Poems

Things to Come – A Francophile writes

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MY WIFE OFTEN mocks my penchant for austere Euro art movies. So when we went to see Mia Hansen-Love’s L’Avenir (Things to Come) at one of London’s inevitable Curzons, it felt like slipping into an old pair of espadrilles. I remembered liking Hansen-Love’s Le Père de mes enfants (2009) and figured – on the basis of the inevitable reviews by Peter Bradshaw et al. – that I’d like L’Avenir.

And guess what, I did. Apart from anything else, Isabelle Huppert was superb: bustling, unsentimental, alone and ultimately atomised. Yet I wasn’t entirely moved by her late-middle-aged losses, however many of them I’ve shared. That’s partly because her character (Nathalie Chazeaux) so effectively seals herself off from compassion, retreating for comfort into the pensées of Pascal, Rousseau and the many other philosophers whose work she teaches to her Parisian students.

But it’s also partly because L’Avenir felt familiar to the point of generic staleness: with a few changes of wardrobe and automobile, the film could have been made 30 years ago by, say, the great Bertrand Tavernier. The arthouse tropes were reassuringly non-Anglo-American: the endless bookshelves, the coffees and the baguettes, the jagged Alpine mountains and the Brittany coastline, the sardonic political banter à table.

En route home, my wife inevitably asked if I’d enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure. I’d admired it; it wasn’t pretentious; its absence of catharsis was, in many ways, admirable. But had it really just been another fix for my Francophile snobbery? Some residual belief that French intellectuels think more deeply about the human condition than Brits or Yanks do – even when all the pages of Pascal and Rousseau (or, for that matter, Adorno and Schopenhauer, who also get regular namechecks in L’Avenir) offer so little comfort to Hansen’s heroine?

In that connection, here’s a poem I wrote a couple of years ago about, well, my penchant for austere Euro art movies:

Art House

Plusher seats and fancier snacks,

Guardianista dreaming in the dark:

No popcorn here, no CGI,

just quiet scenes of bourgeois desperation,

suites in Paris or Milan,

the quaint and crumbly farmhouse,

tension and baguettes,

father, daughter, in a Citroen,

not even speaking.

Four-hour films without a single gun,

occasionally a breadknife raised in anger.

Haneke, Almodovar, Zvyaguintsev's The Return.

Films of slow release for middle-aged and middle-class,

waiting for catharsis as we crunch Wasabi nuts.

mummy can I have some flowers in my hair? (a post-port eliot poem for bruce robinson)

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But it’s so lovely here:

the hills that roll down to the river,

woods bedecked with lanterns,

yurts for mindfulness, the vegan carts,

the wildest meats this side of Yeovil.

 

And of course the glamping families:

not a chav in sight, no red-slashed crosses,

rabid Leavers from across the bay –

nor one black face unless you count the kora players

in from WOMAD yesterday.

 

Instead the earthy MILFS

with nut-brown feet and daughters

rifling through the vintage stalls in search of skirts

that say they would have rolled in Yasgur’s mud

had they been born in 1951.

 

We’re all too busy pinning flowers to our tousled hair

to listen to the lonely novelist who drifts among the trees

with shoulder bag and Sharpie pen

but who will spend more on Halloumi wraps

than he can ever hope to make by being here.

 

What right has he pronouncing on these boutique hippie kids,

this man forever longing to belong?

Why always separate himself and find the flaw,

why point to self-delusion and delude himself

he has some vantage point from nowhere?

 

He has no zany shirt, nor quirky feathered hat,

he’ll never be the weathered Trustafarian

in mud-flecked boots with wife of 34

who danced all night to raucous bluegrass songs

beneath the darting stars.

 

Still he’s as privileged as every other tosser here:

why can’t he just be grateful we are gathered in this paradise

to celebrate the written word and save the day –

one reading at a time –

from Trump and from Theresa May?

Gone

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Today I walked again where once I walked a dog:

I walked a winding path imprinted in my head,

past tumbled trunks on mashed and matted leaves,

by river running over rocks,

with no black dog ahead, no loyal boy,

now dead ten years, not here,

yet I am here, the path the same.

 

The dog I hardly know in memory,

a dog replaced as all dogs are.

I know I loved him, that is all;

I know I held him as he breathed last heaving breaths.

 

All this comes back, with smells of smoke and fall

and red leaves dropping

as I return to rooms where women died,

to men left womanless and lost,

last breaths and sounds of time,

the presence of the absence,

not-thereness now of women and of dogs,

their ghosts still moving in my mind.

dupont circle, 7 am

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How odd to be in Washington –

the embassies across the street, the flapping flags –

and find it’s not like House of Cards at all,

but just a town with cars and clouds

and people grabbing coffee on their way to work.

 

No sacred monsters on the hotel’s TV screen,

no Underwoods or Douglas Stampers here:

just psychopathic Donald on the breakfast news,

the demiurge for all the nation’s noxious fears.