Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

We see the Châtelaine’s breasts as her lover lying beside her sees them. It was a pleasure to look at this body. The camera keeps close company with the lovers. In adoration of the Châtelaine, the lens loiters on the soft declivity between her shoulder blades; on the pulsing skin of her neck; on her lips; on her thighs. The young man is regarded closely too. Our gaze – the Châtelaine’s gaze – caresses the tightening muscle of an arm, a taut buttock, a curl of hair around an ear. We glimpse a penis, tumescent, twice; and penetration, in close-up – a slow and blatant coupling, of documentary frankness.

‘I’m useless on stage,’ Imogen said, as if this were an incontrovertible fact. ‘And applause is a problem. For me, I mean. You do your turn and you get your reward. I don’t like it.’

It struck me as reasonable for people to congratulate and thank the performers, I said. And wasn’t applause an honest way to close the evening? The lights go up, the audience claps – the whole thing has been an illusion, and now the show is over.

She was all in favour of honesty, Imogen said, but she was not cut out to be an entertainer. ‘That sounds pompous, but it’s how it is,’ she said. ‘You give your performance, and at the end of the evening the comfortable ones give you their approval, if they feel they’ve had their money’s worth. And I’m speaking as a member of the comfortable community. I’m aware of the hypocrisy,’ she said, bowing her head to accept the implied reproach.

‘Life consists in the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted,’ wrote Marie François Xavier Bichat, chief physician to the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort. His book was published in 1800. Two years later he died, at the age of thirty, after falling down a flight of stairs at the Hôtel-Dieu.

I watched Les tendres plaintes last night – or skim-watched it, for the scenes in which Imogen appears. I have never cared for the actor who plays Xavier. It is hard to understand why any of these young women would tolerate this prig for more than ten minutes. And the behavioural tics are overdone: the staring eyes, the staccato speech, the peculiar gait. Everything is overdone: the unmanaged hair, the ill-fitting clothes. Xavier has no TV; such is his disdain for the modern world. He manages to rein himself in for the longest scene – with Caroline, at the concert given by his bête noire, Gaston Lasserre, a serial winner of competitions and awards, who just happens to have attended the same conservatoire as Xavier. Perhaps Imogen’s self-restraint obliged him to tone it down a little. Depressed by the brilliance of Gaston, Xavier walks with Caroline to the Métro; he walks at arm’s length from her, head down, like a man who has just received terrible news. ‘He is better than me,’ he complains. ‘He is very good,’ Caroline admits; she cannot lie. ‘I hate him,’ says Xavier; Gaston is handsomer and cooler than Xavier too; he drives an implausibly expensive car. It’s a tough world, Caroline sympathises; it’s unfair that there should be room for so few harpsichordists at the top of the tree. ( Les tendres plaintes is a comedy, Antoine Vermeiren maintains; this is the only scene at which I smile.) ‘Gaston Lasserre is a showman,’ Xavier protests. ‘He is not serious.’ We know that Xavier is very serious. He is a scholar as well as a musician; his knowledge of the music of his chosen era is profound. Unfortunately, though, he is not a performer of Gaston Lasserre’s calibre, as he knows. ‘He loves the applause, not the music,’ he moans. The whingeing continues all the way to the Métro station, where Xavier informs his girlfriend that he might as well kill himself. There is of course no possibility that Xavier could do any such thing; nevertheless, Caroline dissuades him. ‘The music needs you,’ she tells him. He kisses her on the forehead. ‘Tonight I have to be on my own,’ he says. Caroline watches him as he descends the steps and disappears. Imogen’s face in these four or five seconds is the best thing in the film: we see pity, anger, affection; and her knowledge that their relationship has just been ended.

We were leaving my office, where I had shown Imogen some of the letters. She preceded me to the door, and as she opened it I felt compelled to tell her that Marcus Colhoun had given me a copy of La Châtelaine.

Registering no surprise, she glanced over her shoulder to ask: ‘And you’ve watched it?’

‘I have.’

‘What did you think?’

My remarks were inane: I had appreciated the pace of it, and the tone; the cinematography was excellent. Blah blah.

She glanced at me again and said, without innuendo: ‘There are some nice images.’

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘The basket of oranges was memorable,’ she said, and laughed. Then she stopped at the head of the stairs to suggest that we continue this conversation some other time.

The final scene of Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort is difficult to watch; it is difficult for anyone to watch. The woman, Marguerite, is in her bedroom, seated in front of a mirror. Motionless, the camera observes her from the far side the room; the distance implies some sort of tact. A window is open; we hear a car passing in the street; after ten seconds, a second car; a child calls out and is answered by another child. The room is bright with sunlight. Calmly, or so it seems, the woman regards the reflection of her face. We hear her exhale, then the camera is abruptly in the place of the mirror, and her face occupies most of the screen. The lens receives Marguerite’s consideration. We last saw her weeping; she is not weeping now; her eyes suggest exhaustion, and vast disappointment. Then, in the space of two or three seconds, the focus of her gaze changes. The eyes widen fractionally; the exhaustion appears to dissipate. Marguerite is no longer looking at what she sees in the glass: she is looking through the glass, at us. Her gaze makes each of us feel that we are being specifically addressed. ‘Look at me,’ says her gaze. Nothing in her face undergoes any alteration; her mouth is relaxed and closed; there is no frown. She blinks, slowly, with composure; that is the only movement. She is not protesting; neither is she requesting pity. The power of her gaze is the power of absolute openness. For a full minute we are not released. Each of us must look at her; we must look into her eyes and return the gaze of this dying woman, until, in an instant, the screen becomes black. For ten seconds the screen is black, then the names scroll up in silence.

I could not say how many times I have watched this scene. My admiration is some sort of palliative.

She disliked the ‘contrived intimacy’ of the theatre. ‘We pretend to be unaware of the audience. And I know what you’re going to say,’ she said, raising a finger. ‘Film is every bit as contrived. That’s true. But it’s a different kind of contrivance.’ The camera allowed her to be natural, she said. ‘The camera sees everything, and I like that. There’s no distance to cross. I don’t have to project myself. But there’s a distance too: because I’m not there for the performance. I’m on a screen, in a big dark room. People are looking at me, but I can’t see them. To the audience it’s enhanced reality. It’s an immersion: the picture is huge, the sounds are loud. But it’s just a screen – they’re staring at a wall. So you’re absorbed in it, but detached. That’s what I like. It’s more true and at the same time more false,’ she said.