands,' although perhaps not the first that comes to mind. Thus during the plight – it does become a plight for more than one reason – of our Mr. Markum, we may find ourselves recurring to Kipling: "He may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success and go to his grave a castaway." If that be his besetting sin, then surely we can forgive him.   

El secreto de sus ojos

A long time ago, it seems, I was more skeptical about love and more partisan of passion. That is because love in its romantic sense is not worth experiencing too early on in life, while about passion fairly the opposite can be said. An egregious stereotype exists about women and passion that needs no further coverage here; what we can state with certainty is that the emotion can be enjoyed regardless of what else life has offered the impassioned, because if we understand someone's passion we can trace his portrait in broader strokes. Anyone with a faint knowledge of etymology, however, will tell you the real meaning of this oft-abused word, and in a way it will make even more disturbing sense. A brief introduction to the guiding principles behind this film.

Our place and time is Buenos Aires on the eve of the current millennium, and our protagonist is the newly retired criminal investigator Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín). Of these three, only the time will change. Espósito is writing a novel and decides to recur to a case closed a quarter of a century before, the rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher by the name of Liliana in her apartment one dreadful day. When he asks Irene Menéndez-Hastings (Soledad Villamil) how he should begin his initial foray into the world of literature (we see a waste-paper basket of crumpled first pages), she recommends that he start with the strongest and most brilliant image – which, of course, is Irene herself. Twenty-five years ago, she was not married or the mother of two children, but a Cornell-educated lawyer and Espósito's immediate superior in the ministry of justice. Irene could be the thinking man's runway model: tall, trim but well-nourished, lovely, educated, intelligent, dapper, restrained, and, perhaps most importantly, entirely reasonable. There is no doubt that Espósito has loved her from the very first day they are introduced by the cantankerous old judge to whom they both report; in time we learn that his love may be the weaker of the two. Espósito follows her advice – as he has always wanted to do whatever she says – and the film pendulates between the Buenos Aires of 1999, a warm, pleasant modern city, and the compromises of a period in which thousands of outspoken Argentines were silenced. My understanding is that a film about 1970s Argentina without reference to the operations of the secret police would be an even bolder statement, but El secreto de sus ojos does not really want to delve into politics. The typical police procedural aspects – the brutal, unsolved murder, the framed suspects one of whom just so happens to be an impoverished Bolivian immigrant, our righteous protagonist and his overtly malevolent colleague Romano (Mariano Argento), a man who believes only in power and in those who take it for themselves – are all washed away by the development of two love stories and two secondary characters. Our first love story never really quits the screen, but the second is wrought out of curiously posthumous emotions on the part Liliana's widower, the run-of-the-mill bank employee Morales (Pablo Rago). 

Morales's first reaction to the murder is one of disbelief and delusion, but this changes when Espósito peruses some albums of Liliana and discovers three separate photos in which a young man finds her lovely face much more riveting than the camera lens. "Did she have a brother?" he asks the morose Morales, who suddenly perks up and replies in the negative. Using the tracing paper numerical scheme Morales taught his wife, an eerie outline emblematic of the "disappeared" persons identified only by some hidden code, the two find out that the man who could not keep his eyes off Liliana is a glum, creepy-looking lowlife called Isidiro Gómez (Javier Godino). Espósito takes a particular interest in Morales, whose icy indifference to the investigation would make him in most films a suspect, yet the thought never crosses the investigator's mind. Morales – his name is not a coincidence – seems to represent something more than a bereaved husband. As he sits in alternating train stations waiting for Gómez, he opines that he has started to forget, that the human ability to bury pain along with the deceased, the mnemonic equivalent of endorphins, is remarkable. He may be waiting for his wife's alleged killer, but he seems indifferent to the person and more interested in the penalty, which is when we remember that the fellow works at a bank. Every day things must be balanced or he cannot go home. I firmly believe that those who are attracted to banks and ledgers and bookkeeping are likewise attracted to justice and, if necessary, even revenge. There must be equality at the end of the day or at least at the end of a life. Looking at our humble bank clerk, it becomes difficult to determine whether he is reliving the scant memories of a young marriage or killing a purported murderer again and again in his mind. 

Gómez has the distinct privilege of being in the film's two best scenes and being the subject of the third best. In this last episode, Espósito breaks into a house in which the camera always stays a room ahead, as if it were his very fate to come across game-changing evidence. Yet the documents our investigator discovers and filches initially seem trivial until elucidated by his drunken sidekick Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). This precipitates the investigators' visit to this team's soccer stadium, which from the bird-eye's swoop, to the revelation just as the goal is scored, to the frenetic chase, is one of the most magnificent five minutes in recent cinema and has to be seen to be believed (admittedly, there is something exhilarating about fifty or a hundred thousand people agreeing with you). But even through these impressive touches the film focuses upon how these characters discover the truth about one another. Irene catches Gómez staring at her cleavage and realizes that he may be much more dangerous than she thought, and her insults prod him to do two very foolish things. Espósito treats Sandoval in a sardonically cruel way in an attempt to make him turn his life around. And Romano, with his final on-screen appearance, speaks with malicious glee for all the military police that almost destroyed Argentina in the 1970s. Since these are his last words to us, we assume that some variation on them probably adorns his now otherwise unmarked tomb.

Like many European or foreign mysteries, El secreto de sus ojos is not so much a whodunit as a clothesline on which the director can hang a few portraits and then gaze at them with an intensity that does not befit the wafting museum visitor. What these people think of one another and how they express it are the main motifs. But since every work of art needs some nominal structure, they find their common language in a crime as senseless as it is unexplained (the exact connection between the killer and his victim is never given full vent, suggesting that while we should pity Liliana, her story is only a vehicle for a greater perspective). So many details are eloquent with meaning: after chastising Gómez for his lascivious stare in some pictures with Liliana, Espósito then finds a snapshot of himself looking with only slightly less desire at Irene; when Sandoval creeps up behind his partner, Espósito is legitimately scared and not at all amused; and Irene's eyes, in the excellent and almost requisite reopening-of-the-case scene, speak volumes about her love for Espósito, and here we remember that we are still reading a fictionalization of the events. The film's only flaw is its omission of what prompted Espósito, who did marry a "Jujuy princess" (in Irene's words) but never had children,  to write a novel at all. Surely retirement from the force could not possibly be the reason? But then again, for some people old passions don't die hard as much as bide their time.

Goethe, "Natur und Kunst"

One of the greatest poems ever written ("Nature and Art"), the work of this German man of letters. Especially famous is the penultimate line, a favorite quote of this writer.  You can read the original here.

Nature and Art, from one another fled,     
Are, ere one knows, again in closest tie;  
Aversion, too, from me has soon been bled,              
And equal force attracts me to their side.            

And yet, one honest effort will suffice! 
And when in measured hours ourselves we bind              
To art, at zeal and fervor's glorious price,   
Anew may nature's glow our hearts then find.  

All learning asks for such tuition paid;           
In vain will strive those minds unbound, unmet,                       
To reach at last some marveled heights unseen.   

Thus great things come to those whose will is made,
We know the Master by his limits set, 
For this one law can only make us free.

Ein Landarzt

A story ("A Country Doctor") by this German-language writer. You can read the original here.

I was in quite a quandary: before me lay an urgent trip; a deathly ill patient waited in a village ten miles away; heavy snowdrifts filled the space between me and him; I had a light, large-wheeled carriage well-suited for our country roads; wrapped in furs, my medical kit in hand, I stood in the courtyard ready to travel; but a horse, we needed a horse. Last night my own horse had perished from overexertion in this icy winter, and now my domestic was scampering around the village trying to borrow another one. Yet I knew it was hopeless; the snow was accumulating in larger and increasingly sturdier heaps, and I was standing there without a purpose. At the gate my domestic appeared alone, her lantern swinging, and I shouldn't have been surprised. Who would loan out his horse for such a trip? Once again I trudged through the courtyard and found no possibilities. Annoyed and distracted, I kicked open the dilapidated door of the pig stall unused now for many years. It opened only to snap back and forth on its hinge; from within came warmth and horse-like odors, and I espied a dim stall lantern hanging on a cord. A man was curled up in a lowly crate, his blue-eyed face open to the light. "Should I yoke the horses?" he asked, crawling forward on all fours. I didn't know what to say and only bent over to see what else was lurking in the stall.  The domestic was standing next to me. "One has no idea what's stored in one's own house!" she said, and we both laughed. 

"Hullo, brother!  Hullo, sister!" said the stable-boy as two horses came out of the doorway which kept them restless. They were powerful and broad-shouldered beasts, their legs tight against their bodies, their well-formed heads sunken like camels, and they pushed themselves out only through the strength of their torsos. But then suddenly they stood up straight, their legs locked, their serried muscles evaporating in steam. "Help him," I said, and the willing domestic hurried to give the stable boy the carriage harness. But hardly had she reached him when the boy grabbed her and pressed her face to his. She screamed and fled to my side, her cheek bloodied by two rows of teeth. "You brute!" I cried out in anger, "do you want to taste my lash?" Then I remembered three things: that he was not from these parts, that I didn't know where he was from, and that he had willingly helped me when others had turned away. As if reading my thoughts, he took no umbrage at my threat but instead, still occupying himself with the horses, he turned towards me. "Climb in," he then said and, as it were, everything was indeed ready. I concluded that I had never ridden with so fine a team, and I climbed in. "I'll be the one driving, however, since you don't know the way," I said. "Certainly," he responded, then added: "In fact, I won't come along at all.  I'll stay here with Rosa." "No!" screamed Rosa, and rightly sensing the inevitability of her fate, she raced back into the house. I heard her chain the door and bolt the lock; then I saw her in the hall running through the rooms and turning off all the lights to make herself unfindable. "You're coming along," I said to the boy, "or I won't travel at all, so urgent is the matter. And I have absolutely no intention of leaving you the girl as payment for my trip." "Giddy up!" said the boy, clapping his hands, and the carriage was yanked forward like lumber down a stream. Then I heard the boy's assault on my house gate, bursting and splitting, since all my senses, eyes and ears included, were filled to the brim with sounds of bustling activity.

But even that only lasted a moment. The next thing I knew, the patient's house gate opened as if directly across from my own. I was already there; the horses were standing and silent; the snowfall had ceased; moonlight was all around; the patient's parents came running out of the house; his sister was right behind them; I was quickly helped out of the carriage; from the cacophony of voices I understood nothing; the air was barely breathable in the patient's room; the neglected stove top emitted smoke; I wanted to crack open a window; but first, I needed to see my patient. Gaunt, feverless, neither cold nor warm, without a shirt and with empty eyes, my patient, a mere lad, lifted himself out of bed, hung his arms around my neck, and whispered in my ear: "Doctor, let me die." I looked around; no one seemed to have heard him. His parents stood on without as much as a word, bent slightly forward and anticipating my evaluation. His sister had brought a chair for my kit. I opened the kit and looked for my instruments; meanwhile, the lad kept groping from the bed in my direction to remind me of his request. Finally I found a pair of pincers, checked them in the candlelight and replaced them. "Yes," I thought blasphemously, "in such cases it is the gods who help, who send the missing horse, even a second one to compensate for the matter's urgency, who provide the stable boy as added assistance."  

And here I thought of Rosa. What should I do? How could I save her? How could I pull her out from under that stable boy with her being ten miles away and my carriage chained to unwieldy horses? These horses who had now somehow loosened their straps; who, I still didn't know how, had pushed the windows in and stuck a head through each window and, undeterred by the family's screams, were watching the patient. "I'll come right back," I thought as if the horses were summoning me, but then I let the sister – who believed me to be dazed from the heat – wrest my fur coat from my shoulders. A glass of rum was prepared, the father clapped me on the back; the surrender of his beloved son justified such trust. I shook my head; nausea would have overcome me had I succumbed to his way of thinking; and for that reason alone I refused to drink. The mother stood beside the bed and beckoned to me. As a horse neighed loudly to the ceiling, I walked over and laid my head on the boy's chest as he shuddered beneath my wet beard. What I already knew was confirmed: the boy was healthy, a victim of some bad circulation and drowned in coffee by his solicitous mother perhaps, but healthy and best yanked out of bed. Not being an idealistic do-gooder, however, I left him lying there. 

I am a district employee and bound to every inch of my duties' ambit, even when it becomes all too much. Badly paid, I am generous towards the poor and always ready to help. I also had to worry about Rosa, since the lad might be right and I too would die. What could I do here in this endless winter? My horse had perished and there was no one in the village from whom I might borrow another. I had to retrieve the harness from the pig stall; if I didn't have horses, perhaps I could ride with pigs. So it was. I nodded to the family. They knew nothing of the matter, and even if they had, they wouldn't have believed me. Writing prescriptions is easy, but getting along with people is much more difficult. Now my visit had come to an end; yet again had I been bothered unnecessarily, something to which, of course, I was well accustomed. I was well accustomed to having the whole district martyr me through my night buzzer. But this time, this time I had to surrender Rosa, that lovely girl who had lived for years in my house with hardly any attention on my part, such a sacrifice was too great. With sophistries I had to gain time to arrange my thoughts so as not to abandon this family who, try as they might, could not give Rosa back to me. 

Yet as I closed my medical kit and waved for my fur, the family gathered together: the father sniffing about the rum glass in his hand; the mother, in all likelihood quite disappointed in me – but what do people really expect? – biting her lips, teary-eyed; the sister waving a thick, bloody handkerchief. Under certain circumstances, I could be persuaded to admit that the boy was in fact sick. I went to him. He smiled at me as if I were bringing him the heartiest of soups – oh, now both horses were neighing. Mandated from on high, the noise was supposed to facilitate the examination and now I found that, as it were, the boy was sick. In his right side near the hip he had a wound about the size of a human palm. Pink, in various shades, dark in its depth, bright along its edges, soft at its core, with irregular rivulets of blood, exposed like an open mine shaft. So it appeared from a distance; from close up there was an aggravation. Who could look upon it without whistling mildly? Worms, in length and force the equal of my little finger, in and of themselves pink but also sprayed with blood, were winding their way deeply ensconced within the wound, all with white heads and their many legs against the light. Poor lad, there was nothing to be done. I found your great wound; this flower across your ribs would be your destruction.

The family was happily gazing at me in action; the sister said as much to the mother; the mother to the father; the father to a few guests who were standing on tiptoe, balancing themselves with their arms spread wide as moonlight crept in through the open door. "Will you save me?" the boy whispered, gulping, still dazzled by the life in his wound. The people in my neighborhood were no different: always demanding the impossible from the doctor. They had already lost the old faith; their preacher sat at home disentangling and teasing his chasubles, one after the other. But the doctor had to accomplish everything with his tender surgical hand. Well, as you like it: I had never offered my services; you used me for holy ends, and I let that all occur. What better could I wish for, old country doctor, robbed as I was of my domestic? And they all came, the family and the village elders, and they disrobed me. A school choir led by a teacher stood before the house and sang an extremely simple melody to the following text:

Disrobe him, then he'll heal.
And if he fails, so kill him!
'Tis but a doctor, 'tis but a doctor.

Then I was disrobed and I looked upon the people, my head bent forward, my fingers in my beard. I was completely composed and superior to all, and things remained as such, although this helped me in no way since now they took me by my head and feet and carried me into bed. Against the wall, on the side of my wound, they laid me down. Then everyone left the room; the door was shut; the singing stopped; clouds appeared before the moon; the bed covers lay in warmth around me; and like shadows the horse's heads were swinging in the open windows. 

"You know what," I heard spoken in my ear, "I have very little trust in you. You got shaken up somewhere, and you can't get back on your own two feet. Instead of helping, you're crowding me in upon my deathbed. I'd love to scratch your eyes out." 

"Right," I said, "this is all very scandalous. Yet I'm a doctor. What should I do? Believe me, it's not any easier on me." 

"Am I supposed to content myself with this apology? Oh, I suppose I'll just have to do so. I'll always have to do so. I came into the world with a lovely wound; this was the only provision I received." 

"Young man," I said, "your mistake is that you have no perspective. I who have already been in all the hospital rooms far and wide, I say to you: your wound is not that bad. Two strokes with the sharp end of an axe. In the forest many cutters turn to the side and do not hear the axe fall, much less approach." 

"Is that really the case or are you deceiving me in your febrile state?"

"That is most certainly the case. Take the word of a public health officer."

And he took it and fell silent. But now it was time to think of my escape. The horses were still loyally at their places. Clothes, fur, and medical kit were quickly rounded up; I didn't want to delay myself by putting on my things; the horses raced back as they had raced here, and in a way I was going to jump from his bed into my own. One of the horses stepped back from the window obediently; I threw the ball back into the carriage; the fur flew too wide; only one sleeve held on a hook – good enough. I swung myself onto the horse. Rubbing the straps loose, one horse barely tied to the other, the carriage straying behind, then the fur dragging in the snow. "Faster!" I said, but faster we did not go. Slowly like old men we drove through the snowy desert; for a long stretch behind us sounded the new, insane song of the children:   

Be happy, you patients,
The doctor has come into your bed!

I had never come home like this; my booming practice was now lost; a usurper arrived, but unnecessarily since he could never replace me; in my house raged that repulsive stable boy; Rosa was his victim; I did not want to think of the consequences. Naked, exposed to the frost of this most unblissful of seasons, with earthly carriage and unearthly horses, I, old man, drove around. My fur hung behind on the carriage, but I couldn't reach it, and from the rabble of patients not one of them even moved a finger. Betrayed! Betrayed! Once you've followed the night buzzer mistakenly, there is no going back.

Rendez-vous

Away from light steals home my heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.

                                                                                                    Romeo and Juliet, I.i

There are star-crossed lovers, lovers cut into little stars, stars that exhale meteors, but the tales of love woven across the centuries of literature remain in our memory because we fear one thing: that the love of which we read will never infect the air of which we breathe. Those who claim that love is but chemical dependency provoked to perpetuate a species have never loved one afternoon or evening on this earth; and though we cannot begrudge them their bitterness their words need not concern us. The love that is high as the sun in day and cautious and hidden as the moon when darkness reigns, this is what each of us desires, however estranged we may feel from the world at large. And however we may speak of teenage infatuation, as exemplified by the most famous couple in literary history, love is a barometer of maturity: it is the ability to know when to cast down one's arms and call off the search. We cannot expect a fourteen-year-old maiden to know anything of love, and the expectation may be equally unreasonable for a rather frisky eighteen-year-old from Toulouse. Which brings us to this film.

The premise may be old hat, but something about it occludes sleaze or cynicism. A young woman, Anne Larrieu, dite Nina (Juliette Binoche), departs her rustic hometown for the bright lights of Paris with the tentative goal of becoming an actress, which is another way of saying she wants to do something where she wouldn't have to be herself. We first see her walking into Gertrude Soissons Real Estate and onto the radar of a rather hapless lad named Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak). Paulot, whose name conjures up a nursery rhyme, quickly develops feelings for her although the signals she sends suggest nymphomania, insouciance, and a certain amount of self-loathing (the most famous being, "the nights I have spent alone in Paris I can count on one hand"). Nina does have one modest role in a bawdy farce, "Tea or cocoa," which is one of the few lines uttered by her character, a ditzy, underdressed French maid, and Paulot is mysteriously presented with an extra ticket. Now anyone with even scant knowledge of female machinations would know that a pretty young girl with an unstable job and no real friends in a city like Paris does not just happen to have an extra ticket. Paulot becomes in short order her bodyguard and confidant but unlike most of the other male characters not her lover. That duty is predominantly left to his enigmatic and self-destructive flatmate, Quentin (the immortally handsome Lambert Wilson).

Quentin's appearance about fifteen minutes in points the film in a more somber direction – precisely the "artificial night" of Shakespeare's play and for good reason. In slow details that reward the viewer's patience, Quentin is revealed to have once been a fine actor in a production of Romeo and Juliet four years prior. His Juliet, a woman we never get to see, was also his lover after rehearsals and the passenger in the car wreck that only he survived.  He is brooding, histrionic, and completely self-absorbed – in other words, a typical actor. When Nina whacks him with a shoe, the camera remains on his face as he bleeds and cackles. We never get to see her expression because it doesn't matter to him and, therefore, not to us. The first time he and Nina make love is preceded by a ridiculous display with a razor, a weapon that will be wielded on different occasions throughout the film, and not only by Quentin. His stalking of Nina ("I get the feeling you've been following me since we met") worsens the tensions between him and poor old Paulot, who end up convening unwillingly at her apartment one fateful morning. After parboiling himself in frenzied platitudes and maniacal grins, Quentin departs to a dog's-eye perspective beneath some bumpers. We never glimpse his body but are simply informed in good theatrical fashion that a death has occurred off-stage, at which point the third act begins with a sad middle-aged gentleman called Scrutzler (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Quentin was once Romeo and the daughter of Scrutzler, whose name evinces an ignorance of German nomenclature, was his Juliet. Scrutzler himself was the director who hand-picked Quentin ("The first minute I saw him, I knew"), and his performance was so impressive that even when Nina re-encounters Fred, her dressing room lover at "Tea or cocoa," Fred remembers just how good Quentin was. So when Nina meets Scrutzler – in the words of Quentin, "a madman who calls me every day trying to save me" – there is only one destiny left to be revealed.   

Romeo and Juliet's quandary, if one may employ such a term, is that they are too young to know better and expiate their sins on the basis of their artlessness. They immerse themselves in second-hand passions because the idea of love is more valuable to die for than the courageous act of life. To her credit, one thing that Nina doesn't wish for is death, perhaps because life has yet to fulfill its promise. On more than one occasion she is accused of being immune to love, owing in no small part to her nightly gambols, and she wonders whether this is true, whether she is doomed to be the halfwitted maid who "always finds something to like about a man." There is enough nudity to satisfy those who feel such a life cannot be accurately depicted by suggestive parlor talk alone, but the flesh that does appear is never gratuitous and always advances the story line (when Paulot finally makes his clumsy, telegraphed move, for example, Nina just begs him to get done with it since he's just like all the rest; naturally, he leaves flustered and appalled). The story line, however, does not quite drift where we think it might go, and again we see that much more effort was exerted in sculpting the film than in naming it. And at some point towards the end it also occurs to the viewer that the actress who has become Juliet has the same name in our reality. Quite a burden for a young actress unless she lives past fourteen.