Blog 79: Conventions

79. Conventions: Sarasota Ballet, “Elizabeth Finch” and “Peter von Kant” reviewed by Louise Ebersdorf

After consultation with my dear friends, colleagues, and close advisors, I have decided not to enter the lists for upcoming primaries, or to put it more realistically, not to toss candidates into the lupine arena that is contemporary politics. My special counsels – Belle and Mme Sesostris – and I watched the recent televised speech which President Biden delivered in front of a flame-red Constitution Hall, and we noticed that Our Leader had to be encased in bullet-proof glass to survive his address to the nation – a solemn sign of the times. I’m not sure that I want to see, let’s say, my assistant Pippa Hammet in such a situation while running for office or holding court. Now that Britain’s Elizabeth II has passed peacefully, perhaps a constitutional monarchy could be seriously considered on this side of the Atlantic? The anointing, the gold spurs, the sword, the orb, the ring, the scepter, and the crowning! Just like a grand défilé for my company, The Ballet. A bejeweled crown would never be too heavy for this old head.

I have decided to take the long view and work toward a much more necessary goal: the thorough rewriting of our U.S. Constitution via a series of Constitutional Conventions to be held right here in Ebersdorf Tower just as soon as I can get members of Congress to agree on times and days, not to mention a cease-fire and détente. Constitutional monarchy is in the running!

Mme Sesostris, Belle and I have our individual interests, of course. I want attention paid to the national arts that are now so neglected by our leaders and so underfunded from federal coffers. Perhaps a Cultural Czar might be in order, although the term “czar” may be a problem given Ukraine’s current plight. Perhaps “Prime Arts Minister”? Belle insists, what with her involvement with a well-established Florida religious order, that an All-Mighty Church and a single Unified State might advantageously attain an intimate relation to one another in the near future. Who better than politicians to require spiritual counseling on the job? And Mme Sesostris is big on Total National Security – especially with the massive introduction of new citizens across our southern borders. Certainly, I am for the type of security that prevents certain so-called artists – I am thinking of two French examples hereabouts – from invading our American galleries and stages and diluting the spirit of our native cultural tradition with Euro pretensions. There is much work to be done.

As my assistant Pippa puts it, why not go all the way and get rid of the current Supreme Court, replacing it with an all-female Evolutionary Tribunal made up of Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi? Why not strike while the iron in our female blood is hot? True, the trio would be a bit lopsided toward the current Democratic component (and especially if Cheney changes horses), but our Republican cartel may deserve its chastening after the havoc it caused to my plans for a D.C. Demon Cat blockbuster filmed inside our nation’s august Capitol. It is time the Proud Boys were replaced by the Pride Girls, and I mean “pride” in the sense of a pack of lionesses, female warriors like Belle, Mme Sesostris, and yours truly! I will definitely demand an animal rights provision in the new Constitution, with special attention to protecting prize-winners like my brilliant pets downstairs on the Thirty-fifth Floor from exploitation. (PETA may have Spielberg under review for cruel aspersions toward an animal act. Right on!)

Speaking of the British traditions, the Sarasota Ballet brought two Frederick Ashton works to the Joyce Theater last month, one of which was his beloved Birthday Offering. Some of us remember seeing the ballet at the old Met here in New York soon after its 1956 London premiere and with the majority of its original cast, led by Margot Fonteyn. The ballet celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (which had become the Royal Ballet through Royal Charter). The British are so faithful when marking such historical events, so different from current U.S. practices which involve removing memorial statues and changing the names of holiday observances. Our history undergoes permanent revision momently. The British live their history.

Pippa and I enjoyed very much Macarena Giménez in the Fonteyn role. She has the grand manner and the stability required for the many balances in the pas de deux. The Sarasota dancers do not have that thorough coordination of upper and lower limbs necessary for the full Cecchetti (Royal Academy) contrapposto, but they are reaching in the right direction. Their accountings registered more clearly than those in the American Ballet Theatre production several years ago. I enjoyed Gabriella Schultze in the Svetlana Beriosova role with its slicing battements en relevé in second position and its tours renversés into bourrées. The brisés volés of Anna Pellegrino in the Nadia Nerina variation have much of the flotation I remember from the 1950s. And Marijana Dominis’ petit allegro in the Beryl Grey solo was satisfying in its musical precisions. Ashton (and his lieutenants) were always adamant about fidelity to the original choreography. Whereas in Balanchine’s choreography the steps were sometimes negotiable but the rhythm was not, Ashton’s steps were always sacrosanct. Step-wise, the Sarasota Ballet maintains that tradition.

At intermission a young balletomane complained to me about the display of the immobile male contingent across the back of the stage during the female variations. I explained that this was a convention of the French ballet – the male as attendant cavalier. Ashton wanted his ballet to evoke Russian, French and English manners: an international summa, installing the Royal Ballet in the art’s ongoing practice. So cosmopolitan. So The Ballet.

I noticed that in the Sarasota company’s brochure for the coming year that the Kenneth MacMillan Danses Concertantes is to be added to the repertory. Is this really necessary? We’ve all had enough MacMillan to last us, thank you very nuch, and there is never enough Ashton around and about. I do not approve. (This is said in the parodic Queen Victoria voice that Freddie used in his hilarious impression of Her Majesty.) I am nothing if not a defender of the Great Tradition, and in English ballet that means Ashton.

Speaking of defenders of the past, I have been reading the new novel by Julian Barnes entitled Elizabeth Finch (Knopf, 2022). The work is a tribute by Barnes to his late friend Anita Brookner, whose fictional counterpart becomes a charismatic teacher of Neil, the narrator of this novel. Neil is fascinated with the woman whose lectures for an adult education course in “Culture and Civilization” are aimed at questioning received ideas from history, ethics, religion, art and politics, to the end of allowing the willing student to think with rigor. This object of Neil’s fascination is mature, sly, unsentimental and able to lecture extemporaneously, without notes. He becomes obsessed with her. When the course ends, he suggests that teacher and student meet for lunch, and this ritual develops into meetings once or twice a year for two decades.

Elizabeth Finch is unmarried and apparently unattached, whereas her admirer has undergone two divorces and at least one affair with a fellow student named Anna. When Finch dies mid-novel, Neil is bequeathed her notes and library, and he becomes aware that she may have been planning to write a book on the historical figure Julian the Apostate, who attempted to restore worship of the pagan gods against the rise of Christianity. Neil is inspired to do his own research into the emperor-scholar-soldier as a tribute to his love for his teacher. The mid-section of Julian Barnes’ novel is the product of the studies and synthesis which Neil offers in memory of Elizabeth Finch. The final section of the novel returns him to questions about her very private life. He eventually learns, for example, that his former love, Anna, also had a relationship with Finch, as a close friend rather than a distanced worshipper like himself. The narrator’s realization that two women in his life, Anna and Elizabeth, were intimate throws his own conception of his departed love-object into disarray. And the reader of Barnes’ novel also now questions his abilities at a reliable interpretation of the world and its people. Is this man who has trouble living with women capable of trustworthy narration?

The central section of the novel on Julian the Apostate has thrown a number of British and American reviewers into a state of confusion: what is it doing there? The term “ambiguity” has been used to criticize Barnes’ work. But clearly, Finch’s interest in the historical Julian is meant to tell us something about her essential character, even if Neil is incapable of drawing the parallels between modern teacher and historical figure. Like the famous Julian, Elizabeth Finch is ascetic but open to artifice. The emperor Julian was a skilled writer, and Finch has written a book, Our Necessary Myths. The teacher would revive certain old truths, just as Julian wished to bring back the worship of pagan deities. (She distrusts mono-thinking; Julian battled the One Christian God.) Finch is a scholar-soldier who, like the vanquished emperor, is essentially “efficient, incorruptible, hardworking, and fair-minded.” Both faced death with stoic indifference.

Before her death, Finch also becomes the victim of contemporary cancel-culture. When she expresses her questioning of the West’s Christian foundations in a public lecture, the London tabloid press picks up the story of audience outrage and “shames” her mercilessly. Finch thus experiences a public failure like the Apostate’s bow before the “pale Galilean” of Swinburne’s poem on the death of the emperor.

The reader of Barnes’ novel wonders if Finch had steadfastly and privately held out hopes that her favored student’s mind might develop toward an unpossessive commitment to ideas and people. When asked about “heart trouble” by Linda, another young woman infatuated with our narrator, Finch tells her that love “is the only thing that matters”. Neil’s dedication to his teacher’s memory is both the sign of his obsessiveness and of a stumbling enquiry into the mystery of his own needs. Neil has been an actor when young, and he regularly tries on self-flattering roles -- husband, student, researcher, memorialist -- none of which provide him with answers. The novel Elizabeth Finch is a character study analyzing various styles of reverence before an object of obsessive love. Barnes puts Neil under our close observation and from an oblique angle. His studious monograph on Julian the Apostate is a lens toward that end. We too may learn a lesson about and from his teacher.

I loaned the new novel to Sandy, and he replies that it reminded him of a short sketch by Proust: “A Captain’s Reminiscence”. That narrative is also about a life-long fascination inspired by an official encounter “outside of time and space”. Sandy recommends Elizabeth Finch.

Master Raro took Sandy, Pippa and me to a new movie by the French director François Ozon – Peter von Kant. It is based on a play and film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) which deals in Douglas Sirkian terms with a claustrophobic Lesbic love affair between a famed German fashion designer and her fashion-model favorite. The designer’s ecstasy and jealousy are displayed with such deliberately suffocating detail the movie has become a cult classic. Ozon has now flipped the genders of his source and turned the fashion designer into a film director not unlike Fassbinder in his later period of self-indulgent drug use. The German actress Hannah Schygulla played the love object in Petra von Kant; now in Peter she is the director’s mother. The great Isabelle Adjani plays one of the director’s star actresses, and Stefan Crepon is the director’s secretary-gopher, the long-suffering Karl, a near-wordless role. The part of Peter von Kant is played by a bigger-than-life Denis Menochet, and the director’s handsome young discovery, Amir, is enacted by Khalil Ben Gharbia.

The theme of Ozon’s film is the price an artist sometimes pays to deliver a work of art – or, since others often pay as well, how to use and abuse your muse. The famed director Peter von Kant has lost a lover, and one of his muse-actresses, Sidonie, brings him a potential replacement, Amir, as consolation. Peter falls in love, vows to make Amir a star, and when six months have passed and the young man proves less than faithful, Peter rages against the world, including his young daughter and his mother. His tirade against his private fate is titanic. All the above takes place in the director’s chic apartment, observed by Karl, the faithful assistant. Eventually Peter tells himself that he has rid himself of his obsession and might see his way to some form of love that is not so demanding or so possessive. In the meantime, he begins a search for a new muse. And he is left with the record of his former passion on celluloid: the film in which he has immortalized Amir, perhaps like the movie we have enjoyed.

Ozon has filmed his adaptation giving full range of expression to his skilled actors and actresses. I especially admired Adjani’s comic performance as the go-between. Her French-farce timing is delicious. Adjani has perhaps the most expressive eyes of any woman on earth. You must see this film for her star turn. But it has even more to recommend it. Trust me.

Imagine my surprise in opening the Weekend Arts section of the New York Times to find the Ozon film described as “tedious tragicomedy” and “fan-fiction”. I think the Grey Lady’s reviewer has missed the point, including the movie’s rich satire of a megalomaniacal auteur. I was equally discouraged to find the Times reviewer of the Sarasota Ballet’s evening at the Joyce characterizing Ashton’s ballets as “dusty baubles”. And the Times review of the Barnes Elizabeth Finch was unable to locate any coherence in its pages. There are things called conventions in a film, a ballet, or a modern novel. The reviews now being published in our city’s newspaper of record show no sign that the writers are aware of those inherited frames or what such tools accomplish. This failure may explain why the Arts section of the daily Times has shrunk to a mere six pages dealing mostly with pop and folk entertainments via large photographs, avid reports of box office takes, and lengthy dialogues and interviews, while serious critical commentary disappears into the paper’s gutters. The Covid epidemic is not sufficient excuse for such journalistic no-show. The Times has for quite some time rendered itself unable to confront the arts. In the paper’s ambitions for political correctness and smartass scene-making, its entertainment editors are content to provide the city with a six-page throwaway.

L.E.

​ __________________