Known and Strange Things Read online

  Georges and Anne are distinguished by their acuity; Anne, in fact, is the sharper, more acid-tongued, and more attractive of the two. It is the contrast between this sharpness and its sudden vertiginous loss that frightens. Not long after her blank moment in the kitchen, she has an unsuccessful operation and becomes bedridden. Shortly after, dementia sets in. Georges insists on being her primary caretaker, and their lives become purely physical: eating, excreting, cleaning, sleeping. Anne often cries out in pain—helpless and wounded cries that Georges struggles to parse—and these are among the most harrowing sequences in the film. Cinema has its settled conventions about physical candor, most of them unrealistic. When, in one scene in Amour, we see Anne’s aged body being bathed—the naked body of a woman in her eighties—it is a terrible and original moment, at once dignified and totally lacking in dignity. This is Haneke at his realistic and heartless best.

  Georges and Anne’s grown daughter, Eva (played by Isabelle Huppert), high-strung and selfish, cleverly distances herself from this day-to-day horror, but then demands her father tell her “what happens now.” Georges says what we often think but seldom say in such situations: “What happens now is what has happened until now. Then it will go steadily downhill and it will be over.” This plain truth is also a piece of misdirection. We are meant to suppose we know what “downhill” might mean; but we don’t know, not really. Yet to come are further terrors, more loneliness, more pointless pain, all of which come in bursts, striking the family more or less harshly than expected. These are predictable things, but the suffering they cause is worsened because they happen in a wildly unpredictable sequence.

  There are brief moments of diegetic music in the film, Schubert’s impromptus and Beethoven’s bagatelles, which, when they come, feel like small mercies, but mostly we are left in silence, and with the sounds of apartment life: chairs being moved, silverware clinking on plates, taps running, feet shuffling, unhappy human voices. “Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in Ulysses, and Haneke shows how implacably difficult the last of those days can be. Even when the end is certain, the days must be lived, and little can be done to hurry things along. To express such things well in a film, to express them in a humane and unflinching way, to resist the temptation to entertain or soothe, to keep the film as arid as the material, as Haneke has done in Amour, is to provide some very small but indispensable comfort. This is not about the high tone of the work—the Schubert, the understated Parisian knowingness, the ironic repartee—for in a film as different from this one as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, with a wholly different set of cultural codes, a similar kind of consolation exists. It is more a matter of a willingness to push past the clichés of representation into a zone of discomfort so specific that it achieves universality. The temptation for many filmmakers is to console too soon, or to console in the wrong ways; to encounter those who give us some fresh and necessarily unpretty version of “how it is” can be a tremendous relief.

  The question then is whether Amour is one of those films that one urges everyone to see. I don’t think so. It’s difficult to place it as a product; it’s too troubling and bruising to be a nice night out at the movies. You wouldn’t want to watch it after dinner, nor would you want to go to dinner after watching it. But it is undoubtedly the kind of film that will find its viewers, and that will long continue to trouble them in the right ways. For hours after I saw it and, intermittently, for days afterward, I could not shake the world and truths it conveyed.

  In a moment of tension and despair, Georges slaps Anne. The camera immediately cuts away from them and comes to rest on the paintings on the wall of the apartment. This goes on for slightly longer than we anticipate. We look at the indistinct details of figures in a landscape. The paintings are not remarkable, but they are a respite, showing us scenes where fate is settled, an Arcadian escape from the tyranny of time. It’s a glimpse of what will happen when it’s all over, which is to say: nothing.

  An African Caesar

  WHEN Julius Caesar was performed at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1864, the role of Mark Antony was played by John Wilkes Booth. His brother Edwin Booth played Brutus, and their brother Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., was Cassius. Five months later, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln with the cry “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants,” words traditionally attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination). In the years following, Edwin Booth went on to one of the most distinguished theatrical careers of the nineteenth century. Between December 1871 and March 1872, he appeared in another run of Julius Caesar in New York City, playing, on different nights, Mark Antony, Brutus, and Cassius.

  When I saw Julius Caesar in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it happened to be on April 13, the Ides of April, and a day before the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. The coincidence was theatrical in a literal sense, too: Lincoln died in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, Caesar died in Pompey’s Theatre in Rome, Julius Caesar was premièred at the Globe Theatre in London, and I watched it at the Harvey Theater, in Brooklyn. Shakespeare’s love of superstition is rich soil for suggestible minds.

  Julius Caesar bristles with augury, but hinges on a more terrestrial concern: Was Caesar a tyrant and thus deserving of tyrannicide? The Caesar of the play is imperious and inflexible, happy to compare himself to Mount Olympus and the North Star. But he also has “popularity” in the sixteenth-century sense of that word, as the scholar James Shapiro has written: his rule is a radical democracy that is the very opposite of tyranny. He might have escaped assassination had he read the note proffered him by Artemidorus as he entered the Senate on the Ides of March. That he waved it off with the self-promoting and self-abnegating line “What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d” is evidence of his popularity.

  This finely balanced ambiguity is the material for the first half of the play; it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s coinage “misgiving” should make its first appearance in English in this play of doubts. A tight conspiratorial knot leads up to the assassination, which is followed by the funeral orations by Brutus and Mark Antony. Shakespeare then takes us into the less interesting matter of the conspirators’ fates, their various suicides and deaths by misadventure. The RSC players did their best with this later material, though they were hampered somewhat by a minimalist staging in which we got neither the sense of battle nor the tension of a battle camp.

  The RSC production had an all-black cast and was directed by Gregory Doran. It was an African Julius Caesar, and the play contains many elements that aid this conceit: the soothsayer is a féticheur in body paint, Brutus has a silly houseboy, there’s a lynching (of a poet who, by some ill luck, happens to share a name with one of the hunted conspirators). The assassination itself feels like a story from one of the newly independent African countries of the 1960s. Doran highlighted the political aspect of the play, and this was to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past. Caesar, played with roguish charm and cold resolve by Jeffery Kissoon, is in the company of such manipulative despots as Idi Amin Dada, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.

  The alterations in the text were limited to a few compressions here and there, and to the occasional well-placed “ehen!” (one of the most frequent interjections in West African English, generally used as an affirmative, sometimes as a query). The most familiar lines—“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”—were delivered as smoothly as proverbs. A small musical ensemble was on the stage in some scenes, playing highlife and Manding-influenced music, which added a beautiful aural texture to the proceedings. Before going, I had thought that a more precise identification of the play with a particular country—South Africa, say, or Nigeria—w
ould be preferable, the better to avoid the pernicious notion that Africa is a country. But the performance persuaded me otherwise: Shakespeare’s play is a gloss on an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, and its force is in the dramatic language. The general African setting unexpectedly illuminated that language. Had the setting been too narrow, it would have distracted the viewer from the delicate amalgam at hand: an ancient Rome in which Renaissance English is spoken by contemporary Africans.

  The ensemble was extraordinary. Cyril Nri’s Cassius and Joseph Mydell’s Casca had such clear diction that I found myself wishing for more of Shakespeare’s plays to be done in African-accented English. Kissoon’s Caesar, Paterson Joseph’s Brutus, and Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony were less clear, their use of accents drifting at times into singsong. But the acting throughout was tense and vibrant. All commanded the stage, all had the broad shoulders, swagger, and calculated carelessness of African “big men.” One of the pleasures on offer was the sight of these men strolling about, all coiled energy and purpose, in their dyed buba and sokoto, or in the white or earth-toned safari suits one sees on businessmen in Lagos, Dakar, or Kinshasa. Walking with authority is an art of which the leads in this Julius Caesar were virtuosi.

  Shakespeare’s rhetorical choices in Julius Caesar were intended to echo Roman public speech. He aimed, as W. H. Auden noted in his Lectures on Shakespeare, for a bleak, plainspoken style largely dependent on monosyllabic words. There’s an added benefit to this: words written then sound much like they might now. Brutus, taking leave of Cassius in the first act, in the infancy of the conspiracy, says:

  For this time I will leave you.

  To-morrow, if you please to speak to me,

  I will come home to you; or if you will,

  Come home to me, and I will wait for you.

  Mark Antony, manipulating the crowd during his “friends, Romans, countrymen” oration, is similarly straightforward. His reiteration of the word “honorable” emphasizes its unwieldy shape and ironic intent in what is otherwise a staccato pentameter:

  Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up

  To such a sudden flood of mutiny.

  They that have done this deed are honorable.

  What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,

  That made them do it. They are wise and honorable,

  And will, no doubt, with reason answer you.

  Later, Antony, in his arrogant way, tells Octavius, “I have seen more days than you”; later still, at the Battle of Philippi, he attempts to pull rank.

  ANTONY: Octavius, lead your battle softly on

  Upon the left hand of the even field.

  OCTAVIUS: Upon the right hand I. Keep thou the left.

  ANTONY: Why do you cross me in this exigent?

  OCTAVIUS: I do not cross you; but I will do so.

  It is an ominous bit of foreshadowing, and the lines were delivered well. But I missed a certain intensity that might have made this young Octavius (Ivanno Jeremiah) more convincing. This, after all, is the man who will transform himself into the emperor Augustus and will rule the world, and it is to him that Shakespeare gives the very last words of the play. I wished to see more evidence of that potential, in this play that is so much about how a fate only guessed at today can become a reality tomorrow.

  In the spring or winter of 1865, sometime between the Booth brothers’ Julius Caesar performance and Abraham Lincoln’s death, Lincoln had a nightmare. He recounted it to his friend Ward Hill Lamon, who wrote it down. Lincoln had seen in his nightmare a mournful crowd in front of the White House and, on asking who had died, had been told it was the president, “killed by an assassin.” The dream “annoyed” him for quite a while after, and then, presumably, he let the matter be. As in Shakespeare’s play and Caesar’s life, the portent proved exact.

  Peter Sculthorpe

  PETER SCULTHORPE, AUSTRALIA’S leading composer, died on August 8, 2014, at the age of eighty-five. The news came as a surprise to me, because by coincidence I had spent all of the previous day listening to his music. (I hadn’t known he was ill.) I had also listened to a long radio interview that he gave to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1999. This was the first time I’d heard his voice—a confiding, relaxed, thoughtful voice—or the stories behind some of his best-known pieces. I hadn’t known that his somberly beautiful “Irkanda IV” was written after his father’s death; now I understood the searching grief of the solo violin. What I loved most in Sculthorpe’s music was the dry yet rich sound of the orchestral pieces and the string quartets, so evocative of the Australian landscape, but I hadn’t known that Mahler’s work, in particular the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde, had been a vital influence on him. I didn’t know that he was a child prodigy (his String Quartet No. 1, composed when he was fourteen, is still performed today), or that he’d been blamed, as a boy, for the accidental death of a playmate.

  Sculthorpe was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1929. Apart from studying music at Oxford, he lived most of his life in Australia, working as a professor at the University of Sydney. I got to know his String Quartet No. 8 through a 1986 recording by the Kronos Quartet—the detail that struck me then was that three of its five movements were marked “con dolore”—but I only began to explore his other work after I visited Australia. When I traveled into the bush in Victoria, a few hours north of Melbourne, I had “Earth Cry” and “Small Town” in my ears. It was music that perfectly evoked the landscape of southeastern Australia—its vernacular architecture, beautiful stands of eucalyptus, red hills, dry grass, and sudden screaming flocks of lorikeets. The mental process by which one matches an orchestral texture to a physical landscape is mysterious and, of course, highly subjective. But, just as the soaring horns and massed strings of Sibelius are inseparable from the idea of the Scandinavian wilds, Sculthorpe’s pizzicati and percussive effects sounded to me precisely as the Australian landscape looked. The ecstatic rhythms and the melody of a piece like “Kakadu” drew strong influence from northern Australian Aboriginal chant. And ever present in Sculthorpe’s thinking was the question of Aboriginal land rights; he was one of the first Western-trained composers to write for the didgeridoo.

  Sculthorpe’s flowing and interesting soundscapes are brilliant in effect and in structure, and redolent of tone poems from the early twentieth century. Like his contemporaries John Adams and Einojuhani Rautavaara, he found a way to escape the strictures of post-Schoenbergian composition (Egon Wellesz, under whom he studied at Oxford, was a Schoenberg disciple, but not a dogmatic one) by bringing in a wide range of influences—not only Aboriginal music but also English pastoralism (Delius, in particular), minimalism, montage, and Japanese and Indonesian traditions. Sculthorpe said that it was important to him to consider Australia as part of the Asian world, and he had a profound personal engagement with Shinto. His music is intelligent and always gorgeous, like Mahler’s was always gorgeous, but it is also imbued with warmth and gentleness. In a piece like “Small Town,” for instance, a simple tune for the oboe is juxtaposed with a stately trumpet fanfare. With remarkable economy, Sculthorpe captures the bittersweet experience of small-town life, in which the Sunday picnic takes place in the shadow of the war memorial. It is a kind of antipodean double of Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City.”

  No wonder, then, that Sculthorpe’s music was so adored in Australia. That it was not better known internationally is evidence, yet again, of how poorly contemporary classical music, like contemporary poetry, travels. In the 1999 radio interview, Sculthorpe mentioned the particular honor he felt when, following the deaths of notable Australians, the obituary programs on television would feature fragments of his music. It made him feel like he had become part of the culture in some essential way. On the day before he died, I listened to Peter Sculthorpe all day. And on hearing the news, far from Australia, I did so again.

  Red Shift

  FEW THINGS ARE more mysterious than someone else’s favorite film. To hear it named is
to be puzzled. You appreciate its merits but not how it can be preferable to all others. Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible way. Often, you first see it when you’re young, but not too young, and on each subsequent viewing it is a home to which you return.

  I first saw Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red in 1996, in the basement of a college library in Michigan. Valentine, a young woman in Geneva, played with austere grace by Irène Jacob, accidentally runs over a dog, loads the bloodied animal into her car, and seeks out its owner, a surly retired judge named Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who seems not to care about the dog, and who, Valentine discovers, passes his days listening in on his neighbors’ telephone conversations. They are drawn into a relationship—not a romance but a series of tenderly exchanged confidences. In one scene, the judge, on his birthday, wonders if he made the right decisions during his career. There is another thread: Valentine’s neighbor, a law student named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), whom she doesn’t know but often passes in the street, is betrayed by his girlfriend. The three characters move through perfectly average days—unlocking an apartment door in time to catch a ringing phone, stopping at a kiosk to buy a newspaper—but their gestures seem to be part of a larger pattern.

  The hushed intensity of the film, the sense of inner workings not fully grasped, stayed with me. I have since seen Red more than a dozen times: with my siblings during Thanksgiving in Alabama; alone in a crowd on the Museumsinsel in Berlin; in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Geneva; on a stalled Amtrak train somewhere near Poughkeepsie. Kieślowski uses the tiniest gestures to illuminate dilemmas: the camera lingering on Valentine’s face as she tries to figure out where the dog, which she has adopted, has run off to; the twitch of Auguste’s jaw when he realizes that his girlfriend has another lover.