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No, Patrick: both Joyce´s story and Huston´s film go growing from...

Posted by orejones on August 5, 2005 at 10:05:24

In Reply to: Re: " Pastiche a la Rico------ posted by patrickU on August 5, 2005 at 05:18:33:

...start to that end, which is intensely climactic in its extreme contention, what simply makes it evn more intense...

This has brought to my mind a scene in another film, Minnelli´s "The Bad and the Beautiful", when Kirk Douglas starts messing up with a director (of German ascent, if memory serves me well), insisting in having some scene played with more intensity: the director tells him why he prefers to keep it under control, in order to slowly grow the whole film towards a higher tension. Douglas finally fires him, takes the rheins and... when he sees the results he´s got, he accepts that what he´s done is bullshit, and kills the film.

Both Joyce and Huston were high masters in their trades. And both were extremely successful at developing the whole plot to the best end it could ever have: from the apparently banal starting, with Gabriel and Gretta arriving to the party together, but somehow distant, to that wonderful ending when both have their most intimate feelings showing up unrestrained, in a most tender, painful way (as Catherine Deneuve said to Belmondo in "La Sireine du Mississippi": "Love hurts, doesn´t it?..."), nothing in this wonderful film happens per chance, as everything slowly goes adding up, slowly unweaving the masks both Gretta and Gabriel had been hiding themselves behind to each other and to themselves, until those incredible few last minutes, when, their souls finally naked, they both let their most intimate feelings show up, and Gabriel´s parlament recapitulates what we´ve been seeing all along the film, giving everything a new, deeper dimension, with his overwhelming acceptance of life and love, and of death as an inseparable part of life itself.

The moment they reach their hotel is not sad at all: it´s just the time when every veil starts falling down, and the inner beauty of both is finally allowed to shine, for all of us to see and feel it..., the time when we no longer are looking at a film on a screen, as we fall into it, and become part of it too, as the whole film is about us human beings, about how love becomes more powerful than us, and about how we all are finally related to each other, the white blanket of death covering us all, as snow covers the fields. Let me quote from the written story:

"Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing `Arrayed for the Bridal'. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Sad? Not at all, just an overwhelmingly serene acceptance of life, love and death...

Regards

BF

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