Haunting movie last night—”One to Another,” “Chacun sa nuit” in the original French. Based on a true story, a murder of their beloved and admired friend by three of his friends, for no known or apparent motive. The movie turns the situation into as Dionysian a drama as possible, even while telling the story in a very cool and detached manner. Mainly beautiful young people, faces, bodies, sexual exploration and permutation, a calm orgy scene with older people, incest, bisexuality, gayness, all fluidly swirling around Pierre. Wow—how could I have forgotten to note the Melvillian allusiveness there?? “Pola X” must surely be in the background, a French movie of Melville’s novel, starring Depardieu’s teenage son. Anyway, Pierre commits incest with his younger sister by a year, very beautiful, and goes to bed with some of the friends and turns tricks with an older guy for money to save and buy a motorcycle. The friends have success with their rock band. Pierre is the star, sensual, easy in his skin, perhaps touched with poetic/artistic gifts, insightful, warm, everyone loves him, wants a piece of him, admires him, and, not hard to suppose, is a bit scared by his energy, his charisma, his power. His body is found, the sister sets out to find the killers. The police seem ineffectual. The case is nearly closed. She finds out she is pregnant, by Sebastian. At last one night the father of Baptiste comes to her house to tell her and her mother that the boys confessed to the murder. We eventually see them re-enact the crime for the police . Meanwhile Lucie has been through therapy and a time in a mental hospital. Paul is an enigmatic outsider, seems he is a laborer in the area, same age as the kids, maybe a little older, a friend of Lucie’s who spies on the group and barely talks but who also has special powers of knowing. Yet he is not able to reveal the killer either. Once the friends are in prison, Lucie has little knowledge or them or communication with them. At the end documentary text tells us one boy got five years for watching and the two killers got eighteen year prison terms and they have never spoken of a motive for the crime. Gide’s motiveless crime. The director and writer clearly also know their Sade, Genet, Bataille, and ? who else in French s-m tradition? Oh, of course, probably Lacan too. And Girard.
This movie would work really well in contrast-comparison against the new American movie, “Shortbus.” Contrast cultural differences. Community and its breakdown.
Few minutes after writing the above I read a Commentary by A S Byatt at TLS–http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2960112.ece
Byatt thinks the work of cognitive scientists may help show us a way out of the narcissism of the late 20th Century novel as explored by, say, Philip Roth. Here are her last two paragraphs–
During my lifetime we have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind – when I was a girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became fashionable to describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was constructed by a brain. In the past few years the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux has furnished us with descriptions, both purely physical and philosophically theoretical, of the way the brain puts the mind together. When he describes the relations between axons, dendrites, perception, memory, concepts and the world outside a brain, I feel I am reading a description of what I always sensed was happening, but could not describe. He is interested both in a biological and chemical “grammar” or algebra, and in the way in which things we perceive are retained – by the neurones – and combined to make “images” and “concepts” which are made by strengthened and stabilized collections of neurones, related both by the “pruning” of the sensory input and the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects are linked.
This may seem a little abstract in the context of a paper on the novel. A novel is made of language, and arouses both feelings and thoughts in its readers, as it should depict both feelings and thoughts in its people and its microcosm. Changeux’s descriptions of the cells of the brain and the way they combine and recombine give me a sense of understanding the excitement, the drive, the pleasure, I get out of making worlds with words. We have had a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism.
