reorder the world
and I spell check them in
my dictionary.
Colin Firth is trying to find a comfortable position for shooting himself in the head. Amongst them: in bed, wrapped inside of a sleeping bag. He lets the gun slide along his cheek, puts it in his mouth, readjusts the angle. The scene triggers a memory - Wednesday nights, watching suicide tales in a sticky seminar room. The outcome, an angry paper, angry at Alain, angry at the protagonist of Louis Malle's LE FEU FOLLET (I/F 1963). Warm summer days spent indoors writing agitated verses, after having read too much Sartre. Alain, you are objectifying yourself by your own gaze, you turn yourself into an easy prey to the judgemental eyes of your predators, Alain, I warn you, project yourself. Otherwise, Alain, the future is always already dead. Look, Alain, the past is chewing you up, it already ate the present. Sartre is angry: I am nothing but my own project, alive. Suicide is absurd (what good shall come from it, you gonna be dead) and btw, it's pathetic.
The warnings hit me right at the beginning, Tom Ford's A SINGLE MAN (USA 2009) might make my skin crawl. For one, there are fiddlers, fiddling a score without pause. For two, a protagonist voice-overing, dancing on the edge of the redundancy cliff. Maybe I just cover my ears and get by. But then again I would also have to cover my eyes, because three, there is beauty. Beauty everything. Beauty everywhere.
No. No, I get silenced. No need to be warned. Ford's gaze silences me. Its persistence to set the world on fire. Not burn down, but glow, simmer, gaze by gaze. It's hungry, tender, it zooms in. It looks, pushing back a past that is trying to suffocate the present. A gaze under which ballerina shoes turn ice cream blue (or is it summer sky pool water blue) and lips crimson red, skin gets sun-burnt. Under which James Dean is not dead. Nick Hoult's pullover one overflowing tactile sensation.
A gaze which says, matter-of-factly, carpe diem. And not because life is so thorougly short, but because. Because, look, // Awww! //.
carpe diem (top), project: the future is always already dead.
Alain, LE FEU FOLLET.
carpe diem (bottom), project: trigger, ignite.
Colin Firth, A SINGLE MAN.
I won't read this.
ReplyDeleteHave to watch the film first.