Fish Beach
I do this stupid thing where, if I’m weary or sad or anything other than alert and wide-eyed and distinctly ready for some stimulation, I resist watching “good films”. By which I might mean “serious films,” because I’m generally willing to allow myself Woody Allen or Wes Anderson (both have the same initials! How have I never noticed this before?!) It’s not something I’m particularly proud of but I don’t quite know how to counter this tendency. The Marquis has this theory that good art is always uplifting but I don’t know how I feel about that. Anyway, it seems stupid to make myself miserable by shoving Dancer in the Dark down my throat when I’m already exhausted and moody. (Is Dancer in the Dark good? I don’t really remember; I only remember the feeling of gutting horror and melancholy I felt once it was over.)
Acceptable Dancer in the Dark. [From Rock God Cred.]
The first time I heard of Peter Greenaway was when I read Nick Hornby’s ubiquitous High Fidelity in high school, where Greenaway’s films are posited as an antidote to the fluffy business of spending all morning wafting around record stores waiting for something worthy of purchase to leap out from the racks. This concept interested me but also put me on guard, since I lived in the most boring town in the universe and the mere thought of having access to sufficiently interesting record stores to spend an entire morning browsing made me dizzy with excitement; an antidote was hardly in order.
Still back in high school, I caught a little bit of a Greenaway film on SBS late one night - I have no idea which one, I just saw his name listed in the TV guide - and I toyed with the idea of watching it to see what Rob was banging on about but gave up after about three minutes. My recollection of the film is of a black velvety screen with several heads emerging from it, wearing ruffs and screeching in various accents. (This may not resemble any scene from any Peter Greenaway film. Memory is a strange thing.) “Ahh, he’s one of those,” I thought to myself grimly, and put aside all notions of furthering my interest in Greenaway for a few years, although when I noticed people had him listed as an interest on social media I would think, “Surely not really though.”
This may have been what I had in mind. [From Precious Bodily Fluids ]
A couple of people recently told me I should watch The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. This didn’t seem such a bad plan. The name indicated there would at least be some sex, which always breaks up a boring film quite nicely. The Marquis de Marque and I were at Planet the other night and I asked him if he’d ever seen the film, and he said yes it’s a wonderful film and then he said let’s get it out right now and you can watch it this week, so we did.
The version we rented had a less salacious cover; this one is much better. [From The Cinematic Endeavours of Peter Greenaway.]
It took me a while to get around to watching it because for whatever reason sitting down to watch a film at home makes me feel like I am wasting a tremendous amount of time I could be using to get better at playing guitar or going for a run along the Swan River. But finally there was a rainy night, and no one was home but me, and I had things to do but I was clearly not going to get them done, so I put it on.
The rain was very loud and for whatever reason the DVD was very quiet so I could hardly hear the first scene. It wasn’t until later that I realized what had occurred. All I could make out for, I don’t know, the first twenty minutes or so was this grotesque, shouting fool (whom I had not yet identified as Dumbledore, although I can tell you it was a painful jolt to realise those same kind eyes had recently overseen the sentence, “Harry, you wonderful boy; you brave, brave man.”)
I wasn’t sure whether I would even bother making it through the film until there came a scene where this elegant cheekboned woman (whom I had not yet identified as Helen Mirren) stares at a lovely polite-looking man (whom I would never identify as Alan Howard, since I don’t really know much about him) with a book trying to eat but failing as food falls off his fork (I was a child who was persistently scolded for eating and reading; I understand this conundrum entirely). It was, I guess, the first moment of humanity in the thing.
Greenaway and Mirren. I may be bad at recognising her but heavens I love her. [From The Cinematic Endeavours of Peter Greenaway.]
Shortly after was the first love scene between Howard and Mirren, and it was so captivating that it took my breath away, not so much because of the lighting trick which first becomes apparent here (although it’s great) but because of the piece of music that swelled underneath it. The first four notes of it stalled me; the second four moved me and the eight following made me close my eyes and exhale very slowly.
I was certain that I knew the piece of music from somewhere, but I was uncertain of my certainty. You know how very good music often makes you feel like you have heard it before? I think Jeff Bridges says that in Crazy Heart. Oh well, he makes a decent point.
Say what you will, the Dude makes a decent point. [From The Film Stage.]
So I can’t pretend I wasn’t sort of sickened or terrorised throughout the rest of the film (the concept of force-feeding makes me intensely anxious, so in many ways this was not the film for me), but after that scene I was rather more amenable to finding myself sickened. Which was a fine thing, because there were a million things that revolted me, but the piece of music I had heard sustained me through these moments and even had the decency to reappear a number of times, just when I was feeling too disgusted to continue.
I looked it up afterwards and discovered it was a piece of music called Fish Beach, originally written by Michael Nyman for another Greenaway film. This didn’t help me too much, but I conducted some deeper research (approximately ten minutes of it, which in the Internet Age is probably equivalent to a PhD.) Eventually I realised where I knew it from: Man on Wire, a documentary about tightrope walker Philippe Petite, who concocted a plan to bypass World Trade Centre security and string a wire between the twin towers.
Well, that explained a lot. I saw Man on Wire at Cinema Paradiso a while back and I sobbed and sobbed, because I was so moved that someone should be so driven to undertake something so demonically beautiful. I always like documentaries more than I think I will but this was by far the strongest reaction I had ever had to one. I don’t think I can even talk about it but to say: watch the documentary; it is important that we see people doing magnificent things.
You know, I heard that Greenaway is a bit of a hardliner and thinks that basically all modern cinema is shithouse. This may be a complete myth – I will research in time – so don’t go quoting me. After watching this film I thought that, if that is Mr Greenaway’s opinion, he is probably right. Most other things I might have considered watching seemed extravagantly poor by comparison: wanting in imagination, wanting in dexterity and absolutely wanting in courage. Perhaps it was the fact that they were embedded in a garden of sheer repulsiveness that allowed them to flourish (oh god too strained a metaphor calm down Caroline) but the sex scenes were some of the only ones I’ve seen lately worthy of that esteemed/awkward title, “erotic”; it made me feel extremely aware of just how banal cinematic sex is for the most part. The costuming by Gaultier was glorious but not in a Rodarte-for-Black Swan way (which I loved! Not a criticism!); it took me quite a while to realise what was going on with Mirren’s dress in the final scene. (The answer was, eventually, WHOA, A LOT.) There was not a moment in the thing that was not measured or bold or impeccable.
That being said, I also imagine that if more filmmakers were of the Greenaway school then I could surely only stomach watching six films a year.
It reminded me a little of the first time I watched A Clockwork Orange, when I was fifteen. It later became one of my favourite films but the first time I saw it I was horrified. I couldn’t believe that human nature should be so depraved. This is easily as gruesome and stylish but is, I think, a much better film with a tiny, vital streak of tenderness at its very centre. The scenes where Howard and Mirren hide in the book depository are as pulsingly romantic as anything I’ve seen, although I guess they are abruptly tapered by cruelty.
One part of me is hesitant to post the piece of music I was rabbiting on about, because it attains so much of its majesty in context and I worry that you won’t think much of it and perhaps you will decide my opinions worthless and it will put you off seeing either TCTTHW&HL or Man on Wire, and what a terrible shame that would be. I could include it along with footage, but that would soften the impact when you actually watch the film. So what I recommend you do is listen to the piece of music just once or twice, then forget you ever heard it, and in two or three months time go and rent one or both of these films and feel like an idiot for forgetting how luminous and powerful films can be when they’re done right, and to remind yourself what can happen when courage is applied not to wrestling bears or buying shares but to the world of small, shimmering ideas. Fuckin’ A.
CAROLINE J. DALE
(dazed, beautiful & bruised)
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