A weekend in the country
How amusing
How delightfully droll
A weekend in the country
While we're losing our control
If I told you all the crazy coincidences in my life, you wouldn't believe it for one minute. Serious. It's not the magnitude of coincidence-ness per se, but the frequency of them. Anyway, here's a small example: by and by I've managed to haul all my CDs over to London, but I almost never look at them since it's incomparably easier to just click and look up a song on the net, even if I did have it on CD. Last night, I had wanted to blog something on Renoir's La Règle du jeu and Altman's Gosford Park, and it suddenly occurred to me that something might be relevant in Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" (though I didn't blog it in the end because my thoughts about the two films were still fuzzy). But instead of firing up Napster as usual, for some unknown reason I went over to the DVD cabinet, got down on my knees (CDs are in the bottom shelf) and hunted out the CD instead. Maybe I just wanted my particular recording, who knows. The CD booklet was lying right in front of me on my desk this morning when I turned on the computer and found a surprise e-mail from my friend Marc in Boston telling me to check out a song he had put up in his latest post. The song is "Send In The Clowns". And I don't even know why he was looking up the song in every probability at the same time as when I was taking out my CD (why were you checking out "Clowns", anyway?)
This is not even the freakiest of stories I could tell, but anyway I took it as a sign that I should blog about Règle and Gosford Park. So ok. I was thinking the English (or French) countryhouse is as much a trope of place as, perhaps, the American motel, or the European middle-class apartment block. It is as if the holiday sense of "going to the country" rips off metaphorical corset strings, releasing tensions (Règle), setting loose memories (Gosford Park), reviving old and discovering new loves (Night Music). It is always the same structure - the beginning is always stable and orderly, everything in its place, then something happens while they are in the country and the whole structure gets turned upside down, usually with a tragedy. It is cathartical - how many times have we also wanted to rip our own lives inside out, upside down, but not daring to do so for fear of the unknown, the consequences of shaking up the familiarity? And it is also instructive, because in all the turmoil people also discover new relationships (Christine and Octave, Anne and Henrik) and new things: pasts they thought they had forgotten but hadn't, romances which they thought were over but weren't, games they thought they were playing but in which they were outplayed.
Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines...
No one is there.
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