39. Market Days: Film and Book reviews by Pippa Hammet
We are all in voluntary-solitary here at Ebersdorf Tower under the pandemic lockdown, and Louise is wearing her face-mask around the clock. Not only does she see herself at her advanced age as particularly vulnerable, she also doesn’t want to compromise those of us (Belle, Madame Sesostris, Cheryl, Sandy, and myself) who are her close, homebound companions. Since Louise has dismissed her domestic staff, Master Raro now waits on her hand and foot, including making sure supplies are foraged and delivered on marketing days by the building’s super, Mr. Pessoa. The rest of us keep to our apartments in perfect isolation. Luckily, we can communicate by phone and PC, and I have my Murr for feline companionship around the clock. He is my guardian non-stop. That’s not to say that things are not proceeding (despite the world-wide tragedies) on the Ebersdorf artistic front.
Sandy made the mistake of informing Isabella Belladonna, the French ballerina, of a new project he has initiated with Cheryl: a series of dance solos to Franz Liszt on the theme of France’s very own Joan of Arc. (Sandy currently demonstrates the dance movements to Cheryl via the Zoom screen. He says she is deft in learning and definitive in performing the material, no problems in the digital transmission.) Somehow, Albertine -- our French-born ballerina and resident cat-wrangler downstairs -- got wind of the project and demands that she be given the role to premiere, whenever that might become possible what with the pandemic. Albertine would see herself as martyr! So now we have an international competition – Paris versus New York -- over the new project, and our Louise must come to the rescue and adjudicate alone in the absence of Le Swing’s Mme Beach, who is quarantined in distant Siberia. Of course, our Louise has a way of letting things play out over time, as we all know. “Market-State”, she keeps murmuring through her face-mask. I assume she’s concerned over the state of the U.S. stock market?
The last movie that Master and I caught in a theater (trustworthy Film Forum) was the new Chinese film noir The Wild Goose Lake, directed by Diao Yinan. The movie reminded us of the stylistics of Wong Kar-wai in its brio and formalism and of the South Korean director Myung-Hoon Park for its energetic portrait of gangster anarchy. The film was shot in a lake district of Wuhan province, an area that is now world famous for reporting the first incidence of the coronavirus.
Ge Hu plays ex-con Zhou Zenong, who heads a “family” of motorcycle thieves and finds himself in conflict with a rival gang as well as the local police, who take exception to his accidental killing of one of their number. Zhou is thus on the run from both groups throughout much of the movie. Stoically, he shows the melancholy fatalism of a Jean-Pierre Melville hero. (Think Alain Delon in Le Samourai.) The film’s female lead is Gwei Lun-mei, who plays Liu Aiai, a lakeside “bath-lover” (read a svelte “sex therapist”), who offers to help Zhou escape through sprawling apartment buildings and the resort environs.
Wild Goose Lake is photographed by Dong Jin-Song, now widely revered for his work on Bi Gan’s brilliant Long Day’s Journey into Night, with its ultimate sequence in one continuous virtuoso 3D shot. The 2D camerawork and photography in Lake are masterly. Seldom since MGM musicals have primary colors been used with such expressive panache. The film is stylized toward full immersion in its magical underworld. The Chinese suburbs are outlined in all-nocturnal neon.
What particularly excited Master and this writer is the in-camera editing style devised by Diao Yinan and Dong Jin-Song. (The editing team proper consisted of Jinlei Kong and Matthieu Laclau.) The film is fluidly in movement throughout, either in continuous panning, dollying, or crane-swooping, but within this trajectory it constantly re-positions itself with quick adjustments around and about its subjects like small jump-cuts, so that the viewer is regularly reminded that any one action can be seen from multiple points of view. Visually, we are kept off-balance, nervously attentive. This effect is achieved without incurring the charge of mannerism. Not only does the ploy argue sensuously for the “reality” of the scene in its spatial contouring of the actors, but in addition, we are dissuaded from taking a simple attitude toward any photographed event. We hold judgment in abeyance, perched above the fray, with a kind of aesthetic objectivity. The effect can be initially disconcerting – but also visually fascinating.
I was also struck by the way the heroine-prostitute becomes the main character by the end of the movie. Liu Aiai is eventually briefed to help Zhou by turning him in and collecting a 300,000-yen ransom, which he then asks to see transferred to his ex-wife, perhaps effecting a kind of redemption for himself after a life of crime. I will not give away how this challenge is handled by Liu, but the result is a refreshing view of the film noir femme fatale. Liu becomes opportunist, rescuer, lover, and even something like a secret-sharer. Perhaps she has been sent to help Zhou by a power higher than her boss-pimp.
There is no climactic scene in which Liu becomes hysterical, like Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s fatal woman in The Maltese Falcon. Instead, she ultimately appears to have found a new partner, perhaps replacing her pimp with Liu’s ex. And this ending also says something about Chinese society today, or how it can be represented through genre conventions by Diao Yinan. The police and the criminals are shown as mirrors of one another – with the constabulary portrayed as peacocks with flashing sneakers and a propensity to document themselves in group selfies. How does the CCP take this social comment, beyond turning aesthetic conventions on their head for “entertainment”?
And speaking of opportunism. I have finally read Benjamin Moser’s extraordinary biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World (OUP, 2009). You will remember I had a variety of responses to Moser’s recent life of Susan Sontag. (See my essay “Changes” in Blog 26.) Moser obviously likes to take “difficult women” as his subjects for biographical research, and Lispector may fit the cliché bill. (The tired category would undoubtedly apply to any professional female who demands respect and equality.) Moser obviously expended years in following the itinerary of her life, from her birthplace in Ukraine (1920) to her death in Rio de Janiero (1977). I have read only a small amount of Lispector’s work, but, thanks to Moser, I will return to it with a greater sense of how arduous her career was, especially given the uncompromising quality of her fiction’s style and language. Moser’s comments on the novels and short fictions are alert to the psychological issues and social dramas of this writer’s protagonists. Lispector is now regarded as a classic in modern Portuguese and South American literature, and one comparison of her achievement that is often made is to the works of Franz Kafka.
There are indeed similarities. Lispector can isolate an object or detail and make it resonate the way Kafka can. Both do this with fidelity to the unique nature of the thing itself, so we are not talking about allegorical meaning. The foregrounded item becomes a near-metaphysical symbol of itself. I am thinking of the timorous “mole” in Kafka’s story “The Burrow”. And I am thinking of a famous use of a cockroach in Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. It is true that Lispector is even more dependent in her narratives on a sense of paranoid threat than Kafka. A walk home by a housewife with a bag of groceries (in her short story “Love”) can become a treacherous obstacle course for the psyche. “The world had become once again a distress,” the woman thinks to herself. Such persistent unease leads to brilliant examples of stream of consciousness writing in Lispector, and much of that flow is disturbing and descriptive of characters – often women – who are at least briefly psychologically disturbed. Since Lispector herself had periods of depression throughout her life and required forms of analysis to maintain mental balance, some of the unique poetry of her fiction may have been the product of a deeply intuitive drive, beyond the shaping powers of conventional fictional methods. Kafka allows the reader the artistic benefice of discovered patterning, whether consoling or threatening. In Lispector, an equivalent pattern is usually sinister. But there is a shared quality of metaphysical fatality in both writers. Lispector, like Kafka, described something that comes to seem very real on the page.
It is interesting that “distress’ was also often the subject (and the effect) in the work of Sontag. (Perhaps this partially accounts for the grueling indictment of that writer’s private morality in the mammoth Moser biography. Moser may be mining his own type of pattern-making in these works.) Like Sontag’s, Lispector’s life was globe-spanning, and one can read both books for information on how “intellectual” writers handle their careers in the modern world of publishing and politics, how they adapt to the market. Born to Jewish parents in pogram-ravaged, post-World War One Ukraine, an infant Lispector was already a world traveler when her refugee family emigrated to the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil. Moser records the possibility that Lispector’s mother had been raped by soldiers before the move and may have died eventually from syphillis contracted from the attack. Lispector’s tradesman father died of typhus not long after relocating his family to South America.
The young woman at first attempted to study law and then began work for a wire service in Rio de Janiero. Her first published story appeared in 1940. Lispector’s Spinoza-influenced novel Near to the Wild Heart appeared in 1942 and became a sensation. One critic described the effect of her prose as “magic realism”, which may have been the first use of that category to describe a type of South American fiction.
In 1943, Lispector married Maury Gurgel Valente, who was in service to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and the two began a series of moves from one diplomatic posting to another around the world. Moser’s biography follows their every turn and juncture. In 1944, the couple was stationed in wartime Naples where – famed for her great beauty – Lispector had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico. She read widely: Proust, Kafka, Elizabeth Brontë. In Italy, she met that living master of the hermetic, Giuseppe Ungaretti.
By 1948, the couple’s first son Pedro was born, and by 1952 the family had been posted to the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where a second son, Paulo, arrived in 1953. Despite serious difficulties securing publishers for her work, Lispector continued her writing: The Chandelier (1946), Family Ties (1955), The Apple in the Dark (1956). Finding the social demands of the diplomatic life to be problematic for her writing and her marriage, Lispector eventually left her husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. (He subsequently divorced her and remarried.) To earn a living in Rio, she wrote an advice column for women in a popular magazine.
In 1962, the poet Elizabeth Bishop discovered Lispector’s fiction and translated three stories for English publication in America. The following year saw the release of The Passion According to G.H., which Moser regards as “one of the great novels of the twentieth century”. In 1965, the novelist was burned badly in bed when falling asleep smoking cigarettes – a hand and arm were severely injured. In 1968, she participated in the March of a Hundred Thousand in Rio protesting the dictatorship of the President of Brazil, General Artur de Costa e Silva. Her publications continued in 1973 with the short fiction Áqua Viva, which many consider a masterpiece. In 1974 she became notorious for what some termed a pornographic work, The Via Cruces of the Body. Lispector produced nine novels and nine collections of short fiction in all. Moser provides succinct discussions of what makes them distinctive as literary and philosophical statements.
In a sense, the career was a triumph, especially given the originality and challenge of Lispector’s work. We are reminded that artistic “product” is always seen as equivocal in a market economy. Lispector was lionized, interviewed, and celebrated long before her death in 1977. You can watch a Säo Paulo television interview with her on YouTube from 1977. (It is subtitled in English.) In the year of her death, Lispector appears in the video to have been articulate, morose, and formidable. One wonders whom Moser will choose for the subject of his next biography?
It turns out that our own “difficult woman”, Louise, has been reading Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, a 2002 study of the relation of state formation to military realities over the last five hundred years. Louise says that Bobbitt predicts a shift from the nation-state to what he calls the market-state in our future, a governmental philosophy and thorough reformation in which concerns for the welfare and personal security of citizens will be replaced by a new emphasis on opportunities and profits. Louise wants to be an early opportunist and a mega-profiteer, of course. She has asked me to help her forge a new identity for the Ebersdorf Ballet -- something that “sells”.
Louise sees her company as a first responder toward recovery now that major ballet companies here in the States have postponed their seasons as protective measures against the coronavirus. Louise wants to effectuate an “end-run” around them for her enterprise. (Belle suggested promoting the Ebersdorf Ballet as a new form of religion, rather like Scientology. Louise readily rejected the idea. She does not recognize organized Higher Powers.) I must think of an aesthetic brief that Louise can use to define the work of choreographers like Cheryl and Sandy. Louise says the French solution (Le Swing’s all-woman personnel) may work in Paris – but not necessarily in New York. That’s my new challenge. Wish me luck!
P.H.
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