Celluloid Bites (6): Some Like It Hot

You are about to read this and you have not watched Some Like It Hot? Get out of here! Do yourself a favour and watch it before you read this, you lucky, lucky, you.

The adjective “hot” has both carnal and gastronomic connotations. For a split second, that salacious poet extraordinaire, Billy Wilder, tries to hoodwink his viewers into thinking that his characters are throwing their spice into their jazz music but you only have to look at Marilyn shimmying behind a tiny ukulele made even tinier by her curves, to realise that every frame here revolves around the compelling presence of human flesh: female flesh to be more precise, even when only a travesty. If ever there was a film that could put its characters in a menu Some Like It Hot is it, and its cracking script barely disguises it.

Wilder has been accused of vulgarity by his detractors because of the occasionally coarse nature of his scenarios and the undercurrent of barely disguised male desire running through his films. It has taken us fifty odd years and seven seasons of Madmen to realise that what passed for crassness in the wane of Wilder’s fame is nothing other than his holding a mirror up to the decade that did untold damage to male livers and women’s self-esteem. You only have to realise that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, that unfettered priapic grotesque, became president of the US only two years after the release of Some Like It Hot to know that Wilder was the Virgil to JFK’s Augustus.

I was watching it again recently and it struck me that beyond its nimble and lovable gender bending antics and its rather sweet and conventional endorsement of romance as a process of acceptance (“Nobody is perfect”, remember?), Some Like It Hot mines sexual harassment for comic gold and continues to get away with it more than fifty years after its release. This is so ever since the camera breaks into the speakeasy where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, showcasing the kind of onscreen chemistry that could launch a chain of drugstores as best buddies and jobbing musicians Joe and Jerry, are first seen blowing the sax and plucking the strings of the bow fiddle as they leer at a line of chorus girls wearing the corsety-sequiny swimsuit that passed for music hall attire for any historical period in 1950s American films.

To be fair, shortly after, as he seduces one of the secretaries at a musical agency to borrow her car, we discover that Joe is the kind of “heel” that cheats a dame of her money to bet it on the dog track and then leaves her forlornly staring at a freshly baked pizza pie in her best negligee. I would not say that Wilder endorses this behaviour but rather that he admires the wit and zest required for a “regular Romeo” to keep scoring gullible broads. On his part, Curtis plays Joe with unflappable swagger thus satisfying the high octane drag farce required to elude the mob and the playboy masquerade he concocts to seduce the ditzy Sugar Kane.

Joe and Jerry are two hungry men, no doubt: this is, after all, Chicago in the eve of the Great Depression and they have chosen a life in the lower rungs of bohemia, yet there is little eating in the film even when bread and board are on the cards. No wonder: the moment they see Monroe as Sugar Kowalczyk at the station where they will board the train that will take them to Miami as the unlikely addition to an all female band, Wilder serves us his central metaphor on a silver platter. Two sex starved-men surrounded by goodies they cannot touch, stopped on their tracks by a sashaying Sugar as Jerry, who has been wondering how women manage to walk in high heels and has noticed how “drafty” skirts are, is jolted back into his masculine self by the appearance of Monroe looking like “Jell-o on springs”. Later on, conveniently yet frustratingly disguised as Daphne, he will ogle the blonde “talent” in his new jazz orchestra and describe the dream he used to have as a little boy that one day he would be locked up in his own sweet shop and help himself to all the “cream buns and the mocha éclairs” and the “cherry tarts”. Joe quickly disabuses him of this notion by telling him that he is “on a diet” but it won’t take long for him to have his own designs on the main ingredient at any sweet shop, Sugar.

A 1950s farce with two straight men in drag surrounded by attractive women they lust after would be intolerable in the hands of a lesser director/scriptwriter and would now be largely unwatchable. Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond, however, knew that humour, like light, dazzles when it bounces off as many surfaces as it can catch, and this requires multiple perspectives and unexpected directions. In other words, the lusting sugar-crazed child has to become the lusted after “cherry tart” of his dreams and get a taste of what women were doled out on a daily basis in the 1950s: recalcitrant bodily intrusion on the part of strangers, or what was otherwise called “unwanted advances” when women’s bodies were considered a battleground to be conquered and dominated. Thus Daphne, and to a lesser extent, Josephine, experiences the harassment of decrepit millionaires and diminutive bellboys who like them “big and sassy” and therefore gets a taste of his own behaviour as a man. When Jerry complains about this to Joe, he retorts that women are to men what “red flags are to bulls”, to which Jerry, yanking the wig off his head in a telling gesture, replies, “Well, I am tired of being the flag. I want to be the bull again.” Naturally, when it comes to being the pastry or the excitable child that eats it, we all want to be the child.

Wilder does not go as far as to fully embrace his character’s new found empathy for women: after all, it is clear that Jerry does not want to put an end to harassment, he just wants it to stop when he is on the receiving end. After all, he is quick to try a “trick he has learnt on the elevator” on poor Sugar when they are bathing together as pals in the Florida Sea. Nonetheless, Wilder also gives Sugar her own dose of guile and cunning by having her pass herself for a society girl who learnt music in a conservatory and has joined the band for a lark as she tries to seduce Joe as playboy millionaire Junior in yet another twist. When Joe/Junior manages to draw her to the yacht he has “borrowed” from an Osgood head over heels in love with Daphne, he turns the tables once more and pretends he is beyond sex to goad her on. Once more, Wilder continues to exploit his welding of sex and food in a scene where Curtis takes a bite of pheasant to avoid taking a bite of Marilyn. As they get closer and it gets so hot that his glasses “steam up”, Marilyn is shown hovering over Curtis in the position traditionally reserved for the male seducer. I hate to be vulgar but there is no other way to put it: Marilyn is the devourer and she is the one eating Curtis’ face off.

As in real life, hunger banishes the moment love arrives and our characters quickly lose their appetite the moment they fall for each other. Ultimately the film wins its audiences’ heart by recognising that if desire is driven by a perpetual hunger, love is its final satisfaction: the one dish that does not leave you wanting for more. True love only exists when we accept the flawed humanity of our lover: there are many sweets out there but only one sweetheart.

 

 

Celluloid Bites (5): When Harry Met Sally

Sit at a table in a French restaurant and, in the clumpiest of un-Gallic accents, order a wine which displeases the chef as an accompaniment to your main, and he will march into the dining room, sommelier in tow, to look you square in the eye and tell you that the restaurant will serve you no such wine with your meal. Or so we have learnt watching that country populated by terribly surly, or terribly charming, people (for there is no middle ground) that so often passes for France in Anglophone, and particularly American, films. I imagine this is a Libertarian’s idea of how far that busybody and interfering matron they call the nanny state can whoop us Europeans into submission: not only are we duped into believing in free universal healthcare and unemployment assistance; we also are happy to be told which wine to drink with our meals. Don’t hold it against me but, entre nous, I would love it if, appropriately subsidised to match my spending power, I was told what wine to drink with every meal I eat at a restaurant. It would save me that tiresome ritual of choosing the second less expensive wine and pretending that I care or know what I am doing when it comes to tasting it.

Not so Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, who as a patron of formidable exactitude in her restaurant orders, embodies the American ideal of demanding individuality in several scenes where all manner of ingredients are to be substituted, served on the side, or entirely eliminated, to please her taste buds and dietary requirements. To watch Meg Ryan’s concentrated frown under a panoply of outmoded hairstyles as she peruses a menu that she will shortly blitz until it is barely recognisable, is to witness a transformation that is as entertaining and charming as it is ground breaking. For here we have all the ingredients that traditionally made for the insufferable shrew of male-centred chauvinistic nightmares: the brittle demands and know-it-all self-sufficiency coupled with the frosty and forthright sheen of the waspish hyper-educated woman. This time, however, those same ingredients are expertly handled and turned into comedic gold by Norah Ephron, who not in vain was an excellent cook as well as a very sharp scriptwriter, and thus Sally Albright emerges to honour her surname in every sense of the word: verbally sparring the lackadaisical but zingtastic Harry Burns and managing to hang on to her thought through idiosyncrasies in every frame of the film. So that for the first time we have a romantic heroine who only changes the length of her feathered hair and width of her shoulder pads to signal the passing years for absentminded viewers but does not budge an inch to meet the demands of love or marriage.

Norah Ephron’s script is commendable to a quasi-Aristotelian point: it seems to generate its own perfect brand of romantic comedy, one where laughter and common sense are expertly matched, and where a feminist outlook is effortlessly paired with hetero-normative romance. In When Harry Met Sally, Ephron managed to prove that opposites attract to an extent that goes beyond the purely dramatic to enter the terrain of ideology. I imagine the world it depicts and the narrative it unfolds as a sort of Heaven for straight female overachievers: a place where professional acumen and steely resolve are a clear sine qua non for women but one where women and men make each other laugh and form friendships so valuable that the thought of losing them seems a more frightening prospect than the dreaded spinsterhood of yore. By showing us that a woman finds love when she meets a man who is happy to be her equal, Ephron and Reiner manage to give us one of the first feminist fairy tales on the silver screen. No fairy tale that delivers its moral through a woman faking an orgasm in a crowded Manhattan deli could be otherwise.

If we are lucky, we will also have what Sally is having.

You threw me a lemon; I poured some milk down my chin

Sex and food are strongly linked. For starters eating and sex are the only two activities I can think of that involve the five senses. They are thus all round sensory experiences. They are unparalleled in provoking cravings, and sparking desire, and peerless also in triggering disgust. You will sing for your supper and joust for a lover, and equally, the sight and smell of the wrong food or suitor will make you gag. Show me a person that is indifferent to food and I will show you a person who is not moved by sex either. The glutton will be mindless in bed; the ascetic will be parsimonious in kitchen and bedroom. If there are bones on the table, bones will jab your sides as you lie under your lover. If fat, fat will shake on the mattress like jelly on the plate.

Given this connection, I am surprised that food is not used more often to explore and voice sexual experience, a notoriously difficult area of human behaviour to represent in art and literature. What is the difference between eroticism and pornography, for example? I have asked myself that question a few times and it was only recently, via food used as a poetic vehicle and a film prop that I came to undersand the difference representationally.

Eroticism is eloquently captured in “You Threw Me a Lemon” by Miguel Hernández, here in a beautiful translation from the Spanish original by A.S.  Kline:

You threw me a lemon, so bitter,

with a hand warm and so pure,

that its shape was not spoiled,

and I tasted its bitterness regardless.

 

With that yellow blow, from a sweet lethargy,

my blood passed to an anxious fever,

feeling the bite of the tip

of a breast that was firm and full.

 

But on gazing at you and seeing the smile

that broke from you, at this acid act,

so different from my voracious malice,

 

my blood stood still, inside my shirt,

and became that porous and golden breast

a pointed and dazzling pain.

The erotic experience is doubtless a sensory experience that gratifies the ego, but eroticism, unlike pornography, recognises the provocation and the mutuality of the act of love and, most importantly, the responsibility to the other/lover. Hernández’s lemon is simultaneously the body of his female lover and her mind, her own desire, and her own call for love. His cravings, his “voracious malice” bring “dazzling pain” the moment he is able to recognise her own erotic universe, the moment he recognises that the lemon he bites in an “anxious fever” was once held by a hand “warm” and “pure”.

By contrast, pornography is mechanic and repetitious because it can never allow us a glimpse into the erotic universe of the other, it always folds upon itself. Watching porn, we become mechanised voyeurs, using alien bodies as canvasses for biological urges. There is no dialogue, no mutuality, and no sense of responsibility in pornography. And here is where food can again help us understand and see the difference: Nine and a Half Weeks –wrongly labelled an erotic film in my opinion– perfectly illustrates the mechanics of pornography through a soft-core food scene. So much so that it obviously borrows from the “money shot” endings of pornographic films with Kim Bassinger’s chin dripping with milk as she gulps it from a glass.  

A simple lemon has never been more complex than in Hernández’s poem. Conversely a full fridge never looked as empty as in Line’s film. Give me the lemon any day.

Celluloid Bites (4): Blue Is the Warmest Color

Rome, 1^st century BC, a slave, topless and barelegged, stands knee deep in a bath behind his master who is sitting with his back to him, completely naked. The light lathers their bodies in a bronze that compliments their tan complexions. Addressing his slave, the master proceeds to interrogate him about his habits and morals, does he lie? Does he steal? Has he ever dishonoured the gods? To all of these question the slave replies no. The questions are a form of foreplay, a series of appetizers preparing the ground for the main course, “Do you eat oysters?” the master asks; to which the slave replies that he does whenever he can. “Do you eat snails?” the master continues. “No, master.” The young slave replies. “Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral, and the eating of snails to be immoral?” Thus runs one of the most explicitly coded homoerotic encounters in the history of cinema courtesy of Stanley Kubrick’s direction, Dalton Trumbo’s script, and Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis’s performances in, you guessed it, Spartacus.

Abdellatif Kechiche fishes in similar waters in his provocative, intense and explicitly homoerotic Blue Is the Warmest Color by having the assured artist Emma tease her young and more inexperienced lover Adèle about the latter’s dislike of oysters, which Emma relishes both literally and as coded female genitalia. In the scene, the two leads are lying on the grass side by side, fully dressed, so absorbed in each other they may as well be an island slowly drifting away under the sun. Delight and a subtle flash of embarrassment cross Adèle Exarchopoulos face in yet another of the myriad close ups that constitute Kechiche’s film. It may not be the film’s subtlest moment, coming in the wake of Trumbo’s daring defiance of 1950s scruples but, the universe of adoration and intimacy in the young actress’s lovely face will touch anybody lucky enough to have experienced requited love. By the end of the scene Adèle is ready to enter the threshold of a new world that will devour her and spit her out forever transformed. She is now ready to taste oysters.

However invested in his lesbian love story (and invested he is), Kechiche’s film is ultimately a character study; a sort of sentimental education for a young working class woman who begins the film wading the troubling waters of her sexual awakening and finishes it almost drowning in them. Blue Is the Warmest Color is a long film, running at almost three hours, and it is exhausting in its uncompromising refusal to breathe for air as it inhabits young Adèle’s development; in that sense, it is utterly novelistic and Kechiche acknowledges that his protagonist must be measured not only in terms of an inner consciousness that is beginning to assert itself, but also against a milieu that is at odds with her passion and, as Kubrick would have it, her taste. For that reason, Kechiche has found in his oysters not just a metaphor for sex between women but also a class signifier, which he deftly uses in a scene that brings the young women for dinner to Emma’s house. Emma’s mother and her partner are bohemian, comfortably off but-unshowy in their tastes; they buy art and display it on the walls, they are discerning and adventurous in their search of white wine, they know Emma is gay and they receive Adèle with open arms and a batch of fresh oysters. The scene is lit in subdued muted gold reminiscent of candlelight; Emma’s mother, warm but inquisitive, tries to disguise her incomprehension about Adèle’s modest and pragmatic ambition to become a primary school teacher. Adèle overcomes her scruples and swallows the oysters that used to disgust her. She has crossed the line that separates her from the worldlier Emma, even if momentarily.

Kechiche sustains his use of food as a class signifier in a mirror dinner scene staged in Adèle’s house. Here Emma is not a lover, but a friend helping Adèle improve her results in Philosophy. Oysters are not on the menu, spaghetti Bolognese –a male and working class coded dish in cinema (not incidentally is it frequently on the menu in Mafia films heavily invested in depictions of masculinity)– have been cooked by Adèle’s father. In this environment, where earning one’s crust is paramount, Emma’s metier is questioned as impractical. She, like Adèle before her, is willing to enter her lover’s world on its own terms, adopting a heterosexual mask and toning down her bohemian streak to please her girlfriend’s parents. Léa Seydoux smiles as she absorbs the spaghetti that run under the charming gap between her teeth. She is more knowing than Adèle and it shows on her face. Kechiche once again proves that he is a great director of character: action and expression meet through the consumption of food. Dinner tables have always been pregnant with silenced truths in classic drama and this scene is a fine addition to that tradition.

Elsewhere Kechiche and co-script writer Ghalia Lacroix prove that it is impossible to write about love without writing about food. I won’t tell you any more. Go see the film and have some food before you sit down for its three-hour run. Be careful not to overeat though: Blue Is the Warmest Color proves that oysters can be far more (ful)filling than spaghetti.

Celluloid Bites (3): Ace in the Hole

There were no limits to Billy Wilder’s mastery as a filmmaker: if he had been a chef we would extol the virtuoso range of flavours and textures in his cinema, his ability to tease the palate with a seemingly light and frothy appetiser only to deliver a meaty main straight to the gut minutes later. He is a rare auteur in that his dexterity and ingenuity when handling genre can make you forget the uniqueness of his vision. The more films of his I watch, the more I discern a thread running through his work: his best movies offer lucid accounts of the dark side of the American Dream.

At his darkest and best, Billy Wilder was the sharpest satirist American cinema has produced. And because he satirised a society rife with exploitative cynics, he was often mistaken for a cynic himself. In this, Wilder proves his credentials as a satirist: the more successful satire is, the more it absorbs its target’s grimy outlook. For the satirist catharsis only comes through disgust. But we also forget the hope inherent in satire: our disgust reminds us of our moral centre and fuels the anger necessary for change. I believe that is the reason why Wilder’s films often feature antiheroes whose self-disgust ultimately leads them to moral clarity.

 Of all of Wilder’s antiheroes, the protagonist of Ace in the Hole takes the lion’s share of disgust and self-disgust. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a disgraced down-at-heel journalist recently arrived in Albuquerque, who stumbles upon a “human interest story” concerning a man trapped in an ancient Native American burial mountain in dusty sun-baked New Mexico and decides to exploit it as his ticket back to the greener media pastures of New York City. The story that unfolds is the blackest, most riveting of all of Wilder’s satires: Ace in the Hole explored the moral quagmire of his characters with such gusto and verve that it proved unpalatable for the American public of the 1950s and the film flopped. Audiences may have been misled into thinking they were in for a musical extravaganza due to the film’s ill-chosen title upon release, The Big Carnival. If this was a carnival: it was one full of grotesques. Tatum’s fall in the film is so spectacular in its sordidness that Wilder had to invent a shot to match it for its closing scene. He dug a hole to put the camera in so that he could capture Kirk Douglas’s final collapse from its very bottom: a rare (and much imitated) display of camera virtuosity for Wilder.

 You would think that there isn’t much of an opening for food in the metaphorical and literal desert I am describing but, as a scriptwriter, Wilder knew very well that the devil is in the detail and his films are always full of visual puns and metaphors. They are also well grounded in a naturalistic milieu, so food is often utilised to advance character, plot, theme or vision. In Ace in the Hole, he may have pushed the symbolism of food more than in any other film of his that I can remember: this is true of a memorable shot of Jan Sterling leaning against the door frame of her husband’s trading post as she takes a deliberate bite of a shiny and crunchy apple. Sterling plays the platinum-haired wife of Leo Minosa, the man trapped in ancient debris in The Mountain of the Seven Vultures (the name of the mountain also seems to anticipate the feeding frenzy that Tatum will unleash out of exploitative greed.) As a disgruntled and parasitical wife she is a tawdrier version of Cora Smith in The Postman Rings Twice. Wilder captures her fall, and by extension the beginning of a collective fall, by having her take a bite of the apple right after Tatum convinces her to stay and play along with his plan to milk her husband’s accident for personal gain.

 If Eden is lost it may also serve as a metaphor for the loss of a more innocent (as in blameless) culture in the shape of the decimated and maligned Native Americans on the fringes of the film. Wilder did not break much ground here: Native Americans in Ace in the Hole are as invisible as is usual in American culture and only appear in two guises. Typically, they appear as a uniform silent group refusing to desecrate their ancestors’ burial ground even if to rescue a trapped man (also, by the film’s logic, a grave robber, least we forget that he is driven by greed to endanger his life in a place of spiritual significance). There is also an individuated Native American character working in the Albuquerque newspaper that hires Tatum, and Wilder endows him with dignity in spite of the limited screen time. But by locating the film in New Mexico, with its Indian heritage, Wilder managed to make his critique resonate with American history and the troubled legacy of colonisation and genocide. There is a fine food-related image that stresses the erosion of Native peoples and their culture in the Westernised consumerist America of the 1950s. As a radio reporter interviews the couple that first arrived in the scene following the publication of the first instalment of the entrapment, their two children are included in the frame: two blond and very Caucasian-looking boys eating ice-cream wearing Indian headdress. I register this shot as one of the most acerbic visual puns I have seen: rapacious indifference not only to the suffering of the man buried alive but also to the Native peoples whose monument he has desecrated. Typically for Wilder, the scene is also thoroughly unobtrusive and naturalistic; very few filmmakers make such light of their art.

 But if I had to pick one food-related scene in Ace in the Hole it would undoubtedly be the one where the corrupt sheriff played by Ray Teal, thoroughly compliant with Tatum’s ploy to milk his “human interest story” to maximum gain in his bid for re-election, finally finds the right fodder for his pet rattlesnake: chewing gum, still in its silver wrapper. The grubby bottle-blond played by Starling supplied the apple and the unscrupulous sheriff gives us the snake. Wilder uses that most American entertainment, chewing gum, to round up his catastrophe: an un-nourishing and thoughtless cypher for a consumerist culture that has lost its moral compass. A piece of nothing swallowed whole by the blind beast. More than 60 years after its release, Ace in the Hole continues to leave a sour taste in the mouth.

Celluloid bites (2): Le Week-End

We’ll always have Paris; at least on the silver screen. And when it comes to food and film you could do much worse than spending a couple of days in the City of Light. My housemate and great friend was away in Paris last weekend with her beau and I suffered from mini-break envy to an extent not experienced since Bridget Jones was still a singleton in ardent pursuit of Mr D’Arcy.

Several eateries in Dublin could have offered some solace: The Paris Bakery, for example, has a mean patisserie and a staff as Gallic as they come this side of the mainland. Chez Max is offering an excellent deal for lunch: a main (tartine or salad), wine and coffee for just over 10 euro and elbow room so restricted and a room so dark and cosy in its Dublin Castle premises that you will feel like you are wearing a black polo neck and earnestly discussing your next ménage à trois. Being the unrepentant film addict I am, however, I decided to get my fix of menu prix-fixe by going to the cinema to watch Roger Michell’s Le Week-End.

A commendably nuanced script by Hanif Kurieshi sees Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) –a Birmingham-based married couple nearing retirement– returning to Paris thirty years after their honeymoon to celebrate their anniversary.  Kurieshi and Michell turn the trope of Paris as the city of nascent love on its head, and instead present it as the possible burial ground for a marriage in crisis. Not incidentally, a fine scene takes the couple to Beckett’s grave in Pierre Lachaise cemetery, where Nick muses on the playwright’s line “Do we mean love when we say love?” The answer is explored in the film through the brewing up of a storm that is Kurieshi’s script: his male protagonist provides an increasingly overcast horizon, opalescently grey at the beginning and lead-almost-black by the closing scenes; his female protagonist is hot and cold in flightily successive turns, providing the sparks that can break into lightning in a matter of seconds.

It is impossible to set a film starring an educated middle-class couple in Paris without staging several scenes in restaurants. It would be like setting a film in Vegas without a casino and a stripper, unthinkable. The challenge is to incorporate what is a Paris staple, its fine gastronomic tradition, into an exploration of marriage on the verge of dissolution, and Le Week-End meets the challenge well. For starters it recognises the theatrical potential of restaurants as places where several mini-dramas unfold simultaneously, each confined to its own narrow table space and privately-conceived conflict. In their first foraging adventure in Paris, Nick and Meg ogle and dismiss several restaurants before settling for the one bistro that can provide the complexity of their relationship with the right stage. The sequence is finely staggered, with Meg leading the couple in their uncompromising search for the right place. Nick merely acquiesces and follows his restless hard-to-please wife, reflecting his increasing forbearance in his hope for his wife’s acceptance; an acceptance that is as fraught with disappointment as her rejection of the succeeding eateries, and much slower to come.

Michell frames the couple side by side at the bistro and their sitting momentarily brings them together and highlights the camaraderie of old spouses. She offers him a taste of her bisque, he a bite of his dish. There is more intimacy in this exchange of morsels of food than in an exchange of bodily fluids. As you observe their un-showy closeness, you expect a successful rapprochement: food can do this to us. It can bring us a back and bring us closer. Kurieshi, nonetheless, has different ideas for his characters and more restaurants to play with. The resolution is slow burning and far from ready to be served to the viewer.

A second outing takes the couple to an upscale oyster bar: the food does not live up to its libidinous promise and Meg suggests the possibility of separation to her husband. He calls it a last supper and asks her to pay. Things are once more shaken off course by her sudden taste for adventure. To reveal more would be to spoil your appetite for a film worth watching. Suffice to say that, like all dramas set in France, including one with two English protagonists, Le Week-End finds its resolution at the close of a dinner party where the truth outs in need of a stiff drink: perhaps a cognac with a taste as mature and complex as the relationship explored in the film.

 

Celluloid bites Part I: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment

(If there is one thing I hate more than a spoilt appetite, it is a spoilt film: approach with caution if you have not seen the movie. On the other hand, you have not seen The Apartment? Are you serious? Go rectify that straight away.)

Billy Wilder famously got the idea for his bittersweet comedy The Apartment whilst watching David Lean’s melodrama Brief Encounter, which details the melancholy affair of two married lovers in post-war England. The character that caught Wilder’s attention would not give most viewers pause for thought: he is the friend who lends his apartment to the star crossed lovers so that they can conduct their affair away from prying eyes. You can extract a number of lessons from the anecdote: inspiration will dawn when you least expect it; an author remains one in the most unlikely circumstances; a wise cynic will strike gold in dark corners; always pay attention to the little things. On the other hand, it is possible that no lesson accrues from this. After all, how many melodramas did Wilder watch in his lifetime that did not make the slightest ripple in his work? Nonetheless, I would choose this anecdote to illustrate Wilder’s authorial mark over a thousand essays on his work. The result of Wilder’s interest in the schmuck in the touching Brief Encounter is Jack Lemmon’s touching schmuck in The Apartment: CC Baxter, a man so bereft of social and professional finesse that he is only apt to plump the cushions on the casting couch of his superiors before making himself scarce from his own apartment. Baxter represents the lowest rung on the capitalist food chain: when he returns to the apartment after it has served its carnal function, he finishes the dregs of the martinis scoffed by his bosses and their broads as an appetiser to a pre-cooked dinner-for-one in front of the television. Call me dirty minded, but should this scene in The Apartment not be included in some anthology of food as a metaphor for sex in cinema? Or is it all going to be plump-lipped French ingénues licking their lips after feasting on a peach?

 The object of Baxter’s affection, the elevator operator Fran Kubelik, deftly embodied by an adorable-looking Shirley MacLaine, as simultaneously knowing and hopeful, is also partially fleshed out in scenes revolving around food. This is particularly true of her extramarital relationship with her boss, Mr. Sheldrake, a calculating philanderer, stripped of any redeeming qualities by Wilder and Diamond’s script and honoured by Fred MacMurrray’s bravely unsympathetic performance, with whom she is having an affair largely conducted in the bowels of an out-out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant. Fran is unlucky in love, not because she does not have anybody to have dinner with, although we expect her to eat by herself when her married lover dines with his family, but because the marriage she longs for is clearly not on the menu. A relationship built around cocktails and discarded fortune cookies is insubstantial, regardless of her lover’s predictable, and predictably postponed, promises to leave his wife.

 It is a testament to Wilder and Diamond’s darkly lucid vision that Baxter and Kubelik’s first date follows a stomach full of barbiturates, the result of an attempted suicide prompted by a particularly insensitive Christmas present by Sheldrake. Fran’s stomach is mercifully pumped empty by Baxter’s neighbour, a doctor who covets Baxter’s liver for a medically fruitful post-mortem, mistakenly assuming that he is responsible for the empty gin bottles left behind by his bosses, in a scene that is more adult and bleak than any filmed in the last 50 years, in Hollywood or anywhere else. Never was a romantic comedy (?) more touching or astute than in the depiction of the growing warmth between Baxter and Kubelik in what we suspect to be their first taste of real intimacy and domesticity. Forced to coop up until she recovers, he makes dinner for her: spaghetti strained with a tennis racquet in lieu of a colander, yet another example of the scriptwriters’ genius; a shrewd visual metaphor for a bachelor en route to becoming a husband. Where Sheldrake is a predator, Baxter is nourishing. Never has a simple pasta dish looked more appetising.

Nowadays we may say that Wilder was being intertextual avant la lettre, citing Lean for the few cinematic savants who may get the connection, but it would be more accurate to say that Wilder rescues a nobody from invisibility, gives him a name and a cheap suit and shoves him centre stage. It is cruel work but somebody had to do it, and Wilder was never afraid of a little cruelty. Especially if by the end of the movie the nobody has become a somebody of sorts, emerging from the shadows to grab his once in a lifetime chance at common heroics: by the end of The Apartment Baxter narrowly manages to rescue himself and what is left of his dignity, which is more that can be said of most characters, fictional or otherwise.

Celluloid bites

Tomorrow I will inaugurate a series in which I will marry two of my favourite things: food and cinema. There are rich links between them as I suggested in an earlier piece about James Gandolfini’s superb performance in The Sopranos. I expect this series will run for as long as this blog is alive and kicking. May it run well into the night, like a dinner party in convivial company.