William Boyd: The Destiny of Nathalie X

MICHAEL SCOTT GEHN. Have you ever seen Le Destin de Nathalie X? Extraordinary film, extraordinary. No, I tell you, I’d put it right up there with Un Chien andalou , J.J. Todd’s Last Walk, The Chelsea Girls , Downey’s Chafed Elbows . That category of film. Surreal, bizarre … Let’s not beat about the bush, sometimes downright incomprehensible, but it gets to you. Somehow, subcutaneously. You know, I spend more time thinking about certain scenes in Nathalie X than I do about Warner’s annual slate. And it’s my business, what more can I say? Do you smoke? Do you have any nonviolent objections if I do? Thank you, you’re very gracious. I’m not kidding, you can’t be too careful here. Nathalie X … OK. It’s very simple and outstandingly clever. A girl wakes up in her bed in her room—

Aurélien looked at his map. Delphine and Bertrand stood at his shoulder, sunglassed, fractious.

“We have to go from here … to here.”

“Aurélien, when are we going to film?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe. First we walk it through.”

Delphine let her shoulders slump. “But we have the stock. Why don’t we start?”

“I don’t know. I need an idea. Let’s walk it through.”

He took Bertrand’s elbow and guided him across the road to the other side. He made half a square with his thumbs and his forefingers and framed Delphine in it as she lounged against the exit sign of the Dollarwize Inn.

“Turn right,” Aurélien shouted across the road. “I’ll tell you which way to go.”

MICHAEL SCOTT GEHN. — A girl wakes up in her own bed in her own room, somewhere in Paris. She gets out of bed and puts on her makeup, very slowly, very deliberately. No score, just the noises she makes as she goes about her business. You know, paints her nails, mascara on eyelashes. She hums a bit, she starts to sing a song to herself, snatches of a song in English. Beatles song, from the “White Album,” what’s it called? Oh yeah: “Rocky Raccoon.” This girl’s French, right, and she’s singing in English with a French accent, just quietly to herself. The song sounds totally different. Totally. Extraordinary effect. Bodywide goose bumps. This takes about twenty, thirty minutes. You are completely, but completely held. You do not notice the time passing. That something so totally — let’s not beat about the bush — banal, can hold you that way. Extraordinary. We’re talking mundanity, here, absolute diurnal minutiae. I see, what, two hundred and fifty movies a year in my business, not counting TV. I am replete with film. Sated. But I am held. No, mesmerized would be fair. [Pause] Did I tell you the girl was naked?

“Turn left,” Aurélien called.

Delphine obliged and walked past the mirror glass façade of an office building.

“Stop.”

Aurélien made a note on the map and turned to Bertrand.

“What could she do here, Bertrand? She needs to do something.”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

“Something makes her stop.”

“She could step in some dogshit.”

Aurélien reflected for a while. He looked around him: at the cracked parched concrete of the street, the dusty burnish on the few parked cars. There was a bleached, fumy quality to the light that day, a softened glare that hurt the eyes. The air reverberated as another jumbo hauled itself out of LAX.

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “Thanks, Bertrand.” He called to Delphine. “OK, go up to the end of the road and turn left.”

MICHAEL SCOTT GEHN. I’ve written a lot about this movie, analyzed the hell out of it, the way it’s shot, the way it manipulates mood, but it only struck me the other day how it works. Essentially, basically. It’s all in the title, you see. Le Destin . “The Destiny of Nathalie X.” Destiny. What does destiny have in store for this girl, I should say, this astoundingly attractive girl? She gets up, she puts on her makeup, she sings a song, she gets dressed. She leaves her apartment building and walks through the streets of Paris to a café. It’s nighttime. She sits in this café and orders a beer. We’re watching her, we’re waiting. She drinks more beers, she seems to be getting drunk. People come and go. We wait. We wonder. What is the destiny of Nathalie X? (It’s pronounced “Eeeks” in French. Not “Ecks,” “Eeeks.”) And then? But I don’t want to spoil the movie for you.

They started filming on their sixth day in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon — almost magic hour — and the orange sun basted the city in a thick viscous light. Aurélien shot the sequence of the walk in front of the mirror glass building. The moving cloudscape on the mirror glass curtain wall was disturbingly beautiful. Aurélien had a moment’s regret that he was filming in black and white.

Delphine wore a short black skirt and a loose, V-neck taupe cashmere sweater (no bra). On her feet she wore skin-colored kid loafers, so fine you could roll them into a ball. She had a fringed suede bag over her shoulder. Her long hair was dyed a light sandy blond and — after much debate — was down.

Aurélien set up the camera across the road for the first take. Bertrand stood beside him and pointed his microphone in the general direction of Delphine.

Aurélien switched on the camera, chalked scene one on the clapper board, walked into the frame, clicked it and said, “Vas y, Delphine.”

Nathalie X walked along the sidewalk. When she reached the middle of the mirror glass she stopped. She took off one of her shoes and peeled the coin of chewing gum from its sole. She stuck the gum to the glass wall, refitted her shoe and walked on.

MICHAEL SCOTT GEHN. I have to say as a gesture of contempt for Western materialism, the capitalist macrostructure that we function in, that takes some beating. And it’s not in the French version. Aurélien No has been six days in Los Angeles and he comes up with something as succinct, as moodily epiphanic as that. That’s what I call talent. Not raw talent, talent of the highest sophistication.

BERTRAND HOLBISH. The way Delphine cut her hair, you know, is the clue, I think. It’s blond, right? Long and she has a fringe, OK? But not like anybody else’s fringe. It’s just too long. It hangs to her lower eyelash. To here [gestures], to the middle of her nose. So she shakes her head all the time to clear her vision a little. She pulls it aside — like this — with one finger when she wants to see something a little better … You know, many many people look at Delphine and find this very exciting, sexually, I mean. She’s a pretty girl, for sure, nice body, nice face. But I see these girls everywhere. Especially in Los Angeles. It’s something about this fringe business that makes her different. People look at her all the time. When we were waiting for Aurélien we — Delphine and me — used to play backgammon. For hours. The fringe, hanging there, over her eyes. It drove me fucking crazy. I offered her five hundred dollars to cut it one centimeter, just one centimeter. She refused. She knew, Delphine, she knew.

Aurélien filmed the walk to the café first. It took four days, starting late afternoon, always approaching the café at dusk. He filmed Nathalie’s levée in one sustained twelve-hour burst. Delphine woke, made up, sang and dressed eight times that day in a series of long takes, cuts only coming when the film ran out. The song changed: Delphine sang Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” with the pronoun changed to “He.” This was Delphine’s idea, and a good one Aurélien thought, the only problem was she kept forgetting. “He’s an artist, she don’t look back,” Delphine sang in her flat breathy voice as she combed her hair, “He never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall.”