Give yourself thirty minutes in which to write something. Something
about this particular thing. No editing and no re-writing – see where
that gets you. A first viewing of the film some years ago, a small art
house cinema (now sadly closed) that had palm trees either side of the
screen. The film was compelling, broadly traumatic, but still that last
sequence got to you.
And watching it again you wanted to slow it down – or rather go back
afterwards, watch the sequence again or even pause it to examine it. Not
that it’s going to yield any secrets – there’s not anything to be
gained from this one supposes, except for a writing exercise. What
happens comes like a ripple across the frame. A clenched fist, a
character so tightly wound that you find your muscles contracting just
watching her. Hair scraped back, the skin slightly puffy. A marbled
lobby that is neatly drained of all activity, all sound. Alone with the
echoes of the stiff (an unmoving clasp) purse, from which the knife is
taken – a long blade from the kitchen.
But then, there, the expression rises as if from nowhere, it comes
through like something completely alien. What is this manifestation?
Strange to think that this is no doubt the most expressive moment the
character has – is this right? Maybe it should be that it is the most
unusual expression that comes out – the most inventive somehow.
It contains too much. It a despairing, hate-filled growl but that’s not
nearly enough. It’s absurd too – mocking, arrogant, even playful in the
circumstances…
It accompanies the movement of the knife, high up, as the right arm
is raised in front of the face, bringing it back down into the shallow
flesh at the front of the left shoulder – this movement too is
unsettling, the blade only entering an inch or so, perhaps hitting bone,
jarring into the sturdy bars of the upper ribcage – the knife comes to a
halt horribly, swaying with the initial momentum and the persistence of
the action, the stabbing hand oscillating momentarily. It leaves
another mouth behind, like lipstick on the blouse.
The expression – and I want to call it a smile (maybe something to do
with the smile that Francis Bacon always thought he hadn’t captured
successfully) – is certainly a speech act too, you can see it’s
intention to wail out in the reverberant foyer, trailing both the lover
who has entered the auditorium and serving as a general utterance to
empty space, a swelling attempt at certainty – that she is there too,
that she exists. Here too there is no need for a full close-up – no need
for any magnification of tiny details of dramatic emotion – as this
smile does not concern subtlety in that sense. I’m not sure what I mean
when I write this but there is no going back. It is something of an
eruption of the face – if it does accompany the most pronounced act of
violence in the film, then this violence is matched by the tearing of
the mouth… But is this a single expression or can it be broken up into
countless shades…?
It is not necessarily a matter of a character being encapsulated by a
betrayed detail, more a question of a character becoming something
entirely other before our eyes – where an expression breaks out that is
so drastic that it does not seem to belong to them, and in some
curious way does not even belong to the film – maybe that’s it then, it
is a leak INTO the film of something that is too extreme to be a
construct of the scene, a construct consistent with the material that
surrounds it, the matter that makes up that particular world. Another
world interrupts here, one that is uncontrolled for a moment – a slip
of chaos that the actress nonetheless has the capacity to rein in and
close off, as if the tap were the mouth that closes again, the knife
being returned to the purse.
There is nothing else to do now. We leave the building. There is
nowhere for the film to go. It is never a question of gaining an insight
into a character, identifying or empathising with her, at least not
here. Already she has seemed too far away, at such a distance that is
difficult to negotiate any access to her – but here there is a sense
that absolutely all ties are severed for a moment – an anarchic
instant, even if it is also shadowed by a strangely romanticised,
overblown theatrical stabbing toward the heart, that is led by the
grimace. The face leads here, not the knife – it is the weapon that
permits the face to revolt…
Keep going, continue writing… the terrible nature of the smile is
partly to do with its absurd humour – the slapstick puerility, a silent
raspberry blown into the chest. Time’s up. Dot images into the text.
