A RIDDLE: A Stone is thrown in Budapest on a winter night in 1944. It sails through the air toward the illuminated window of a house where a father is writing a letter at his desk, a mother is reading, and a boy is daydreaming about an ice-skating race on the frozen Danube. The glass shatters, the boy covers his head, the mother screams. At that moment the life they know ceases to exist. Where does the stone land?

Nicole Krauss’ 2010 novel, Great House, is my favorite among those I read last year. It’s a marvel, a work layered in four first person narratives that glance off of one another, ever so tangentially, as they loosely trace the life of an enormous desk, “really more like a ship than a desk, a ship riding a pitch-black sea in the dead of a moonless night.” The four voices belong to a writer, a father, a husband, and a lover. Each carries a deeply nested and burdening truth that he or she must share. What Krauss allows them to do– pillow talk style — is unburthen so that the reader is both midwife and burial vault for their honesty. These are among the most captivating, intimate voices I have read.

The novel begins with Nadia, a writer who is deeply depressed at the loss of the desk she unconsciously associates with her modest success. Her self-awareness is acute, her self-appraisal frank. ”Something in me naturally migrated away from the fray, preferring the deliberate meaningfulness of fiction to unaccounted-for reality.” Nadia has inherited the desk from a poet she met briefly, a man leaving New York for his native Chile. Years later, she gives the desk to a young woman, Leah Weisz, and finds herself suddenly panicked and bereft. Nadia hurriedly leaves New York to search for the desk in Jerusalem.

The next story is that of the father, a man whose anguished love for his favorite son projects in a not so subtle fashion. When the old man’s wife dies, the beloved son, Dov, returns to Jerusalem and walks into the emotional firestorm maintained by his father. Krauss has created an exceptionally realistic first person account of a brutal and hardened older man’s stupefying resistance to the sensitive nature of his son, and to his own as well. This is a man who appears larger than life as he is fleshed out in towering monologue.

Suddenly I saw you as you were at the age of ten…Calling and calling to me because you thought you were lost. Guess what, my boy. I was there the whole time! Crouched behind a rock, a few meters up the cliff. That’s right, while you called, while you screamed out for me, believing yourself to be abandoned in the desert, I hid behind a rock patiently watching, like the ram that saved Isaac. I was Abraham and the ram. How many minutes passed while I let you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness, I don’t know.

Following these two intense narrators are another two, every bit as profound, just as deliciously readable. First is a widower, a man bereaved by the recent death of his wife, Lotte. He mourns not only the loss of his wife, but the complicated secrets of her existence. Finally there is Isabel, an American studying at Oxford who falls in love with Yoav Weisz, brother of Leah. Isabel’s desire for Yoav lifts her out of her narrow life and into unexplored terrain, “because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating…”

Compared to what awaits within Great House, these words of praise here are pale indeed. Krauss is a writer who pours flesh and blood into her characters, places them on the pillow next to yours, and lets them spill their hearts.

Maybe you sense that I am coming to the end, that the story that has been hurtling toward you from the start is about to turn the bend in the road and collide with you at last.

In the Old Testament book of Kings, Solomon seizes upon an interlude of peace to undertake construction of his Temple, the Great House, erected in a splendor of cedar and gold and dedicated to holding the ark of the covenant of the Lord. The ark, precious beyond measure, and so holy that even its caretakers were not allowed to look upon it, held the basics of faith, the words of Yahweh, etched by the human hands of Moses into tablets of stone. Words, thrown from stone to inhabit human history and move indelibly throughout lives. Words, the gold and cedar. Stories such as these– the Temple.

Moneyball takes place in the gritty urban setting of Oakland, a city dimmed just a bit in proximity to its shining neighbor. If director Bennett Miller had shown it, the glint of wealth and polish from San Francisco pouring across the bay with the late day sun might cause your eyes to burn. Wisely, Miller is a much more subtle and finer artist who makes no such comparison. In Moneyball’s Oakland, within the A’s clubhouse, the cheap fluorescent lighting and harsh paint of the club offices do enough to make sharper the distinction between a team with its small market payroll and that of the one who’s just handed it a drubbing, the ever flush Yankees. Much of the film takes place in the drab workings of the Oakland Coliseum, and you can practically smell the feet tramping the worn indoor-outdoor carpet as fading banners from the A’s glory days hold tenuously outside, testament to something that hasn’t been seen there in a while.

Moneyball begins in October 2001, and loss of the American League title to the Yankees weighs heavily upon Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt. Beane is a man whose life has been shaped by a decision that he once made based upon numbers and whose ability to do his job is stifled by the lack of numbers representing team wealth. He’s in his forties, divorced, a manager who moans, “I hate losing more than I love winning.” He’s more anxious than superstitious, able to watch or listen to games only from the club weight room or his pickup truck. Pitt brings a depth and mystery to his characterization, a bit of off-kilter specialness that imbues his Beane with both a thinking person’s distance and a whiff of vulnerability. When he visits his daughter in the ultra sleek home of his ex-wife and her husband, there’s an almost imperceptible shift in his bearing that is more endearing than hundreds of sentimental screen moments in succession could ever be.

When he travels to Cleveland for some 2001 post-season trading, Beane meets a young assistant to the Indians’ general manager, the precise and articulate Peter Brand, played with wonderful freshness by Jonah Hill. Brand is recently graduated from Yale, with an economics degree and big ideas spoken credibly, if tentatively. Beane is so impressed with those ideas that he tells Brand, “pack your bags, Pete, I’ve just bought you from Cleveland.” Thus, the two men begin to reshuffle the 2002 Oakland team, looking far beyond the traditions of baseball to craft their lineup and, in the process, causing upset within the organization. Aaron Sorkin’s intelligent and witty screenplay cleanly propels the film with dialogue, pulling the audience along in the swoop of thought and play without once stooping to twist or manipulate.

It’s in the person of Billy Beane that Brad Pitt stretches into greatness. For me, he’s always been an uninteresting actor, his bland chiseling seemingly inhabited by nothing more than boredom, perhaps with his looks or celebrity. In Moneyball, he’s a person, a bit grizzled and weary, shadows crossing his face, ones that can’t be washed away by the fleeting nature of victory. It’s this central nugget of Beane’s character, the doubt and consideration, that’s delivered so well by Pitt more than halfway through the film when, in a few minutes of exchange with Peter Brand, Beane muses about the difference between the beige, forgettable nature of winning in professional sports, “the champagne, the money, the rings” — and what he wants it to mean. I could have kissed the screen.

If you are wishing for an easy feel-good film, one that fills you with a sense of triumph, you might shy away from Bennett Miller’s thoughtful release. But if you want to zig when zagging would be the comfortable choice, if you want to see a film about limits within the cults of money, success, and personal achievement, and then so many other things that you will take the long way home just to think about them all, well then, don’t be the last dog at the bowl. Race for your chance to see Moneyball.

Solaris is a film all about the space in between. There upon that lonely outpost lurks the obstacle of reckoning with oneself and of wrestling alone with what is most important. Sometimes we need to be blasted into orbit for this. More often, this unique cosmos flickers around us in the everyday. Like Tarkovsky’s character, Kris, some of us are always peeking into closets from where the desideratum beckons. Like him me, sometimes we come out from those corners empty and covered in smudges when instead we sought to reach in to embrace what we most cherish.

On Solaris, the susceptible traveler, Kris, is met and confounded by what I can only express as his heart’s deepest wish, a state he’s been unable to find amid the clamor of his life and work. What Kris finds and how it changes him is for the viewer’s delight. I can’t spoil that for you, remember?

Of course, discovery happens here on Earth all the time, smack dab in the mess and junk. On a planet where men and women can find it agonizing to talk with each other, you made intimate conversation easy. In a world where the sum of people becomes absurdly reduced to their parts, I observed your dignity and allowed you that same view. In what is forever an upside down, scrambled universe filled with defended posing, I lit up for you, and you instantly got who I am. I’ve come back from the encounter a bit bleary.

So, here is where we spin out, S., into that distant borderland, a space where the fine and natural breathe and exchange their own oxygen in balance. A place where the essential me and the rightful you whirl in elemental form. On that Solaris, I’m just now placing the finishing touches on a sandwich made especially for you, and it’s the best you’ve ever had because, alongside the grilled cheese, I’m dishing up myself. And it is enough…

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the words “love go with you—” fly from me into the reach confining us all. Those words weightless, infinite.

Months and even years may pass between the moments when I pick up the kaleidoscope for a short visit. Always, of course, I hold the scope into light and manipulate the marble to create new patterns, and this makes me smile because, after all, the purpose of a kaleidoscope is nothing but a glimpse back at the viewer’s unique and private eyeful. The only thing a kaleidoscope can produce is reaction, either the dismissal or delight of such minuscule events.

A good novel brings much the same effect, that of holding a slice of life in mutable relief, inviting the reader to turn the marble of perception and consider the patterns that are revealed. The French writer Andreï Makine’s 2004 work, La Femme qui attendait or The Woman Who Waited, casts this kaleidoscope effect brilliantly.

Outwardly, The Woman Who Waited might appear to be an overly romanticized story, that of a young man who sets forth to write a satire about the lives and customs of small town folk and finds himself in thrall to a middle-aged woman who has placed herself on the shelf waiting for… someone, or is it something?

The narrator,  a young man of sardonic disposition, begins to closely follow the life of Vera, a middle-aged woman of no apparent exception, save the one, as she dwells within the northern Russian village of Mirnoe.  There she teaches children by day while in her spare time she befriends, cares for, and buries the old, forgotten women sprinkled in poverty throughout the village and surrounding woodlands. Vera is bound to her life amid the thatched roofs and tree-darkened doorways of her village. Makine uses the forest imagery to distinguish Vera’s environ from the cynicism of Brezhnev’s Moscow and the harsh world of the young sophisticate who finds himself drawn into the physical and emotional thicket of village living.

In Leningrad, at the Wigwam, we were forever making clear-cut distinctions between good and evil in the world. I knew the evil that had laid waste to these villages in the North was boundless. And yet never had the world appeared so beautiful to me…

Within this deceptively simple premise,  Makine wields muscular, clear language as translated by Geoffrey Strachan, vibrant prose that holds up and turns around for a look-see the lovely marble which is the emotional contradiction found in the act and art of waiting. The Woman Who Waited reveals the great variegation within what would appear to be a lonely woman’s existence, and it constantly surprises with challenges to the notion of waiting as simply a state of forbearance . The expressions of delicacy and exoticism in Vera’s suspended animation, along with those of the narrator, himself yielding to knowledge of his new friend, cart-wheel before the reader in an athletic display that welcomes the incongruity of slow, close reading. Yet, Makine never plows the reader with sentiment.

But life, easy-going life, caring little for elegance, is nothing more than a constant mixture of genres.

Makine’s ability to access the fluctuating inner life of his characters is profound. He writes into and around Vera and the nameless man, charging them equally with the sense of both the quiescence and the purpose found in waiting.

In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me… Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave…We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales…

The French philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote, “Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it. Still, it is not confined to one place, it is not a resigned immobility; it has the endurance of a movement that will never end and would never promise itself the reward of rest…”

For a reader, The Woman Who Waited is like that beautiful, rough marble at the end of the long tube. Read the book, turn the marble, let the kaleidoscope come in.

Forward then to last Sunday, a merciless July day that resulted in my first ever drive to Iowa City and the iconic Prairie Lights Bookstore. After an hour or so of inspired browsing, parking meter and budget constraints forced me to get serious about one or two titles. That’s when I spied the cover of Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, shyly posed on the staff picks shelf. I almost tripped in delight as I dove to pick it up. Who wouldn’t?

Bailey’s ode to the snail begins briefly recounting an illness, her own, and with it her harrowing removal from the activities of her well ordered life into forced recumbency within a sickroom. She addresses the malady and its course with grace such that her eye, and the reader’s, remains upon the gastropod who is lovingly plucked by a friend from the woods just outside her home and gifted within a pot of field violets.

These field violets in the pot at my bedside were fresh and full of life, unlike the usual cut flowers brought by other friends. Those lasted just a few days, leaving murky, odiferous vase water…But what about this snail? What would I do with it? As tiny as it was, it had been going about its day when it was picked up. What right did my friend  and I have to disrupt its life?

The disrupted life is at the heart of Bailey’s meditation upon her snail. What happens to us when things happen? Can we “love the questions”, as the poet Rilke suggests, or is there shrinking and defending afoot whenever change and uncertainty are about. Through Bailey’s thoughtful words, the life of the woodland snail provides a small template for contemplation of our larger animal selves. Snails possess so much more than their slimy reputation suggests. They have a heart, a lung, rudimentary eyes, and a sleep-wake rhythm that normally occurs within the same 24 hours as ours, though it’s true they can sleep for years. They meet disruption with slow and careful tentacles, feeling and sensing in a beautiful proportion that allows for sure footed balance.

Bailey sprinkles numerous poetic, scientific, and literary references to the snail, from the ancient Mandarin Chinese to Darwin, from mollusc experts to Emily Dickinson, all people who have thought and written about the nature of snail explorations, their architecture, slimy abilities, and their social graces.  Snails, I am just finding out, know where they are and what they are about. Though they do use some defenses, their tactics are more in line with some of my own such as hiding when the sun is too hot and cherishing a good portobello mushroom in small bites.

Then, there’s that special connection snails enjoy…

A romantic encounter between a pair of snails can take up to seven hours from start to finish and involves three phases. First there is the lengthy courtship, in which the snails draw slowly closer, often circling each other, smooching, and exchanging tentacle touches…In the second phase, the snails embrace in a spiral direction and mate…Consummation is followed by the last phase, resting; the snails, still quite near each other, both withdraw into their shells and remain immobile, sometimes for several hours.

This lovely book about the little snail traveled with me this week to Chicago and helped me to keep perspective and smile at passersby while shepherding two teenagers through the urban landscape. Snail and The City, anyone? Truth is, I would recommend this immensely charming book for just about anyone, anywhere. Who needs a noise machine, a chemical habit, or satin eye shades when there is some time to be spent unwinding with a woodland snail?

Marauder by ono no komachi courtesy of Flickr

Filed under: Books Tagged: nature, snails ]]> http://coldtoast.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/the-sound-of-a-wild-snail-eating-by-elisabeth-tova-bailey/feed/ 0 Elizabeth Thomas Marauder by ono no komachi http://coldtoast.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/reading-the-sea/ http://coldtoast.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/reading-the-sea/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 21:58:07 +0000 Elizabeth Thomas http://coldtoast.wordpress.com/?p=228 ]]> Ostensibly, I’m reading John Banville’s Booker prize winning novel, The Sea, but it’s on hold for the moment.

Tonight, I’m writing from beside the water and thinking about this place, trying to read, as it were, an English village that fronts the Irish Sea. This has been an adventurous, noteworthy day, full of the things you do when you are alone in a seaside town. Namely, I have wandered on foot through the town and throughout my hotel, becoming familiar with the place and grabbing a slice of how things work here, alongside the slice of ham and cheese quiche I bought at noon. Things are working, but not in the ways I expected.

Here, the library works superbly. It was the primo destination for my morning’s stroll into town. An astute and competent inquiry librarian (aren’t they all?) was on duty, someone who specializes in the local history and who has a room full of proper research material close by. I was looking for record of my immigrant grandfather and grandmother, both supposedly born in or near this place in 1713 and 1715, respectively.

What I discovered, with help from the librarian, is that there is no record of my ancestors, nor anyone of the surname, born or christened in this area. None. And this is a place that knows how to keep records! This morning I held a fragile book and searched in vain for some trace of history, a link to my life, a word of belonging to a place I hold dear. We, that immigrant family, simply aren’t here, in this one place I’ve always believed, as part of any permanent record.

It’s possible that years and misunderstanding may have broadened a parish name into that of a town, a New World interpretation of an Old World declaration. That is the most likely event. My ancestors could have originated from any number of villages, a multitude of similarly named parishes.

Still, the trip is in no way fruitless. Tonight I swam for nearly an hour in the hotel spa, lapping the meters until my heart pounded in my ears. I sat in the whirlpool afterwards, bubbles from the water jets clinging to my legs and surrounding each hair on my arms until they stood like sea anemones, waving and beckoning. I traced into them with my fingers, at first tickling lines of obliteration down each limb, wiping the bubbles out by row and non-sensical design.

Finally, I wrote into the oxygenation, letters, initials, each one a split second psalm to people I carry inside. Etchings lasting only the moment it took to trace them on my skin. Before I left the water, one last letter, an ’S', for swimming, sea, solace, for the irrefutable record of Somewhere, just not here.

Bicycle Thieves is not difficult to view in the technical sense. Di Sica presents the story as a straightforward, almost factual course. An out of work man, Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), receives word from the local employment officer that he is eligible for work distributing movie posters, a position for which he must provide his own transport, a bicycle. This work has been a long time coming, and Antonio’s bicycle must first be redeemed at a sacrificially high price from the local pawn shop. On the proud first day of his new employment, a young man brazenly steals Antonio’s bicycle, leading the man and his young son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola), on a journey through Rome in a desperate search to retrieve the means of their family livelihood from the thief.

With such a simple premise, as the disc loaded I wondered if the film would be a fable-like musing on the importance of work, or if Di Sica would be giving me a lesson in post war economics. No such thing. For the viewer, Bicycle Thieves is akin to walking the streets tucked inside the coat pocket of Antonio or Bruno — dirty, hungry, filled with a cautious optimism one moment and utterly bereft of it in the next. The film’s careful use of light, rain — even the Roman pavement and architecture — all create a world of  painstaking realism. The portrayal of poverty as experienced by one family, and especially as it is borne by the child, reaches across the years with a firm tap on the shoulder.

While Bicycle Thieves presents an unsentimental primer on the desperation and the hard work that comes with being poor, it gracefully holds in its other palm a glimpse of the beautiful mosaic of family ties undiluted by the sort of upward striving that elevates individuals from poverty while rending them from home. Little Bruno, who has his own job at a gasoline station, is crucial to the search for the bicycle. He and his father share desperate moments, a terrifying separation, and a joyous episode of abandon. Antonio’s strides are long and not always easy for Bruno to fall into, but cling close the little boy does, father and son inseparably bound in the work of searching.

One line, spoken by Bruno, caused me to stop what I was doing, weeks after seeing the film. “We’ll look for it, piece by piece, then we’ll put it together.” With these few words, Di Sica captures an essence of childhood that is nearly impossible to describe but important to feel. Knowing that the child is the father of the man, Di Sica reveals in Bicycle Thieves the portrait of a man who is wordlessly instructing and encouraging his son at the childhood truth of keeping hope in the face of defeat.

The film’s climactic scene almost tramples what has been so carefully constructed, as the unfailing dignity of Antonio goes through a momentary, and shocking, transformation that threatens to tear him from Bruno in the cruelest manner. But the realism of the clinging child brings to the characters one of the few snippets of satisfaction to be found in Bicycle Thieves. The ending, painful though it is, somehow can be viewed as holding slim seeds of  possibility, the father and son relationship intact, boy and man together into the gray duration.

Bicycle Thieves rewards with infinite angles of complexity, themes that surface and recede upon reflection, and a final sense of ambiguity that stretches the viewer and stirs up questions about individual response and just how important it remains to snatch meaning from a work of art and to take it for ourselves, forever.

John Ford’s cinematic vision incorporates his belief in the beauty of human camaraderie, and he uses that solid foundation in order to pierce the ambiguities he himself flourishes on the screen; it’s one of the reasons he will always remain the consummate film director. When watching one of his films, I always enjoy the dark, unspoken corners into which his characters are allowed to wander, their silent attempts to stand strong alone, their inner sense of isolation, even self-loathing. At the same time, the subtle thump of Ford’s belief in community never fails to illuminate as deftly as his lighting a fine idealism that is as true today as it has always been. Ford’s belief in the dignity of humans acting in imperfect accord fairly hums through My Darling Clementine, an anthem sweeter and more lilting than the titular folk song.

My Darling Clementine bills itself as a retelling of the story behind the legendary alliance between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday culminating in the October, 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Wyatt Earp, played by Henry Fonda at his clean cut best, early on meets the dark side of humanity in the shape of the Clanton family, a cohesive unit of brutal, lying thugs who will stop at nothing to increase their cattle holdings. Ford then places the initial conflict between Earp and the Clantons skillfully into the background as Earp becomes Marshal, meets and befriends Doc Holliday, superbly played by Victor Mature, and falls in love with Clementine. At first glance, this might seem to be the straightforward telling of an old legend, but Ford’s intellectual range and skill imbues the narrative with detours and characterizations that dot the landscape of the story with poetry.

Fonda’s Wyatt Earp is the lawman’s lawman– observant, non-violent, and thoughtfully moral. Victor Mature’s Doc is a masterpiece of contradiction and dim, shadowy interiors, his individualism set aside in a crucial moment to quietly (with cowboys whooping and hollering in the background) portray something more central to the notion of America than Monument Valley, the idea that we can only have a finest hour as individuals when we are an integral part of a community that accepts and bears responsibility for one another. Ford’s characters might sashay it alone at times, but they do it right into the bevy of their neighbors’ arms.

My Darling Clementine, like most of John Ford’s work, is the kind of multi-layered marvel that rewards viewing and re-viewing. Sometimes it’s all about the lighting. Sometimes it’s all about one character or another. Sometimes it’s all about America. And sometimes it’s all about all of us.

The plot, such as it is, involves a young London photographer, Thomas, played by David Hemmings. Thomas’ world is populated with the fashionable, the beautiful and sexy, the avant-garde young British who epitomized Swinging London of the 1960′s. Thomas enjoys great freedom, upscale living, the overweening attentions of young women, and the unapologetic solitude of his art. Openly contemptuous toward others, he moves with that stolid determination which the  self-absorbed carry as their right.

Antonioni unhurriedly allows the viewer to slide along with Thomas in some of his pursuits, to a morning photo shoot of high-fashion models, on a drive through London streets, into an antique shop for a bit of browsing, onto a large paper palette for casual sex. Thomas is a man who exists on his own plane, it would seem, one from which an intersection with anything not of his choosing appears unlikely. Therefore it’s a bit surprising, and wonderfully effective, when Thomas takes a slow walk into London’s Maryon Park and into that spot’s green world of summer-full leaves, spongy grass, and languidly unfolding intrigue. To say more would spoil the central pleasures of Blowup. This is a film to watch carefully, in a quiet room where, say, the tinkling ice of the evening’s margarita pitcher has been a pleasant precursor for the intimacy and discovery of this film.

It’s safe to say that nothing will lurch from without to make you jump during Blowup. There may be a few minutes, especially early on, when many viewers will wonder just where things are heading. Certainly that was the case for this viewer. But the beauty and surprise to be found in Blowup has everything to do with the purity of the beauty and surprise to be found in the sights, sounds, and feel of the medium. The final scene should not fail to lurch at you from within, when the grand finale of a charity rag intersects with such force in Thomas’ life that to watch the last minutes of Blowup is to experience  a sense of just how much a superbly crafted and emotionally replete film can express, all without a word.

Mr Webster defines fog as “a murky condition of the atmosphere or a substance causing it.” Dense fog rolled in here exactly one week ago and will not let go. It pushes against me from all around, disallowing any semblance of clarity on the ground and trying to obscure what is within. Forcing itself everywhere, the fog pervades -  from waking in its unearthly light until stumbling home beneath its dark weight and tamping of even the nearest lights. For all of its wispy meteorological properties and the faux dreamscape it renders, fog is harsh. The daylight, especially, struggles to find any place to fit within the earthbound clouds. What comes through is a hard brightness, a silvery attempt at definition allowing only impressions and uncertainty.

Fitting, then, that I chose to watch the 1966 film, Persona, in the middle of this foggy week.  The weather outside lent itself to all of the film’s grey notions and any murkiness within the viewer. Which is to say that amid Persona’s black and white, I can find very little that is clear, and much that causes me to want to push back against that quality, to struggle and place meaning where there is no straight view, to emerge from the fog.

Ingmar Bergman’s startling portrayal of two women who are, like dense clouds, close to the ground, uses imagery that is at once bleakly detached and vibrantly, even sexually, charged with closeness. Persona is, barely, the story of an actress, Elisabet Vogler, played by the majestic Liv Ullmann, and her nurse, Alma, rivetingly portrayed by Bibi Andersson. Elisabet, a maestro of words upon the stage, is stricken silent during a performance of Electra. The camera halts in a garishly bright, lingering view of her panicked, empty face, her pained mouth, haunted eyes, and sweat suffused lip. “She apologized afterward, saying she had got the urge to laugh.” But the frozen moment turns into a period of near catatonia and hospitalization for the actress.

Elisabet’s doctor places her in the express care of Nurse Alma, a young woman who has her life figured out, it would seem. “I’ll marry Karl-Henrik and have a couple of children, which I’ll have to raise. All of this is predestined. It’s inside me. It’s nothing to think about. It’s a safe feeling.”

Alma and Elisabet travel to the doctor’s seaside cottage to facilitate the silent actress’ recovery. There, as the center of the film unfolds and the viewer experiences the world of alienation and pain inhabited by both women, the only thing plain about the film is its universality. “Life trickles in everywhere.”

The women, their gauzy clothing and carefully lit skin placing a thin façade upon their overt sexuality, settle into their new locale. Elisabet begins a tentative, silent response to Alma’s caregiving by taking oceanside walks and writing letters. When a sudden downpour finds them inside for an evening, Alma, faced with the uncomfortable notion that she is the only one able to speak, begins to disclose secrets to which Elisabet responds with barely perceptible enrapturement and tightly restrained prurience. The cinematography which dwells upon the faces of both women reveals them to their pores and follicles.

Alma and Elisabet are women displayed by Bergman in raw, earthy aspect. They are alienated, alone, separated by intractable distance and pain from one another and from the world. It is an agonizing and yet beautiful thing to watch. Their attempts to care for one another, their efforts to dismiss and wound one another, the conflicted caring they impose upon others, all combine flawlessly to produce an unforgettable experience. Each woman has sought respite, Elisabet in silence, Alma in the numbing, fleeting liberation of sex. The viewer is free to go right there with them, into their skin. The film spends long minutes upon facial closeups of Ullmann and Andersson, blending and blurring their identities until the only thing visible, truly, is the image, not of one or two women, but of the viewer in a sharp moment of self-recognition.

Persona is a film that gathers resonance and impact long after the reels  symbolically burn in the closing.  Far from the “ingenting” left to Elisabet and Alma,  Persona is a film to be savored, lit from within, and kept for the bewildering journey.

Posted in Film Tagged: Ingmar Bergman, Persona, uncertainty ]]> http://coldtoast.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/in-the-fog-persona/feed/ 3 Elizabeth Thomas