I’ve been watching old movies late at night, bits of which come up again and again, as I flip channels and the movies are repeated. In this way, eventually I piece together a whole. Or actually look at the listings and, quelle horror, watch the thing from beginning to end. Which is not remotely as interesting, especially if you’ve gotten good chunks of the film under your belt.
There is the pleasure, for instance, of seeing that fool Sir Clifford in his motorized wheelchair, ca. 1930, roll backward all the way down the hill, scaring the hell out of everybody, not least himself. I know one is supposed to think of his impotence, but really, the man is a pill. And it’s not like Parkin, the gamekeeper, is some god-awful stud, that’s the point. If anything, he proves to be more tender of heart than Constance, Lady Chatterley. Who, in this lovely French version, is played in that wonderfully girl-woman way that reminds one of the real. It’s nonsense, American film is, on sex. It’s formulaic, and the camera is always a man. Or a boy of about fourteen.
How odd, how lovely, then, as in so many European films, to see the characters brought forward as persons. The invisible eye of the American camera, which is nonetheless firmly controlling your gaze, is nearly always a studly thing, supporting and catering to, well, pretty much all that is sick about American sex, and gender.
Parkin and Constance running about in the rain, full frontal male nudity, without a wink. Ah, directed by a woman, wouldn’t you know.
And then there is the notion of the inversion between background and figure, the way in which the characters’ bodies become the landscape and the flowers become the figure. Pascale Ferran
When I was a girl, I winced when people were crude, it spoiled things so. The boys on the schoolbus—once they were twelve or so and had discovered the old in-and-out, they were lost to any other subject. The rest of us, the girls, on the long ride to and from school, were made miserable—and a bit more lonely. Our bus was famous for the singing we used to do, all the way home, as was our driver, who drove us in his best bus. I can’t imagine what the sound was like from outside, it must have been quite lovely as we passed, the windows open in spring, thirty children at full voice.
I’m going to say it again, only slightly differently this time: you write like an Impressionist master.
On the bus, the real story is the devolution of romance and the loneliness of the American male, the American female. Outside the bus, the imagined story of an intimacy and a collaboration in the song. In my imagination, maybe one child from among the singers grows up to escape the confinement of lessons learned on the bus and, briefly, finds something as lovely as Constance discovers with her Parkin. Maybe she will recognize it when she sees it again, much later in life, on film.
I had never thought about how crudely and pruriently American treat sex in movies, but I guess we do. We either titillate or bludgeon with images. Good old Puritans!
For a couple of years, I have been planning to post about a perfect-moments memory of the voices of 7th- or 8th-grade girls harmonizing Top-40 hits on a school bus.
We didn’t have school buses in our small NJ town, where nearly everyone walked to school. So this was an “event” — a field trip to the museums in a nearby city. And oh, my, those voices… Thank the gods it would take me another six or seven years to know what a crush was or I would have been very confused: was this one girl leaving an imprint, or ten? As it was, I didn’t have to think about what was going on in my head. (Until decades later, of course, by which time the memory lies exposed for good.)
Bang on about the sensibility of American films vs. French, although I do love both. (Except when they’re mixed, as in godawful Hollywood remakes of French classics. The only good case to be made against miscegenation.)
Nance led me here, for which I thank her. And thank you for the lovely read.
“The invisible eye of the American camera, which is nonetheless firmly controlling your gaze, is nearly always a studly thing…”
Thank you! These words explain for once the discomfort I have towards American (Hollywood) films: same subject, nay, same book, different outcomes.
And the school bus as the ground where sexuality is fought, negotiated, and defined. A fine dissertation topic!