cutriver

'It's easy to leave, it's hard to stay behind and rust'

- American Music Club, 'Home'

Friday, in the library, I bumped into two people I know. This is the thing about living in little old Europe, it really is a small world. I went for lunch with Michael, a fellow French cinema scholar, and told him of my Australian dilemma. He said, 'You seem remarkably relaxed for someone who has to resolve a difficult dilemma in the next few hours'. This is typical. I have never considered myself to be a relaxed or laidback person (I was anything but relaxed about this Adelaide issue), but people have always told me I am. I even once had a small argument with Murray about it: No, no, I kept repeating, I'm not relaxed at all, and Yes, he insisted, yes you are.

So anyway, I wrote the e-mail and I turned down the job, then, to celebrate, or commiserate, I went to the Cinmathque to watch Jess Franco's Necronomicon. My web buddy, Jean-Sbastien, whom I have not yet met but am working on it, was talking in his blog not so long ago about what a sinister place the Cinmathque is, and he's right. Maybe a Jess Franco film brings out the worst in the place, but it was full of lonely, socially inept men in their 30s and 40s, all with glasses and bad haircuts and all arguing about who'd seen the most obscure movies. Dotted around the room were one or two women, too ugly or too aigries to attract anyone but lonely, socially inept men in their 30s and 40s, plus a handful of curious East Asians and, in the middle of it all, a girl with dyed red hair, sitting in the third row and furiously snogging her boyfriend in full view of everyone, resplendent in the knowledge that she was the one and only person in this audience of 200 who would be getting any tonight, or at any time in the foreseeable future.

It was all fantastically depressing. I was half tempted, afterwards, to look in on the porn cinema over the road to check whether there was any appreciable difference in a) clientele or b) production values (but I was too tired and am maybe coming down with a cold, the result of all the aeroplaned air and indecision-induced angst of my September). And anyway, I'm being a little hard on Jess Franco who, after all, has an eye for a striking image and not merely an eye, as we used to say, for the laydeez. But, like all these Mediterranean idiots, his eroticism is profoundly dependent on a deep-seated Catholic guilt that, ultimately, I find rather laughable. What would be an eroticism that didn't contain this degree of guilt, that didn't, on some level, feel bad about iself? Would it actually be erotic at all? Would it, in fact, be anything other than love, what Leonard Cohen called 'love itself'?

In a similar vein, Park Chanwook's ultra-violent thriller Old Boy is stylishly shot and ingeniously plotted, but I'm rather disappointed that the unmentionable secret towards which the whole narrative tends turns out to be incest. Just like in bloody Chinatown, thirty bloody years ago. It strikes me as rather odd that incest remains the most unspeakable of secrets, even after all these years. This is what I like about Jacques Rivette: the secrets in his films, even when they relate to the family, always go beyond sex to suggest that there are other, darker forces at work in the world...

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After an early aperitif with K and Alicia, followed by half a bottle of cheap, nasty red wine over dinner, I am all exciteable and restless on Saturday night and, having phoned everyone I know in Paris (= about 5 people) and found them all busy, I go out and walk up and down the rue des Dames for half an hour, unresolved to enter any establishment as they're all too empty or too full, too posh or too male or too Turkish. So I come home and fall asleep to the soothing tones of Mark Eitzel, only to be woken at 3am with poisonous tannins thundering through my veins and all sleeping over for the night, and lie awake and brood, for three hours, about Adelaide.

Later, much later, Michael Mann makes everything all right again. Collateral is the best film of the year and, maybe when I've seen it again, I'll be able to say something about it. For now, I'm still catching my breath.