thursday 3/30 on cable

if you want to watch an interview with me you can tune in tomorrow at 6:30pm. its channel 77 or 501 on time warner cable. mercifully i don't have a television machine (as my friend curt quaintly calls it).

Books beyond the radar—The Illusionist

Originally published as Le Rempart Des Béguines Françoise Mallet-Joris’ novel The Illusionist is an easy but lovely read. The narrator Hélène lives in a small provincial town that cannot help but remind us of the one in Flaubert’s novel. There, mercifully, the comparison ends. Hélène’s father is a widower with wealth and political aspirations and little energy for his daughter who whiles away her time day-dreaming. She says, "I forgot that I was not yet sixteen, and at times I would be overwhelmed with the desire to run away. It would be better, I thought, to beg by the wayside than to have to go on dying of loneliness! As I walked in the streets I became so lost in reverie, my steps were so weighed down with desires, as well as a feeling of guilt, that I lost all notion of where I was going. It seemed to me that with one step more I might reach the horizon…"

Being both bored and imaginative, it isn’t long before Hélène seizes the opportunity to make an unsolicited visit to her father’s mistress Tamara. Tamara is young, somewhat Bohemian, and nothing like the other townsfolk. Hélène and Tamara begin an affair. As their relationship evolves and takes several sharp turns, Hélène grows into a young woman. Tamara grows into an old one. We see the archetype of the crazy cold French heroine in Tamara, Breton’s Nadja from the eponymous novel, Flaubert’s Emma. One of Tamara’s other suitors, an artist by the name of Max Villar, befriends Hélène and soothes her. He says, "My child, you’re too young to understand Tamara’s motives. You’re sixteen, you can’t imagine what it is to be thirty-five." By then we are invested enough in Hélène to wish that she never understand what it is to be Tamara.

Despite the somewhat spotty English translation (I’m going to try to find the original) Mallet-Joris’ narrative keeps a sweet languor. Entirely lacking in hysteria it gives us an immediate sense of Hélène’s journey and allows us to walk the road with her. When the book came out in 1947 it created a stir but by 1970 Mallet-Joris was a member of The Goncourt Academy. Guy Casaril made a film based on the movie. If you have suggestions on where to find it please email me!

It is impossible to read this novel without thinking of the other book about a girl, her father, and his mistress: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. Unfortunately I read that one too in translation. That book was permeated by the sea and the sun, the narrator was less analytical. The biggest contrast in the two works is in the father figure. In Mallet-Joris’ work he is benign, somewhat secluded, and clueless. In Sagan’s work his virility leaps from every page.

Beyond Bollywood--Bawl your brains out

Rudaali (dir Kalpana Lajmi 1992)

Rudaali refers to a professional mourner who’s been called to mourn a death. When the film begins, we see an ailing Amjad Khan cursing his fate at neither being fully dead nor quite alive. He’s a zamindar (liege) in the village and well aware of his unpopularity. He chastises his servants, his son, and his bonded laborers that none of them well shed a tear when he dies. He therefore asks for a Rudaali (played by Rakhee) to be brought in.

I’d been looking forward to seeing this film for many years and am sorry to be a tad disappointed. Gulzar’s dialogue and Dimple’s acting are definitely the best parts of the film. The film won Dimple several Best Actress awards. Gulzar’s dialogue captures with finesse and texture the many layers of caste and economic conflict in the village. Dimple is afraid even her shadow will send people to hell while the upper caste landlord—played by Raj Babbar who takes a shine to her—assures her that this is all based on the false myths of brahmin logic. The village brahmin is a suitably sleazy character in this film who, like the dying landlord and his munshi, is out to make a quick buck. When Dimples husband and mother-in-law die he tells her she must give him 50 rupees ($1) for their last rites. Dimple shows up at the ailing zamindar’s to borrow the money and he tells her she can have it in return for 15 years of bonded labor to him.

Most of the people are relatively low, beating on each other in hard times and never missing an opportunity to hurt others. Dimple’s husband is a perpetual drunk and her mother-in-law hurls insults even while on her deathbed. Later Dimple’s son brings home a whore as his wife and this woman too curses like a sailor and acts nasty to Dimple. It is only in the moments with Raj Babbar and under his gaze that Dimple is bestowed simple human dignity. When he first takes a liking to her he tells her that he can buy women but he doesn’t want to do that, he likes her. He asks her repeatedly to look him in the eye and convinces her it isn’t a sin.

We see Dimple’s story as she relates it to Rakhee who suggests that Dimple become a Rudaali like her. It’s a life of dignity, you’re given both money and respect, Rakhee tells her. Dimple however is unable to cry; she has dried up. She didn’t cry when her husband died or when her son left. What can possibly make her cry?

Dimple tackles her role with subtlety not giving in to the temptation of over-acting, trusting Gulzar’s lines to carry her through. Raj Babbar’s performance complements hers. Shot in the Rajasthani desert the landscape is simple but gorgeous. However, in the end, the chest-beating and the repetitious songs didn’t work in favor of the movie all the time. Rakhee and Raghuvir Yadav put in somewhat mediocre performances and the film while solid stops short of being excellent.

French Film Fest 2005---Claire Denis and Claude Chabrol

Clare Denis and Claude Chabrol

I

The best part of watching Claire Denis’ Intruder—not yet shown in France—was having Denis answer questions afterward in a melodious, halting, long-winded, roundabout, and somewhat evasive way. Having Lou Reed and Willem Dafoe in the audience sitting like anyone else in the fifth row was another bonus and hearing the reverence with which questions were posed to Denis—generally including the word metaphor or significance—a crucial part of entertainment. It was necessary to redeem the evening for me as I was still trying to make simple prosaic sense of 123 minutes of footage. In the absence of this sense, of a tight plot, of a movement from A to B, I needed to be lulled (and not the only one, I noticed) by the lethargic music of Denis’ voice as she told us that for her the film was like an arc. You had to see the gesture, these were not the exact words-it was the gesture of her hand moving across the hemisphere as the protagonist Louis goes from Europe to Tahiti.

Go and watch Intruder if you would like to “watch” “metaphor” on film and a lot(like 80 minutes) of septuagenarian male mammary close-up. Denis said that S.A. Staples who wrote the score wrote a loop, which was not exactly her idea for the film in the beginning but then it worked. Yes, it works. It works because you think you’ll eventually get some answers, some narrative clarity, and that score keeps you hoping till the end when you realize you’re not getting it. What there is to get from this film is vintage Denis, cinema as movement, as poem. Not always my thing but even less so when I’m being promised continually through a somewhat contrived plot that there might be a plot to discern. If you loved Beau Travail you might love this one.

There are many beautiful cinematic moments. Beatrice Dalle on a sledge with a pack of six dogs carrying her through the snow, the camera is jerky and shaky, puts you in the experience. Louis’ dogs eating a heart (is it his? He’s just had a heart transplant). And, the most beautiful, a blind woman in Korea (I believe) giving Louis a massage, feeling his knots, his pain, touching his chest which has been cut open for the heart transplant and grotesquely stitched back. When she touches him we know that she knows everything she knows through her tactility, it’s her way of apprehending the world and she possibly sees what no one else can see about Louis, his haunted past, his pain and needs. That scene is the most precious one in the film and the camera captures it intimately without putting any distance between the viewer and the act.

Why Denis and Chabrol in this one piece? Because as artists they’ve both reached that place where whatever they do is art. But once you reach that place and lose your enemies you could easily find yourself filling their shoes. In Denis’ case the things that make the film work also run counter to it and make it work less rather than more. The film could stand to get rid of 20 if not 30 minutes of footage. Since the plot is loose and disjointed its not hard to do. In its absence all we have is the camera lingering and capturing beautiful things. But the camera lingers too long and fails to escape noise. The editing unfortunately is way too reverent just like most of the questions at Walter Reade were. Some noise can highlight the music, equal decibels of noise and music and the music is lost. Not entirely but a little. In the end the balance isn’t quite there. Denis predicted while introducing the film that the audience would be less enthusiastic and somewhat long-faced when she’d come back for the Q&A after the screening. She was right. But my long face wasn’t because the film was depressing or because of the brutal end but because in the end it had failed to touch me in the places it mattered, my heart, my head, my stomach.


II

Like many others in the Walter Reade last night I had hoped that this Saturday night was going to be the big one. Chabrol and Denis—two masters back to back. When Chabrol’s film opened, the cockles of my heart warmed on seeing the entirely handsome Benoît Magimel impeccably dressed and (playing Philippe) perfect son and brother on the screen. That he caresses and feels particularly attached to the green bust in the garden that the family calls Flore is even more endearing.

Enter Senta The Bridesmaid who resembles Flore the garden bust. They fall in love. The story begins. And we wait till the very end to find out if Senta is a somewhat dreamy girl who spends her time making up macabre stories or stark raving mad. She tells Philippe that all lovers must prove their love for each other by planting a tree, writing a poem, having sex with someone of their own gender, and killing someone. You get the drift.

Claude Chabrol has done too good a job this time round and ended up defeating himself. That Chabrol at seventy-five is engaging with young people and their stories is not in itself a problem. That the film ends up feeling not about adolescence but adolescent is. Senta and Philippe are young but not teenagers, they just seem it in the film. The acting is competent enough, Laura Smet who plays Senta was there for the screening and said that Chabrol hadn’t wanted her to prepare for the film yet she did. Magimel has a lot of finesse and even the minor characters pull through for the most part. The part that is broken and doesn’t work is the love between Senta and Philippe. That love can render people blind is not what is disputable. How someone like Philippe without a grain of darkness in this film can sustain un amour fou for a girl who is at best off her rockers and at worst a killer is never evident, the leap of faith never made. We don’t believe it. For a psychological film like this to work we need to see the psychology at work at some point, either in gesture or dialogue or visually. Possibly Chabrol spent too much time on Smet and ignored Magimel where the key to the leap could have been found.

Smet said to the audience that she had trouble getting out of the mindset of Senta after the film. She had prepared for the film by sleeping a lot and reading the original Ruth Rendell story on which it is based. Senta is a girl who spends a lot of time in isolation and Smet for three or four months after the film found herself also living this life of self-imposed isolation. This is a fine thing for an actress. When someone in the audience asked Smet whether she though Senta was crazy she replied that the girl had un grain but wasn’t crazy mad in her view. I wasn’t alarmed on behalf of Smet because it simply shows that Smet truly put herself in Senta’s head. You and I after seeing the film might and would be right to take cause with that.

I suspect that Chabrol immersed himself so completely in the story that like Smet he could no longer clearly see the girl for what she was. If he had approached the story with full-on adolescent vigor as a story seen only through Senta’s eyes I think it would have been more successful though possible even less palatable to the audience.

French Film Fest 2005---Me and My Sister

For those of you who love Isabelle Huppert playing Isabelle Huppert go watch the film. Everyone else wait for some of the other films that are soon going to come to the States with the other talented actors who acted in Me and My Sister (Catherine Frot & François Berléand) and skip this.

Alexandra Leclère has delivered a competent but unexceptional first film without jarring flaws and without anything remarkable. The dialogue gets a B- grade. The cast is so competent that it could have acted with closed eyes and probably did. I can’t imagine Huppert needing a single direction for the film since she has played the same role in each and every film for the past ten years or longer. In some of the other films (Piano Teacher, Merci pour le Chocolat), a lot more was demanded from her. In this one, the director seems happy to let Huppert, the angry, mean, jealous sister, get away with playing bad on medium heat. Frot’s role demands moments of overacting since she plays the small time provincial sister in Paris for a few days to meet with publishers who’ve shown interest in her novel. Despite our sympathies for Frot who is ridiculed by her sister every few minutes in the conversation, we’re unsure if Frot has anything much going for her till she shows up for her interview and we see her buzzing the door for Editions Grasset no less! Berléand is cartoonish as well at first. He’s shown first taking his wife (Huppert) against her will in bed. But he somehow seems to escape through the caricaturing instincts of the director and delivers a believable performance. Tired of the blind hatred Huppert is turning against her sister he tells her he’s been sleeping with a dead woman for ten years…that he could do…but he won’t be with a jealous woman which is what she’s become. When Huppert buckles in the kitchen and falls hurting her back, Berléand is tender, loving, yet firm in his opinion that she should apologize to her sister. Huppert doesn’t.

Leclère may yet make a good film in the future. The frustrating thing about Me and My Sister is that it plods along a rather predictable path all the way till the end. We can see what it could have been but isn’t. We see Huppert playing her archetypical role (someone please cast her as Mother Teresa or the world will forget she’s actually acting!) as soon as the film starts and nothing changes whatsoever in her acting or her character. She seems to pay lip service to the idea of getting a job (spurred by envy for her sister) but in the end not much comes of that. She finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband and screams at the woman. Yet after the incident she remains unremittingly mean to her sister who is nice to her. There is a momentary deviation twice or thrice in the film when she asks if she was bad or says she hates herself but even that feels old and stale. An actress like Huppert, given the roles she chooses, needs a somewhat more complex psychological role to play. Me and My Sister can never decide if it wants to be wicked or funny or sweet or accessible and as a result simply ends up a little bland despite one sister hurling insult and injury in the direction of the other. In contrast Eros Thérapie with Frot and Berléand which should be coming here soon gives more satisfaction even though it isn’t seeringly ambitious. Watch out for it.

And oh! A special invitation to you Huppert fans out there who loved this film to comment on it on this blog.

French Film Fest 2005---Bad Spelling

Rarely do we see a film so well put together that there isn’t a moment when one is less than completely engaged with the story. Jean-Jacques Zilbermann has created a fantastic and entirely transcendental tale guaranteed to take us back—regardless of age or nationality—to the days of our own youth and our years in school. Despite the plethora of personalities we will recognize from our own teenage years, there are no cardboard characters in the film.

The main character Daniel (played by Damien Jouillerot who we are sure to see again) says at a couple of points in the film that he was "born in detention." His parents are the founders of a boarding school and the film begins at a point when Daniel has switched from being a mere day scholar to a boarder in the dorms. It doesn’t take long for the class bullies to turn on Daniel since he is the son of the tyrannical principal. The boys are all struggling at that awkward age with some problem on another. Daniel’s is the delayed onset of puberty. In order to avoid taking a shower with other boys he’s willing to be placed out of all group activities. But he isn’t shy of using the secret set of keys stolen from his parents when one of his classmates Zygelman, a gentle newcomer, wants to retrieve some jam in the middle of the night. The boys are caught and punished, a friendship ensues. At one point Zygelman helps himself to the panty hose of a popular girl Suza-Lobo and spins a tale to Daniel as to how he came into possession of these tights. Daniel insists on safekeeping them for Zygelman lest he get into more trouble but is caught by the bullies who try to strip Daniel down. They find the stockings and are willing to let him get away in return for the sordid details. Eventually this incident spins out of control and the entire school is punished. The boys are slapped one after another by the tyrannical principal (Daniel’s father). When it is Daniel’s turn, his mother (the head of studies at the school) asks Suza-Lobo if Daniel is responsible. Suza-Lobo who has kept mute while all the other boys are getting hit says NO. Daniel is let go. His classmates now beat him, urinate on him, and subject him to worse humiliation.

We see Daniel back in his parents’ home (attached to the school) locked up while they picnic in the garden. He isn’t complaining, he has full access to the fridge and a break from the harassment of his classmates. He invites Zygelman in from the escape hatch in the bathroom and the two raid the kitchen and the liquor cabinet. They start to wrestle and as the tension mounts Daniel finds himself astride Zygelman, the winner. Zygelman asks what Daniel wants from him. After a pause Daniel says he wants help with his bad spelling. He has lost one of his few friends, a boy who has corrected his spelling mistakes for years. We realize that Daniel is truly too young to want anything else.

The bullying of his classmates and the oppression of his parents increase unchecked till Daniel one day gets violent in retaliation. He is warned by his parents that if he doesn’t change he will find himself at a nearby reform school. A school reputed to inflict greater corporal punishment than this one. If Daniel is to come out on the other side he must do something. He helps Griset, an insouciant classmate, steal a large box of chocolate candy from his father’s office. Later when Daniel is pummeled by bullies, Griset comes to his rescue. Daniel suggests that they go into business together selling the candy they have stolen, estimating they can make 1000 francs. Griset an anarchist says that the sticks of chocolate candy are metaphors for dynamite. They set up a co-operative. The business thrives and the tables turn. When the dorm teacher catches the boys, Daniel bribes him with an enormous piece of Bayonne ham and appeals to the man’s leftist temperaments. Everyone starts buying from the co-operative and donating items stolen over the holidays. Daniel ensures all sales are recorded. Except for Daniel’s tyrannical parents and a couple of teachers, everyone is au courant, in the know, at the time of the final climax.

Zilbermann shot the film in the school where he himself had studied. Introducing the film today, he said that he had worried about how he would recreate the way the school had been in the past but discovered instead that it hadn’t changed at all in the intervening time. His main challenge was to turn this place which had been a place of unhappiness for him to a place of happiness in the film. Zilbermann has accomplished more than that, he’s ensured that the school is a place of unhappiness for the entire audience before transforming it into a happy place. As Daniel suffers and struggles we endure with him.

The role of Daniel won Damien Jouillerot the César nomination for Best Promising Actor. Zilbermann had initially intended the film as a comedy but Damien Jouillerot—who lost some 70 pounds for the role by switching to Diet Coke—according to him brought a profound dimension to the film making it something more. One can only hope that American distributors will see how much more. I for my part cannot wait to find and watch his other films including L’Homme est une femme comme les autres (Man is a woman like the rest), Tout le monde n'a pas eu la chance d'avoir des parents communistes (Everyone wasn’t lucky enough to have communist parents).

French Film Fest 2005---Tickets, Shows etc.

Since people have been asking me....you can get a full listing of the films showing at the Rendez Vous with French Cinema 2005 on the website of the Film Society of Lincoln Center http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/3-2005/rendezvous05.htm. Also, since I've received emails pointing out the shows are sold out, just as an fyi you can usually get tickets standby if you go before the show (atleast during the weekdays).

French Film Fest 2005---Les temps qui changent

In LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT André Téchiné has extracted the best performance we’ve seen from Gérard Depardieu in recent and not-so-recent memory. Téchiné’s extraordinary accomplishment in this film is that he effortlessly achieves a graceful balance between the genre of French vacation film (country home, pool, family reunion) and that of French film shot à l’étranger. Téchiné’s LOIN was very much defined by Morocco, the experience of being abroad, out of France. The only film that comes close to the same harmony as LES TEMPS in certain moments is LE SOLEIL ASSASSINÉ (Murdered Son) a seaside film starring Charles Berling and directed by Abdelkerim Bahloul. A film sorely missing from this year’s Rendez Vous when a mediocre film like Tell me I’m pretty is being included with what is otherwise a formidable lineup. LE SOLEIL takes place in another former French colony Algeria and Berling plays the poet Jean Sénac who runs a radio program in French just like Deneuve does in this film and one reason it would have complimented LES TEMPS. The resemblance between the films ends with the radio station characters. LES TEMPS is about love and the four principal characters in the film. LE SOLEIL is about a hero.

Catherine Deneuve introduced the film on Sunday to a spellbound audience that gasped on seeing her. The same age as Téchiné (both are 1943 born) Deneuve has continued to remain alluring and compelling in all her recent work and was no less so on stage. She thanked us for coming to see French films, French films with English subtitles no less. The film proposed the question, she informed the audience, as to whether the first love of one’s life can also be the last love. An audible sigh went through the screening room.

Depardieu arrives in Tangiers in search of Deneuve the first love of his life after convincing his company to post him there to oversee the construction of a new television studio facility. He sends bouquets of flowers anonymously and even consults a local Moroccan woman responsible for his leisure and entertainment to teach him how to cast a spell on Deneuve to win her back. When he finally has a face to face encounter with her he is flat on the floor outside a grocery story having hit his nose and damaged the cartilage. Deneuve’s husband rushes on hearing the noise and informs Depardieu he is a doctor. As if the circumstances are not humiliating enough Depardieu has an attack of diarrhea when Deneuve spots her husband and comes up to them both. Depardieu’s performance is irreproachable. He is contained, mature, passionate, and poignant. No mean feat given the general tendency to exuberance in his acting coupled with the challenges Téchiné puts his way in terms of the stupefying and the ridiculous all of which he pulls off with pathos.

Enter Deneuve’s son played by Malik Zidi. Home on vacation he fails to warn his parents in advance that his girlfriend and her son will make the trip with him. His girlfriend is there in search of a twin sister who has decided that for twins to become whole and heal they must cut contact with their siblings. Zidi spends his time back home in Tangier rekindling a relationship with a former male lover who eventually diagnosis his problem saying that--you are half French and half Moroccan, half man and half woman you’re indecisive. Lubna Azabal who plays Zidi’s girlfriend is plying herself with sleeping pills while Melki spends most of his time in the swimming pool, drinking, and watching his medical practice decline. The family is gathered in a house in Tangiers away from the bustle of the city, each tending their own problems and imperfectly, imperceptibly, trying to make peace with the flaws and humanity of the other. The father with the son’s gay-side, the girlfriend with the rupture from her twin, the mother with herself and the men in her life. Unrushed and human to the core they all lash out in moments and then arrive at a different understanding, evolve.

The love story or rather, at this point in the film, the non-love story between Depardieu and Deneuve happens in the background. He wants her back he tells her, he wants to spend the future with her. They are walking and she says there is no future the forest they just left behind is over and now there is the cliff and its nothingness. But there is the sea in front of the cliffs and across the sea there is Spain, the beginning of Europe he says.

Téchiné’s genius in all his films is that they end up more like living entities with the hum and heartbeat of the passage of time, the complexity and evolution of characters taking place both within and outside time. The beauty of his films is like condensed sunlight and the dialogue is always just so. LES TEMPS is quintessential Téchiné, to be cherished dearly.

French Film Fest 2005---36 Quai des Ofèvres

A policier the way it should be! Oliver Marchal the director of the cop film 36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES was also an inspector in the criminal brigade in Versailles before he took to cinema. It’s a different story that he became a cop in the first place because of cinema, because of Melville...it is always heartening for someone in the business of creation (whether art or literature) to know that life follows literature follow life and we're part of a recursive cycle. After seeing Marchal’s film I met with Maryam Keshavarz the critically acclaimed director of THE COLOR OF LOVE. We swapped stories of when we had both made something (in her case a film, in mine a story) and months later found real life mirroring the art that had been produced. A scene, a moment, an episode, we’d already lived in the process of creating it and then gone through it once more for real.

Back to Marchal. I heard Marchal speak after the screening of his film at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center yesterday. He described Gérard Depardieu who plays the bad cop as un chien fou--a mad dog, in that Depardieu on the set needs to touch people and grip their arms and talk and connect using flesh, space, and smell. Daniel Auteuil who plays the good cop on the other hand is a "cerebral actor" in the words of Marchal. Auteuil was nominated for a César for Best Actor for the film. This contrast that Marchal raised between Auteuil and Depardieu took me back instantly to another film, a comedy, in which they’ve played together—THE CLOSET(Le Placard) directed by Francis Veber. In that film Depardieu plays the hulky male frat boy grown old and falls in love with Auteuil who is rumored to be gay but really isn’t. A successful comedy, that film nonetheless hangs on the exact same dynamic between the two actors that 36 does.

I’ve been thinking of actors in terms of the roles they play (Isabelle Hupert in almost all her films) and also in terms of acting-pairs like some binary star system. If Depardieu and Auteuil are an obvious pair that come to mind since they play polar opposites in 36 then a less obvious pair is that of André Dussollier and Auteuil. Dussollier was nominated for the César for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 36 and plays the senior policeman who has to choose between Depardieu and Auteuil. Dussollier like Auteuil, is a cerebral actor and the distance between them in 36 is not much different than the way their dynamic hung, suspended between tension and the possibility of mutual understanding in UN COEUR EN HIVER (A heart in winter?) directed by Claude Sautet. In that film the men are partners in a violin repair service, Dussollier rustles up the business while Auteuil is the expert luthier. Auteuil gives Emmanuelle Béart (Dussollier’s girlfriend) the eye but when Béart falls for him he rejects her.

According to Marchal, Depardieu gave his fullest from the start and then as a director Marchal found ways of fine tuning the performance. And while, in contrast to Depardieu, Auteuil might be cerebral in 36 he is glacially cerebral in UN COEUR. His entire success as an actor lies in fine-tuning his art at the very extremes of human consciousness. He uses barely perceptible and implausibly subtle expression to carry him enormous distances between masochism, depression, violence, mirth, and rectitude. Just look at his eyes in SADE, MA SAISON PRÉFERÉE (My favorite season), L’ADVERSAIRE (The Adversary), LA FILLE SUR LE PONT (Girl on the bridge), LA VEUVE DE ST. PIERRE (The Widow of St. Pierre) and you will find revealed in those eyes a range of human types that few of us could dare to live.