grace must be, again and again, performance

This cover was a big deal for me.  I am such a sucker for ink.  And French.  And ravens.  And the Criterion collection.

I watched Le Corbeau this week.

Which is not the Crow unfortunately.

A movie which DID NOT AGE AS WELL as one might have thought.  What was once every goth's heartthrob/role model now just looks like Joker at a fetish ball.  

(So...still a heartthrob/role model HAHAHA oh man.)

But so Le Corbeau:

What a strange ugly snip of a movie.  I didn’t really enjoy watching this, which could be a combination of mood or disposition or whatever.  This was strange because normally I am just all about older French movies because a) their language is simple and slow enough that I can follow along okay without subtitles and b) foreign movies with subtitles are what I watch while I fix my hair because I don’t need to hear over the blow-dryer.

The portal to sophistication.

 I did not appreciate this movie at all till I researched it later, and found out it was made during the Nazi occupation of France, and then it made sense. Actually, for me this film only has charm within context: when it was released, its unpleasant and murky ambiguity angered basically every so much they were like calling for major players’ executions.

All of these people?  WANTED DEAD.

The basic (semi-stolen) synopsis: A mysterious writer of “poison-pen” letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town.  They send progressively crueler letters exposing dirty little secrets, thus exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s oh-so-quotidian surface.

Seething I say.

Le Corbeau is not like technically noir but it has noir’s claustrophobia, where you are a person getting caught in a sharp, oppressive, and progressively smaller trap (usually represented by a city or in this case a social system); the more you struggle the more it closes.  It is inevitable.  The struggle is almost ritual, as with most genre movies actually.

This is how they feel inside and outside.  Trapped and claustrophobic...and sassy.

It’s so, so very French, but harsher and more sterile than expected.  A cultural difference between France and America is that in France people are much more understanding of people’s banal little weaknesses when it comes to whatever appetites.  Whatever it takes to get you through the day, you know?  But in this film people are hated and penalized as even the smallest and thus most pathetic of indiscretions are wrenched to the surface for everyone to see and judge.  (LIKE PROVO AM I RIGHT.)

The fact that is left a bad taste in my mouth is a testament to its quality I guess.  It evoked that whole spirit of paranoia and pettiness and self-loathing that is all too familiar sometimes like really, really well.

Some more seething, now with added loathing.

The closest thing to a protagonist we get is a bitter doctor trying to hide from his own demons.  Of course all the lovely ladies love him.

OH MAN GIRLS AND BOYS GET IN LINE FOR THIS.

We follow him through his travails, and it is he who of course uncovers the mystery.

Actually the whole experience watching this reminded me of reading “Kissing the Mask” by William Vollmann, an author that I can’t exactly deny the quality of his telling but is extremely caught up in his own (in this case puerile) present-tense that I have no hope of relating to or even to a degree understanding. 

I special-ordered this used from Amazon.  Then I saw it at the BYU bookstore.  I need to rethink my assumptions about something for sure but I don't know what.

(At nineteen, his book Rainbow Stories just floored me.  But what is exhilarating and edgy at nineteen often proves less so when older; revisit those works with caution and preaccepted loss.)

I bought Kissing the Mask on sale because of my interest in him and identity-as-performance (and vice versa).  It’s not really a book but an extended essay on Noh theater as a venue for understanding femininity.  I was disappointed.  For such a venture to understand the ultimate other (both archaic Far Eastern performance/allusion to an American and femininity as a male) it was the most narcissistic self-indulged thing I’ve ever read.  (And I love Infinite Jest.)  I don’t think it’s just me obviously, but the reviews were worshipful and simpering and I was all like IS THIS REALLY ALL IT TAKES TO BE A SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR but I’m sure I’ll write more on him later because I just have ALL SORTS of thoughts and feelings.

The point is, is that Vollmann chose for his subject transvestitism in Noh theater as a way to try to understand something as foreign from him as possible, through as many filters as he could.  So, he’s aiming to understand the principle of femininity through centuries of stylization and ritual through a foreign a culture as possible through performance.  And so for the (especially female) reader there’s just too much filtration to get a good grip on what (if anything) he’s saying.

 Here’s the quote in particular that stuck out: Reading those Noh plays is sort of like reading the libretto of an opera and never hearing the music. But even so, I was very impressed, the stories were fairly haunting, and years later when I was interviewing this Noh actor, Mr. Umewaka, he was kind of laughing that I was so ignorant about Noh performance in general and yet I knew the actual stories better than a lot of Japanese. Because in a way, the plot and what’s actually said is the least important part–and you can hardly understand it anyway because it’s chanted in a peculiar way. 

Emphasis mine.

Now I'm cruising Ebay for masks though.

THE EXTREMELY LONG-WINDED POINT I AM TRYING TO MAKE: I am in the wrong place and am the wrong person to appropriately enjoy or even really appreciate this movie as it should be.  It both was so impossibly far away and way too close to my own personal experiences.  I’d watch a lot of other movies before I ever watched Le Corbeau again.

THE EVEN MORE BASIC POINT:  It is time to get the eff out of Provo for sure.

But let’s go out on a high note:

 OH BABY.  I have such good memories with this movie--namely rigging the TV on the porch and watching it in front of the fire with Paul and Katherine one emo night.  Maybe I should just talk about this instead.  Except I feel this shot kind of sums up the whole film.