An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures and Certified Copy
Oh hello
Despite feeling constitutionally undesirable both online and irl, requiring instead notes on my phone to wake up to remind me of how hot and in my lane i am, despite that and those feelings intensifying more in a city where there is so much to desire and lust over such that it becomes very easy to pair an outwardly sycophantic ethic with an inward revulsion, despite all that, or probably, more likely, because of it: romance remains sacred of course.
I want my heart to leap lol. I want to feel that enveloping mix of insecurity and power in offering total genuflecting adoration and being cherished and chased in return. I worry writing this that you might think I support the trad revival or hope for a queer cottage core coupledom but, truly, those contemporary forms of romance sound to me, to me personally, like the drone of office A/C. I want more excitement, more pace, more 3am texts, cute moments. I want city life romance. That romance continues, as I sit here on my bed before work, to elude and frustrate.
My inner girl boss (there’s a girl boss inside all of us darling) taps her foot, in the face of this blasé rejection, and beckons me in her pencil skirt to focus on myself, on the altar of personal success, which I am doing, but I am trying to pay less attention to. I want instead to be more stubbornly committed to romance. I want to stay open, outwardly open, because it is summer, to the ongoing pursuit of crushes, lust, love. “We are still permanently trapped”, Kate Tempest says in Brand New Ancients, “between the heroic and the pitiful.”
This email is about An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector and Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami—two classics, I think, of desire: in each, the characters are frustrated with their lover but mainly at themselves for being insecure, for not knowing what they want, for trying to stand awkwardly: exposed and strong and, of course, sexy all at the same time.
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969) by Clarice Lispector
Lóri, a primary school teacher, is in love with Ulisses, a philosophy professor. Predictably, he keeps her at arm's length. Predictably, she is scared of ruining things. Yet the story is short, life isn’t forever, death wanders closer, Lóri cannot sit around waiting. An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures follows Lóri’s doubts in the give and take of her relationship with Ulisses, while exploring how to find the “infinite delicacy of joy” in her life. Central to that, is opening herself to Ulisses, a man she craves “a complete unification” with. Early in the novel, going to see Ulisses at a party, she is afraid of showing herself to him and so opts for makeup: “she was putting someone else on top of herself: that someone was fantastically uninhibited, was vain, was proud of herself”. She keeps herself reserved, preferring the stability of suffering and sadness over the tumult of joy. Faith, she adds, “can be a real scam, it can mean falling into the abyss”.
Initially, it is the closeness of death that propels Lóri into action, into seeking out Ulisses. In one scene, she first resists the urge to clasp Ulisses hand because, she says, all she wants is the possibility of holding Ulisses: “Being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own”. Yet, while in the physical world she can maintain that pose, in her imagination she cannot: “since everything would end … she took the man’s free hand, and still in her imagination, as she held that hand between hers, all of her was gently burning, burning, flaring”.
But Lispector seems to push against the sustainability of this yolo ethic. Lóri prays that “death doesn’t exist”. She asks that “loving is not dying”. She wants “a modest and daily joy”. Which is to say: Lóri doesn’t want her love to consume her. She wants her life to continue and for her to find calm, grace and happiness in it, rather than feeling only death’s nagging gaze.
So Lóri releases herself to love. She grasps and opens herself to Ulisses, and, scared, she felt “suddenly the surge of joy”. An Apprenticeship is a compact fable on the lick of desire, and the ecstasy found in letting go. Lóri asks: “Careful, is there a danger in the heart’s being free?” Yes, for sure, Lispector suggests. But it can be wonderful too.
Certified Copy (2010) by Abbas Kiarostami
Recently, 4 Columns wrote about films that are, they say, post-heterosexual or “anti-heterosexual”: “anti” in that they concern heterosexuals who labour under the fact of their heterosexuality. (Query how anti that is: at least for some, it seems that part of the charm of heterosexuality is that you get to be in a relationship with someone that you despise.) A viewer’s frustration in watching an anti-heterosexual film is that the protagonist is helpless—a Sally Rooney character grimacing at the inescapable unavoidable unsolvable difficulties of life. This protagonist thinks that the world demands their participation in a relationship structure that they do not enjoy and there is nothing, frankly zilch, that they can do about it. That plot bores because we want struggle, change, we want agency not just a weak acceptance of how things are.
Thankfully, we can watch Juliette Binoche in Certified Copy. An English author, James, is in Italy to promote the Italian translation of his book in which he argues that a copy should not be scorned but instead valorised like its original. He meets Elle (Juliette Binoche) who owns an antique store and she takes him on a tour of the town. At a cafe, Elle pretends that he is her husband—an absent, neglectful one—and for the remainder of the film, they flit in and out of this backstory.
The brilliance of Certified Copy lies in this overlap between the development of their actual relationship and the development of their fictional one. As the two stories muddy, both James and Elle express genuine anger at the other for their failings—failings that often begin in fiction but over time lose the gloss of being just made up. It all becomes very real.
Elle sees her possible relationship with James as a mimicry of a relationship that she does not want to be part of. She looks ahead and sees it for what it will be: part of a long line, an endlessly long line of relationships that look ultimately exactly the same. And that is depressing. Elle wants to be free from that lineage. She wants to plot a relationship on its own terms. Certified Copy looks at the possibilities of doing that: of using humour to change what is itself a parody into something full of magic and intrigue; of ungirding a relationship from the structure in which it so painfully sits; of turning, finally, hopefully, a copy into an original.
Love
Anne