Woman recovered, then given away - We’ll always have Paris

Of course I need to delay completing my post on Before Sunrise / Sunset (after all, Linklater took 9 years to complete the romance between Jesse and Celine, so I have plenty of scope), which would take us to Paris. So I thought I’d ponder on a classic variation on this regret-renunciation-remembrance = romance thread: Casablanca.

Too obvious? Forgive me, but I’m just back from Morocco (albeit Essaouira), where I went to escape the horror of Christmas, and to restore the true meaning of the festival with a bit of sun worship. And while I was there I read Tahir Shah’s book The Caliph’s House, about his adventures living in the city where the film is supposedly set. He relates encountering a mad American who travels the world watching the film everywhere it is playing, and who declares it the greatest film ever made. Many would agree, as it still tops the favourite film ratings, suggesting it still has the power to stir us 65 years after it was made.

I think this is down to the way it combines the archetypal with the historical and topical. The classic love-triangle is as old as romance itself (as Lancelot and Guinevere at least), but is enriched by the war-time conflict between personal desire and patriotic duty. And as time goes by (sorry), that period itself, and certainly its setting in what was once the Art Deco jewel of French North Africa, have acquired their own Romantic veneer as an epoch to sigh after. Who wouldn’t wish to walk into that particular gin joint, swathed in stark film noir ambiance, and hear the tinkle of that piano, just about to play that song? Memory, melancholy, a certain melody, borders, crossroads, danger, the exotic orient - the film is a veritable tagine of Romance, spiced with all its essential ingredients. OK, on the ‘oriental’ side it may be, as Tahir Shah points out, a farrago of Hollywood fantasy of old Arabia, whereas ‘the Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe’. But I’m dealing with romance here, not reality, and exaggeration and fantasy are the life blood of this concept, and add to the film’s enduring appeal.

I’m not going to just witter on about the film, or about orientalism and Romance, as I’m qualified to do neither. I’m interested in that line, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ muttered while an engine roars in anticipation of departure. This brings us to the next leg of our journey started by faint-hearted Hardy not getting off that train. ‘We’ll always have Paris”. Always is a tricky concept in the Romance repertoire. This is what Wilde’s Lord Henry has to say about it In Dorian Gray: “Always!. That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever”. Yet we’re not talking about the happy-ever-after always of clinging anticipation, but of fond recollection. The past is redeemed by Ilsa walking into that gin joint and restoring their memories of Paris.

Here we are again, at the crossroads of Romance, and an engine is already running. Rick reasons that Ilsa should get on that plane along similar lines to Jesse suggesting Celine get off that train - the projected anticipation of regret. But with a difference here. “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Wise-cracking cynical Americans moulding the destinies of dreamy Europeans are evidently not all alike. There’s a war on, don’t you know, and so personal Romance is commandeered for a Greater Good. The Underground has its hero, Rick has his redemption, and they will Always have their memories. And not just of anywhere - of PARIS no less...

Woman found then lost...

Girls on trains, radiant strangers, the romance of regret? Of course, there are exceptions, and rules (like hearts) are there to be broken.

‘Happy ever after’ is the approved romance ending, but does it spell the end of romance? This is the paradox that delightful diptych ‘Before Sunrise / Sunset’ explores so beautifully and plausibly, making them such devastatingly ‘romantic’ films, when manipulative drivel like ‘Love Actually’, actually is not*

Before Sunrise (1995), Boy meets girl on a train. She (French, shy, dreamy) is continuing on to Paris; he (American, worldly-wise, confident) must get off at Vienna to catch a morning flight back home. They chat, they connect, and as the train pulls into Vienna, he moves into familiar territory: "If I don’t ask you this, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life". Ah, he’s read the poems, heard the songs. No faint heart in a railway station he, he asks her to leave the train with him, and walk around Vienna for the evening. His reasoning and audacity are faultless:

“Jump ahead 10-20 years from now, you’re married, but it just doesn’t have the energy it once had. … and you start to think about all those guys you've met, and start to wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d picked up with any of them. Well. I’m one of those guys. Think of it as time travel… This could be doing a gigantic favour to you and your future husband, showing you you didn’t miss out on anything. I’m just as much a loser as he is, and you’re really happy”.

This is how it starts, and goes on, somehow managing to be both romantic – impetuous, dreamy, idealistic –; and realistic - cynical, wary and knowing – at the same time. The dialogue (and the film is mostly dialogue), threads a swaying tight rope across the chasm dividing romance and realism, and they walk it engagingly together.

Defying convention, defying genre, it earns the right to romanticism, by being so very honest. One meaning of ‘Romance’, after all, when used as a verb is to fib, or at least to exaggerate. ‘Romancing’ before it was used to rhyme with ‘dancing’ in throwaway pop, meant telling porkies. "Do you know anyone in a happy relationship?" Celine asks. ""yeah, but I think they lie a lot". But, there’s none of that here. Principally because they only have that one night together. Stolen from time – “officially we shouldn’t be here”. So happy every after (the biggest fib of romance), isn’t an option, and is summarily dismissed: “Why do people believe relationships are supposed to last for ever? Yeah it’s stupid”.

And so they fall into romance by resisting it through reason. We’re rational adults, they keep assuring each other, trying to convince themselves of the logic of not attempting to stay in touch. The more honest (ie unromantic) they are, the more they earn the right to what they resist. They rub reality against the debased coinage of romance, against all its clichés and conventions, they rub it so hard it eventually shines through.

But at their back they always hear Time’s winged Chariot (the 9.30 Austria Airlines flight to America) hurrying near. And so they make love, under the stars, and finally make a pact with their cold reasoning. They will not exchange numbers or addresses (not even surnames), so none of that happy-ever-after stuff is even considered. They refused to be hoodwinked by false hope. Instead they will meet in exactly six months. Time, cheated, travelled through, deferred, will have his due. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time”. TBC (of course).

*Oh, that ‘actually’, the smug, so-very English embarrassed understatement, qualifying the tawdry, vulgar passionate ‘Love’ and sanitising it into Home Counties idiom: ‘I did go to a public school, quite a famous one, Actually’; ‘Actually, I was hoping to get into TV/publishing/film, and was wondering if you knew of any openings, yes my father was x, I suppose the name gives it away’; ‘I don’t Actually know anything about it, but I’m sure I’ll do a splendid job’…Actually, I am bitter, and I haven’t actually seen Love Actually, but that snivelling caval of posh luvvies is sufficient demerit in my book.

Women Lost

A former lover, who stumbled across this, my new venture, questioned my credentials for pontificating on the subject of 'romance'. There was precious little of that when we were together, she wryly noted.

Maybe I need to set the record straight, and define more clearly what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about 'love' in itself (whatever that might be), so much as those rarefied relics that beguile us into believing it might just be possible. Most of these things make little sense in the real world, and many of them are impossible. Hence their enduring potency and allure. I'm quite certain that she would have given me short shrift had I showered her in red roses and other cliches of commodified desire at the time. Chocolates maybe, but chocolate boxes are not her style. Yet I gave her something more enduringly romantic - I said goodbye.

Does imagination dwell the most on a woman won or woman lost?

Silly question Billy. By ending the relationship I bestowed upon it what she claims it lacked - romance. What Might Have Been and the Impossible are the cornerstones of this concept. And the so relationship, alchemised by regret and the passing years, now glows in the imagination. More enduringly than faded roses, or snuffed candlelight. We should not, when talsking of romance (to quote Billy Boy Yeats again), 'mistake the brightness of the moon for the prosaic light of day'.

I dedicated my last book - Sunshine - to 'lost love'. It had been dedicated 'to _______', but _______ and I finished the day before the book went to press. I feel the loss of the relationship terribly, but am rather pleased with the dedication. I once heard of an author dedicating a book 'To whoever I'm with now' (nicer than the other one I heard about, 'To Bitch', but formed from the same logic). 'To lost love' means mine is perennially dedicated to Whoever I'm no longer with now. Given I appear to have a season ticket on the whirligig of love, that was a shrewd investment on my part. I just hope it stays in print long enough...

These Foolish Things

Sigh. And for my first posting on his project I start with a song that is both exemplar and key to what I'm trying to capture here. Indeed, I very nearly named my project after it. For it is the foolish things that touch us, that I plan to catalogue and anatomise in this blog.

Doesn't the song do the same? A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, an airline ticket to romantic places ... Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations? Foolish things. Why foolish? Because not necessarily bearing intrinsic meaning, but enriched with romance through association. And so the song compiles a potpourri of mournful recollection, redolent of romance because riddled with regret. And how the ghost of you clings.

And this, I think, helps us understand the link between what we term ‘romance’ and love. The romance of things, evoking lost love. As the song regrets a lost lover through the associative triggers of bitter-sweet recollection, so we regret the beauty that we imagine has somehow passed from the world. Imagination dwells the most on love that is lost. Romance is remembering forgotten beauty. Whether this resides in the peerless eyes of the beloved or in an epoch saturated in style, and tinged with sentimental regret.

But why things? Things, objects, are the stuff of romance. They absorb it. Look at these lines from Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes' (1820):

Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress,
And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,
And ‘tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo!—how fast she slept.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
...

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”

How could she resist? Porphyro sure knows the way to a girl's heart, and goes to town with the delicacies as a seductive prelude to melting into Madeline's dream. It is a fetishistic tableau of aching desire. Not just for sex, but for the relics and rituals that are the handmaidens of what populates the planet.

Or Daisy Fey swooning over Gatsby's shirts. What lovely, lovely shirts. And so he breaks her heart with his impossible love (and fine tailoring) once more...

So, what are these things, these foolish things?