M. Butterfly

Early on in this film a discussion arises about the threadbare plot of this opera involving an American sailor and the sad, lonely, and beautiful Japanese woman who pledges to him her unmerited love.  As the participants, a European male and Asian female, slowly concede that Madame Butterfly smacks of imperialist degradation, an analogy is made that I have to quote in all its preposterousness:

It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it?  The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man .... Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde cheerleader fell in love with a short Japanese businessman?  He marries her and then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture, and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy.  Then when she learns her husband has remarried, she kills herself.   Now I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct?  But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner, you find her beautiful ... the point is, it's the music not the story.

This analogy might work today, or even twenty years ago, but it certainly could not apply to 1964 Beijing, nor would it mean a drachma to a French diplomat, who would probably think a cheerleader was a firebrand rabble-rouser.  The anachronism is so egregious that one might generously consider its inclusion as a hint: the person troating the phrase is as fraudulent and misinforming as the statement itself, and the person accepting this argumentation is an utter fool.  Which would make a great deal of sense as the speaker is Madame Song (John Lone) and the listener a French diplomat by the name of René Gallimard (Jeremy Irons).

We meet Gallimard as he shuffles papers for the French Embassy in his capacity as its bookkeeper; we meet his cold if fetching wife Jeanne (Barbara Sukowa); and then we glimpse his nighttime activities, which at the beginning of the film entail taking in an opera – but not in that order.  Gallimard attends Madame Butterfly somewhat out of character.  "I've got one or two people around here thinking I'm profoundly cultured," he confesses to Frau Baden, an older, well-connected German woman, as good an excuse as any for his ingenuousness.  When she first floats into our purview, Madame Butterfly remains at a distance; it is therefore incumbent upon Irons to convey the restrained yet undeniable madness of love at first sight.  At what we now term the after-party, Gallimard buttonholes the diva and begins the awkward advances of an overeager admirer.  "I've never seen a more convincing performance," he croaks.  To which Madame Song asks whether he meant her performance as a Japanese woman, and then launches into the political agenda punctuated by the cheerleader reference.  The East-West dynamic, surely a horse killed a thousand times over, informs the rest of their conversation.  They part, he reluctantly, she at just the preordained moment, with Madame Song's recommendation that Gallimard attend the Beijing Opera to hear the real product.  The first act closes with his return home to Jeanne, and Gallimard gets more than a little discomfited when he sees his wife fanning herself, looking in a mirror, and singing the aria to the opera that is the soundtrack to his obsession.

What happens next may only make sense to plain minds if one knows the true story on which M. Butterfly is based – a source that has been ignored by many reviewers.  Ignored, I should say, for one uniform reason: Madame Song is clearly not who she claims to be; that is, to even the untrained eye she is far too masculine in voice and appearance to sustain any sort of duplicity.  Even without foreknowledge of the events, this distinction strikes the viewer but not the protagonist, which is one of the great conventions of drama.  Gallimard and Song begin what would be deemed a usual affair, express in turn the usual reservations and passions, but in closed quarters do not pursue the usual pursuits.  The love scenes – not the right word, the scenes in which the characters moan, fondle one another, and moan again – are shot fully clothed.  Is this because Gallimard truly respects Song's shame or based on some other conviction?  Whatever the case, Gallimard is rewarded for his ostensible purity in an extraordinary way: his Embassy colleagues, whose expenses he has been questioning since he arrived, are discovered by the imperious Ambassador Toulon (Ian Richardson).  Toulon does not like backslapping junkets, and of all the charges one can hurl at Gallimard, he can never be accused of either humor or frivolity.  Irons's demeanor and gesticulation will remind the attentive moviegoer of this masterpiece, released only a year before, as will the suspicion of other levers at work.  The levers come in the form of a second androgynous Chinese character just as, curiously enough, Gallimard is appointed head of Embassy intelligence with the assignment of monitoring a certain "conflict in Vietnam" with the Americans.

The gender issues in M. Butterfly provide catnip to modern theorists who debase everything and everyone and end up just demolishing their own credibility – yet the point is quite another.  The difference in gender, a crude and obvious conceit, could easily apply to any relationship in which the appearance of love gave way to heartbreak.  “What I loved was the lie," says Gallimard, "the perfect lie," a sentiment that could describe any romantic misfortune.  Gallimard beds another woman and, upon seeing her sprawled in waiting, quips, "you look exactly as I imagined you would under your clothes," leading to an ironic confession to Song.  In another magnificent scene, we see Song working in a quarry as a megaphone condemns all "artists, writers, and intellectuals" to manual labor so that they may know "the flinty soil of China's revolutionary future."  But the film's oddest conceit has to do with our allegedly French characters.  Both Toulon and Gallimard not only possess perfectly clipped and refined British speech, they also react to emotion and empire with the same morbid indifference.  In fact, it is empire that stirs Gallimard more greatly when he oversteps his expertise about Southeast Asian politics and seeks the Ambassador's approbation.  Casting actors more prone to the vicissitudes of human feeling might have led a greater number of critics to buy into the whole charade, although we may again be generous and see this ploy as intentional.  It is fair to state, however, that the very ghastly last scene, while dramatically correct, should not have taken place physically even if, mentally, the change occurred ages ago.  Perhaps that is why as Song is being led away by army officers she tells Gallimard that, “whatever happens, the days I spent with you were the only days I truly existed."  If only we knew more about the days before that.

Pasternak, "Зазимки"

A work ("First snow") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

An open kitchen door let in  
A monolith of airborne steam; 
For but a moment all was dim,
And old like those same childhood eves. 

The weather's dry and silent still.
Five steps away, upon the street,
Embarrassed winter waits until 
It opts to break our threshold's pleat.

Again it's our first winter time. 
November greys touch distant ground; 
White willows fade, like unled blind, 
Bereft of cane, of dog, of sound.

A river and a willow share  
The naked frozen ice across; 
A table mirror perch'd will stare, 
While darkest sky our dreams will gloss.

Like crossing roads half swept with snow,
Upon a birch-combed star it wanes; 
These branches hold the far-off glow, 
These cross'd roads crack the mirror's plane;

The birch suspects, in secret thought,
What wonders truly never cease:
A dacha winter far more fraught 
Than tallest birches at their peak. 

Lermontov, "Поэт"

A work ("The Poet") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

When Raphael the last inspired blush,
Upon the saintly maiden's sacred face,
His fingers trembling less than his fine brush,
Enthrall'd by his own artistry, did place,

He fell, in ecstasy, before the sight! 
Yet soon this burst of wonder left his breast, 
So silent, young, and so bereft of rest, 
That he in shortest time forgot that white,

That heavenly white flame which he once caught. 
Such is the poet: should thought so sparkling shine, 
So shall his quill disgorge in sweetest rhyme, 
His soul in full.  Loud lyres in their assault

Enchant the earth; yet in his silence seems    
The poet, to all oblivious save you, 
You, idols of his soul! Utopian dream! 
And suddenly his cheeks grow cold and blue:

His heart's concerns will soon fall quiet, still – 
And there before his eyes a spectre flees!  
But so long shall his weary mind yet keep
Those very first impressions of his thrill. 

The Farewell

Erst ließ Freude mich nicht schlafen;                ('Twas joy that first kept me from sleep;)
Dann hielt Kummer nachts die Wacht;              (Then worry held me till first light;)
Als mich beide nicht mehr trafen,                     (When neither more my soul did sweep,)
Schlief ich.  Aber ach, es bracht                        (I slept.  Yet sleep turn'd, out of spite,)
Jeder Maienmorgen mir Novembernacht.         (Each May morn to November night.)

                                                                                              Bertolt Brecht, Wie es war (I)

It is August 1956; the wall that would separate a city and two countries and be symbolically demolished fewer than thirty years after its installation did not yet exist, but Germany, the worst and wickedest of twentieth-century nations, had been cloven.  History books have varied in their assumptions as to why this all happened, yet they all seem to agree that Germany was once a wonderful place to live, work, and think, and that sooner or later it was bound to become that place again.  And although what we glimpse of the eastern half of Germany in this film is hardly broader than a stage set, it is enough to extrapolate a horizon of details.

Our protagonist is a nearly-deceased Bertolt Brecht, but perhaps not the bookish, big-eared comrade with the bad haircut we recall from hundreds of photos.  This Brecht (Josef Bierbichler) is a disheveled, ailing, and, frankly, fat and disgusting world-renowned playwright who has retired yet again to this lake, famous from his elegies, to do something akin to work.  We say "akin," because considering the passel of women who follows him thither, no work of any value could possibly be undertaken much less completed.  Brecht senses all this, of course, because he senses his coming end.  A cigar-smoking rake until the last breath of life leaves him, Brecht has assembled, or allowed to assemble, his past, present, and potential future all at one scenic if bland East German resort.  There we find his legal wife of twenty-seven years, Helene Weigel (the late Monica Bleibtreu); their hapless daughter Barbara (Birgit Minichmayr); his former lover, current alcoholic, and washed-up thespian Ruth Berlau (Margit Rogall); his current muse, the very young and very ambitious actress Käthe Reichel (Jeanette Hain); another lover, Isot Kilian (Rena Zednikowa), who happens to be married to the Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Harich (Samuel Finzi), the only other male at this girls school of hard love; and Elisabeth Hauptmann (Elfriede Irrall), who cooks, edits the ailing master's writings, and is generally ignored by Brecht, suggesting a very dear (to her) affair very long ago.  Brecht's relationship to each is revealed in marvelous Chekhovian vignettes, so that we need not know how all these real people interfered in each others' real biographies.  Some facts will be bent with artistic license, but one fact will be clear: Brecht is dying and to whom he allots his final months, weeks, or days will form his real testament, at least to those who have loved him.

There is, of course, a little more than that.  After the introduction of all the planets revolving around one pasty, grizzled star, an unmistakable automobile pulls up and an unmistakable man approaches the house.  He has a request that is much more of an order, and wishes, he claims, to spare Weigel and Brecht any hardships, which is to say he wishes them to stay out of it.  We have seen the subsequent exchange a hundred times in a hundred films, but the upshot is that our unmistakable man has an unmistakable aim: to arrest Harich, unfaithful to the state, and the latter's spouse, simply unfaithful.  Later monologues insinuate why the controversial thinker has fallen out of favor with the East German government, and these reasons will again seem hollow and useless since the cause that provides them was misbegotten ("We each have our own idea of socialism"; "I have Moscow's blessing"; "Ulbricht must go," and so forth).  Apart from this grim inevitability, little of any import occurs.  Ruth corners Brecht in a barn and says and does all the things drunk, jilted lovers with no self-esteem do at those fateful moments – Brecht cannot even bear to look at her, and neither can we.  Later, she reveals her real connection to the master which, if she is telling the truth (we remember Ruth is an actress, and probably a very good one), justifies her behavior to a certain degree.  When Brecht goes out to the end of the pier to apologize to Elisabeth, we cannot judge his sincerity since all he wants is Elizabeth's hand and consent to forgive him, much like the unmistakable man also wanted Helene to shake on it (which, in the latter case, is very odd).  There is also a strange set of mistranslated subtitles, not so much wrong as misleading: the unmistakable man proposes the shibboleth "Was macht die Kunst?", slang for "what's up?", but the phrase is rendered almost literally and not in question form.  After spying on Haring and Kilian coupling, Brecht quips, "Wir Schwaben müssen alles wissen," lost completely in "Some of us need to know everything," which seems to assert Brecht's arrogant prerogative as a writer, when in fact he is indulging in some self-deprecation about his humble Bavarian origins.  Finally, Isot and Käthe are asked whether they have seen the master's cap, which I fear is a bit like its owner: burnt up, lost, and symbolically destroyed (later in the film it is likened to Helene, as the truest and oldest fit).  They respond indifferently and suggest the boathouse because they are Brecht's current lovers and do not need symbols.  They have, at least for a few more days, the real "monster" for themselves.

Despite some poems of startling beauty, I have never cared for Brecht.  Whatever talent he may have had was outyelled by his insufferable political agenda, which while perhaps well-meaning was in turn deaf, dumb, and very, very blind.  Bierbichler is not a well-known quantity outside the German-speaking world but, as many critics have noted, he is perfectly cast precisely because he does not really resemble Brecht in any significant way.  What he represents is a bloated, fuzzy, unhealthy caricature, or what we might expect Brecht's death mask to resemble, if we didn't already have his death mask.  That said, Bierbichler's pathological removal of his glasses and eye-rubbing may have been a tick he himself inserted, and it helps to remember that he is playing the great Brecht, not the real Brecht, who likely tended to confuse the two.  The Lebensabend of the callous lothario is one of literature's oldest tropes, but rarely is it staged with such savage subtlety, abetted, one assumes, by the political climate in the erstwhile GDR, where there were roughly as many stool pigeons as there were real ones.  There can be little talk of first-rate literature, none of religion, almost none of history; everything is about the now and the future, which means the sins of the rake mean nothing, and his life alternates between poems and muses, with no particular responsibility for either production.  Brecht does not react overmuch to the appearance on his 'property' of what is unmistakably a Stasi agent because he intuits, correctly as it were, that he is not the target.  If intentional and not simply plot acceleration, the detail, which epitomizes Brecht's selfishness, is of magnificent genius.

In The Farewell's sole predictable event, Brecht will fall sick and just as quickly convalesce, only to die offscreen shortly thereafter.  During his illness he mumbles into a edifying conclusion about life and, specifically, the country of his citizenship ("Where there are no secrets, there are also no truths").  But love and life are the greatest secrets, as Brecht knows.  He knows because, as his country well suspects, he is a poet before he is a citizen.  If you still disagree, ask yourself what committed socialist would pen this poem, recited in the author's presence by a zealous pioneer:  

An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September      (One fine September when the moon was blue,)
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum          (And still beneath the sapling plum tree's beam,)
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe           (Her pale mute love I held, I held it true,)
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.       (In my poor arms like the most golden dream.)

Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel     (Above us in this lovely summer sky,)
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah                  (Was but one cloud, at which I gazed so long.)
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben          (Up there so white, enormous to my eye;) 
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.          (And when I looked again, so was it gone.)

The scene, commendably brief yet unrushed, adds the local color those perniciously afflicted by Ostalgie might desire; it also brings a tear to our playwright's eye.  Why would such a wanted man grieve over a past paramour?  Perhaps because September hovers precisely between May morns and November nights.

Erst ließ Freude mich nicht schlafen               (‘Twas joy that first kept me from sleep;

Dann hielt Kummer nachts die Wacht.           (Then worry held me till first light;

Als mich beide nicht mehr trafen                    (When neither more my soul did sweep,

Schlief ich. Aber ach, es bracht                      (I slept.  Yet sleep turn’d, out of spite,

Jeder Maienmorgen mir Novembernacht.       (Each May morn to November night.

                                                                           Bertolt Brecht, Wie es war – I (How it was, no. 1)

Blok, "Они говорили о ранней весне"

A work ("Of early spring they came to speak") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Of early spring they came to speak, 
Of snows both blue and white; 
And there a star burned at its peak, 
Twin lives in dreamful night.

With dim recall of this past day,
They welcomed sleep-filled gloom;
Yet sensed cold steps of temple's clay,
Where golden spires loom'd.

Perse distance of a fairy tale;
A first light just as blithe.  
A silent dawn 'til saddest wail   
Embraced the last reply.  

Severe the day began, august;
Her eyes sought heaven's face;
Death's raiments cold in gilded rust, 
Just like these gloom-strewn gates.