What with various scheduling clashes, its been a while since Grumpy and I met for our traditional Orange Wednesday film nights. Always followed or preceded by a trip to Lambland, our “favourite restaurant in the world”. A Turkish kebapci, it looks like nothing more than a cafe, but this hides some of the finest Turkish food in London. As it has been recently reviewed by the likes of Matthew Fort, and featured in Rick Stein’s ‘Food Heroes’, I am afraid I won’t mention its name here, for fear of expanding the 30 deep queues we have recently seen snaking up the alley it sits in, of a summer night.
Our film of choice this week was Francois Ozon’s 5 x 2. Unusually for me, I knew nothing about the film before seeing it, apart from that it is French. The resultant lack of preconceptions meant that I enjoyed its neat temporal switch even more than I would otherwise have done. The film shows a marriage in reverse – five extended vignettes each giving us a deeper understanding, starting with the prosaic opening scene showing the couple, Marion and Gilles, in their solicitor’s office, hearing their divorce agreement. In what seems a terribly French act, they go on to a cheap hotel for an obviously pre-arranged final act of congress. There is no love in this scene – just an aching absense of am indefinable that clearly once was there. It is a painful scene to watch, with Marion deciding half way through that she doesn’t want to go through with it, but being forced into it by her newly ex-husband.
The resonance for me, was in the way 5 x 2 forces us to confront the flaws of the couple’s love. By showing us first the desolation of the post-divorce Marion and Gilles, and then taking us back, the film asks us to look for clues – both to what went wrong, but also to what their love entailed when it was right. At their wedding there are two echoes of the divorce scene. The wedding vows are read out in the same businesslike tones of the earlier divorce scene. And when Marion, denied her conjugal rights by her husband’s passing out, goes for a walk in the grounds of the hotel they are staying in, she meets an American stranger whose brutishly physical advances she tries to reject, in a reflection of her actions with her Gilles after their divorce. As in the earlier scene, she acquiesces in the end.
Depressingly, but also very bravely, the film never shows us a relationship that is uncomplicated and painless. As it goes further back through time, we expect a respite, a lifting of the sombre tone of their divorce. I waited the whole time for a moment I could pinpoint, the moment I could say ‘that’s why they loved one another’. This moment is denied us.
The film brought to mind a poem I recently remembered – my tutor at University, who was a figure of derision to us at the time, was also a poet who had had his own little following. One of his poems examines a couple’s reunion after their divorce.
The Onion, Memory Craig Raine
Divorced, but friends again at last, we walk old ground together in bright blue uncomplicated weather. We laugh and pause to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs, prehistoric, crenelated, cast between the tractor ruts in mud.
On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks, swinging on the chestnut’s unlit chandelier, defies the corporation spears– a single rank around the bole, rusty with blood. Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance A gust–the old flag blazes on its pole.
In the village bakery the pastry babies pass from milky slump to crusty cadaver, from crib to coffin–without palaver. All’s over in a flash, too silently…
Tonight the arum lilies fold back napkins monogrammed in gold, crisp and laundered fresh. Those crustaceous gladioli, on the sly, reveal the crimson flower-flesh inside their emerald armor plate. The uncooked herrings blink a tearful eye. The candles palpitate. The Oistrakhs bow and scrape in evening dress, on Emi-tape.
Outside the trees are bending over backwards to please the wind : the shining sword grass flattens on its belly. The white-thorn’s frillies offer no resistance. In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly strives to keep a sense of balance.
I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress. This is the quiet echo–flesh– white muscle on white muscle, intimately folded skin, finished with a satin rustle. One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread. It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.
Because there’s everything and nothing to be said, the clock with hands held up before its face, stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase– while we, together and apart, repeat unfinished gestures got by heart.
And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line– headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine.
Grumpy is here, and I have to go. I asked him to read through this post, and he (having not been to his own bed yet) felt that it was a little heavy for this time in the morning. And to compound this high-falutin’ behaviour, we are going to look at art all day – the Caravaggio and the Turks exhibitions. Crikey!
Funnily enough, Susan and I were going to go and see that last night but felt that it would be utterly depressing and as the alternative was a film by the king of self aggrandisement (Woody Allen), we settled for dinner and drinks instead.