Thursday, 2 August 2012
In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive.
Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous.
- Anaïs Nin
Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Tracy's face..
Her featherweight voice (with the inflection of a foreigner) — that in some moments squeaks like "the mouse in the Tom & Jerry cartoon" — appears extra shaky when speaking about matters of the heart. For her, nothing is more perilous than those matters.
Tracy is not yet cynical; she hasn't been corrupted. She hasn't begun referring to friends as "geniuses" and art as "derivative." She insists on "fooling around" instead of fighting in bed. She thumbs her earlobes when she's listening and combs her hair until it's soft. She begins sentences with "Well" and "Guess what?" and asks Isaac "to have a little faith in people."
In the film's most devastating scene, the two sit at a soda shop; him with his harmonica and her with her milkshake. Here Hemingway looks especially pure. Her hair is wrapped tight in a french twist, her cardigan is creased on the sleeves (either new or ironed,) and a single ring sits on her pinky finger. Her wide elfin features and thick eyebrows appear holy; the product of one single brushstroke or carved painstakingly out of wax. The moment's melancholy anticipates itself and Isaac breaks up with Tracy. While she dips in and out of adolescence — "Gee, now I don't feel so good" and "I can't believe that you met someone that you like better than me" — her sincerity and logic remain heartbreaking. She lists what they had going for each other and the tally, for any couple, is near perfect.
"Seeing the film, I was reminded of an earlier arthouse era, where grand existential allegories from the likes of Bergman and Bresson were relatively common. Today, in a post-Tarantino world, they seem almost like an anachronism. In truth, Tarr's vision of life is far more pessimistic than either Bergman or Bresson, who both saw a potential for grace or redemption. In a way, it's a question of religion: Bergman and Bresson grappled with the existence/role of god in a world that offers neither rewards nor answers, and Tarr takes their angst to its most atheistic extreme."
Um museu que está, definitivamente, na lista "a visitar". Para ficar com água na boca e um desejo repentino de ir a Potsdam este vídeo ajudou muito.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)