Nicholas Rombes - The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Haydn gives himself a couple of weeks ( it seems; time is disjointed through elusive editing that recalls Varda’s French New Wave roots ) and then goes back to work. People had said it was the best thing to do. He assigns his English class Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker and is reprimanded at the end of the year, kindly but formally, by the superintendent in his absurdly cold air-conditioned office. Then Haydn slowly and deliberately cuts off all connections to his limited and far-flung family: his wife’s mother, who at age 43, abandoned her family to sell her art on eBay; his older brother ( all this is told in weird short mini-films within the film, like Polaroids come to life ) in San Francisco; his aunt who gave him all those rare books and the Roman coin. Haydn sells his house and moves into a smaller one, and then a while later sells that and moves into a smaller one yet ( shown in a slow montage of dissolves ), a cabin really, that backs up against a five-hundred-acre woods outside of town. Sitting on the back stoop now, in the dark ( we are in real-time present again ) June night two days after summer vacation has started and many, many months after the accident, nursing a beer, he can remember the dumbest of details about them — like how his daughter always skipped stairs or how his wife said “whew” and tossed her keys on the entry-way table when she came home, no matter where she had been.

On the first day of summer ( big jump here; the film becomes full of color and sun showing all that happens next ) Haydn goes to town for groceries, and as he pulls out of the parking lot, he sees a girl waiting, she says later, for a taxi.

Her red backpack.

Her army fatigues.

Her beautiful face beneath her stringy hair.

She is standing in the sun, by the side of the road, watching him.

She seems to have rings on every finger.

She gets into his car because he leans over and opens the door, unexpectedly.

It’s not something he planned to do.

He drives away with her because she lets him. ( The camera floats above the car .)

He takes her to where he lives because she says “yes.”

He doesn’t kid himself about how ridiculous this is, and how dangerous, but he feels he has “earned the right,” and that nothing had been for anything, and that everything that has come before is merely the set-up to an awful, awaiting punch-line that will put an end to it all no matter what he does or does not do.

She slumps down in the car seat on the way to his cabin, either because ( the camera is now in the car during this ) she is hiding or because it is some weird affectation, like the way teenage girls twirl their hair. He drives her past his old house, with a new SUV in the driveway, and past the familiar storefront landmarks and out to the edge of town to his new place on the edge of a woods where, he does not tell her, a human sacrifice took place in the 18th century.

“Can I stay here a few nights? Do you mind?” she asks, looking around ( we are in his cabin now, Haydn’s ) at his sparse place like she’s interested in renting it. Before he answers she had tossed her backpack onto the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. It is either sheer confidence or else an act.

The first night he sleeps in his bed and she on the couch.

The second night she sleeps in his bed and he on the couch.

On the day of the fire ( flames fill the full screen frame for several seconds ) that drives him finally and evermore out of his old life, she wants to talk, but not about anything that seems to matter.

He doesn’t know if she is homeless, or a runaway, or what.

He guesses she’s about 17.

Her face has a savage determination about it, but he can’t tell if it’s from lots of experience or something else. Her eyes are wide-apart bright green. Perhaps people were desperately looking for her, or perhaps they were hoping she would never return. She is quiet about all that with Haydn. He can see how she, with her long bare arms and fierce stare, could become “the object of obsession or disdain.” She is eating an orange at the kitchen counter, digging her fingers into it, wearing a white tank top. She has a tattoo of an oversized drop of blood on her left shoulder. It is a place where you could put your lips.

“Have you ever been to Spain?” she says. ( Camera moves, creeping ever so slowly in some unmotivated direction during what follows, as if there’s a third character not on the screen but watching.)

HIM: “No. Have you?”

HER: “Yeah, it’s nice. No one rushes around. The beaches are white.”

HIM: “Beaches? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

HER: “Calamari.”

HIM: “With squeezed lemon juice. And what else?”

HER: “Priests. You can have a drink with them at the cafe. They understand about sin.”

HIM: “I’ll bet they do.”

HER: “But I don’t do confessions.”

HIM: “I understand, my child,” he says and puts his hand on her shoulder in a gesture of mock forgiveness. She smiles and holds his eyes. He just wants ( it seems ) to touch her tattoo.

HER: “Do you want to know what I saw in one of the churches there? In Spain?”

HIM: “Sure.”

HER: “I’ve never told this to anybody. I shouldn’t tell you… maybe it’s because you’re a total stranger, you know?”

HIM: ( I’m sure this line is accurate; it’s underlined twice in red ink ) “I don’t believe you but go ahead.”

HER: “It is unbelievable, you’re right. God. You’ll think I’m lying. It’s like something out of a horror movie, except that in a horror movie you don’t know who or what to trust which is the whole point and I already know that I can trust you. It was hard to find you, do you understand?”

HIM: “Not really.”

HER: “It was so fucking hard to find you but then you came up to me in the car just like that and I worried that you’d drive me to a parking garage and pull my jeans down and put your hand or a knife on my throat and rape me but it was something I had rehearsed over and over in my head and I had it figured out what to do.”

HIM: “God.”

( She pushes the plate of orange rinds away .)

HER: “In this old stone church or church-like structure in the country we went to one night, past midnight, when we were drunk. It was outside of Madrid. We had followed the dirt road through a forest. It was ( sound cuts out )… anymore. It was so dark. And then this church — or ( a foreign-sounding word; ‘templo’? ) — appeared, at the end of the road. The door kind of fell off its hinges when we went to open it. Should I really tell you this?”

HIM: “I don’t see why not.”

HER: “I’ve wanted to tell somebody. Might as well be you. At first it was only a feeling, a feeling like ( sound cuts out )… but we were drunk, so it’s hard to say. It was pitch black inside. The floor was crooked, tilted. But everything was spinning anyway, so. Why we were even there, I don’t know. It was one of those ( another word that makes no sense; ‘jyhiardo’? ) things. I was the first one in, and it smelled rotten. Like dead flesh. Like a dead animal.”

HIM: “This is like a campfire story, isn’t it?”

HER: “But it doesn’t have much of an ending.”

HIM: “That’s okay.”

HER: “Well inside, there was this thing. I don’t know. It was ( soundtrack garbled ) and dark, but you could still see it, standing there, like ten feet tall, by the altar.”

HIM: “What kind of thing?”

HER: “Like a person. But too ( sound cuts out )… Standing very still, but looking right at me. At first I thought it was a statue, something religious. Like Mary. But it was moving, swaying.”