Since Otar Left

You don’t get too many truly trilingual films these days, especially when one of the languages is this ancient tongue.  And although there is oftentimes a large amount of Russian in Georgian films, having a few characters proficient in French as well is a bit of an oddity.  A Georgian–speaking friend of mine who was less than enamored with this film said there was not enough Georgian (his main impetus for buying a ticket) and way too much French (his personal bugbear), and he’s probably right.  Yet this film, with a plot so simple it could be unraveled in one short scene, is precisely about too much French and not enough Georgian in a family where a little more balance might have proven felicitous.

As we start our film, Otar, a Georgian physician in his 40s, has now been in Paris for two years not utilizing his education’s credentials. Instead, he has been relegated for legal reasons to visaless work on a construction site.  This remarkable underachievement does nothing to lessen the adoration of his mother Eka (Esther Gorintin).  For Eka, the archetypical motherly quip “he can do no wrong” might as well be a wall–sized banner.  We know, as do Eka’s daughter Marina (Nino Khomasuridze) and Marina’s daughter Ada (Dinara Drukarova), that Otar is the type of person who lies to his parents because he suspects that he will never meet their expectations.  Eka acknowledges as much towards the end of the film.  But she also seems to imply that when you are the perfect son in image (as he is to her), what you actually make of your life is not as important as how proud your parents are of you.

And what has Otar been doing in France of all places?  Well, for Eka, who still lives in Tbilisi with Marina and Ada, France is all places.  It is the idealized homeland, the nostalgia–soaked meadow on the other side of a mountain that keeps Eka’s mind in a happy dream.  Her presumably French father had hundreds of French books imported and the family has always spoken French, so Otar is, in a sense, returning to the homeland which his ancestors revered.  On a regular basis, Otar writes to the three women about his life in Paris.  He also occasionally calls, and although Eka can barely hear him on the invariably bad connection, she continues to delude herself about the feasibility of the whole endeavor.  She is likened to the grandmother in this magnificent novel, probably the greatest in French literature (indeed, Ada reads her a passage from Combray), who had a few delusions of her own, including the insistence that she never actually slept.   Then one day Marina picks up the phone and gets Niko, Otar’s Georgian chum in Paris.  It appears that Otar has met with a rather serious accident on the construction site.  She and Ada then proceed a couple of days later to a government office to learn that he is, in fact, no longer among the living.  “If she knows he’s dead,” thinks Marina but doesn’t quite say it, “she’ll make him into a saint.”  Yes, a poorly timed display of sibling rivalry.  Marina was never Otar for Eka, as in life so in death.  Ada will call her on this insecurity later in the film, but it is clear that Eka cannot be informed about his demise.  So Ada, whose French is spotless, proceeds to forge letters from France and continue Otar’s life for him (a conceit also used in this film, released thirty years earlier).  Thus, apart from the situational shenanigans that such a scheme induces, the plot attains completion by about the film’s twenty–third minute.

Here we are reminded of two narrative rules, neither of which hampers our enjoyment of the film.  1) Gift of the Magi rule: if an impoverished character has one item he treasures, he will sell it by the end of the story to realize his dream or the dream of someone he loves.  2) Nostalgic distance rule: if you keep talking about a place as if it were paradise and you continue to complain about your current station, you will have a sobering visit towards the end of the story to destroy, in the softest way possible, your delusions.  I will not say whether these rules are strictly obeyed, but they are, in any case, predictable.  A lot of time in the movie is spent in silence.  Initially, it is not the productive silence of artistic films that understand the unique power of the cinematic medium and that certain things cannot be said.  It is the silence of wanting to perpetrate a lie, of not wanting the truth or an ironic reflection thereof to slip out in speech, as happens to Marina when talking about her deceased husband.  At the end of the movie, however, this is not the case.  The silence is Eka’s exploration of what she thinks is Otar’s space and what she imagines may be France.  This is especially evident when she stares a while at Otar's red door and walks around what she thinks is still his neighborhood, tracing his footsteps as if doing his commute.

There's another rule involving big decisions that comes into play, and we know that most films require that their characters either undergo some fundamental metamorphosis or remain so steadfast in their ways that they become symbols for certain traits.  We also know exactly to which character this rule will likely apply, but whether or not such a move occurs I cannot, for the sake of propriety, reveal.  That it takes a Frenchman of North African stock to call Otar a toubib, French slang for a doctor (actually a calque of the Arabic word), ironically emphasizes Otar’s foreignness in a country where he was supposed to be at home.  But at least Otar was known as a doctor although he did not practice medicine.  And for some mothers, that is good enough.

Pascal, "Marques de la véritable Religion"

An essay ("The mark of true religion") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

True religion should have as a mark the obligation of loving God.  This is quite right.  And nevertheless no other religion makes this an order apart from our own.  True religion should also recognize the concupiscence of man and the powerlessness with which he strives on his own to acquire virtue; it should provide man with remedies, of which prayer is the most important.  Our religion has done all that; and no other has ever asked God to love and follow it

A religion makes itself true by having come to know our true nature because one cannot separate the knowledge of the true nature of man from the knowledge of his true good, his true virtue, or of true religion.  True religion should have come to know the greatness and baseness of man and the reasons for both one and the other.  What other religion apart from the Christian faith has known these things?  Other religions, like those of the pagans, are more popular because they consist exclusively of an outward appearance; but they are not made for able and talented people.  A purely intellectual religion would be in line with such able and talented people, yet it would not serve the populace.  Only the Christian faith is made for everyone, a mix of the external and internal.  It elevates the populace internally and lowers the able and the magnificent externally; it is not perfect without both of these elements.  Because the populace needs to understand the spirit of the law, and the able and talented need to submit their minds to the law by practicing that which may be deemed the external element.   

We are hateful; reason convinces us so, for no other religion apart from Christianity proposes that we hate ourselves.  No other religion can then be received by those who know that they are worthy of nothing but hate.  No other religion apart from the Christian faith knows that man is the most excellent of creatures and at the same time the most miserable.  Those who know full well the reality of their excellence consider those base sentiments that man naturally has of himself to be cowardice and ingratitude.  And those others who know full well how effective this baseness is have dismissed with laughable arrogance the sentiments of greatness which are equally natural to man.  No religion apart from ours teaches that man is born into sin.  No sect of philosophers says it.  None, therefore, has said the truth.

Since God is hidden every religion which does not aver that God is hidden is not true.  And every religion which does not engage reason is not instructive.  Our religion does all that.  This religion that consists of the belief that man has fallen from a state of glory and communication with God into a state of sadness, of penitence, and a distancing from God, yet in the end will be redeemed by a Messiah who was bound to come, has always been on earth.  All things have happened and this has subsisted because this is all things.  For God wished for a sacred people to arise whom He would separate from all other nations, from whose enemies He would deliver to safety and put in a place of rest, and to whom He would make this promise and come into the world for this purpose.  And through His prophets He predicted the time and manner of His coming.    

And nevertheless, so as to confirm the hope of His chosen people through all of time, He has always allowed them to see images and figures and never left them without assurances of His power and His wish for their salvation.  For in the creation of man, Adam was both witness to this and the depositary of the promise of the Savior who was to be born from woman.  And although mankind was still so recently removed from this creation so as not to be able to forget it or mankind's fall, or the promise that God had made to man of a Redeemer, nevertheless even in this first epoch of the world mankind allowed themselves to be carried away by all sorts of disorders and abuses.  They were some saints, however, such as Enoch, Lamech and others who waited with patience for the Christ promised since the beginning of the world.  Then God sent Noah who bore witness to the utmost degree to the malice of man.  And He saved him by drowning the entire world in a miracle which He deemed sufficient and by the power which He possessed to save the world, and the desire which He possessed to do so, and to have born from woman Him whom He had promised.   

This miracle was sufficient to confirm the hope of mankind.  And this memory being fresh enough among them, God made His promises to Abraham who was surrounded by idolaters, and taught him the mystery of the Messiah which He was to send.  At the time of Isaac and Jacob the abomination was spread across the world.  But the Saints lived in faith.  And Jacob, as he lay dying, blessing his children, cried out in a spasm of joy that made him interrupt his discourse: I have awaited, O Lord, Thy promised Savior (Genesis 49:18). 

The Egyptians were infected by idolatry and magic; the very people of God were being carried away by their examples.  But nevertheless Moses and others saw what they did not see, and adored Him, gazing at the eternal goods which He was preparing for them.  The Greeks and Romans subsequently let false gods reign; poets concocted various theologies; and philosophers were split into a million different sects.  Nonetheless, at the heart of Judea there always remained some chosen men who predicted the coming of the Messiah known only to them.  The end of this period came at last; and since that time, although we have seen the rise of countless schisms and heresies, the overthrow of countless governments, and countless changes in all things, this Church who adores Him who has always been adored has subsisted without interruption.  And what is admirable and incomparable and completely divine is that this religion which has always endured has also always been in combat.  A thousand times was it on the brink of universal destruction; and every time it reached that state, God raised it again through extraordinary displays of His power.  This is what is surprising, and may it remain without bending or yielding beneath the willfulness of tyrants.   

Governments would perish if we did not often bend our laws when needed.  But religion has never suffered this nor of it has ever made any use.  Here too do we need accommodations, or what we call miracles.  It is not strange that in bending these laws we preserve them, yet this is not the same as maintaining them.  For sooner or later they will perish entirely; no law has lasted fifteen hundred years.  But religion has always been maintained and is inflexible.  This is divine.

In this way the Messiah has always been believed.  The tradition of Adam was still new in Noah and in Moses.  The prophets have since predicted Him, always while also predicting other things whose occurrence from time to time before man's eyes has marked the truthfulness of their mission, and, consequently, the truthfulness of their promises regarding the Messiah.  They told us that the law they obeyed was simply to wait for the law of the Messiah; that until then it would be perpetual but that the other law would last for all of eternity; that therefore their law or that of the Messiah from whom the law was promised would always be on earth.  And indeed it has always endured.  And Jesus Christ came in accordance with all the predicted circumstances.  He completed miracles and His apostles converted the pagans, and with these prophecies accomplished, the Messiah has been proven for ever and always.

The only religion contrary to nature in the state in which it is, which combats all our pleasures and which seems initially contrary to common sense is the only one which has always been there.  The entire conduct of things should have as an aim the establishment and the greatness of religion: men should have within themselves sentiments in conformity with that which religion teaches us.  And, in the end, religion should be so much the aim and the center towards which all things tend that he who shall learn his principles from it, can also derive reason and all of the nature of man in particular, as well as all of the conduct of the world in general.

It is on this basis that the impious intercede to blaspheme the Christian faith, because they do not know it well at all.  They believe that it simply consists of the adoration of a God considered great, powerful and eternal; what is properly termed deism is as distant from Christianity as atheism, which is its exact opposite.  And from there they conclude that this religion is not true because if it were, then God would have to manifest Himself to man through proofs so tangible that it would be impossible for anyone to mistake Him.  But those who come to whatever conclusions they wish against deism will not have come to any conclusions against the Christian faith, which recognizes that, owing to sin, God does not show Himself to man with all the evidence at His disposal, and which consists more specifically in the mystery of the Redeemer who, unifying in Himself the two natures, divine and human, has removed man from the corruption of sin so as to reconcile him with God in His divine person.

Thus the Christian faith teaches men both truths, and that there is one God for whom they are capable and there is one corruption in nature that renders them unworthy.  It is as important to men to know both of these points; and it is equally dangerous to men to know God without knowing their own misery, and to know their own misery without knowing the Redeemer who can heal them from it.  Knowledge of only one of these truths results either in the pride of philosophers who know God but not their own misery, or the despair of atheists who know their own misery but nothing of the Redeemer.

And so, as it is equally necessary for man to know both of these points, it is also from the grace of God that we have come to know them.  The Christian faith does so; this is precisely of what it consists.  May we look at the order of the world on this matter and may we see whether all things do not tend towards the establishment of the two main points of this religion.

If a man is not filled with pride, with ambition, with concupiscence, with weakness, with misery and with injustice, this man is then quite blind.  And if, in recognizing that he is so batten, he does not desire to be delivered into salvation from these things, what can we say of a man so lacking in reason?  How could he possibly not hold in esteem a religion that knows the flaws of man so well, and how could he not long for truth from a religion that promises him such desirable remedies?

Spider

Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and gotten us lengthily engaged in a vast polemic on the writing of a first–person novel whose narrator omitted or distorted the facts and ran up against various contradictions, all of which allowed a few readers – very few readers – to divine its banal or atrocious reality.

                                                                                  Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius

We have always been fascinated by guilt.  The reasons suggested for this fascination might as well be as diverse as the reasons for our existence.  Our conscience, not our DNA, is the dividing line between us and the rest of the animal kingdom, and finding out how that conscience works, why it focuses on certain things in lieu of others, and why our dreams consistently appear to be surrealistic metaphors for our conscience have always been integral sources of art, and, more recently, of science as well.  Do I doubt science’s ability to get to the meaty core of these issues?  Not at all; but I also know that the binary codes of this programming help us to be perfectly individual and yet share in basic moral dilemmas with our fellow humans.  One of the dilemmas that most fitfully shake us to our roots is coping with a criminal act, be it as the victim or the perpetrator.  The more egregious the crime, the more scalding the oil that fuels our fears.  And the psychological novel – for want of a better term to save it from the steambath mindlessness of its cousin, the historical novel – has been more acutely aware of the human psyche over the past century owing to our advances in neurology.  Demonic possession, a topic I touched upon earlier, is as much a remnant of the past as miasma or a chunk of Vesuvian rock.  Its replacement, and the subject matter of many an inferior novel, is madness.  Inferior because the presence of a mad or unreliable narrator means we may be fed a pack of lies, retconned at the last moment to knock over everything before it like a strip of obedient dominoes.  In these type of stories, the plot functions purely as a thin curtain that hides a crime, so that the text itself can be understood to answer the question: how does one describe the anatomy of a crime without detailing the crime itself?  You may rightly ask why the hidden portion needs to be a crime; I would then ask in return whether you know of any book or work of art that employs criminal circumstances to mask something good.  Good needs no mask, nor does it plague our conscience.  Our nightmares are fed a steady diet of temptations, misdeeds and betrayals. 

Such is the predicament of Spider (Dennis Cleg on legal documents), the narrator of this near–flawless novel of degeneration by McGrath.  Spider is tall, thin, and empty, and his scroungy garb looks “untenanted ... as though [he] were nothing and the clothes were clinging merely to the idea of a man.”  He lives in what appears to be a boarding house with a bunch of “dead souls,” other semi–animated creatures waiting for the last drops of life to leave their wretched frames.  Most of them couldn’t care less about their environment nor the friendless people in it, which sets Spider apart since he is both very aware and bent on recording his impressions in a trusted notebook.  Soon after attempting a few boring sketches of the milieu as if he were doing a gonzo piece from inside a halfway house, Spider gets derailed by recollections of his family’s tragedy.  His mother is dead and he refers to his father, although not lovingly, in the past tense.  We also know from the onset that the tragedy has something to do with a woman named Wilkinson, because that also happens to be the surname of his present landlady and surrogate caretaker.  Soon, Spider is awash in the crashing waves of memory and we get fewer and fewer cutaways to his present.  He enters his adolescent past fully and hypothesizes about the circumstances of the tragedy, which I cannot permit myself to disclose here.  Yet I will say that approximately a third of the way through this slender novel an awful event occurs that, while inevitable, shocks all parties involved and speeds the book down a dark and evil road.

Now, in these types of situations there can only be three logical explanations: that the narrator is telling the truth; that the whole tale is fabricated from beginning to end to conceal the narrator’s own agenda; or that the imagery and details are essentially correct but the conclusions are wrong, which is precisely the failing of a bad reader.  I have never advocated one school of textual criticism over another because they all seem to thwart each other’s crusade for hermeneutic dominance, but it is important to understand how much a good reader changes the aspect of a good book.  If the reader is enlightened, he will see the ulterior motive for the inclusion of certain tidbits and angles and proceed with the greatest of caution in reaching an overarching theory on what these unfamiliar perspectives might really denote.  On the other hand, if the reader is determined to solve every book he reads on his first go, he will handle the text like a crossword puzzle and fill in nonsensical words where needed to ensure completion, obtaining in the end nothing more than garbled gibberish.  Fully conscious of how such a premise can go sour, McGrath wisely takes a simple action, or dysfunction, or crime (herein lies our uncertainty), and imagines every little detail to it, every how to, why then, and what after.  The event becomes historic, a watershed in the life of an obscure man, and around it a whole epic unfolds.  This is a stratagem that, in the hands of the less talented or of those who wish to sublimate the subject matter for all of humanity (one could easily have envisioned a less artistic writer ingeminating the social conditions with some silly statement about how things have not changed much nowadays, except that the poor are no longer born in England), would fail and fail badly.  Steered by someone with a sprawling imagination who loves detail for its surface and allegorical meaning rather than for its solipsist subjectivism, however, and you enter a rather chilling world where you actually do step somewhere different.  One author, an obvious precursor to this type of stuff (even the hatted cyclist on the cover of Spider resembles that of Molloy), was more antagonistic than McGrath is here, with Malone, Molloy, and others constantly snapping at some unseen enemies offstage (Dennis does have some imps bother him on occasion, but they hold a minor role).  Spider has one enemy, and it’s not really himself, or the human race, or God.  It’s what he sees as a dysfunctional family and negligence to which he does not ascribe his condition, but simply rages against its fallout. 

Like the best of Beckett, Spider is to be savored not considered.  The beauty lies in the descriptions of workmanship precision.  The street on which the Clegs reside, a den of primitive lusts and everyday vulgarity, is called Kitchener Street, and the favorite pub of Horace (Dennis’s father) is nothing less than the Dog and Beggar.  Spider seems on occasion to be talking in code and an interesting set of statements is qualified with two telling words, “you see” (such as: “I’m something of a gardener myself, you see”; “Hilda was a prostitute, you see”).  As his narrative progresses Spider becomes a symbol, figuratively and literally, and we start to detect increasing significance in the smallest asides or objects.  Take, for example, the passage that appears “dead in the middle” of the novel:

Then I cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a dark stain.  I stared at it with some unease.  Then a syrupy fluid began to ooze out of the potato, the thick, slow discharge of what after a moment or two I recognized as blood.  I looked up, startled, to see my father and Hilda, their knives and forks poised aloft over their plates, openly grinning at me.  The light bulb suddenly crackled overhead and for a moment I thought it was laughter.  Again my eyes fell on the oozing potato, and now the blood appeared to be congealing in a viscous puddle under my kipper.      

A potato, or perhaps a mandrake.  There are a lot of dead animals in this story: a rat or two, that kipper, a turkey, a one–eyed ferret; all not surprising given the fact that spiders are some of nature’s most ruthless trappers and killers.  Conniving and deadly, is this our Spider?  Wasn’t he just named that because of his daddy longlegs appearance?   

Yet in the end, Spider is much more than another tale about squalid circumstances that drive a man to the brink of reason, then lustfully push him off.  If there is a weakness, it is the constant coincidence between Dennis’s childhood and his present adulthood, although the vacillation correctly corresponds to the obsessive thoughts of someone with too much time on his hands and too many memories to accept the ineluctable modality of the visible.  And if you know what type of animal a cleg is, you might see no coincidences at all but only a banal or atrocious reality.

Heine, "Die Unbekannte"

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

My beauty of the flaxen locks
I meet each day beneath the trees;
Those chestnut trees which line the paths 
Across the Garden Tuileries.

'Tis there she takes her daily stroll 
With two old hags – could they be aunts?
Old battle-axes so well disguised,
In ladies' dresses for ladies' jaunts?

Alas, no one can tell me this:
Who she may be, or her first name.
So sick was I to know the truth, 
My friends I asked – yet all in vain!

Intimidated by those aunts,
Their whiskers guarding my love near;
Intimidated even more
By my own heart, beset by fear;

I dared not breathe a sighing word,
Nor whisper as our two paths kissed;
I dared not look with sideways glance,
And so betray my fiery bliss.

'Twas but today that I did learn
Her name was Laura – love itself.
Just like the rustic beauty pure,
Loved by the poet on my shelf.

Her name was Laura (now I've come  
As far as Petrarch came – not far):
So celebrated in sonnets soft,
And through canzoni's plaintive bars.

Her name was Laura!  Now I too
Bask in this one word's euphony,
In Petrarch's sweet Platonic love.
No further than this word came he.

Pushkin, "Прощание"

A work ("A farewell") by this Russian poet, born two hundred thirteen years ago today.  You can read the original here.

One final time your gentle shape     
In my thoughts I dare to caress;            
And with heart's force these dreams rewake,
In timid, cheerless joy I shake,
And let to me your love regress.  

Our years bring change and then our doom, 
Like everything, so change we both;
For your sweet bard I see you groom'd,
Garbed greyly in sepulchral gloom,
For you a friend lost long ago. 

So distant friend, now please accept, 
From my young heart a last farewell: 
A widowed spouse so now bereft, 
Two friends embrace before they're cleft,
And one retreats to darkest cell.