Thus Were Their Faces and L'Ami de Mon Amie
Oh hello
Presently, I’m totally sappy (ugh!) barrelling suddenly into goodbyes, which is happening too soon and in a manner that is, like it always is, unkempt, with my focus both here, and on leaving, and on arriving and the life I want to create for myself there. Saying goodbye makes me sad, in part, because I am greedy: like, having coffee with friends and wanting to do it at the same place and time everyday; or, like, sitting on a friend’s bed talking about the night before and holding myself because this is all I actually wanted; or, like, spending time with someone new and realising WAIT, this was something that should have could have happened sooner. I know, I get it, that I need to cherish the good times for what they are but I will always, I think, feel a small rip after these moments, an undertow that says: I want more.
When moving, I have a strong desire to transform and arrive ready and packaged for my new life. That feeling, I think, stems from and, also, demands a revulsion of who I am now (like Janus but in the departure lounge and one face is dewy and the other is blotchy and cringing). So, instead, I’m trying to see leaving as less like an ending in which I step into a new beginning and more like a continuation of the same with, perhaps, an opportunity to glitch into being more comfortable with myself and open in how I present to others. At a friend’s dance show, the performers moved mainly in unison, building, spiralling, circling with occasional individual frictive breaks. They would, for example, create a line and move that line like two spokes on a wheel and while circling one dancer at a time would remain in rhythm while dancing more spontaneously, much like a musical solo. I want to see moving as like that line of dancers - still building and developing (thank god), still breaking irregularly - but a line that progresses in circles, that spirals on itself.
Thus Were Their Faces (2015) by Silvina Ocampo
In her introduction to this collection of short stories, Ocampo says that “I, who am unhappy for no reason, want to explain myself, to rejoice, to forget, to find something others might find in Ovid in my unhappiness or in my other self.” Throughout her stories, Ocampo’s characters are cruel for no reason, mean for no reason, “unhappy for no reason”. She constructs stories that have fantastical elements and riddle-like structures but which avoid narrative explanation, backstory or resolution.
In Report On Heaven and Hell, angels and demons come to you when you die, making you pick the things that you liked during your life and, depending on your answers, will assign you to heaven or hell. In Icera, a girl, motivated to stay the size of a doll, vigilantly repeated, “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” and wore the same doll dress, gloves and hat every day. Despite slipping and growing 4 inches, she reaches middle age and returns to her doll store, takes a box for dolls and sleeps in it every night “preventing her from growing in the past”. In (Com)passion, the protagonist’s wife contracts diseases and surrounds herself with illness in order to evoke compassion. I could go on.
The grimness of an Ocampo story reminds me of Cindy Sherman portraits, where the model’s smile seems off, where the hyper stylisation becomes ghoulish. In the preface to Ocampo’s collection, Borges—a friend of hers—wrote that Ocampo sees us all as glass. But it is a glass full of bugs, blunt razors, over bitten fingernails. In Autobiography of Irene, Irene says: “What is a beloved face? A face that is never the same, a face that is ceaselessly transformed, a face that disappoints us ….”
These are stories that have an interest in cruelty, are preoccupied with the body, the difficulties of being a woman, and the ongoing hell of staying alive. We are, apparently, in an era of the trauma plot in which stories articulate heavy handedly that he is like that because of how he was treated … as a child (see, e.g, the Cal backstory in Euphoria). This genre’s urge to satiate always our desire to know why transforms the complexity and bizarreness of human action into a tired dramatisation of legal submissions, and tends, also, to leave the reader thinking: okay, well, sure, but is that it? Reading Ocampo, then, is refreshing because she constructs worlds where the magic and weirdness of behaviour, the vibes that make up life are not explained. In Cornelia Before The Mirror, Cornelia, who is talking to their mirror, is met by a small child who might be a ghost, and then by an intruder who is ultimately poisoned and then by someone who comes to Cornelia’s aid. And as Cornelia tells their story, this supposed samaritan says: “Sometimes you make a decision and fulfil it even though the cause that has made you decide to do it no longer exists.”
L’Ami de Mon Amie (1987) by Eric Rohmer
Look, it is summer, duh, and in summer, you are delirious, you are wandering from ice cream to heartbreak to park to rave, your cerebral winter abstractions have dissipated to an ethic that at its simplest is a combination of texting: up 2 and where is the party? Now, you are lusting, romance is what matters, and the reemergence of people on to streets and in to parks brings with it time to marvel at the small moments and interactions that comprise a life. And for that, to buoy these magical summer feelings, you, like me, need to be watching more French New Wave. L’Ami de Mon Amie (the English title is Boyfriends and Girlfriends) is set in the Parisien suburbs. Blanche, played by Emmanuelle Chaulet (a star in Jon Jost’s brilliant All The Vermeers In New York (1990)), is an office worker who goes swimming in her lunch breaks. She becomes best friends with Lea (Sophie Renoir). They go swimming together. Blanche falls for Alexandre who is charming, windsurfs and looks like someone who works in finance. But Alexandre is dating Adrienne. Lea is seeing Fabien but the relationship seems fraught and ultimately does not last. Blanche, meanwhile, turns her eye to Fabien.
In part, this is a film defined by its place. They live outside of Paris in a new suburban development, which has a pool, a lake, a mall, big buildings for offices. It is cheaper than Paris, obviously, but it is also not Paris darling. Rohmer loves a chance encounter, a coincidental overlapping routine (see, e.g., L'amour, l'après-midi (1972), La Boulangère de Monceau (1962) and Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (1984)), but in L’Ami de Mon Amie people are there and you are there because there is nowhere else to be: you are all at the beach just like the architect for the City sketched on their plans for the development 20 years ago.
Blanche can’t escape! Like many Rohmer films, the conceit of the film—I love my friend’s ex, is that okay?—is hardly revelatory, but, but, but: Emmanuelle Chaulet captures in her performance a more profound concern. Throughout the film, she presents obstacles to her finding love. These barriers feel immovable; their shape seems structural. She is trapped. It is sad watching her struggle, when the antidote, which I think the film makes clear, isn’t going to come from meeting the perfect person who is available and just right for her. Rather, it requires Blanche recognising that she has agency too; that she has been using these walls as a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. It reminded me of the reliance and misuse of attachment theory and astrology as almost medicalised prescriptions for behaviour, prescriptions that make us incapable of changing and of our lives changing. They are stuck in a bad situation simply because they are an anxious attachment sagittarius. Similarly, Blanche remains in her bleak Parisien suburb and is in love with her friend’s ex, but all does not, I don’t think, have to be lost. She can literally just ask him out.
More? No
Mad Max (1-4): Number 5 is coming out in 2023, but for now you have four movies to watch. They are hot, punky, greasy and full of Mel Gibson (and then Tom Hardy) saving the day while being misunderstood. Number 3 gets a bit strange with the pigs and peter pan subplot but otherwise they are perfect summer candy movies to watch on a sunday in bed.
Love
Anne