Melodrama, Studying, Parks

Melodrama’s such a dirty word when it comes to criticism. “This film devolves into melodrama,” or some such comment, indicating that, frankly, big emotions rendered large are slightly embarrassing and certainly inartistic. I’ve been guilty of the same sin—I know “it’s so melodramatic” has stumbled out of my mouth as my first criticism of a movie so many times.

There’s good reason for that. There are those trite melodramas, the ones where everyone concerned, the audience, the director, the writer and most unfortunately the actors knows what’s going to happen ahead of time and so everyone goes through the motions (see how I had to use a cliché to describe a cliché? That’s what I mean.)

Then there are those melodramas where you feel like you’ve been ambushed midway through. Crash was like that for a lot of people, and I certainly sympathize. Myself, I’ve found rape is the type of scene where people get clubbed over the head, and I’m referring the audience here.

So when you see melodramas like that, you kind of see where the reputation is deserved. But then again, to reconsider: practically every opera is a melodrama. Same for many of the early Greek plays. Then, there’s another film: Syndey Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Marisa Tomei’s breasts (I kid. Marisa Tomei has a fine performance.).

As you might expect from a melodrama, it is in no way subtle. The film features two brothers (Hoffman and Hawke) who decide to rob their parents’ jewelry store because they need money and know it well. Hoffman, who plays the slimy real estate executive brother, convinces Hawke, the in-over-his head “baby”, to do this act using the reasoning that the jewelry store is insured and hence no one will get hurt. Wrong, of course—the whole thing is bungled and everything unravels from there.

The title, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” comes from an Irish blessing that goes, “May you be in Heaven thirty minutes before the devil knows you’re dead.” That’s the idea (and I use this term loosely; the film is mostly about its characters hitting emotional peaks [one might say piques], in a good way) behind the film: the characters, all of them, are bluffing throughout the film. Particularly notable is Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character, who plays the slick real estate executive, until everything disintegrates in his hands. One of the most memorable scenes features Hoffman’s face, focused upon, glazed over, numb, lifeless, as insults are hurled at him.

The narrative device that ensures that the film does not degenerate into the aforementioned emotional ambush is the Tarantino-type chronology, which is continually cutting and weaving between characters and time frames. Furthermore, each scene is quickly and efficiently played, pushing the pace with an electric current. The narrative structure reinforces the movie’s melancholy mania.

The movie isn’t deep, and I don’t think it’s meant to be (and it were, I appreciate it on other terms). What it is, is an effective showcase of the character’s emotional range and acting, as well as a plot that, upon reflection, is formulaic, but very fresh at the time.

****

As I was walking to get lunch today, a bus parked on the sidewalk in my way. While annoying, this was hardly unusual: motorcycles forever take to the sidewalks, and parking in Paris is notably laissez-faire. The reason, I gathered, that the bus parked on the sidewalk, was to make it easier for the smaller children who had to ride on it—maybe it was easier to climb the steps once the bus was parked on the sidewalk? This is only my best guess.

Anyway, because this was a time for role reversals, I took the streets and walked around the bus. Once I got back to my side of my street, I saw a man imitating an auteur: dressed in a faded khaki-colored leather jacket, with pre-ripped jeans and an expensive, seemingly-casually-yet-actually-labored-upon-tousled haircut. He was filming the children get on the bus. Once he was aware of my looking at him, probably with a quizzical expression asking, “So, what are the penalties for child pornography in France?”, he abruptly swerved his mounted camera in the opposite camera, directly at the pole of the sign, whereupon he lingered for the duration of my passing by. When I came back from lunch, he was still there, now filming the empty street.

****

I walked around the Parc Montsouris today. I haven’t been since the unofficial beginning of autumn. The signs think it’s winter though—they advise you not to lie down, as the Parc is going through its “winterly cycle” right now. Also the signs ask you not to feed the birds. And not to climb onto the netting that separates the Parc from the RER station. Definitely a lot of paternalism going on here.

But the Parc looks beautiful. The flowers are fresh, the pond still, and the autumnal raiment of the trees is serenely stately. It is my favorite park to walk around in, because of the typical French marriage of nature and nurture as regards its Parcs.

****

I was traveling on the RER tonight to get to dinner and afterwards the movie. A group of Italians was discoursing amongst themselves loudly—all foreigners, I’ve noticed, speak loudly on the metro, not just Americans—and “Sarkozy” came up. It was a crowded car, and someone shouted from the other end, “Sarkozy sucks!” (the actual word was far less polite but makes far less sense in English).

Speaking of swear words, Before the Devil… features quite a few of them, which afforded me the opportunity to see how the French translated them. After hearing that gorgeous rant on the train to Provence, I expected my vocabulary to expand in a crucial area—I’ve always worried about my ability in a confrontation, due to my ignorance in French swear words. Unfortunately, the translation of the movie disappointed—it was all “putains” and “cons” and “putains de merde”: everything I’d already known. To top it off, they left out some swear words too—“I fucking mean it” changed to “I mean it” and isn’t that underselling the matter?

Some of the other translation choices bothered me. For example, Hoffman elucidates his virtues in one scene, “I make six figures, I’m an exec, I’m smart, I know the angles.” They translated it as, “I make six figures, I’m an exec, I’m not a stupid jackass, I know the angles.” The whole point of the scene is that he’s praising himself, not that he’s trying to find some modest baseline that everyone can agree with, which “I’m not a stupid jackass” misses. Maybe there’s some cultural taboo in France about bragging that way, so much so that it doesn’t even make sense to say “je suis intelligent,” but the same cultural taboo exists in America too, more or less. So count me skeptical.

****

The theater we went to was small and independent. They had a bathroom in the actual theater, which was rare. They also didn’t sell food and didn’t care about us bringing our own food in. That was kind of a bummer for me at least, as I wanted that thrill of being clandestine.

****

I spent a lot of time studying. By a lot I mean that I spent some amount of time at all. By studying I mean reviewing; new assignments and writing have never counted as much in my mental accounting as reviewing. Something in me hates reviewing and that something revolts against it even more now that I’m in Paris and have a light schedule.

It’s so strange to go back to studying, because studying is such a quintessentially academic activity. Studying has always struck me as the broccoli of the academic experience: no one likes it (some people claim they do; some people also lie) but it’s necessary to get through if you want to get dessert. Except that’s a typically American attitude: we rationalize pleasure if it is accompanied by something for self-betterment. That’s the Puritan legacy. For me, though, I’ve been getting my dessert without eating my broccoli, so the idea of returning to it seems pretty odd. But it must be done.