Original subtitles

He feels a growing irritation.

He had run into her on the way to the shooting.

He hadn't seen her for a year.

Some banter was exchanged.

Now he is reviewing the conversation in his mind.

"She hasn't changed a bit," he muses to himself.

His mind works in spirals as he watches the slides.

Earlier this week, she saw them on the other side of the street

and was surprised at her response:

mild distaste,

rather than the rage she had anticipated.

The whole thing now seemed rather sordid.

It was receding.

She had ducked into a shop to avoid them.

He thinks about making love,

then about being in love,

then about performing.

Then he thinks about her.

His very gaze seemed to transform her

into a performer,

a realized fantasy of herself.

Sometimes, it was almost as if she were saying,

"Look at me, look at me,

a small price to pay for my love in return."

He finds himself agreeing.

She tries to reconstruct the passage from the novel

that had so impressed her.

The best she can do is,

"All is finally clarified.

It is unspeakable but clear.

The reach of my jealousy, of my certainty of betrayal,

engulfs me at every step.

It is unthinkable that I live in this condition

in intimacy with another person,

and the possibility of living a life

without intimate connections is equally intolerable.

Is it any wonder that the most plausible solution

is to remove my existence?

I see no way through my dilemma.

I am not one to compromise.

I wish I were.

My life would be easier.

The phone is ringing.

It's always been all or nothing for me.

This statement is for art,

even though, at this very moment,

I don't know where to turn."

She can't remember, hard as she tries,

the passage that had followed.

It had suggested that such a dire solution

might not be necessary.

She is now racking her brain to remember.

What else? What else? What else?

The rain makes her think of when she was 18 years old,

spending a summer in Chicago.

She was sitting by an open window

in a room with five other people.

It had started to rain heavily.

A woman on the other side of the room

was talking about her babysitter.

She said, "I hope the stupid girl has sense enough

to close the windows."

Without a second thought,

she reached over and shut the window.

A stunned silence fell on the room.

She thinks about the snow in Vermont

and their last night in the cabin,

the four of them lolling about the sleeping loft

warmed by a wood fire.

Their talk had ranged over motion

and phallic/vaginal body parts

and illusion and comfort

and back to sex as illusion.

Again, she repeats to herself the remembered phrase:

"Easy locomotion between comfort and discomfort."

Now it all seemed like good social titillation.

"Contempt again," she thinks.

"But I can't help it.

Social interactions seem to be mostly about seduction."

Events of the past rose like waves,

and battering against her mind,

threw it into a wild commotion of shame, grief, and joy.

The man danced with the three-year-old child.

It went on for a long time.

He didn't take his eyes off of her.

He manipulated her tiny, soft limbs

in time to the music.

He bent down to her, lifted her up,

turned her around under his hand,

delicately balancing and maneuvering her body,

which at times his two huge hands

all but concealed from view.

She could not stop looking at the two of them.

The sensuality of the dance fascinated her.

And then, as time passed, it became bizarre.

She began to be uneasy in the realization

that he knew that she, in particular, was watching.

First, an emptiness like a great white bird

soared through her.

Then she began to think about particulars--

the quality of his intelligence at the moment,

his insight into the nature of her struggle,

his refusal to go along with her desperate.

He had dragged it all out of her.

Now she had to pay.

Yet it was a relief that he was now

carrying the ball.

It was his turn to,

and not dance the fandango in.

And there was still so much she didn't know,

which, if known, might have made her act differently.

How much of the problem of their differences was real,

and how much was a smokescreen to conceal?

Her mind clouded when she tried to answer.

She had set him an impossible task.

"To allow me to when I need to,"

she had told him.

He had reminded her that she was not so of his.

She pleaded special circumstances.

They argued.

His voice was hard and curt.

The die seemed cast.

Yet, in some way, she trusted him.

He would...

they would meet again.

If only he could say, "But we really,"

which was all very well for her to say,

having jumped the gun in.

Then, that terrible accusation of his.

She couldn't even repeat it, it...

yet it posed another question.

"Is it possible I have really...

that I will never make...

only in this way survive?

So be it.

There are worse ways to live.

Being so may very well."

She felt, however, little conviction,

and finally, she grew calmer, almost resigned.

They had both been,

her terror and the...

slowly eroding,

and regard him

and pleasure.

She had dinner with him and his male lover

and several of their friends.

It was a noisy, ebullient gathering.

Some of her previous reservations about him

were revived with renewed force.

He seems to be one way,

and then you meet his friends, and you think,

"How can he stand them?"

And then you realize that he can stand them

because he is like them in certain disagreeable respects.

And yet, she didn't want to dismiss him.

"It isn't that I expect him to be only--I mean,

I want him to..."

"Don't waste your time over these old-fashioned faggots,"

she admonishes herself,

"with their pendulum swings from gentle passivity

to nasty aggression.

The ones who still refer to each other as 'she.'"

She likes him because he is so gifted

and has done so much work on himself.

He still thinks of art, however,

as a form of self-immolation.

"Why did you not write about them?"

he had asked her,

an indirect rebuke for her self-involvement.

She had to admit that she really did believe

that her own life was more interesting

than that of anyone who might portray it

in performance,

or she couldn't deal with anyone else's life

as interestingly as she could with her own.

If this applied to her,

it was equally true of him.

But she didn't want to go into it at the dinner,

and besides, it would have put her

in a condescending position.

He had never sought her advice.

She didn't want to risk taking on

needless responsibility with regard to him.

She had a kind of mind incapable of encompassing

historical data.

She could understand an event only through illustration,

such as the plaster casts of people in death throes

at Pompeii,

the paintings at Versailles

depicting the inflated gestures of Louis XIV.

She visited the Pantheon at different times of day.

She didn't respond when he beckoned to her

to come over to listen to the recorded lecture

on the earphones.

She knew that to know who was buried there

would not make the visit any more meaningful to her.

She stood in the great expanse of floor and enclosed light

and felt her mind soar.

By the end of the day,

she was sick of madonnas holding up their male infants,

saints holding their bloody foreheads,

martyrs holding their severed heads,

angels holding their fingers up,

duchesses holding up their robes,

dukes holding their falcons,

soldiers holding their spears,

lions holding up banners,

and virgins holding up mirrors.

Everything is about seduction or death.

But then she thinks of her own recent situation

and the word "resignation" springs to her mind.

But she knows she can't resign herself to it

and must sooner or later have a confrontation

or simply end it.

She would not add her name

to his collection of dubious friendships.

After three days in that city, she began to panic.

How was she to face him when he arrived?

What she had not allowed to intrude

on her consciousness at home was now a reality.

She couldn't go on with it.

Even this brief interlude was enough to make her aware

of a tremendous relief and renewed purpose.

She had to tell him.

She felt at once anxious and happy.

How had she stood it for so long?

She tries to go back to the earliest move

that had launched this particular series of faux pas.

Perhaps it was not too late to set things right.

He is puzzled by her behavior.

She pretends to sleep.

Would you hold me?

He apologizes.

She whimpers.

He congratulates himself on clearing up the matter.

He becomes aroused.

She participates with pleasure,

but something is still bugging her.

He analyzes a situation.

She doesn't say much.

She feels uneasy.

She agrees that getting what you want

is the only way to proceed,

but she doesn't--

He thinks a situation is resolved.

They see each other that night

in a complicated social situation.

I'd like to kick your ass in.

Doesn't that make you think of the movie?

- What movie? - 2001.

Oh yes, of course.

Only in the movies can you send your mind away.

For some reason,

she is embarrassed about her reverie.

I don't think she really wanted to die.

She just wanted to be asleep, to not be alive,

to stop the pain of that Saturday night.

I said, I don't think she really wanted to die.

She just wanted to be asleep,

to not be alive,

to escape the pain of that Saturday night.

Always, it was someone's passion that started me off.

I'm just not going to get excited about it.

I know you're distorting things for the sake of fiction,

exaggerating and displacing and so forth.

That's such a relief.

I thought you'd be angry at the way I referred to your work.

I would have done it so differently.

I'd make a few changes myself.

I would have had that intertitle:

"I dreamed of my mother last night, and of my wife.

My wife was crying for me."

I would have shown somehow

that he was really thinking of something else.

And I would have put some jumps in that solo

and maybe a longer fade at the end of that shot

on the stairs.

Now when she thinks of the work,

all she can see are the flaws.

That part is too long.

that too short,

that too quick,

that too slow.

Her mind overruns with the faces of people

gone from her life.

This one made unreasonable demands.

That one, unacceptable criticism.

This one let her down once too often.

That one grew tired of her elusive reserve.

Maybe it was true that in spite

of all her protestations to the contrary,

she really preferred her own company.

She preferred, as Rilke said,

to love her solitude

and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation

the suffering it caused her.

She knew that he would be back.

He had to work things out his own way,

and he was assured of his prior claim

on her affections.

His arrogance at first astounded her,

then finally could be forgiven

in her anticipation of the pleasure

they both knew would again be shared,

even if it had to be postponed a whole year.

Then she remembers what the scene had reminded her of.

The sky with its leaden clouds,

the wet spray of the sea,

the thump of surf against the rocks.

The two weeks had fled past them.

She didn't remember a single argument,

not even the kind of maneuvering

for a brief privateness

that people do when they are together constantly.

At this remove, it seemed impossibly idyllic.

Looking at those two weeks

against the backdrop of later events,

she was at a loss to understand the nature of his feelings.

She herself felt like a fool thinking about it,

deceived and humiliated.

But she also felt a deep sadness.

There's no denying her own happiness

and sense of completion at the time.

Had he ever felt such things in her presence,

for even a single moment?

She wondered.

On the way back to the city,

she was careful not to touch him

as they sat in the back seat of the car.

When he unconcernedly, or calculatingly--

she couldn't tell which--

shifted his position so that his knee grazed her thigh,

she carefully disengaged herself from contact.

By the time they arrived in town,

he occupied most of the seat,

and she had squished herself into a cramped, tight ball.

She was enraged.

She stumbles out of the theater.

Her disgust with the film and actual nausea

drive her body into the street.

She recalls, roughly, the location of the hotel

and starts walking in that direction.

Her gut burns and she has to keep spitting out

the bitter saliva that collects in her mouth.

The streets are dimly lit and deserted,

the houses shuttered and silent.

She wonders if she will find the hotel in time.

At a certain point, not having seen

any familiar landmarks for a while,

she realizes that she is lost

and experiences a powerful exaltation.

The discomfort of her body,

the presence of the night,

her solitude,

all give her an acute sense of the moment.

She finds a vacant grassy lot,

gropes her way past the open door of a parked truck,

and vomits.

Relieved, she straightens up and sees the looming outline

of a huge gas storage tank,

and remembers standing in the street

across from the hotel that morning

watching two men on a scaffold painting the tank orange.

She then knows that she's now only a block away.

Almost regretfully, she goes directly to the hotel,

willing to take care of her body,

reluctant to terminate being lost in the sleeping town.

Yeah, he said, "Willie, say goodbye to America."

This.

This was given to me by a friend of my brother's

when I was 15.

He and Ernie had practically been raised together.

And then I didn't see him for a long time,

until Ernie discovered he was living with his mother

just a few blocks from us,

and he started showing up at our house.

I guess he always had been homosexual,

'cause I remember him as a very young boy

running around in his mother's nightgown

with pears stuck in the bosom.

By the time I saw him again, he was extraordinarily handsome.

And then he went to Mexico.

And he brought this back with him.

Must have been the very first necklace

I ever owned.

And I had a huge crush on him.

And I would send long, lingering looks at him.

And he took it quite graciously.

Although, I remember when he presented me with the necklace,

his hand trembled slightly

as he withstood the ardor of my gaze.

And Ernie saw him very infrequently

during the next four years,

and only when he invited him to his house.

By that time, my brother...

I remember him as a very young boy

running around in his mother's nightgown

with pears stuck in the bosom.

By the time I saw him again, he was extraordinarily handsome.

And then he went to Mexico.

And he brought this back with him.

Must have been the very first necklace

I ever owned.

And I had a huge crush on him.

And I would send long, lingering looks at him.

And he took it quite graciously.

Although, I remember when he presented me with the necklace,

his hand trembled slightly

as he withstood the ardor of my gaze.

And Ernie saw him very infrequently

during the next four years,

and only when he invited him to his house.

By that time, my brother was married and had a baby.

And sometimes I would be invited to dinner

and he would be there.

I remember it might have been the last time I ever saw him.

We left Ernie's place one evening together.

He told me that by the time I was 30

I would probably be a very beautiful woman.

I think the primary distinction has been between...

She finds herself looking at the other woman

with curiosity.

She has a way of talking,

delicate, precise, and lilting,

that reminds her of women

she has had disdain for in the past.

Effeminate women, yes,

yet this woman's assertion emerges in spite of the style,

and not unpleasantly.

She is intrigued and self-conscious.

The three of them talk about sexual fantasies.

She keeps thinking about privacy.

No, it isn't hard to talk about these things.

It is almost too easy, almost meaningless,

almost absurd.

"What will I say to her when we meet

for the second time?," she thinks.

Then she realizes that the subject of conversation

has come up because there are three of them.

An intimate revelation to her alone

might demand a comparable gesture, she reasons.

With an audience of two,

my revelations are reduced to gratuitous display.

I become a performer.

An hour and a half since the last embrace.

You're still here, I see you, we are one,

and this indestructible togetherness,

they'll never be powerful enough to wrest away from us.

That so much love could exist anywhere in any two people,

even between us, I never realized.

It makes me feel all fluttery and kind of weak.

Not enough, though,

in the sense of succumbing to weakness,

for it makes me feel so much stronger,

my lifelong husband.

She catches herself snorting gleefully

at the scene of the two women being totally bitchy

to one another.

She remembers a similar scene.

Was it Dorothy Lamour or Betty Grable

in a movie she saw when she was no more than nine or ten.

One woman had ripped another woman's dress off.

She had stayed in the movie theater

long after her friends had left

until that scene came around again.

She had laughed louder than anyone around her

and she must've felt guilty about it

because she never told anybody,

not her mother nor anybody.

Hello?

Oh, hi, hi.

Yeah, I just got it in the mail.

You want to hear it?

Well, I'll try but, you know,

your handwriting is sort of hard to read.

Okay, okay, here it goes.

"This is the poetically licensed story

of a woman who finds it difficult

to reconcile certain external facts

with her image of her own perfection.

It is also the same woman's story

if we say she can't reconcile these facts with her image

of her own deformity.

She would like to engage in politics

but she can't decide whether to join the Big Women

or the Hunch Twats.

The Big Women have a lot to offer

but she has discovered a central weaknesses

in their proposal to use wads of counterfeit money for..."

doorstops?

What is this?

Box tops? Oh...

Box-stops.

"Neither is she attracted to the naiïve notion

of the Hunch Twats that every connection brings bed chains.

Not that it's a matter of victims and oppressors.

She simply can't find alternatives

to being inside with her fear or standing in the rain

with her self-contempt.

How long can you go on this way? Hm?

You still think it's all going to come out right, don't you?

For instance, if you get up in the morning

and feel your feelings well enough

you will receive the right gifts from heaven

without ever having to ask for them

or even to find them.

It should be smooth sailing now, right?

Just deciding which side you're on

should ensure that all the best things in life

will beat a path to your door, right?

After all, you've paid your dues, haven't you?

What do you want?

Her pretense of innocence must end.

Nothing is new anymore, thank God.

Now at last, she can use her head and her eyes.

If the mind if a muscle then the head is a huntress

and the eye is an arrow.

Thanking you for your immediate attention to this matter.

I look forward to hearing from you

at your earliest possible convenience.

Respectfully, blah, blah, blah, blah."

Yeah.

I think it's pretty good.

I think they'll get the message.

Because she has younger looking breasts than you.

Because she has younger looking breasts than you.

I'll leave.

I don't want you going down there alone this time of night.

Propelled by an avalanche of rage,

her limbs catapulted her body into her clothing.

She hardly knew what she was doing,

and when her voice came out, it surprised her.

You're not moving fast enough.

He lost no further time and bolted out the door,

then she became aware of her heartbeat.

When it had settled down she thought

that she had never been that angry in her whole life.

She thought she knew how someone could murder.

The places for sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens

are individual chairs rather than benches,

so one can make small adjustments

in placing one's self in relation

to a companion with a total view.

She sees him and tries to turn away

but it is too late.

He has already caught sight of her.

He tells her about his eidetic images.

She listens intently watching his graceful, quick gestures,

his darting eyes, the mouth moving,

pursing, curving, opening.

The slender fingers curving around the cigarette.

Her eyes devour him.

Her mouth becomes hollow with expectation.

She moves her knees cautiously so that they are further apart.

He doesn't notice or pretends not to.

She holds back, continues to listen,

and the sensations pass.

What was it like for him when he was with her?

Images with oily outlines waver in her reverie.

She sees them eating together but not the place.

She sees them talking but not their expressions.

One of them may have just smiled

in response to the other.

She can't quite make it gel

but she feels her jealousy acutely.

The knowledge of their past urbanity

and mutual congratulations releases slivers

of jealousy through her mind in a slow drip.