Day 149: “His one regret in life is that he is not someone else.”

“I wish my life were like a Woody Allen movie,
then things wouldn’t seem so bad.......
you know, um, like all those people living
in Manhattan and they’re bohemians and they
spend their lives in Art galleries, in museums,
and, and they’re all having affairs with some
ingenue or other and there’s always old movies playing
like Fred & Ginger or The Marx Brothers or
Charlie Chan and..and...then...then there’s Gershwin.
Manhattan.....it seems like such a long way
off, but I know that if I could live my life
there, like, y’know everything would be okay.
I sound like Chekhov’s three Prozorov sisters;
they thought that if they could only get to
Moscow things would turn out fine; I mean, instead,
their house burnt down and one of the boyfriend’s
got shot in the head in a duel and so maybe they
didn’t live the happiest of lives, y’know and
one of them was a real nut job; I went out with
someone like that once and she ran out of
the restaurant on our first date cos’ I did this
real easy party trick, a mind-reading thing I do,
and she thought I had powers of prophecy, I mean,
seeing into the future, who am I kidding? I can’t
even spot someone waving at me from across the
room without my glasses. But what am I looking at
here in Sydney? I’m the other side of 40, single...a
trail of unsuccessful relationships behind me, I’ve taken
up yoga (who am I kidding?) and and I’ve written
these great film scripts, that are beyond the
understanding of producers here and so...sure,
well maybe it’s little on the tragic side....but
I think that the human condition is fundamentally
one of unhappiness, just ask Frederich Nietzsche
or...or...Ingmar Bergman...and...and...we spend our
whole lives doing things to distract ourselves
from that very fact, the fact that we’re actually
unhappy and well, we’re going to die one day and
no-one seems to know the point of all this? Perhaps
the best that we can look forward to is a truce with
discontentment.....that and maybe a little glimpse
of cleavage along the way. Gee... Sydney’s killing me,
I need to get to New York...if only I could....things’d
be so much better.”

Taken from the treatment of Looking for Woody.

Day #149 Tip: Is “there” any better than “here”?
Have we learnt nothing from Dorothy? In ‘The Writer’s Journey’ (Boxtree, 1996) Christopher Vogler says this: “Dorothy also has a clear inner problem. She doesn’t fit in anymore, she doesn’t feel “at home. Like the incomplete heroes of fairy tales, she has a big piece missing from her life...”

This missing “big piece” is the “Object of Desire” that a protagonist quests after to restore balance in their life after the Inciting Incident or Disturbance knocked their life out of balance. I imagine that when I have a screenplay made into a film and receive the success, recognition and acknowledgment that I know the world is saving up for me, then I too will be complete. Yeah, sure?!

Tomorrow marks the five month stage of this scriptwriting journey and the day that I print off my Treatment and had it to OTHER HUMAN BEINGS to read.

Handing work out to be read by others is like Stage #8 (of twelve), The Supreme Ordeal, “...defined as the moment the hero faces his greatest fear.” My fear is that people will think my script stinks, which taps into a very old writer’s wound of mine, related to when a teacher held up a piece of paper that I’d written on (aged 5) and said “what Roger’s done is wrong”. Dorothy’s fear is that the Wicked Witch is going to kill her and her three companions for stealing the Ruby Slippers.

The next stage of the journey is to take the comments and hopefully move forward to turn that Treatment into a Screenplay proper: Stage #9 Reward (Seizing the Sword), #10 The Road Back, #11 Resurrection, #12 Return with the Elixir. Then I’ll be “there” won’t I?

I am most certainly not in Kansas anymore.

Day 148: Favorite Actresses No 2 - Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert has appeared in over 90 film and television productions since 1971. Many of the characters that she plays are sexually provocative, slightly unhinged, emotionally remote and certainly not roles that I could imagine her compatriots Audrey Tatou or Juliette Binoche taking on (both fine actresses). It’s just that Ms Huppert seems to have carved out a certain niche for herself.

I think I first noticed her in a film that was part of the 1994 French Film Festival here in Sydney - La séparation - playing opposite another favourite French actor, Daniel Auteuil. La séparation tells the story of the disintegration of a couple, with Huppert’s character of Anne falling in love with other men whilst Auteil’s Pierre becomes more violent; not unfamiliar terrain for either performer.

But it was famously in La cérémonie (1995) that I really awoke to the acting prowess of Isabelle Huppert. Portraying a deranged postal worker, she plays opposite Sandrine Bonnaire and encourages the younger woman to stand up against her bourgeois employers, for whom Bonnaire is the housemaid. Claude Chabrol’s slow-burner is in fact an adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s book 'A Judgement In Stone'. Now, I’d like to say a number of things: firstly, Chabrol, well, he’s just as much a French legend as Sacha Distel or Johnny Halliday. Secondly, it’s the Brits that normally do Ruth Rendell and it would generally end up on our tv screens on a Friday night but this reworking, by those existentially French, is one to hunt down. Chabrol calls this “the last Marxist film”, a movie about culture and class that “spirals down” towards an ending of violence that is worthy of those that stormed the Bastille.

Recently, this fine actress has had praise and awards heaped upon her for her role as Erika Kohut, in Michael Haneke’s uncompromising film The Piano Teacher. The character of Erika is a professor in a music conservatory, who, whilst in her forties, still lives with her domineering mother, and over the course of the story, falls for a much younger student, the 17 year-old Walter. But the “relationship” becomes obsessive, especially when the teacher begins to reveal her sexual proclivity for sadomasochistic fetishes. It doesn’t end well.

Nor does Ma mére (My Mother) end well for her character of Hélène, a woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with just about everyone, including her son, Pierre. I must confess to struggling with this film which appeared to me to a nihilistic and disjointed piece. The French love to push the boundaries of what might make us flinch in the cinema, especially when it comes to matters sexual (and I’m normally with them all the way), but this has to be one of the most despairing and possibly nonsensical pieces that I’ve come across. Yet, it is much feted, and familiar ground for Huppert.

I like Isabelle Huppert because she strikes me as someone who acts from her soul, her spirit, her groin, her gut and her heart as well as her mind; her performances are visceral, instinctive, fearless and emotional, which is ironic, given that she often plays emotionally-distant characters.

This is a woman who is obviously working non-stop, even as she approaches her sixties ( a triumph for an actress) and for my money, she is the antidote to the “it girls” and “ingenues” who, professionally, could be blown over with an acting feather.

Vive Isabelle!

Day #148 Tip: Be unflinching. audacious and lionhearted
Mr McKee says this on ‘risk’: “...Life teaches us that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value, the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks - our freedom, our lives, our souls.”

Those are the sort of characters that we have to create, so that fine actors like Isabelle Huppert can dazzle us. First, we must take the risk of showing the inner workings of our own hearts and minds by bringing to life such characters and then, we must defend them and argue for them, fiercely and passionately if and when they might come under ill-conceived fire or criticism because they’ve been misunderstood or misinterpreted.

We may have much trial and error to traverse in order to hone our creations and “get them right” but bring them into being we must, even if they do emerge from the darkest recesses of our own shadows.

Courage mes amis, courage!

Day 147: Speak not words of love to me

In the The Age of Enlightenment, Estella is a nineteen year-old young woman, living a life of virtual imprisonment, due to a debilitating & chronic illness that prevents her from having any contact with the outside world. It's England of 1870 and, aside from her father who has raised her and cared for her since birth, the only company that the young woman keeps is that of the characters in the books she reads by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and those of the Brontë sisters. Estella’s world, as lonely as isolated as it is, is however, refined, delicate and a model of propriety befitting any young woman of the age.

When Estella’s father fails to return home one day, she is left without food and medicine; her life begins to slip away. When the door to her home is broken down, Estella expects to see - with the fading sight that she has left - her father, but instead, it is a young Aborginal man - Marlon - who reveals the truth (or lie) of the young woman’s life to her: she has been held prisoner in a fabricated Victorian world of her father’s making; this is not Queen Victoria’s England, but Australia of 2010.

As the rest of the story of this film unfolds, a romantic bond develops between this cultivated young woman from the 1900’s and the “coarse” young man from the twenty-first century, but Estella’s ingrained attitudes prevent her from succumbing to her unwanted, yet palpable feelings. For Estella is a product of Victorian England and whilst she considers herself educated, she is very far from being enlightened as to the ways of the world today, in comparison with the worldly-wise Marlon.

Can a young “lady” from one hundred and forty years ago allow herself to have feelings for a black man? Is this not, to Estella, a love that dare NOT speak it’s name? Is not “inappropriate affection” the very same the dilemma facing her monarch, in the film Her Majesty, Mrs Brown, when Queen Victoria (in mourning) finds solace in the company of a dour member of the Balmoral household, John Brown? Above and below stairs, and somewhere in between, matters of the heart are, equally frowned upon.

We English are well-versed in our inability to speak words of love; what greater evidence can I give you than The Remains of the Day? This Merchant-Ivory tour de force, based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, wonderfully crafted in adaptation for the screen by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (with some of Pinter’s words in there), is probably the finest example I know of our (the English) incapacity to express, in honeyed syllables, the skipped beat of our hearts (I will leave Keats, Byron, Browning, Shakespeare and a few others out of this).

Set in the stately home of Darlington Hall, in the late 1930’s, The Remains of the Day, is about many things, but at it’s epicenter is the “relationship” between the housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) and the butler, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), told in flashback when Stevens visits this woman, long after she has left “service”. As Anthony Hopkins’s character motors west, towards the once-named Miss Kenton (she has had a failed marriage since), he reflects on things, personal and professional, prompting “a shattering re-evaluation of his life.”

In Vincent Canby’s NY Times review of 1993, he says this: “The Remains of the Day looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults.”

Maybe it’s the terror of being thought of as “sentimental’ (which wouldn’t do at all) that is the undoing of most English “chaps”....I mean, I give you the fumbling, mumbling, bumbling Hugh Grant as witness for the prosecution and maybe back him up with Roger Moore?

Suave, yes. Sensual......that’ s a different matter all together

Day #147 Tip: Why they MUST not be together
Yesterday I offered up the idea that the centre of every love story was “why they can’t be together”.

In researching The Age of Enlightenment, I watched many love stories in a effort to master their conventions (let me tell you that I may need to go halfway back to the drawing board and do more investigative work) and what I found was that the most powerful stories were those in which the love beteween the two central characters was not just inadvisable, but verboten or forbidden: Brokeback Mountain (two married cowboys living in an unforgiving heterosexual world), Birth (a young, wealthy widow and a 10 year-old boy), Far From Heaven ( a white married mother and a black man in 1950’s USA).

There are still some taboos out there, ripe for the screen, through whose prism we can look at the world and love today. It’s our job, as writers to find them and tell them, as great and meaningful stories

Day 146: A love that dare not.....

Love stories, on screen, begin and end, for me, with Brief Encounter (1945), the David Lean directed-film of the Noel Coward screenplay, based on his own one-act play, 'Still Life' (1936).

Set in 1945, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) a thirty-something housewife and mother, lives with her family in the commuter green belt just south of London. Her life is one of stultifying regularity, until on one of her weekly shopping trips to nearby Milford, she meets a stranger in the railway station waiting room, Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), himself a married man. In a filmic moment that would now be referred to as the “meeting-cute” scene, he removes a piece of grit from her eye and they look at each other in that way that only a man and a woman “look at each other” (that’s a McKee’ism).

A friendship develops and weekly rendezvouses take place, initially at Alec’s insistence. Whilst exited by these clandestine meetings, Laura is always consumed with guilt and a certain amount of shame. The “friendship” becomes a platonic affair and when they do decide to consummate their relationship, it is thwarted by a third party, a friend of Alec’s whose apartment he has borrowed for the occasion. Now Laura’s ignominy and contempt for herself are sealed, after all, this was a day and age, a time and place where such liaisons and such betrayals of one’s family duties (at least for a woman) were deeply, deeply frowned upon; this is indeed ‘scarlet woman’ territory that Laura has stumbled into.

Alec and Laura’s time together is short-lived as he accepts a posting in South Africa. Their parting scene takes place in the same public waiting room where they first met, allowing them little or no privacy, these two who in all probability will never meet again. This final scene also happens to be the same scene that the film began with, only now, as we return to it after what constitutes an hour long flashback, this moment is endowed with so much more.

With Alec gone, the thought of returning to her seemingly dull life, after such heady excitement, drives Laura to the platform’s edge and the thought of ending her life under an express steam train passing through, but thankfully, she doesn’t. Laura Jesson returns to her husband and his crossword, their children and her needlework, but not with the barren desolation that would permeate such a piece if it were written by Chekhov, for, as a writer, that was never Noel Coward’s métier.

Joy and happiness may not envelop Laura’s being that evening - indeed she is distressed beyond consolation, even though her husband attempts to comfort her in his solid way - but there is the feeling that, given time, Laura will ‘come back to her life’, to her family, to herself, and be a richer person for the experience.

Day #146 Tip: Why they can’t be together
Love stories of any hue, are predicated on why the couple cannot be together. For Laura and Alec, the reasons are insurmountable and many.

There is the inner conflict that rages within both of them, knowing how they are both betraying loved ones who have been steadfast, loyal and unswerving, families who will be hurt, marriage vows that will be be broken, personal standards of behaviour that will be laid asunder. Then there are the personal conflicts that they face in the form of their respective spouses, families, friends, neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances; the looks, the acerbic and poisonous words that would dog them. But maybe what most thwarts these two, are the social mores and codes of conduct of the day, in this country just coming out of a war, where personal sacrifice has been the order of the day.

Arguably, for a man, Alec would not have faced such criticism, comment and scorn, but Laura certainly would have, behind her back if not to her face. Brief Encounter is the tragedic flip side of the coin that is the “comedy of manners”. Noel Coward and David Lean gave birth here to an illegitimate sister of Oscar Wilde’s work, born the wrong side of the romantic blanket.

As I wrestle with the Treatment of the love story that I am working on, I come back again and again to Brief Encounter to remind me that my lovers must have damn good reasons why they cannot be, just as I imagine many writers of love stories since have also done.