Eucalyptus

Edward St. Aubyn: 'Some Hope' and 'Mother's Milk'

British novelist Edward St. Aubyn's trilogy of novels published together by Open City Books under the title 'Some Hope' is a fictionalized portrait of the writer's own life, of his traumatized childhood and dramatic descent into drug addiction and self-loathing, a condition from which he has struggled to free himself with only partial success, as the continued toxicity of his social commentary in a follow-up novel, 'Mother's Milk', attests. St. Aubyn is often compared with Evelyn Waugh, probably because both writers use irony to expose the spiritually and emotionally defunct nature of English upper-class society, but St. Aubyn's work is both more youthful and more extreme. Its contemporary themes of victimization, debasement and recovery develop within the writer's own larger project to discover in language and artistic work something approaching salvation; it does not examine (in the manner of 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man') the enterprise of developing an artistic credo as such, but there is within its character development a sort of X-ray of the writer's own quest to make a space inside literature where some hope might be discovered.

If all of this sounds top-heavy and confessional, be encouraged. Earnestness is positively forbidden to the English. If personal problems can't be resolved in private, they must be processed with great flourishes of self-deprecating wit, or sanitized and distanced with a controlled use of irony. Anything less disciplined is a matter for the tabloids, and people of a certain class do not wish to be associated with that sort of thing. St. Aubyn is himself an aristocratic product, hailing from the landed gentry of Cornwall, and he is better schooled than most in the vicious arts of ridicule and cynicism, wielded by virtue of his considerable wit to great effect in dialogue. Part of what makes the books so interesting is the author's (and the character's) struggle with the damage his strengths in these areas inflict, not so much on others, who we see cheerfully demolished by a steady barrage of snide remarks, but on the self which suffocates inside their poisonous atmosphere. We as readers are afforded a privileged seat on the front line of a brilliant mind as it confronts the curse which accompanies its own dazzling gifts for irony and invective. We enjoy the benefit of the gifts, and the satisfaction of witnessing their self-conscious deconstruction. It is a delicate balancing act which the writer is able to pull off mostly because his facility for language itself is so exquisite. St. Aubyn is a prose-stylist of the first order - there really is nobody writing in English today can compare with him. The precision and elegance, the exhilarating novelty and outright perfection of his metaphors are nothing short of miraculous. I was tempted to do an entire post of St. Aubyn metaphors and leave it at that, so prodigious is his talent in this area. But there is so much more to consider in his work, not least of which is this way he dovetails the theme of personal discovery (contained within the work) with his literary practice (or the work itself).

The critical moment of the entire narrative arc occurs early in the first novel ('Never Mind') when the five-year-old Patrick Melrose is raped by his father. This cataclysmic event, described in coolly detached tones and with great psychological acuity, bears witness not only to the boy's initial episode of mental bifurcation (an involuntary response which conditions the man he is to become), but also and simultaneously to the metafictional origin of its author as author, in the sense that Edmund Wilson means when he speaks of the wound from which the creative project springs. When Patrick lances his concentrated attention into the body of a gecko and proceeds to leave through the window and escape up into the eaves of the roof, while his abandoned body remains pinned to the bed, he is projecting the part of himself that cannot understand what is happening, but he is also in a sense creating a fictional self with which to navigate the crisis from a safe distance. It's open to interpretation, and I don't mean to suggest that all literary art originates in a cataclysm of this sort, but the autobiographical nature of the material means that the writer haunts events in a way which constantly invites speculation along these lines.

The first novel centers on a day in the life of the Melrose family as they endure one another's company in their summer home in the south of France. The rape scene is central, but it occurs within a wider context of moral stasis which defines the family and its social milieu. Patrick's mother Eleanor is a drunken victim on the verge of collapse, unable to really engage with the son who is himself the product of a marital rape, hardly capable of noticing let alone protecting him from the vicious attentions of his father. David Melrose is especially repugnant, a study in self-loathing and the idle cruelty it engenders, but the friends who surround him for dinner are as remarkable a collection of snobs and the buffoons who idolize them as any assembled in English literature. It is a theme which is picked up in the third novel, where the adult Patrick attends a party of similarly contemptuous types, including the vapid Princess Margaret as well as a host of other dignitaries at a lawn party in the English countryside, "hard, dull people who seemed quite sophisticated but were in fact as ignorant as swans." Patrick is by this point a confirmed member of their ranks, marinating in his own cynicism and despair, but with the crucial difference that he is searching for a way out. The way out is not neatly delivered, but there are faint glimmers of its presence in the details; specifically, Patrick tells his secret, not entirely without ironic embellishment, to a friend; he is also informed towards the very end of the narrative that his father had once acted with great kindness and sensitivity toward a friend in need. With these exchanges we witness a slight softening of what had been an implacable knot of hatred in Patrick, such that he is able to glimpse the possibility of living, finally, with the enforced ambivalence of his experience. It is a massive advance from the nadir of his trajectory, chronicled in book two ('Bad News'), where he wallows in the kaleidoscopic nightmares of his dangerously drug-addicted mind over a two-day period spent scoring, shooting up, and coming down from insane combinations of quaaludes, speedballs, coke and pure grade heroin in a hotel room in New York. This painful episode is occasion for some of the best and worst of St. Aubyn's writing. His dense and elaborate metaphors are intensely beautiful, as he trains his imaginative eye on the hallucinatory effects of drugs and the physical sensations they induce. Here is one extraordinary moment:

Heroin was the only thing that really worked ... Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

But it is also the place where he becomes most ungoverned and self-absorbed, so much so that he loses control of the monologues here and there, monologues which, though meant to be madly proliferating suffer a little in the translation and threaten to undermine our sympathy for the character, who is about to lose himself completely in contemplation of matters absurd. Patrick is in a considerably more hygienic condition by book three ('Some Hope'), having succeeded at last in kicking his habit, and St. Aubyn's control of the material is back to its crisp and corrosive best as he returns to the business of eviscerating the people he abhors. But there are tender gestures as well, hidden in beautiful surfaces not entirely subverted by cynicism.  The final scene beside a lake in the snow is like this: we wonder whether the swans are the same ignorant beasts we encounterd earlier, going nowhere, gorgeously, or whether there is some hope in the perfection of the image, something to do with form giving shape to experience;

A pair of swans rose out of the fog, concentrating its whiteness and giving it shape, the clamor of their wings muffled by the falling snow, like white gloves on applauding hands...(they) flew over fields renewed and silenced by the snow, curved back over the shore of the lake, spread their webbed feet, and settled confidently onto the water.


Revisiting Patrick in a later novel, 'Mother's Milk', we find him married and with two sons, ornery and self-conscious as ever, but engaged in the difficult process of trying to separate his responses to his own children from the polluted legacy of his ancestors. Its examination of family dynamics and the imagination of children is an extension of the theme he initiated in 'Never Mind', and it is the theme in which he is most audaciously brilliant. He is able to achieve the baffling range and sweep of a child's colorful thought-experiments with an ease and familiarity of tone that is quite incredible, considering what is for most of us the opacity of the material. Despite their preternatural intelligence, his child-characters appear credible, child-like, even when they are recounting their experiences of being born, and especially when they are describing their plangent state of consciousness before language seized and sorted it all into its iron grid. Here is Robert contemplating his baby brother on a sunny afternoon:

... he could remember exactly what it was like being in that crib, lying under the plane trees in a cool green shade, listening to a wall of cicada song collapse to a solitary call and escalate again to a dry frenzy. He let things rest where they fell, the sounds, the sights, the impressions. Things resolved themselves in that cool green shade, not because he knew how they worked, but because he knew his own thoughts and feelings without needing to explain them. And if he wanted to play with his thoughts nobody could stop him. Just lying there in his crib, they couldn't tell whether he was doing anything dangerous. Sometimes he imagined he was the thing he was looking at, sometimes he imagined he was in the space in between, but the best was when he was just looking, without being anyone in particular or looking at anything in particular, and then he floated in the looking, like the breeze blowing without needing cheeks to blow or having anywhere particular to go.

This is way beyond the pleasure principle. St. Aubyn's understanding of the blissful state of an undivided self is a projection, along the lines of his earlier scene with the gecko, into a realm of pure, embodied enlightenment. I haven't read anything wiser or more wistfully imagined outside of ecstatic poetry or the literature of mystics. The story dwells in these delightful spaces a lot, but its action proceeds over the course of four successive summers, during which Patrick and his wife and sons must come to terms with the loss of their summer home in France, which the stricken and disabled Eleanor has bequeathed to a New Age quack who has deceived her with his spiritual mumbo-jumbo. We get more of the writer's scathing wit as he unloads upon this new foe; it is a subject he has pursued in two other, unrelated and more experimental works on consciousness and the scam of the New Age. When he tires of Eleanor's shaman he turns his weapons on fat Americans; there are some precarious moments when we once again begin to lose touch with our sympathy for the character, as Patrick's diatribes devolve into cheap shots and general carping. But St. Aubyn is too interested in deconstructing the mind and the parent-child relationship to linger too long in these waters, and he manages to resurrect the clear-eyed and self-reflexive analysis of his own worst impulses that we saw in the earlier work and which bring his caustic pronouncements like stray sheep back into the fold of his grand project - just. The novel is ironic and quite funny, occasionally brittle, wholly unsentimental and utterly unique. Its ending is subtle enough to be inconclusive, even anti-climactic, but word has it that St. Aubyn is busy writing the fifth installment of this saga at a writer's colony somewhere in the States. It will be interesting to see where the expectations of his growing readership will push this most extraordinary of writers.

Ocean Beach

Quote: Edward St. Aubyn

"He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page."
Edward St. Aubyn 'Mother's Milk'

Werner Herzog 'Conquest of the Useless'

Werner Herzog's twelve pages in the spring issue of ' The Paris Review' are a selection of episodes from his upcoming book 'Conquest of the Useless', a diary he kept during the making of the film 'Fitzcarraldo' in the early eighties. The entries he offers here focus entirely on the weird and overheated state of his already somewhat melancholy imagination as it endures the suffocating effects of the Peruvian jungle in which 'Fitzcarraldo' was filmed. It is fevered, surreal, seductive, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, and malignant. Its opium-inflected quality recalls the atmosphere of 'The Ancient Mariner' and the films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch; its amorality is akin to that of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Herzog's jungle is a negative matrix from which each episode emerges whole but strangely wrong, inverted and sinister, like a freak in a jar. Every object and every act partakes of the one condition, that of a mind turned inside-out and experiencing itself as its environment, a mind colonized by visions, not imagined, but actual visions, rendered hyperreal by their unfamiliarity. The pig grown huge "like a whitish grub", the cable hissing in the wet mud, the turkey copulating with the beheaded duck, the poisonous snake, the melted lizard, the dead baby, the molding leather, the shards of broken glass, the dripping leaves and sluggish whirlpools and stopped clocks are all faces of that "obscene, explicit malice of the jungle". It is an artist's nightmare, the imagination stunned, overwhelmed, and exceeded by reality. It is also a director's nightmare - what he describes is an experience of psychic suspension in which things take place without reference to him, including personal recollections, thoughts and actions - he is really outlining a sort of diabolical movie in which he has been haplessly cast without, critically, the guidance of a director. The writing is taut, compressed, intense; it manages to convey a sense of delirium without becoming overworked or decorous. On the contrary, it maintains, for the most part, an air of documentary exactitude. It is also hypnotically beautiful, and perverse: "Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air .... caterpillars crawl toward me from all directions, brainless but unstoppable." If these incredible pages are anything to go by, the book should be stunning. It comes out on June 30th.

SFIFF 52: 'The Age of Stupid'

At last somebody has thought to bring all the emotional impact of narrative filmmaking to the ever-more pressing issue of climate change in a movie we can't pass off as sensational entertainment. British director Franny Armstrong's third film 'The Age of Stupid' is an ingenious combination of both documentary and fictional narrative; the latter element brings a soaring sense of urgency to a subject frankly in need of it. As Armstrong herself pointed out in the Q and A, we have only seven months in which to organize our respective nations' political commitment to reduce carbon emissions at Copenhagen in December. Copenhagen will be, she assures us, our last chance to establish some ground rules in a rapidly deteriorating environment approaching its tipping point, according to current science, in 2015. Billed as the new Kyoto, Copenhagen's basic tenets involve a commitment on the part of the developed world to reduce emissions immediately, while developing nations will be allowed to increase theirs (to accomodate political reality), until we arrive at an equal playing-field by 2015. At this point we will all work to reduce emissions until they are at a few degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, projected to complete in the year 2055. Anything less than this spells disaster for our planet. There really is no sci-fi fantasy than can match the urgency of this scenario, and yet we are behaving as though everything will come out in the wash, trusting to future generations to fix our problems while we applaud ourselves for recycling our papers and cans and sigh about our impotence to effect real change. On the contrary, says Armstrong, we are the generation that must and will bring about the change we need, because that change has to take place immediately if we are to avert the disaster scenario she conjures in her film.

The opening sequence of supernova followed by stellar formation, creation of planets and atmospheres, cell-division, the appearance of underwater lifeforms, their transition to land, the development of mammals, man and society right through war, technology, and the demographic, geologic, and climatic disasters that await us if we fail to act, set to the maniacally spinning digital clock of our known universe's lifespan, is so breathtaking I actually cried. The implication is right there, between the eyes, from the very start - what a waste, what a horrible, perverted lack of vision in our species it implies if we continue to do as we are doing and throw it all away. Apropos of this, Armstrong mentioned in an aside the subject of her university thesis - whether or not the human race is suicidal. It's an interesting proposition, which touches on what I consider to be our fundamental lack of love for our own species, but that is another story.

The film is set in 2055. Mankind has failed to act and the apocalyptic scenario has come to pass; an archive of all human achievement has been assembled in a gargantuan tower which hovers somewhere above the north pole. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing I can envisage us wasting our time on when things start to come apart, a project which is essentially a hymn to the human ego, a lovely, meaningless elegy. Pete Postlethwaite, the 'Archivist', riffles through a selection of news clips and documentary evidence in an attempt to understand why we failed to act. Enter the real-life documentary talents of Armstrong and company, who supply us with verite footage shot over the past few years; films about people whose lives are, in one way or another, connected to one of our principal protagonists in this massive drama, the oil industry. Not that there aren't other culprits - the meat industry and agricultural lobby, for example, but Armstrong seeks to keep the narrative frame as tight as possible. We are introduced to a family of refugees from the Iraq war, villagers living with the impact of a nearby Shell plant in Nigeria, an American oil company retiree, an airline entrepreneur from India, an elderly French mountain-guide who treks the shrinking Alpine glacier and organizes against the Euro transport lobby, and a struggling English wind-farm engineer as he tries, and fails, to confront the vacuous opposition of British county-types defending their 'view'. The stories are edited together with news clips we will recognize from our world media, scenes of Katrina and other disasters, scientific reports and episodes of morning show hand-wringing, the recorded efforts of our contemporaries which seem so fatuous and absurd in the light of what has taken place. The film is a wake-up call along the lines of 'An Inconvenient Truth', but hopefully its emotional power will succeed, where that film failed, in stirring the kind of passion for our planet we are going to need to get us through this unprecedented moment. Perhaps this is the eye of the needle we all heard about a long time ago and didn't really comprehend. Contact http://www.notstupid.org/ for information about what you can do in the next seven months. See film trailer here.

SFIFF 52: 'Moon'

If American moviegoers favor blue-collar heroism and escapist fantasy, they were well served by British director Duncan Jones' sci-fi feature 'Moon' which screened Sunday night at the Castro. Referencing all the classics of the genre, especially '2001' and 'Alien', this relatively low-budget indie production is set to become an instant classic in its own right, by virtue of the astonishing performance of Sam Rockwell, its central, really its only, character. He plays Sam Bell, the solitary site-foreman and technician for a lunar-surface mining operation, nearing the end of his three-year contract and suffering from the mentally disorienting effects of intense loneliness. His only direct contact is with the 2001-style talking computer, Gerty; his video transmissions to and from his wife and daughter are delayed recordings. When he regains consciousness after an accident he finds a stranger living in the station alongside him, a stranger who not only looks like him but claims to be him. What proceeds is a study in identity rendered hypnotic by Rockwell's virtuoso acting skills. The two versions of Sam circle around one another like boxers in a ring; they are bodies locked into a kind of magnetic intrapersonal orbit, the arcs of which expand and contract, harmonize and clash. It is a tighter, futuristic take on the twins in David Cronenberg's 'Dead Ringers', flawlessly achieved, with notes of poignant humor, resentment, and exasperation sounding within a well of deep recognition.

The set is gorgeous: afficionados will appreciate the fact that it comprises models with some CG layers overlaid; what is created is a scene of haunting visual beauty that speaks to the spiritual dimension of its human predicament. There are plot twists, heroic efforts, a struggle against the machine, but the film ultimately succeeds as a character drama, a brilliant solo performance that is unmatched in films of this genre. Sam Rockwell is a true revelation.

SFIFF 52: 'Heaven's Heart'

Thank God for European cinema, where we can reasonably expect to encounter smart, articulate people negotiating delicate situations with sensitivity. Anyone would think we do not have such people or such situations, if American cinema is anything to go by, but we know that the problem is one of representation. Ordinary life is considered infertile ground for filmmaking, as are ordinary faces and bodies, middle-aged women, and so forth. More to the point, the educated class is completely off-limits, unless it is tapped for ironic or malignant purposes. Straightforwardly intelligent characters are considered dangerously suspect, perhaps because they have the whiff of the elite. These un-American types must be subverted, injured, unveiled; if they have a prominent role they will hardly ever command the sympathy of the audience and will more than likely be reduced to a pile of human rubble by movie's end.
Not so with Swedish director Simon Staho's brilliant fourth feature 'Heaven's Heart'. The characters suffer, not because they are intrinsically bad, but because there is no formula for avoiding suffering. Their recognizable middle-class dream to live in fidelity and love with one partner, to build a life together, to work and achieve success in their respective fields, proves no bulwark against disappointment, as anybody living this kind of life can probably testify. If we are happy, it is either through sheer luck or because we are flexible, and open to change, and willing to learn. More often than not the force of habit that comes to define such lives calcifies our spirits and makes us resistant to change, which change will come anyway, like a tidal wave demolishing a seawall.

Staho's four characters lead the more or less ordinary lives that middle-class educated European couples live; both couples have been married twenty years or thereabouts, one couple has a grown child, all four are old friends, and meet regularly for dinner and conversation. When the subject of infidelity is raised at one of their gatherings, the couples polarize, tensions suddenly surface, and the atmosphere begins to crackle with the electrical charge of all that has remained unexpressed - disappointment, fear, exhaustion, sexual frustration, rage, contempt - you name it. New alliances are formed, and old alliances shattered. The actors have unprecedented opportunity to shine, as each character's inner life is exposed and resources tested. The stinging dialogue is so well written we forget it is a script, which is an invaluable asset to a film of this nature, because once the script is absorbed as real we are free to notice how much communication is taking place before our eyes in terms of body language, especially of hands and eyes. Susanna's glance alone is enough to bend steel; her hate is palpable, frightening, radioactive. Similarly, the rush of new desire between Susanna's long-suffering husband Lars and her best friend Ann is so strong at one point we can feel it, if we know what desire is. This is filmmaking at its best. There are no heroes, no idealized fictional stand-ins for adolescent wishes, no stunning curves or athletic moves or drug-related incidents, no nightmares or fantasies and certainly no blood, but the emotional peaks and troughs are as extreme as any you will find in a movie this side of the Atlantic. And, best of all, they are the sort of extremes we recognize as true, which gives us at last the opportunity to experience the catharsis for which theatre used to exist. It's not Bergman - though Staho's homage to 'Scenes from a Marriage' is clear - but it is breathtaking cinema nevertheless, and contemporary.

SFIFF 52: 'Can go Through Skin'

There's only so many episodes of paranoia and scenes of dead cats in garbage bags a person can handle, even if they are in a film festival. When Noe stuffed his dead cat into a plastic bag in '35 Shots of Rum' it was funny, and it revealed another facet, however slight, of his eccentric character. But when Marieke shoves her dead kitten into a garbage bag in 'Can go Through Skin' the effect is slightly sickening, because we have already witnessed nearly an hour of her paranoiac disintegration on screen and are quite disturbed enough. The first feature of Dutch director Esther Rots, 'Can go Through Skin' is a harrowing look at the introverted and hallucinatory psychological collapse of a young rape victim. There is nothing stylized about this picture, nothing along the lines of Polanski's 'Repulsion' for example, but therein lies its power to disturb. With very little in the way of effects, (even its hallucinatory scenes are played straight and bleak), there is a terrifying immediacy to the vision that is frankly too depressing to really enjoy.

Rots, who wrote and produced as well as directed this debut, described the film's genesis as a meditation on how it "might feel" to break up with a lover. Clearly the experience involves for her a sort of tragic vulnerability which breeds monsters of the imagination. Marieke is seen to be isolated and desperate from the outset, as she dials numbers of any men she can think of in the wake of her failed relationship. Her withdrawal after the attack only serves to compound her problems, and it is easy to see from our vantage point how her decisions are compromised by her isolation. She removes immediately to a decrepit house in the middle of nowhere, drinks too much, sleeps in a crawlspace, and discusses revenge fantasies with strangers online, hardly a recipe for recovery. Perhaps this is a comment on the extent of our isolation generally - perhaps there really is no shelter and no support to be found in a society oriented so thoroughly toward personal success and determined individuation? For Marieke, at least, there is none, and she embarks on her hero's journey alone. But hero's journeys cannot take place otherwise, and this is perhaps the best way to think about the film, as a hero's journey through a death of the ego, with its attending phantoms, its macabre details, its rotting floorboards and rat-infested drains and dead kittens in garbage bags, where fantasy and hallucination and hope and reality blend in a contorted and relentless drip drip drip of time through space. Nothing is certain ... by the close of the film I was not even sure if the relationship she had started with a neighbor was not a sort of fantasy, like her pregnancy, a fantasy of hope and fulfillment that she was perhaps beyond realizing, or even a fantasy of ours, projected somehow into the action by virtue of our uncomfortable empathy with her plight and our wish that she be 'saved'. Certainly there are reasons to believe that Marieke may actually be experiencing a renewal of her life while simultaneously descending into a hell of self-division.

A good film often raises more questions than it answers, and there comes in the aftermath of this movie a not unpleasant sensation of its many disquieting impressions and unanswered questions expanding in the mind. It is just as well, because unleavened this picture would be too heavy by far.

SFIFF 52: 'Laila's Birthday' and '35 Shots of Rum'.

"Laila's Birthday' is Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi's fifth feature film, set in contemporary Ramallah and spanning a day in the life of the taxi-driver Abu Laila, as he negotiates the absurdities of life in a city trying its hardest to be normal under abnormal conditions. Its vision of life in modern Palestine is light and sweet; it emphasizes the warmth, humor, and levity of its citizens and in so doing, delivers a political message of great subtlety, because we share fraternal feeling with a people who do ordinary things in more or less the way we do, who love their children and go to work and try to walk between the lines even though the lines are always moving, who laugh and cry and make mistakes, say foolish things and forgive one another. We need more of this sort of filmmaking from Palestine if only to counterract the much darker and more volatile impression we get from watching 'the news'.

This being said, the film's strengths were in its documentary features and it did not succeed so well in the aesthetic department. For one thing, Abu Laila is irredeemably saturnine in aspect; I got tired of looking at his unsmiling visage in every frame. His attitude of embattled rectitude just struck me as false and un-funny. The series of odd encounters throughout his day also had a slightly contrived, artificial feel about them. I don't doubt their possibility, even probability, in this most impossible and improbable of all worlds - but the way they succeeded one another like sketches in a variety show created the distinct impression that we had not left the storyboard stage of the movie, which I cannot believe was the intention. The happy ending helped a little, but even then, the suddenly cobbled together aspect of Laila's surprise birthday party, salvaged from the dregs of her father's various encounters and tied up like a bow on a present, was off by a couple of degrees: either the film needed to be more straightforwardly funny, to support these little twists, or it should have dropped the cuteness and maintained the integrity of its otherwise rather whimsical, ambiguous air.

Claire Denis' '35 Shots of Rum' is, on the other hand, the quietly accomplished work of a true master. Nothing hurried, nothing overplayed, the relationships between its characters unfold in a sort of perfect time which seems to mimic true life despite the necessary compression of narrative filmmaking. Its lighting alone is worth a dissertation on the extraordinariness of the ordinary, evoking a twilit sub-Parisian interior landscape of great subtlety and intimacy which again perfectly matches its occupants' psychological terrain. Denis has famously proved herself a master of the highly charged human environment; in this film, she brings those powers to bear upon the intricacies of familial love and fealty and the results are a kind of revelation of what it is to be human without all the dysfunctional and/or alienated trappings we associate with less sophisticated films about 'real people'. Nothing too much happens, as is the way with much of real life, but the father, daughter, ex-lover and future husband that comprise this family of sorts show us subtleties of hope and fear, disappointment and courage, that are almost hypnotizing in their accumulated intensity and veracity. The actors are off-the-charts brilliant. This is a true jewel in Denis' crown of beautiful films.