Damien and The Castle

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30 August

* Contains spoilers *

When I watched Looking for Hortense (2012) again, I wanted to see the film more freely than when tied to the sub-titles first time around, to catch the French more (the translation is quite free - even the original title really means Find Hortense !), and do my variously named Does it work the second time ? test.

In reverse order, yes, everything dovetails beautifully with the Aurore / Zorica identity, I could hear more idiom, and the film's arc affected me wonderfully now that I could see how we got to Antoine and Eva in the car. But, amongst all of that, ironies, subtleties and confluences of Franz Kafka's Das Schloß*, The Castle, which visibly owes much to the time when he lived in Prague's Golden Lane, very near (almost part of ?) that city's castle complex.


The mapping works thus :

* Damien is the hen-pecked ambassador to his father (Sébastien) on behalf of Zorica, whom he does not know (he has already neglected his task once, partly because he does not wish to have to have contact with Sébastien)

* Zorica and her plight are known to him via the partner (Véra) of the brother (Marco) of his partner (Iva)

* At Time A, Damien's trip to see Sébastien proves to be a waste of time, because judicial matters have overrun, and then Sébastien looks at his diary and writes off the next fortnight as offering no replacement time

* He has just met Aurore (not knowing that she is Zorica, too), and Sébastien has to tap Damien firmly on the shoulder to distract him from watching her have an altercation in the square below : the irony is that Damien breaks off watching to talk about the case of the person whom he was watching

* When he leaves, something on his phone causes Damien to miss speaking to Aurore when she is sitting on a bench


* So, not through his own fault, Damien has not managed to articulate anything to his father when Véra and Marco turn up with oysters (Time B) to celebrate what they think that he has done

* It is, though, Damien's fault, both that they are under this impression (as he lied to Iva about having lunch with Sébastien), and that he does not disabuse them (so guilt attaches, and the stickiness of the task results, because he has been treated as having done what he failed to do, which has something of a paralysing rather than spurring effect)

* At Time B, however, Damien is stirred to exchange text-messages with Sébastien, trying (and failing) to find a time to have lunch that does not clash with his class tuition - none is forthcoming, but they fix Time C

* On account of this renewed activity, he is not free when they have Zorica on the phone, wishing to thank him (so Aurore and he miss again)

* In the unbridled sort of way highly reminiscent of K. having sex with Frieda on the floor of the inn and amidst the slops**, early on in the Kafka novel, Marco and Vera copulate noisily in the bathroom (their celebration ?)


* With the task in his sights in a K.-like determination, Damien finishes his lecture early for Time C, but cannot hail a taxi quickly, and then the cab-driver does not know anywhere by means of which he tries to specify his desired destination (a driver as useless in that role as K.'s 'assistants' are to him)

* He arrives late, to Sébastien's consternation, who will not allow him longer than scheduled

* However, what time they have is wasted, because Sébastien's sybaritic behaviour towards the androgynous waiter Satoshi causes Damien to enquire into his father's sexuality, and he then becomes flustered and cannot dismiss his curiosity

* This sort of distraction happens all the time in Kafka, e.g. Josef K. seducing Leni (in Der Prozeß, The Trial) when he is supposed to be having a consultation with the advocate, or K. (in Das Schloß) missing his appointment in The Herrenhof since, as I recall, he is more interested in finding out what Frieda is now doing

* As in both novels, the matter is an administrative matter with judicial / bureaucratic machinery in the way : here, both getting to see Sébastien, and the meeting being meaningful

* However, Damien would not be side-tracked by Sébastien, if the latter did not flirt with Satoshi and, ignoring what Damien had started saying, concern himself with the gastronomic excesses of his ice-cream dessert, but, once he sees his father's infatuation, he loses sight of the whole purpose of seeing Sébastien until he insists on going


* The task was given to Damien by Iva in the first place, but it has made him less available to her obviously self-inflated ego, which is partly the attraction of Antoine from the latest play that, with whatever skill, she is directing - a form of castration, to which Josef K. and K. are prone (e.g. Frieda decides that one of the assistants is a better bet than staying with K., after K. evict them from the schoolroom)

* The boy, Noé, refers to Iva, and without obvious correction, as 'the airhead' at one point, and Kristin Scott Thomas cleverly and gradually brings her self-obsession out - she cannot cope without purely physical things such as her cigarettes, coffee, her watch


* When Iva admits the affair, but tries to buy more time, Damien insists that she leave

* It is at this time that Aurore and Zorica collapse into one person, and Damien is confronted with having failed someone whom he likes under another name - at least, though, he is honest with her, not least since he has demanded Iva tell him the truth


* That might be where some takes on what Kafka is like would have the story end, and not resolve, but other strands come together, also in a Kafka-like way :

* Damien barges into a meeting at the court and insists that Sébastien listen - he agrees, but a pause covers whatever he says, and we hear Sébastien saying why it is not possible to help by speaking to the Hortense of the title, because Hortense will refuse, and Sébastien does not want that

* Reading between the lines, when we see Damien blag Hortense's number from his mother and first speak to and then meet Hortense (after some suitably poised being made to wait in a Japanese-style conservatory), the sybaritic manners of this man suggest that Damien's father and he probably are (or have been) lovers

* The reason for being unable to contact Hortense is, at the level of bodies and persons, the sort of force that makes K. associating with Barnabas and his family, when he thinks that it will help, damaging to his cause, or Josef K. always deciding that he knows better about his case than people whose time with him is secured to try to assist

* Much as one of Kafka's officials might do, Hortense claims to have an excellent memory and not to need Aurore's paperwork

* Whatever Damien may think or know, he is no longer impressed by getting to see Hortense, and cannot conceal what he feels from Aurore, who has come to wait his exit


From here, how things resolve is Damien getting himself arrested so that Aurore, who has no papers, can escape, but then falling very ill from the drenching rain - in his deepening fever, he reaches out to her with his words, his strong memory of what made him the academic that he became.

After the illness, he narrates greater separation from, and flightiness of, Iva, and one cannot help thinking that the luxury to be a director has been at the vampiric cost of living off Damien, his care for the house and for Noé, and the roof over their heads.

He thinks that Aurore has gone to India with the man who excessively to his embarrassment thanks Damien for saving his life, and tries to threaten Sébastien with the gun by whose removal he did it. Sébastien is not to be threatened, but does despair of love in the future after being rejected (by Hortense ? the final resolution of a quarrel ?)

Realizing that Aurore did not go away, he speaks to her, finds her, sees her. She did not go, because of what he said on the verge of collapse. Things have finally had their consequence and brought them, at least for now, together, a battle, a struggle through the labyrinth of missed meetings, mistakes, lies and confessions...

For Der Verschollene, the third of Kafka's novels, translated as The Man Who Disappeared, such a resolution does not seem impossible - Max Brod claims so, some other material suggests as much, and The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma*** seems of a positive kind


End-notes

* It, as with Kafka's other two novels, is incomplete, in that we have the hint of how it might end (courtesy of his literary executor and first editor, Max Brod), but episodes to get us there are wanting.

** Haneke's 1997 film of the novel brings out well that K. is seeking advantage in seducing Frieda, as well as satisfying lust.

*** Which inspired a huge installation by Martin Kippenberger.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Navigating a labyrinth

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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21 August

Looking for Hortense* (2012) is engaged with its characters, rather than driven by a plot, and Kristin Scott Thomas, for all that she is a striking woman as Iva, is not a primary player in this film (perhaps even less so than in In the House (201?) – towards the end, she is not on the screen, and we hear her activities narrated. It is not for me to know whether Damien has always been suspicious of her, and Iva always held back from her desires by duty, but, if we felt that we wanted to know, there is enough to guess by.

What emerges more slowly, shown unfolding in Damien’s attempts to speak to his father (Sébastien Hauer, an important judge) to ask him to bend the ear of an authority, is what intervenes, in him, between action and execution, what impedes**. The connection of the matter with Judge Hauer, which is indirect at his end, is tenuous at the other, and when the couple known to Iva and him have sex in their bathroom, she, unlike he, is able to pass it off as being in love (as well, probably, as a natural way of celebrating what they believe that he has achieved).

Jean-Pierre Bacri plays Damien beautifully well, and, whether in the apartment, about the streets of Paris, or giving his lecture course in two post-modern confections of architecture, always feels in place. Set him, however, in relation to his father and to the man whom he finally and momentarily gets to meet (expertly played by, respectively, Claude Rich and Philippe Duclos), and it is clear that the latter two are of a kind, and from a different mould from the sort of man who he is : when the former calmly says that he is self centred and apologizes for any way in which he may have hurt Damien, it costs him nothing any more than it does for him to be candid and amaze his son, over a hasty lunch, by his attitudes to sex***.

When, eventually, Damien challenges Sébastien, as a passenger on the vehicle of life, to get off and make way for others to get on, all that shocks the judge is the fact that a weapon has got through security, and he then straightforwardly rejects, as if it were the most natural suggestion in the world to be invited to consider, anyone else saying how and when he might choose to end his life. For those with a bent for Kafka’s writing, this sense of obstacles, of getting to the impossible appointment and then being distracted not to make use of the time, will be familiar : more on that here.

Only in relation to Iva does Damien seem to stand his ground, in a like manner to that of his father with him, by rejecting her manipulative analysis that what has happened between them is what he wants, or that what she wanted changes having to address what is. The teenager Noé (Marin Orcand Tourrès) creeps to the door and listens. There is nothing to say, but I have a sense that maybe he was not Iva’s child, but came from a previous relationship. (If IMDb can be trusted thus far, he has Damien’s surname.)

A dazed Sébastien seems energized by what happened, although clearly upset by it, and we go with him as he appears to find more of who he really is and what matters to him. Not for nothing, surely, has Zorica sought to put the French at their ease (and not attract attention) by calling herself Aurore, dawn, and Isabelle Carré has captured the essence of this vital, if naive, younger woman****.

Yes, she shares characteristics with that idealized type of woman who is suddenly there, but she has an ease of manner, a breadth of emotional intelligence, and her heart appears to be in the right place. Perpetually keeping us guessing, the film leaves us with a vision of leaves on a tree, transformed as if into a painting made with a Chinese brush, perhaps an image of evanescence such as Damien first strove to find in the sky as a boy…


End-notes

* The original French title, Cherchez Hortense, takes the form of an instruction (or command) (Find Hortense !), not a present participle. If, as I do, one goes into films blind, one was early wondering whether Iva’s actor Antoine was going to be the last person who saw her (and she was Hortense).

** IMDb tries to summarize in one sentence : A wife pressures her husband to solicit work papers from his civil servant father, but they are a couple, not married, and judges probably are civil servants in France, but one doubts that IMDb realizes.

*** Unconsciously or not, Damien later seems to set out to test his own attitudes (and risk missing a nine o’clock appointment into the bargain) by drunkenly placing himself near one of his father’s favourites.

**** Dare I say it (and risk detracting from my own thesis), but Carré has been put in a potentially perilously equivalent position to that in Romantics Anonymous (2010), a chocolate morsel so lacking in substance that my interest soon collapsed.

 

 

 

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge) If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here