Beauty and the Beast (Work in Progress)

I love process. I love drafts and iterations, watching something take form. I often wish we celebrated the process more, instead of just focusing on the results, but I recognize I’m in the minority there. Nobody wants to see Yo-Yo Ma practice a piece for hours, they want to see the soaring performance that comes after.

There is evidence, though, that people may want to see more of the process than they realize. The world (correctly) lost its mind three years ago when the Beatles documentary Get Back showed Paul McCartney will “Get Back” into existence over the course of about 45 minutes. The recent deluxe edition of Revolver offered something similar, as “Got to Get You Into My Life” thrillingly took form over four distinct versions.

Aside from the technical knowledge you can gain by consuming multiple drafts of something, the invaluable insights surrounding the “why”s behind each decision made, observing the process also makes great works seem within reach. The picture book Princess Mononoke: The First Story, for example, collects a series of conceptual paintings from a young Hayao Miyazaki. The story, which he wrote and illustrated in the early 80’s, contains the seeds of what would become not only Princess Mononoke, but also My Neighbor Totoro. That those two ideas were at one point intertwined makes both masterpieces seem less impossible as individual accomplishments, while it seems all the more magical—to me at least—that each arrived at its final, “inevitable” form.

* * * * *

In September of 1991, as Disney Animation was putting the finishing touches on Beauty and the Beast, the studio made the unusual decision to bring a work print to the New York Film Festival. Though it is not uncommon for live-action directors to screen rough cuts, this was an unprecedented choice for an animation studio. My guess is that Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg—for some reason I always want to call him Jeffrey Katzenberger—was eager to publicize Disney’s next musical. While The Little Mermaid had been a big success, subsequent release The Rescuers Down Under was a bomb.

The NYFF print was not a rough draft. The film had been locked for ages. The audio was basically finished. What made it a work in progress was the animation, 30% of which was raw pencil drawings, storyboards, or even concept art. In the age of the Internet, and having lived through the era of the DVD extra (RIP), we’ve grown accustomed to this sort of look behind the curtain. This was 1991. Most of the people in that audience had probably never seen anything like it. By all accounts, it was a success. Viewers responded with a lengthy standing ovation.

While I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that theater, I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to watch the print, which was included when Beauty and the Beast made its DVD debut in 2002. Despite having owned the print across two formats and two decades, I realized last night that I’d never watched it. I was surprised. I adore animation as a medium and technical process. I almost majored in animation in undergrad. The work in progress version of Beauty and the Beast feels like something I should be screening annually at my apartment, and I’ve never  seen it? I decided to put it on.

It was wonderful, obviously. It’s always wonderful to experience something you know and love in a new way. In my lifetime, I have watched Beauty and the Beast well over 100 times (if my mom is reading this, she probably just scoffed out loud at the idea that the number could be so low, but I’m being conservative). Over time, it has settled into something familiar. Not closed off, necessarily, but finished. The work print cracked it back open. Because I was paying more attention, watching it as a new work, I experienced it more intensely.

More than that, the unfinished pencils, storyboards, and concept paintings encouraged me to really think about the people who made the movie. Rather than focusing on the animation, I started thinking about the animators. I do that all the time when watching stop-motion, whose tactility actively encourages the audience to think about the artisans. Finalized hand-animation renders the process, and therefore the people behind it, invisible.

The rough pencil lines of unfinished animation bring a similar tactile quality. Much as you cannot see a slight indentation on a plasticine puppet without thinking of the thumb that made it, you cannot look at unvarnished graphite without imagining the pencil and the hand holding it.

Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the Beast, delivered something particularly astonishing. Because I was paying so much attention, I even noticed new details in the finished material. Take as an example the scene after the Beast rescues Belle from the wolves.

“If you would hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much,” Belle chides.

“If you hadn’t runaway, this wouldn’t have happened,” Beast replies, a smirk on his face.

“If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away.”

“Well,” he begins, frantically searching for a reply, “you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing.”

Look at his face! He is grinning! Grinning! In 33 years of watching Beauty and the Beast, I never before noticed that he is enjoying the flirtation, the back-and-forth. He is so pleased with himself for finding a riposte. “Keane should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Actor,” I muttered to myself during another scene. I stand by it.

The ultimate outcome of all this is that every pan, every zoom, every vocal inflection, every subtle bit of squash-and-stretch, all of it became transparently the result of human choices. Of course, it always was. Just like Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent performances of Bach’s cello suites, the electric final arrangement of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the forms into which My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke ultimately settled, Beauty and the Beast as a movie exists because a remarkable, driven group of people got together and did the work. The NYFF work in progress print is a wonderful reminder that you have to build a house brick-by-brick, that the process is just as worthy of celebration as the end result.

If anyone wants to attend next year’s screening, please know ahead of time that seating at my place is limited. Tickets go on sale May 1st.

Merrily We Roll Along at the Hudson Theatre

I wonder how much time and energy has been put into deconstructing Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim’s infamous problem child. I wouldn’t be surprised if more ink has been spilt over Merrily than any other show in his canon, and I wonder, I do I do, if any show with so short an original run has received as many revivals. The strangest part of all this is that the general consensus remains the same, forty years later: Merrily We Roll Along does not work.

People love a project, though, and that may account for the show’s enduring popularity among theatre types. It’s also about theatre types, which can’t be discounted. Whatever the reason may be, every five or ten years someone has a high-profile production that “fixes” this unfixable show. The current production, under Maria Friedman’s direction, purports to do exactly that, and the general audience response seems to find it successful.

Imagine if I did? How boring would this be to read?

Merrily is an uncomfortable creation, a musical told in reverse. It tracks the dynamics between three friends—Franklin Shephard, composer; Charley Kingas, playwright; and Mary Flynn, journalist and critic—over the course of 25 years, from about 1980 to 1955. The show opens at a party hosted by Frank, who has recently transitioned from successful theatre composer to successful Hollywood producer. As the show unspools, or spools, or respools, or however you want to put it, events from the past make sense of what we’ve already seen in the future.

It’s a clever idea, one that feels like it should work. That may be another reason why Merrily keeps finding new gasps of life: it is easy to convince yourself that it’s only a few small tweaks away from humming along. Given the creative team involved—Hal Prince as original director, George Furth writing the book, and Sondheim on keys—that’s understandable. Nevertheless, every production leads people back to the same conclusion: everyone is so unlikable when the show starts, it’s impossible to care about them by the end.

I don’t know if that’s the problem. It might be a problem, sure, but I don’t think it’s the problem. There are plenty of unlikeable characters littering the aisles of American theatre, and we don’t bandy that criticism around. I think the issue is more complicated than that. I think Merrily, for all the work the writers put into it, feels kind of lazy.

That is, prima face, an absurd statement. If there are negative words to be associated with Stephen Sondheim, “lazy” ain’t one of ‘em. To clarify, I don’t think the show is lazy. I said it feels lazy, which is not the same thing. Because of its structure, Merrily has no choice but to take shortcuts to try and elicit emotional responses it hasn’t earned. That’s what happens when you show the post before the hoc. Structured as it is, the show is asking for the audience to experience the payoff without first having invested.

The entire score is built around reversing song and reprise. Embittered or warped renditions of songs transform back into their original purity, mirroring the journey of the characters. Look at “Not a Day Goes By,” which, chronologically, is first sung at Frank’s wedding. The song appears again when Beth and Frank get divorced, a fairly traditional use of song and reprise. The song they sang to one another at their wedding is now a lament of the fact that she’ll never stop loving him. 

The problem? We don’t know Beth yet. Her solo performance of “Not a Day Goes By” is the first time we see the character. That’s a heavy song that requires a lot of audience investment to work, but we don’t get that. Instead, it feels maudlin.

Beth is my favorite character in the show. If the whole thing were presented chronologically, I would probably find her performance of “Not a Day Goes By” devastating. As it is, the best I can give you as an audience member is “I trust that the song currently being sung is motivated by something I will understand later,” which puts me at a remove. Musical theatre is all about feeling. That is its primary motivation as an art form. You cannot separate an audience from what’s on stage emotionally like that and expect it to work in the same way.

Another curious side effect of putting things in reverse order, one I wouldn’t have expected: as the final scene pulls everything together, it feels pat. The show ends with Charley and Frank on the rooftop of their new New York apartment building, watching Sputnik fly overhead. During that scene, a few of the show’s biggest dots are connected. We see Charley and Frank become collaborators, and we watch them meet Mary. We also, finally, see the moment Mary falls in love with Frank.

All of these dots that get connected feel cheap, though. The most tragic moment in the show, discovering that a piece of advice Frank cynically gives a young writer in the first scene was taken from a compliment Charley paid Frank in the moment they decided to become collaborators, elicited a laugh from the audience. Somehow, presenting the whole thing backwards turned everything that’s meaningful into a punchline.

The backwards structure makes the show a puzzle, like the similarly-designed Memento. Instead of living in each moment, we are constantly wondering about what happened next [sic.]. Memento is a thriller. Trying to solve the puzzle is part of the fun. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy about three friends, success, and ego. These are not the same. I continually found myself thinking about that joke from the pilot of Mad Men, when Don Draper says “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Mad Men never made a joke like that again, and for good reason.

Merrily We Roll Along fails for reasons the writers never could have predicted. The current production is very good, but the material is too clever by half. Musical theatre is inherently, and I say this as someone who loves it deeply, a medium for dumb-dumbs. Even at its most intelligent, at its most daring, musical theatre needs to be immediate, something you can entirely lose yourself in. Merrily doesn’t give the audience the space to do that. We’re too busy balancing ledgers and keeping track of questions.

You know, before I saw Merrily We Roll Along, I assumed Mary was the bookwriter in a three-way collaboration. I do think the show would be much better if she were. It would raise the stakes around her, make the dramatic triangle into a real triangle…Hm. Maybe I really can fix it.

Into the Woods at the St. James Theatre

This piece was originally written in the fall of 2022.

I’ve had the good fortune to see the current Broadway production of Into the Woods twice now, once at Encores! and once at the St. James last night. To say that the reception has been positive would be an understatement. “Euphoric” would probably be an understatement. The ovation the audience gives the fully-assembled cast at the top of the show competes in my memory only with the applause that greeted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entrance at the top of Hamilton back in 2016.

It’s easy to understand the excitement. Into the Woods is uniquely beloved amongst musicals, thanks in large part to its ubiquity in high schools, and the ready availability of a filmed performance of the original Broadway production. It’s been ten years since the show was seen in New York City, and twenty since it was last on Broadway. The audience was ready.

The cast, too, seems to have been ready. You can feel love for the material undulate off the stage. In both performances, Sara Bareilles in particular gave off a sense of being thrilled just to be doing this. It was readily apparent at Encores! that Heather Headley, Gavin Creel, David Patrick Kelly, Annie Golden and Julia Lester all love the show. It was also readily apparent, as it always is, that Neil Patrick Harris loves an audience.

At both Encores! and the St. James, I got the feeling that I wasn’t watching a production of Into the Woods so much as I was watching a production of a production of Into the Woods. The energy suggested the March sisters performing Jo’s plays in the attic. That kind of joy in the material is infectious, and I wish we saw more of it in professional theatre. With this material, though, that approach is a double-edged sword. Everyone is having too good a time to be thoughtful. The audience and the performers were so obviously in love with the material already that none of them seemed terribly concerned with doing the work to embody what makes it great.

With a show like Fiddler on the Roof, say, that wouldn’t be a problem. Get me a cast and an audience that loves the material in Fiddler and I’m going to have a great night. Into the Woods is different. It is a messier, trickier creature. Its themes are subtler, and the fluctuations in its moods will get away from you if you don’t work very hard to pin them down.

Not only does this production fail to offer any substantive work as far as the themes are concerned, worse than that, this is Into the Woods as vaudeville. This is a first-class production of Into the Woods directed as though it were the school version that omits the second act. It’s all comedy, no contemplation. Not that Into the Woods isn’t written to be funny; the show is filled with space for comedy, with lines that can be milked for laughs as much or as little as the actors want. Director Lear deBessonet appears to have told everyone to milk the show dry as Milky White.

This makes the first act a breeze, but the second crumbles into dust. Into the Woods is based on classic fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The first act, which more or less depicts these fairytales unchanged, is followed by a second act that interrogates the assumptions at the heart of those stories. What if you escape the tower and your mother, but the world really is dangerous and unpredictable? What if life with Prince Charming isn’t all you expected? Was Jack right to take from the giant?

Without deep and sincere character work in the first act, which is the egg that holds this bake together, the audience has nothing to hold onto when the tempo and mood suddenly shift. The darker and more thoughtful turn taken by the second act is so ill-served by the choices here that I found myself wondering during the Encores! performance if “No One Is Alone” makes any sense as a song. It was unmoored from any dramaturgical sense of place.

Though most of the major issues persist, the Broadway production is a marked improvement. The production itself hasn’t changed at all, but the cast has. Phillipa Soo was magnificent as Cinderella. She brought a subtlety to “On the Steps of the Palace” that most of the first act lacked. Brian d’Arcy James, as dependable a leading man as you can get, made sure that the Baker is a coherent individual rather than a series of laugh lines. When their rendition of “No One Is Alone” started, from the moment Soo’s phrasing choices crystalized on “Mother cannot guide you,” it was a revelation.

D’Arcy James and Soo are such experienced, thoughtful actors that they are able to push against the limitations of what the production is asking. They can feel in their bones what the show is meant to be, and they instinctually steer it in that direction. My greatest disappointment in all of this may be that the two of them were not in the production their performances deserve. That would be worth all this euphoria and then some.

I find myself thinking again and again about what the reviews and audience response would be like if this had been the first-ever production of Into the Woods. Rest assured that the reviews would be nowhere near as kind. They’d fall more in line with the gentleman I overheard leaving the St. James, who said “I loved the first act but the second act was kinda…” If this were the show’s debut, it would have almost immediately vanished into obscurity. What I saw a month ago at Encores! and last night at the St. James was a good musical comedy with a messy second act. Lord knows we have enough of those. Into the Woods is, as both the cast and the audience know, so much more than that.

The Zone of Interest

If there’s a single argument to be made in favor of The Zone of Interest being a great work of art, it’s the fact that I have walked away from each of my two viewings with entirely different impressions. The first time I watched it, I was at home, and I disliked the majority of what I saw. Save for the very end, I found it self-consciously arty and pretentious, a film that took two slow and tedious hours to say exactly what The Look of Silence had said a decade earlier.

Zone of Interest depicts the day-to-day home lives of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. It is not, and the movie will not be upset to hear me say this, interesting. He sits through a pitch meeting for work in the study, or takes his children fishing. She tries on a fur coat, tends the garden, receives her visiting mother. The children see daddy off to work as he mounts a horse. It is all achingly, intentionally quotidian.

The ending, in contrast, absorbed me completely. As Rudolf leaves an opulent Berlin party, he stops on a landing and stares off into the dark. The camera cuts to contemporary footage of staff preparing Auschwitz for a day of visitors. They sweep, and wipe, and vacuum. The sound of the vacuum was violent in the context of what had been a quiet, restrained film.

Despite my disinterest in the rest of the movie, I thought about those shots for days afterward. The staff of the museum echoed the staff at the house, bustling here and there on behalf of the museum’s visitors, on behalf of the Hösses, and, somehow, on behalf of me. The shots in the museum felt pointed at the viewer, asking me if I’m all that different from the people I’ve spent the last two hours watching.

I don’t mean that in a boring way. I’m not talking about the Banality of Evil. Events like the Holocaust are far away, we tell ourselves, separated by so much time and civilization. We put our memorials behind glass and tell ourselves that it won’t happen again, which isn’t really all that different from how the Höss family conducts their business. They separated themselves from the realities of their lives with trellises and vines. “This will grow and cover everything, you’ll see,” Hedwig says to her mother about the vines surrounding their yard.

What’s striking about the museum in that instant is the sanitation of the whole thing. The glass is a transparent barrier, that’s better than a wall, but it’s still a barrier. Plate glass separates you and me from piles of abandoned shoes, from thousands of ownerless suitcases, from the systemized subjugation and murder of how many millions of lives. The thing about plate glass is that it can, as we have seen recently, shatter.

As for the rest of the film, what struck me as pretentious at home felt finely-tuned in the theater. Dozens of smaller details leapt out. The Zone of Interest is all about those details. Auschwitz does not exist save for an ambience at the edge of their lives, an inconvenience that continually insists on making itself known. The fishing trip ends suddenly when he realizes that the camp, located upstream, has dumped incinerator ash into the river.

At home, I rolled my eyes. In the theater, I understood that I wasn’t meant to have a reaction to what I was seeing so much as I was meant to observe the characters’ reactions. Imagine having to scrub your children down to rid them of human remains and then going back to work.

A pair of scenes set at night, treated to resemble a photographic negative, show a young girl of about 10 hiding food in the fields where the prisoners work. She pushes apples into the soil and hides pears among their shovels while an ominous sound repeats over and over. Hers are the only altruistic actions in the film, the only time a character steps outside of themselves to think about others without resenting the implications.

Everyone else seems content with their lot, or content to look away. Hedwig’s mother has the most complex reaction of any German we see. At first, she is happy for her daughter, for her house and her successful husband, but that doesn’t seem to last. She vanishes in the night, after waking up to the eerie red light of the incinerator. That’s as close to an act of resistance as any of the Germans get, a quiet “nein, danke.”

The characters we spend the most time with have chosen to lean in, and none with more alacrity than Hedwig. “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice,” she offhandedly snaps at one of the Polish housemaids. She understands the hierarchy of this world. The cruelty, to borrow from Adam Serwer, becomes the point. The Zone of Interest isn’t talking about the Banality of Evil either. It isn’t about evil rendered with indifference. It is about evil realized with surgical precision, with aplomb, because it works. This is a depiction of evil as means.

In their last on-screen conversation, one held over the phone, Hedwig asks Rudolf about the party. “Who was there?” “I didn’t really pay attention,” he replies. “I was thinking about how I would gas them all. It would be a particular challenge, because of the high ceilings.”

As he descends the stairs, just before the contemporary footage of Auschwitz, he stops twice to retch. It is 1943. The worst of the Holocaust is about to begin. Höss has that day accepted responsibility for the military operation that bears his name, the transportation and extermination of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews. The retches seem to me his body’s last attempt to expel all of the evil he has so willingly imbibed. He swallows it down, fixes his cap, and continues to descend the stairwell into absolute darkness.

Ennio

Ennio Morricone, the beloved Italian film composer, left behind a remarkable body of work. Active well into his 80’s, Morricone’s scores are remarkable not only for their sheer quantity—he scored over 400 films and television programs over the course of sixty years—but for their quality. The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly; a handful of deeply influential gialo films; The Mission; Cinema Paradiso; Once Upon a Time in America; The Hateful Eight. On and on, the list goes. These are some of the greatest scores of all time. You could talk about Morricone’s work for days without running out of things to talk about.

So wealthy a corpus should be ideal fodder for a documentary, but Ennio, the 2021 Italian documentary, doesn’t know what to do with that much material. It’s far too long, too repetitive, and all while nothing that’s mentioned gets the time it deserves. We learn very little of consequence, about either him or the work. While you would hope a 2.5 hour documentary about one of the greatest composers of the 20th century would provide a buffet, it’s more a loose assembly of Costco samples.

That is not a knock on Costco samples, I was raised on Costco samples, but they don’t make a meal.

It started off strong, overlaying audio from various talking heads with footage of il maestro doing stretches. Exercise will keep you, it seems, pretty damn limber. I salivated at the thought of going through his office, lined as the shelves were with albums, scores, and books. The only real glimpse into anything profound comes on two occasions when Morricone reveals an exceptional sensitivity, something that he seems to keep guarded much of the time. It is easy to see how that type of sensitivity would have contributed to his work, which exudes raw humanity.

Despite my disappointment in the film itself, I found myself walking away consumed with thoughts about the magic of The Movies. This was only my second time hearing Morricone’s music in a theater, despite the fact that he has been one of my favorite composers for as long as I’ve had favorite composers. I’ve seen clips from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly dozens of times over the course of my life, and I have always had an academic interest in seeing it, but watching those scenes play out on the big screen, surrounded by darkness and those glorious sounds, having nothing else to distract me? I became positively desperate to see them.

I know every note of “Gabriel’s Oboe,” one of the main themes from Morricone’s score for The Mission, and I heard it in a completely new light on Thursday. How many times have I heard the coyote call from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly? Even in the midst of a documentary that was too long, during which I found myself dozing off intermittently, the power of those great scores wed to those great films, presented in a room in which I had no choice but to completely surrender myself to what I was seeing and hearing?

Fuck, man. The movies.

The Silence of the Lambs

It was impossible for me to read The Silence of the Lambs in a vacuum. I’ve seen the movie too many times. The book had to exist in conversation with its adaptation, which does seem unfair, the parent justifying their own existence to the child. I was immediately struck by the tone, and the degree to which the movie gets the tone right. There is a quality to the opening chapters, a studied remove, a sense that something nearby (but not here) is wrong. Director Jonathan Demme captured that perfectly. I have no idea how. How do you translate something as ephemeral as texture to a different medium? It’s a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned.

With the book fresh in my mind, I rewatched the movie. It has long been one of my favorites, and the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that I now experience the movie as an adaptation while I’m watching it. Just about everything I love about The Silence of the Lambs, it turns out, comes from the book. Even the way Demme explores the experience of women in male spaces, something that I’ve always understood to be Demme’s own exploration of the material, is right there on the page. The film is remarkably faithful to the source material.

Most, if not all, of the changes are about focusing the material. Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge of Behavioral Psychology, no longer has a dying wife, which makes sense. The movie is concerned entirely with Clarice Starling. No need to venture away from that. Exposition is far deadlier in a movie than it is in a book, and a number of adjustments are made to spare the audience an explanation. All in all, it’s entirely successful.

The one thing that suffers in this adaptation? Hannibal Lecter.

It feels as weird for me to say it as it probably does for you to read it. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an iconic performance, one that still reverberates within culture at large. More people know references to Hannibal Lecter than have seen the movie or read the book. Hopkins won an Academy Award, for god’s sake.

Nevertheless, if there’s one character the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs lets down, it’s the good doctor. A series of small and individually innocuous changes come together to turn Lecter into a bogeyman. In the film, he destroyed his medical records before the FBI arrested him, something the fastidious and studied Dr. Lecter of the novel would almost certainly never consider. It’s an act of impropriety. “Discourtesy,” as he says, “is unspeakably ugly to me.” They were destroyed in the book as the result of a court order, which also feels more in keeping with Harris’s worldview in a way that I can’t entirely articulate.

There’s a scene in the novel where Lecter discusses a fellow inmate with Starling, talking about how the poor fellow has been misdiagnosed by the viscously unpleasant head of the asylum, Dr. Chilton. You get the impression in that scene that Lecter does, to some extent, care about this misdiagnosis, even if it is because the misdiagnosis itself is more of an affront to him than this unfortunate individual being left to live an unnecessarily catatonic life.

The biggest change, a throwaway bit of exposition that explains Lecter’s awareness of the presence of a human head in a Baltimore storage locker, makes it sound like the locker is his. In the novel, the story is more complex, undoubtedly trimmed down for time, but Lecter had nothing to do with the head being there. He knew about it through a patient. The problem with this, only obvious once you see it, is that Lecter becomes, through that exposition, entirely monstrous. He is no longer a terrifying human being, but a sort of a bogeyman. He puts heads in the backs of cars of storage units. In the book, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying man. The movie is content to make him a Monster.

As for the book? Magnificent. Within 50 pages, I had stopped thinking about the movie at all. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs is incredible, full of great writing and memorable scenes. He knows how to do quite a bit with very little. I was sad every time the subway arrived at my destination. For one blissful week, any ten-minute pause in my schedule was an opportunity to make progress. In the last year and a half, I’ve read two other books I loved this much: The Grapes of Wrath and The Poisonwood Bible. That puts The Silence of the Lambs in remarkable company.

The Taste of Things

The Taste of Things begins with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) in an estate garden, collecting vegetables. I immediately noticed the sound of her clogs clapping against the boards laid between the garden rows. That sound, it turns out, is a mission statement. This is a profoundly sensual film, one that forces the audience to delight in all the senses a movie can rally to its purpose.

The first 15 or 20 minutes revolve around the preparation of a lavish meal. There is little dialogue, and no real sense of who we’re watching. I was unsure if Eugénie and Dodin (Benoît Magimel) were servants, or a husband and wife working their own stove, or both. Director Trần Anh Hùng nurses that ambiguity. For these people, the preparation of food is the greatest creative act, the greatest act of love, possible. Their passion fills the screen.

I assume the opening sequence lasts about 15 or 20 minutes. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was transfixed. It may have been 10 minutes, and it may have been half an hour. I could have watched these four people—house servant Violette and her niece Pauline assist—cook that meal for the duration of the movie. It’s a perfect example of the magic of cinema, of something no other medium can do. I was in a shit mood as I walked into the theater, but the aesthetic spell cast from the jump is so complete that I was instantly carried away.

Hùng’s camera lingers on every detail. Every time a plate is scraped into a pot or mushrooms are chucked in a pan, I found myself overwhelmed. If the camera took a moment to peer into a pot, which it nearly always did, I cheered. “I should spend more time preparing my own food,” he thought to himself only two hours before buying a cubano and some oversized cookies in the foodcourt.

The Taste of Things is more accurately represented by its French title, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. We learn that the elaborate meal they’re preparing, a multi-course monstrosity spearheaded by Eugénie, is a dinner for Dodin and his gourmet friends. They are a kind-hearted group of enthusiasts, men who talk of food while dining, who discuss the history behind dishes and the latest gossip involving the employment of the great chefs. One of my favorite running jokes of the film is that the four friends seem an inseparable collective, nearly always around. There’s something of magical realism about them.

Food, then, is Dodin’s passion. After the meal, his friends pass through the kitchen, complimenting Eugénie for her efforts and asking why she no longer dines with them. “For it to be done right, I must be here in the kitchen,” she demures. At that point, I assumed they were married. The warmth pours out of both of them, helped I’m sure by the fact that Binoche and Magimel were together in real life for about a decade. It’s only later that night, when Dodin and Eugénie are sat outside by the lake for tea, recovering from the exhaustion of the day’s efforts, that we receive clarity. “I’ll ask again,” he says as he puffs his pipe. “Will you marry me?”

That’s more or less the temperament of The Taste of Things, content to reveal without ever focusing. Not only are Eugénie and Dodin not married, they aren’t even “technically” a couple. They are certainly in love. Through food and over time they have discovered the shared language that is at the center of any great relationship.

Dodin proposes to Eugénie again later in the film, during a marvelous scene in which he cooks a multi-course meal for her. He proposes with a dish, and it is in keeping with the movie’s overall sensibilities that this is the one dish we never get a glamour shot of. The Taste of Things avoids the moments of highest drama as much as it can. It’s fitting that we never see the only dish in the story with an agenda beyond the joys of feeding and eating. It occurs to me, that too is a good description of love.

During that opening sequence, Eugénie briefly reveals that she is hiding an illness. We assume she will die later, and indeed she does. When she dies, she takes Dodin’s joy for (not of) cooking away. He loses all interest in food. “You haven’t eaten in two days,” Violette admonishes. That’s a bad sign no matter who you are, but for Dodin, that’s cataclysmic. This is a man who came home from an eight-hour meal to request some simple dishes from Eugénie before going to bed. “He didn’t want to sleep on the memory of that meal,” she says with a smile.

A few hours after getting home, my mind is marinating in the images and sounds of The Taste of Things. It makes the argument that life is what we experience, for however long we manage to do that; it should all be taken in to the fullest extent possible. I’m also thinking about Eugénie and Dodin, about their love for one another, about the language they share between themselves, and about Dodin’s loss.

“I have a very important question for you,” Eugénie says.

“Yes.”

“Am I your cook, or your wife?”

Dodin takes a moment before taking her hand. “My cook, of course.”

Eugénie smiles. “Thank you.”

Taylor Swift got it right when she wrote, “You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else.”

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

I had a bit of an unusual experience with A Man’s Place, Nobel Prize–winner Annie Ernaux’s 1983 book inspired by her father’s death. I started out reading La place in the original French, in one of those handsome Gallimard editions that are the exact kind of anonymous that I’ve come to associate with luxury goods. I made it about 20 or so pages over the course of a week before deciding I was over it. The writing felt somehow too mannered, too self-possessed, like I was watching a pretentious art film.

I had a copy of the English translation, A Man’s Place, and decided to give that a quick look before ditching the book entirely. I started from the beginning, and a strange thing happened: I was so absorbed by what I was reading that I kept reading, clearing 20 or 30 pages of book while standing at the dining room table. What had initially seemed overly mannered and affectedly brusque in the French suddenly felt like an author maintaining the necessary distance to keep herself together.

I still can’t account for it. The French is not particularly difficult, and the English translation is nearly word-for-word how I myself would translate it were I given the task. Why, then, was this the case? More confounding, when I mentioned the issue to my friend Sara, she told me that over the years she had had multiple friends tell her that Ernaux is best read in translation. These were all French speakers, with a variety of native languages. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.

A Man’s Place is about Ernaux’s father. In the process of depicting his life, it cannot help but be about class and family relationships, and how those intersect. The first passage I underlined came some 30 pages into this 90-page book, when Ernaux imagines the moment her parents met. “My mother must have been impressed…when she met him at the rope factory. Before then she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’”

Something about Ernaux’s mother using “my husband” while talking to Ernaux about her father struck me as remarkably intimate. It feels proud, warmly possessive, and immensely personal. It’s almost uncomfortable to read. I’m realizing now as I write this that Ernaux never tells us her parents’ names, and somehow that serves to make that passage all the more moving. All we are, all we have, is our relationships with those who love us, and so the people here are defined in those terms.

While Ernaux’s parents began life as working class, they managed to work their way up. They opened a grocery store and café, becoming fixtures of the local community in the process. A lot of the most interesting material here relates to the difficulties that result from successfully achieving what I guess we can’t quite call the American Dream, from managing to make more of your financial situation. Relatives appear from time to time, expecting groceries for free while referring to the pair as superior.

Most touching is the impact their transition has on their relationship with their own daughter. When her father visits her as an adult, “I described the flat, the Louis-Philippe writing desk, the hi-fi system and the red velvet armchairs. He soon lost interest. He had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy, but the antique dresser and the Dunlopillo mattress meant nothing more to him than the signs of social success. He often cut me short by saying, ‘You’re quite right to make the most of it.’” He has spent his life working so she can became a part of a world that holds little for him outside of the aspirational possibility of getting there. “Every time I did well in [school], he saw it as an achievement and the hope that one day I might be better than him.” [Italics hers.]

That theme is even reflected in his language, with frequent references to the ways he would oscillate back and forth between textbook French and his native Brittany dialect. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s protagonists in the Neapolitan Novels, individuals who manage a similar upward climb over the course of their lives, who would resort to dialect when angry. We are who we are. We can change the surrounding circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can change ourselves.