The insoluble pancake

Last Tuesday, the 27th of March, is a date which has a certain significance for me — I won’t say any more than that, because I am a modest lad. Nevertheless, I always try to be somewhere interesting on the 27th of March. One year ago, I was in Venice, for a conference. A year before that, I was in the tunnels beneath the streets of Paris. In my bag I had a saucisson, which I sliced on the lid of a subterranean well, and bottle of wine, which I duly opened. And this year? Well, I decided to go to the theatre with some friends to see a new production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Adam and Eve’, which is currently playing at Theatre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis.

I had read Bulgakov’s excellent The Master and Margarita which is certainly one of my favourite books of all time, and was curious to see what “Adam and Eve” would be like. The propos of the story is interesting enough: Leningrad is destroyed by a chemical gas attack, and only a few people survive. Quite different people, really archetypes — the scientist, the soldier, the writer, the bureaucrat – and Eve.

The opening scene of the play was perhaps the most powerful, most lucid. Our characters are in a Leningrad apartment, and it is only a few minutes before it is clear that one should be very careful what one thinks and does. A totalitarian state. We are introduced to Efrossimov, a scientist, whose inventions are of great interest to Adam and Daragan, two citizens close to the heart of the Party. The actors performances are stylized, exaggerated, and I found myself listening very closely to every word spoken, especially by Professor Efrossimov, the scientist, who certainly gave the aura of having a line on essential truths which evaded the rest of the characters.

But Efrossimov turns out to be wrong about one essential fact: that there would be no war with the enemies of the state. A cloud of gas suddenly descends on the city, and every person who has not been exposed to the rays of Efrossimov’s ‘camera’ dies almost instantly. Footsteps echo across the stage, debris falls from the rafters, a thick cloud descends, and we are in the second scene, a wrecked supermarket, corpses frozen in the aisles in their last act of lifting a pack of biscuits (or whatever). The play moves into its post-apocalyptic phase.

The discussions and conjectures which follow were interesting, but somehow lacked the focus and intensity of the first scene. Everything was beautifully realised, lighting and staging were full of atmosphere and meaning. Certainly the themes were interesting enough: the responsibility of the scientist, the absurd nature of totalitarian dictatorships (which are rendered even more ridiculous when all that is left of the state is (perhaps) five people deep in a forest, four of which want no part of this state at all). So I certainly enjoyed myself, but I felt that the play didn’t quite live up to the promise of the opening scene.

Then it was ten pm, and time to return to Paris – we had travelled to St. Denis, a few RER stops out there in the ‘outer darkness’ beyond the limits of Paris. St. Denis, of course, is where the famous cathedral is, the last resting place of the kings of France, where Abbot Suger invented gothic architecture. Now unfortunately it is better known for being a potentially volatile suburb of Paris. We felt a bit like tourists wandering back to the RER station along the tram lines. But certainly it seemed much more lively than Paris…

Or so we thought. We had to change trains at the Gare du Nord to reach Bastille where one could easily find restaurants open late at night. I was aware that something was amiss at first when I saw piles of earth on the station floors. Piles of earth? I imagined people changed into dirt by a sinister variant of Professor Efrossimov’s camera-rays. Well actually these were broken flower-pots. There were many, many of them. We had arrived from the far end of the station, and as we approached the metro interchange we saw that none of the escalators were working. What? There was a lot of debris scattered around: we were inside the Leningrad supermarket once again.

In one corner, a dense knot of people are pressed against the wall, surrounded by the bright lights of television cameras, dozens of people leaning anxiously forward to see — what? We could hear people chanting, and a violent, unstable atmosphere pervaded the station — as well as more than just a whiff of tear gas. Or something more sinister? A dark cloud descends on the city. To take the metro, we had to pass through a cordon of RATP agents wielding canisters of tear gas, facing crowds of disaffected youths, preventing them from taking trains back to Paris to eat their magrets and drink glasses of wine, as we were most certainly planning to do. Our metro arrived, and in a few minutes we had arrived in the ancient heart of the city, the Marais, more than a little bit relieved. The next day, the news broadcasts revealed what had really happened — or maybe they did.

Technorati Tags: Bulgakov, Gare du Nord, Paris, Theatre

But back to cinema. At the beginning of February I saw two films, one after another, and I realised that in each film there was a scene which was almost identical. The first was “Das Leben der Anderen”, the lives of others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film about a GDR secret policeman. This fellow, played by Ulrich Muhe, is given the task of monitoring the lives and conversations of people whose existence is much more interesting than his own, and whom he slowly becomes attached to. And the second one? Well, Kaurismaki’s “I hired a contract killer”, the only film that Kaurismaki made in English. Kaurismaki’s movie stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as a terminally depressed Frenchman, Henri Boulanger, who decides to end it all — with the help of hired killer, because he can’t bear to do it himself. Of course, at that moment, more or less, he falls in love, and decides that life is worth living after all. But how to call off the killer?

Both characters are not exactly surrounded by friends. Mr. Leaud (who got his start in cinema playing the small boy in Truffaut’s classic “400 coups”), upon learning he has been made redundant from his job of fourteen years, goes to the telephone booth. We see him desperately flicking through his address book — which is totally blank. Our GDR secret policeman is similarly isolated.

In the identical scenes, we see our ‘heroes’ at home after a day at work. Herr Muhe’s apartment is almost completely empty. It’s full of those browns and greys which were so popular at the beginning of the 1970s. Empty bookshelfs. A television. Mr. Muhe produces a bowl of rice and adds tomato sauce (yum!) and sits down at his kitchen table.

Mr. Leaud, on the other hand, sits at his table which has a tasteful blue checked tablecloth, and listens to the radio while thoughtfully eating what I think are scones. Two of them. Again, its the 1970s, or thereabouts, I would guess. Kaurismaki has a habit of making films which are set at least twenty or thirty years before they were filmed.

The point of all of this? None, really. An interesting echo, is all. Thank you for your attention, and good night.

Technorati Tags: films, kaurismaki

I’m back in Paris. I returned from Mumbai on Tuesday morning. This afternoon, I made my usual circuit around Paris to make sure that everything is still there, that everything is as I remembered it. I ate an entrecote and drank wine, had a heavy chocolate dessert and cafe, went to bookshops and saw a film. Paris is still Paris, whew. But I have left a lot unwritten about India.

Last weekend, you see, I attempted to break out once more from the pleasant campus of IUCCA and see the land. To see the country. I hired a car, and, of course, a driver: one does not drive on Indian roads, even if one has been to Marseille. Oh no. I had decided that I would visit the ancient cave-temples of Ajanta and Ellora, a few hundred kilometers north of Pune. From what I could gather, this was certainly the sight to see near Pune, if one could get there.

A few hundred kilometers might sound like not so far away, but on Indian roads, this is very far indeed. Leaving Pune at 7AM, we reached Ajanta only by 2pm in the afternoon. My driver was a very gracious man of incredible driving skills (my gosh! we didn’t hit that truck!). Despite our numerous brushes with large slow moving vehicles I didn’t once feel threatened or frightened, kind of remarkable really. At certain points in the drive, I became sleepy. What normally happens in those circumstances is that one’s eyes begin to feel heavy, and heavier, you begin to feel more and more relaxed, almost on the point of sleep and the BEEEP! You are startled awake to see directly before your eyes beautifully painted truck tailgate with the words ‘HORN OK PLEASE’ written on it in large colourful characters (and usually ‘India is great!’ beneath that). Repeat this process about a hundred times.

After about sixty kilometers from Pune, there are no more roads. Or rather, the beautiful four-lane motorway that brings goods and people to the countless factories around Pune comes to and end, and there is in its place a small road, one lane in each direction. Every kind of vehicle imaginable to man is allowed on this road, and I was certain that over the course of the next two days I saw most nearly all of them. Horses and carts, carts and cows, rickshaws, trucks, scooters, motorbikes, trucks, men with carts. Men on horseback. All of these my driver skillfully dodged, accelerating fearlessly on blind corners and steep rises.

How to describe the countryside? After the endless built-up expanses of Pune, desert: dry empty land, scrub, hills. But this was the only stretch of land that was truly empty, and it seems to be only ten or fifteen kilometres. For the rest of the journey we were never very far from houses or villages. And that’s the very strange thing too about India: no matter where you find yourself, in whatever remote part of the country you are in, there is always, always someone walking by the side of the road. I often wondered about these people. Where were they coming from? The last house was many kilometres behind us. Where were they going to? The next village along was not that close either. At one point we saw a long line of people dressed in bright orange robes striding purposefully through the dust. These people, it turned out, were pilgrims making a trek to a temple which was at least a hundred kilometres distant.

Then of course there were the villages — for the most part, a chaotic jumble of shacks and narrow streets, always teeming with people. At night, as we passed through one village after another, it seemed that many places had almost no lights at all, despite the fact there were many people in the streets and shops. The odd bulb here and there cast a dim glow, or car headlights swept across the buildings for an instant like a lighthouse rays, but there was nothing else. In many rooms facing the streets I glimpsed people sitting singly or in small groups in darkened rooms, silently waiting. Once again, I found myself wondering the purpose of all that.

Of course, the poverty was astonishing. How hard people have to work to gain their livelihood. People with hammers compacting burning asphalt on the roads. Families firing bricks on open kilns under the burning desert sun. People welding in the middle of the street. People knocking down buildings with (practically) their bare hands. And of course all that stuff to be moved and hauled with carts and animals or of course incredibly overladen trucks. Everything I saw seemed to be this dizzying mixture of intense activity and lassitude; and nothing seemed to have a time where it started, or finished. From the start of the trip at 7am until I crashed onto my hotel bed at 10pm in the evening I could see little difference in the numbers and quantities of people on the roads and in the streets. For those that worked, the work continued without end. I remember standing in a vacant lot at 9pm on a Saturday evening and watching an endless stream of traffic on this road a hundreds of miles from anywhere in particular. I thought absently of Europe, and Europeans, their privileges and how different their Saturday night would be from the one I could see around me now.
Technorati Tags: voyages, india