Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

They stroll past a line of tables filled with platters of food and pastries. A young woman dressed in someone’s clichéd idea of a French maid’s uniform — something out of a thirty-year-old imported farce — is lighting sterno cans underneath silver chafing dishes.

“No, no, Mariette,” Hugo barks without looking at the girl. “Nothing is to be served until after three. I don’t want the smell of food distracting them from their work.”

They come to half a dozen people engrossed in various duties from planting bottles of Möet in crystal serving buckets to slicing open cherrystones to chiseling a fat block of ice into what might turn out to be a rosebush in full bloom.

Apparently satisfied with the preparation of the feast, Hugo marches toward the set and comes to stand behind a classic director’s chair with Schick inscribed on the back. He grabs a script out of the chair and holds it against his chest.

“I must confess my nervousness at this moment,” he says. “So many of the greats have taken their turn with the legend. Gabriel Tellez may have been the first. But they all had a go at it. Byron. Shadwell. Mozart. Espronceda. Molière. Shaw. Even Bergman, The list goes on and on.”

“And now,” Sylvia says, “we add Schick.”

He looks at her, frowns slightly. “You’ll discover I’ve taken quite a few liberties, so to speak, with the myth.”

“No guts, no glory.”

He nods. “A coarse phraseology, but the truth is the truth. An artist interprets the old myths for the new age, yes? His job is not so much to decode as to re-code.”

“Well,” she says, “there are only so many stories.”

“Exactly,” he says. “And style is everything.”

She nods but he’s not looking at her. He seems to be dazing slightly, staring out at the set, but not quite focusing.

“It’s so tragic, Sylvia,” he says, “when an artist peaks too soon. I think, so often, of Welles.”

She stays quiet.

“I’ve been working on this film for so long now,” he says, “I feel as if the only thing to do upon its completion is expire.”

He opens the script and brings his face down close to a page, then immediately closes it and says, “Do you feel prepared, my child?”

She stares at him until she remembers why she’s here— Hugo wants her to photograph his work tonight. Hugo wants a record of the genius in the grip of his art.

She nods, steps back, lifts the Canon, focuses in on him and shoots the first image of the series. She keeps the camera at her eye and says, “When will you answer my questions, Hugo?”

He stares into the viewfinder for a while, then says, “You’re quite sure you want all the answers, Sylvia?”

She lowers the Canon. She keeps her voice even. “I’m here, aren’t I? I brought my goddamn camera, didn’t I?”

“At three o’clock we break for dinner,” he says. “You and I can dine. And talk.”

She takes a breath, not sure what to do. “You set me up from the start, didn’t you, Hugo?”

He looks surprised.

“You came to me, Sylvia,” he says. “Don’t you recall? You came to the theatre on the day of the riot. You sought me out.”

She wants to say something, to voice some contradiction or insult. But nothing comes out. He reaches out, puts his hand on her shoulder and says, “Keep your eyes open, Sylvia. Tonight won’t come again.”

Then he claps his big hands together and people start scurrying to various stations and jobs. Hugo’s got three cameras ready on dollies, two boom mikes, and two simple banks of lights mounted high near the ceiling. It looks like a fairly second-rate production in light of his speech. A step above an amateur video shoot, but not much of a step.

The set resembles an enormous dance hall. At one end of the room four musicians, two men and two women, all with narrow black bow ties secured around their necks, form a naked string quartet seated on cheesy and cold-looking metal folding chairs. Above them, mounted on the brick wall, is a hand-painted sign that reads Club Sevila. The rest of the room is outfitted with such a dizzying array of anachronisms that determining what time period Schick is going for is almost impossible. The design strikes Sylvia as the quintessential nightclub from hell. It’s sort of a hybrid — the classic New York hotspots of the thirties and forties, places like 21 and the Stork Club, crossed with something vaguely Germanic. It’s a location from your queasiest dreams, the perfect locale for Desi Arnaz to bound onto the stage and sing “Babalu” to Hermann Goering and his date.

And the club is populated by a stunning array of freakish, disparate characters in the gaudiest, most mismatched costumes imaginable. There are dozens of actors and actresses arranged at cocktail tables and dressed in loungewear from Mars, lingerie from the nightmares of a disturbed carnival geek. The view through Sylvia’s camera looks as if Halloween has spontaneously broken out in some tacky clinic for schizophrenics.

Hugo takes a long, slow look around the set, seems to meet the eye of every performer and technician. Sylvia focuses in on him with the camera, watches him through the lens as a makeup man leans over and dabs a little pancake on his glistening forehead. Hugo pulls down on the hem of his uniform jacket, then nods to a young woman in jeans and a blue work shirt.

The woman calls out, “All right everyone. Quiet on the set. Cameras roll,” then steps out in front of one of the cameras and holds up an old fashioned clapboard, says, “Don Juan Triumphant. Scene Seventy-two. Take one,” smacks the clapper down on the board and jumps back next to Hugo who shouts, top of his lungs, “And action.”

The room falls to silence. A beat goes by. Then the naked quartet is cued and, to the sound of screeching violin and cello, Hugo, the Virgil of the porno-tour, pushes out his chin and stork-walks into the center of Club Sevila, clasps his hands in front of him and initiates the movie’s finale, the consummate narcissist to the end.

Sylvia focuses in on the director, zooms until his enormous head is squeezed within the box of her vision, until Hugo’s mouth is a cavernous vacuum that begins to move.

“This, our final circle of hell, can be a very liberating residence. Don Juan has an eternity to indulge his carnal impulse. You, my sweet voyeur, my audience and my customer, are not nearly so lucky. Waste no more time. Join us in the consummation of a lifetime of yearning. Excise the oppression. Cast off the yoke of inhibition. Let the beast inside ride free and wild tonight,” his voice escalates to a roar. “Let this rapture begin.”

And all the performers begin to tear each other’s clothes off. Hugo starts prompting and directing, matching partners up, instructing, his hands flying, letting loose buttons and zippers and hooks and fasteners of all variety. Costumes are flying in the air as more flesh begins to fill the set, all of it young and toned and unreal.

Suddenly Sylvia’s watching an entire stage full of copulating men and women groping and heaving and thrusting and moaning. The actors are acrobatic and wildly imaginative. Hugo, the ringmaster, the carnal dance instructor, stays in his SS uniform throughout the orgy, and once he sees everyone is well-lubed and arranged in a chain of copulation that snakes across the floor from wall to wall, he climbs back to center stage, stands for a moment with his hands clasped behind him, rigid, at full attention, staring down the camera, a prissy general surveying the messy plains of his conquest. Then he pulls two long baton-like sticks from behind his back and holds them out in the air like an orchestra conductor. He extends them downward with a flourish until they touch the closest firepot and burst into flame, become skinny little torches. Hugo turns sideways, bends the trunk of his body backwards, the dome of his skull finally parallel with the stage floor. He lifts one torch to his mouth and inserts it slowly and deeply, pulls it out extinguished. He performs the same feat with the other torch, a bit faster this time, popping the burning stick down into the cavity of his face and withdrawing it seconds later a charred black wick. And then he comes upright, turns forward, and blows out a full lungful of breath that fires a jet of flame into the air above the sexual performers, a tongue of orange fire that seems to roll outward in liquid-ish, spiraling balls. Waves of an inferno from the belly of the Austrian beast.