Beatriz at Dinner

This film is far more complicated than a clash between a Donald Trump surrogate and a Green idealist. The moral spectrum here is far too nuanced to allow a single clear position. It’s a diagnosis without a prescription. 

For one thing, Doug Strutt is no Donald Trump,  He’s far smarter, knowledgeable, more gracious, disciplined, self-aware, more honest — in fact, the character here who is the most at peace with himself. The three wives are uniformly hard, brittle, constantly on guard to sustain their marital and social status. Of the three wealthy couples only Doug is secure in himself and confident in his dealings with the others. The men live on his approval, so the wives must too. Strutt is the amoral super-rich Republican that supports Trump.

Indeed Strutt’s last words to Beatriz are a plausible strategy for dealing with our dying world: enjoy while we can. But enjoyment is not one of Beatriz’s options. As a healer she feels others’ pains too deeply, not just her patients’ but the animals’, the planet’s, the disintegrating universe. 

But the film does not let us comfortably side with Beatriz either. How seriously do we take her goats? They are illegal. Her range of putative sciences feels too close to satire. Her “moral stand” at the dinner rings as futile as the developers’ self-justifications, especially seeing as it’s fuelled by an unaccustomed intake of wine and a joint. Her urgent phone calls reveal a woman in severe personal distress, out of control of her own life. Her dinner-table idealism is as intrusive and self-displaying as the other class’s vulgarity and greed. Oddly, too, Beatriz is played without Salma Hayek’s usual beauty. The shots that emphasize her large rear end bring her down to the wives’ sad, flawed mortality.   

She does make one strong point. Fixing is harder than breaking. The strutting Strutts are wreaking great damage upon the planet, whether the single killed rhino or the multitude of destroyed birds — and the human lives the bulldozing developers envelop and ruin. The latter includes the “partners” here Strutt so generously rewards for their submission and fear. Nature if not the abused underclass will take its revenge. 

But does Beatriz? The film provides two conclusions to this dinner party. The first confirms Beatriz’s fantasy of revenge. She fatally stabs Strutt, in her dramatic but inconsequential sacrifice to reduce what she sees as the rampant evil in the world. In her rage she blames Strutt for her goat’s death. Of course one villain less won’t matter. But she will suffer the serious consequence.

In the second version, after her fantasy, she drops the letter opener, lets Strutt live and — broken by her failed resolve — walks out to her ocean death. The last image recalls her memory of paddling over the waters, here towards a new dawn. She earlier expressed her belief we have multiple lives, in which we can confront again the people with whom we have unresolved differences. That faith may make even her suicide a happier end than her ridding the world of Strutt. 

The alternative ending requires us to choose which we prefer. Do we opt for the murderous revolution? Or the destructive futility of the idealist?  Either position seems emblematized by the flaming lanterns floating up into the night, a beautiful but empty and ineffectual stab at the immutable darkness. Of course, the lanterns are extremely dangerous, indeed illegal, but the lawyer promises to save the host and the boss from any criminal charges. As usual. These rich are above the law. 

Some bit players reflect on the main ones. The photo of the hosts' daughter Tara reveals a fragile, troubled, boyish girl, who finds a connection in Beatriz she can’t make with her parents. She overcame her cancer. Cancer is what Beatriz charges Strutt and bis cronies with being to the world. Struggling to find something positive about the maverick Tara, one woman compliments her eyes. But there's more than beauty: the daughter sees more than the family and their friends realize. 
     Then there are the three servants. The young man presiding over the event falls short on the grace, good looks and suave he’s hired to display. He’s not supposed to interrupt a guest to take the entree choice. He embodies the hosts’ pretence and strain. The cook is a matronly white woman, controlling her realm. In contrast, the hosts’ Mexican servant quietly suffers her work but shows an instinctive sympathy for Beatriz. “So how did it go, the dinner?” she asks. She represents the seething underclass Beatriz predicts won’t stay submissive. Even if she does — or doesn’t.    

Colour in Hitchcock's Rope (1948)

One of Hitchcock’s many points of genius was his ability to turn new technical advances to dramatic and thematic purpose. As early as The Ring and The Lodger (both 1927) he fully deployed the armoury of expressionistic devices. When the advent of sound interrupted his production of Blackmail (1929) he found brilliant ways to use the sound, speech, noise, to dramatic effect. Remember the heroine’s exaggerated hearing of “knife!” over the breakfast table. 

When reviewers cavilled at his obviously false backdrops in Marnie (1964), they must have forgotten his expressionist background and his commitment to theme. The alleged lapses in his craft were rather a representation of the heroine’s psychological disjunction, the gap between her present and her past, the neurosis caused by her buried trauma.  

From his 3-D Dial M for Murder (1954), one most clearly remembers Grace Kelly’s urgent reach into the audience for help against her assailant — and her grasp of the fatal scissors. But there was a more characteristic effect in the opening scene. The mantelpiece in her apartment projects off the left side of the screen, the objects upon it hovering precariously over the audience.  More than just thrust, Hitchcock used the 3-D to express the fragility of even those characters’ privileged lives. 

And so to his first colour film, Rope (1948). Typically, Hitchcock did not deploy the technical advance just to enhance the record of reality but rather turned it to thematic purpose. 

The pre-title shot is downward on a city street. The tone is predominantly grey, punctuated by a green canopy, a passing yellow cab, and in the image centre a pink with white apartment building.The fire hydrant is pink, the mailbox gray. Against that bland palette the title Rope erupts in red, followed by the cast and credits in bright white. 

That colour scheme, a dominating blandness, represents the object of the two central characters’ arrogant and murderous disdain. It’s the world of the dull, whom the bright privileged two young men feel authorized to murder. They have black hair and wear dark suits — Brandon navy, Phillip brown — in contrast to the bald father’s light grey and grey Rupert’s dark grey tweed. Blond Ken wears light brown. 

In his signature cameo, Hitchcock with a woman walks along the screen in the title sequence, shot from above, himself one of the “little people” at whom the sociopaths sneer. Here Hitchcock aligns himself with the generation of the victim’s father, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who takes personal affront at Brandon’s theory that the bright have the right to eliminate the dull. 

The young men’s apartment continues that colour design. When the curtains are opened the cityscape outside is an uninflected grey. Because they are after all of that same world as the less valued, less brilliant, their apartment is furnished in light browns and greys. The chest that harbours their corpse is a dark brown, attuned to their colours. But the flowers are white. Even their art holds that pallor: the Milton Avery painting in the dining room, the black and white cubist piece in the living room, the monochrome heads.  Their new painting by “an American primitive” is —on the contrary — a colourful abstraction, in the manner of Miro. Brandon’s misdescription parallels his performance of innocence about his missing friend. 

When Rupert returns to confront his former students the city outside has turned to black night, with a scattering of red and green neon signs. The professor’s deduction process seems to probe that darkness around the chest. 

When Rupert produces the rope with which the boys had strangled David, they crumble. Phillip knows the jig is up. At that point we get flashing green and red from the neon outside. The flashing light has two effects. It feels like a throbbing pulse against but heightening the tension, like the metronome Rupert turned on earlier when Phillip tried to hide his nerves by playing the piano. As well, the lights cast an aura of disease, of moral sickliness, over the revelation that Rupert’s philosophical theorizing prompted the men to kill their friend. The lights suggest how Phillip feels his teachings have been turned poisonous. 

Of course there is another technical breakthrough in Rope. Hitchcock famously shot the film in the 10-minute segments allowed by a single film cartridge. That is, each scene represents a continuity, a steady flow in contrast to the master editor’s usual fast clip. And again, there is a thematic purpose to that strategy. The continuity in each scene’s shooting points to the central theme: the continuity by which an abstract theory can lead to an unfortunate consequence. 

Rupert feels guilty himself when he learns that his words led to the murderers’ deeds.  In his intellectual speculations Rupert contended “murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the 'seven lively', perhaps, but an art nevertheless. And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.” His defence of murder is playful: “Think of the problems it would solve: unemployment, poverty, standing in line for theatre tickets….”

But two of Rupert’s students take his theorizing literally. “The good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don't they? Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. Course he, uh, he was a Harvard undergraduate. That might make it justifiable homicide.” So they kill their friend and play out their intellectual superiority by entertaining their victim’s father and girl-friend over his corpse. 

The killers’ rationale horrifies their teacher. “By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong?” Our responsibility for our words and what they may lead to is one of Hitchcock’s most frightening exposures. That theme inheres in the 10-minute takes. At the end, appalled at learning g how his words led to terrible action, Rupert calls the police. Not by words, this time, but by action. He fires Phillip's revolver into the night -- the citizens below call the cops.  

But then director Hitchcock was like publisher Rupert in addressing “people [who] not only can read but actually can think.”    

War for the Planet of the Apes

Beneath the superb special effects and the genuinely moving simian pathos lies a parable for our time. As from the franchise’s outset, this human vs. ape confrontation portrays the tragic folly of our continuing impulse to demonize and to subjugate another race/nation/people.

The Kurtzian arch-villain Colonel (Woody Harrelson) is a white supremacist who claims control of nature: “All of human history has lead to this moment. The irony is we created you. And nature has been punishing us ever since. This is our last stand. And if we lose... it will be a Planet of Apes.” 

The film is prequel to the first Planet of the Apes, pitched shortly after our time, so that a beanie reads Bedtime for Bonzo (a classic Reagan ‘50s comedy).

The Colonel acknowledges the apes’ superior strength. “No matter what you say, eventually you'd replace us,” he tells his captive Caesar. “That’s the law of nature. So what would you have done?” Racist belligerence is painted as self-defence. Sound familiar?

Caesar’s apes represent a more responsible civilization: “We are not savages. Apes fight only to survive.” He sends human prisoners back with the message: “Leave us the woods and the killing can stop.” 

But the bellicose humans can’t stop themselves from fear, hatred and killing. The Colonel’s particular fear now is that mankind may be wiped out by a rampaging virus that has been attacking humans, stopping their speech, killing them. The mute girl Maurice adopts proves humanity survives that virus. 

(Full disclosure: Ya gotta love a film where the leader’s wise advisor is an orangutan named Maurice.) 

But the Colonel’s campaign to preserve humanity is itself destroying it. The Colonel speaks for our current extremists around the globe when he maintains: “There are times when it is necessary to abandon our humanity to save humanity.” As its happens, that’s how the current American presidency paints its sweeping sacrifice of democracy.

The Colonel considers himself fighting “a Holy War” — on two fronts. Against the apes he is defending his own culture, however self-destructive and compromised. But he is also facing an attack from a large army of humans from the north, his own military superiors, who are coming to remove the madman from their service. The Colonel needs the apes’ slave labour to rebuild the military outpost where he will defend himself against his own. He will exhaust them, then annihilate them

As in the modern Middle East, however, and contrary to tradition, the enemy of your enemy could still be your enemy. The northern army itself also wants to destroy the apes. After the apes have defeated the Colonel, they are immediately bombarded by the other army, all garbed in white. Why in white?

Because here nature at last intervenes. Nature reminds us its stronger than man. The Colonel claims the white man is the master of nature, that any other species is beneath him on The Great Chain of Being, that his arrogance and slaughter are on the side of the natural. But the white-uniformed army is wiped out by a snowy avalanche. The white nature overwhelms the presumptuous humans, white and uniformly clad in white.  

Though the political allegory here is global it has particular reference to Israel’s continuing struggle for survival. Like the Jews, Caesar’s apes ask only for a secure homeland. They don’t want to continue war and killing. Some seek the false security of assimilation — like the apes who serve the Colonel, who are abused, called Donkey, but sustain their vain hope of acceptance. Caesar’s name evokes the Roman period when the Jews were driven out of Judea and robbed of their roots and identity. 

The avalanche that saves the apes recalls the Red Sea’s drowning of the pharaoh’s forces, finally freeing the Israelites from Egyptian enslavement. Like Moses, too, Caesar gets to see the Promised Land — a desert much like the desert Israel transformed into fertility and modern science — but he doesn’t get to enter. 

Caesar’s personal growth is also pertinent to Israel. Through most of the film he is determined to act on his own to avenge the murder of his wife and older son. He imperils and loses some of his people by this vendetta. But he finally subdues this demon. He saves his people — yeah, I know, they’re apes, but still — by subordinating his personal campaign to theirs. In his climactic gesture he doesn’t kill the humbled Colonel who tortured him and cost him so dearly. Instead he allows him the respectful suicide. Caesar’s hands stay clean.

As Israel has faced relentless attack since 1948 (and its people there from even before statehood), that lesson is important. Vengeance is a terrible temptation. Forgiveness is hard, so it’s necessary if peace is ever to supplant war. 

Of course, before the Israelis can lay down their arms, forgo vengeance, stop fighting back, the Palestinians might be well advised to stop killing them and to accept peaceful coexistence and prosperity with the Jewish state. 
     And so around the world, where people at war demonize each other, deny the other’s humanity and strive to annihilate them. That’s not natural.

From the Land of the Moon

Correct me if I’m wrong. This could be the first major film in which a grand passion starts with kidney stones. (Full disclosure: None of my three episodes went that way — but then none were spent at a posh French rural spa. Mind, one was in Paris.)

The original French title is more revealing: The Sickness of the Stone. The film is about the affliction of stoniness — but that of the heart (turn left at the kidney). The central characters suffer from different forms of this inability to feel and to express true emotion. 

The central case is Gabrielle, who didn’t learn emotions or their expression from her cold, practical mother. But her dull rural life nourished a rich hunger for fantasy, especially of the romantic persuasion. So powerful is her imaginative drive that it prevents her development of a real-life love. The English title — From the Land of the Moon — refers to her preference of her dream-world over reality in human connection. She is a moony dreamer, a “lunatic” in that original sense.

Her first case is her schoolgirl crush on her literature tutor. She’s so in love with the idea of being in love that — with no encouragement — she imagines a full-blown passion with that happily married older man. 

Her madness scares her mother into marrying her off to a Spanish bricklayer Jose. Gabrielle vows never to love him. He doesn’t love her at the start of their marriage. Whether out of curiosity or good housekeeping, she eventually agrees to give him sex for what he would pay the prostitute.  

Then the kidney stones kick in. What begins as periodic cramps eventually causes a miscarriage. At Jose’s insistence she retreats for treatment to a lavish country spa. There she continues her compulsive isolation — save her connection to a serving girl — until she meets and falls for Andre Sauvage. He lost a kidney in the Indochina war and suffers pained and drugged in his room alone. As his surname suggests, their eruptive passion does an end-around on the niceties of civilization and the sacrament of marriage. 

Or does it? A key scene in Gabrielle’s imagined life plays out so persuasive that Jose’s eventual revelation brings her — and us — thudding back to reality. 

Her men provide a key contrast in the theme of stoniness. Dream-man Andre (quite literally, at that) comes across as a man off intense emotion. But the wear has paralyzed him emotionally, rendering him unable to respond to the woman he might have loved “in another lifetime.” In the spa for his missing kidney, Andre is another victim of emotional stoniness.  

From his experience in the Spanish civil war Jose suffered deracination, not as serious as the renal ruin but significant. It leaves him silent, withdrawn, private. His inexpressiveness seems healthy compared to his wife’s florid fantasy. Unlike Andre, he can fully respond to Gabrielle, coming to love her through their shared life and even her suffering. He shows gallantry when he first walks away from her initial rejection. When he learns of her love for Andre, he respects her enough to allow her illusion to sustain her. 
     Jose’s reticent manner may suggest a coldness but he’s the healthiest character in the film. He is a man of feeling not flash. Thanks to his practical engagement with the world and his growing emotional commitment, he ultimately gives Gabrielle the chance to find fulfilment here on earth. The last shot has them looking down on his village, his house, emphasizing her shift away from the moon. Indeed, Jose’s character promises to sustain that marriage even better than the simpler, apparently happy marriage of Gabrielle’s sister, who threatens to leave her husband’s abandonment. 

The Big Sick

The title points to at least two sicknesses in the film. The literal is Emily’s affliction, which graduates from swollen foot to an induced coma and possible death. The metaphoric is the crust of isolation and shame that religious groups, with their tradition of arranged marriage, impose on their young to secure their cultural continuity. The motive may be be proper but the effects can be destructive. The first sickness we can’t necessarily control; the second we can so should. 

There may be a third disease: “Always with the comedy.” As Kumail and his friends are stand-up comedians they are afflicted with the compulsion to take a comic perspective on everything. Kumail often has to add “That was a joke” to a line that doesn’t quite connect. 

To outsiders this could be a problem, as choosing comedy over law is a dubious career choice. But the comic impulse may prove more of a cure than an illness. It requires detachment and an engaged intelligence and wit. So it can be a salutary way of dealing with misfortune and of bridging gaps between people.

The latter is how Kumail uses his comedy to connect to non-Pakistani audiences. He also uses it to deal with his family, his break-up with Emily, her antagonistic parents, and briefly his loss of them all. It works. Note that it’s the comedian’s remark about Emily’s swollen ankle that points them in the direction that will save her life. The comedian observes and remembers and remarks.

Of course comedy has its limits. We see his act bomb when he can’t make jokes in the face of Emily’s danger. We’re told it bombed when he based it on his dilemma between losing his love and losing his family. That’s the risk when the comedy moves from Henry Youngman entertainer to post-Bruce/Sahl social commentator. To remind us of his serious intentions Kumail also works up a one-man show about Pakistan and the  issues a young Pakistani faces in North American life. 

Kumail grows up when he decides to be true to himself and to stop hiding. That is, he stops “pretending” or performing in his real life. He tells his parents he no longer believes in Islam and he has a non-Muslim girlfriend. If that means a break in the family it will be his parents’ choice not his. He will live with their abandonment, if necessary. 

The signs are good at the end. His brother visits his one-man show, his father comes to see him off to New York, and his mother refuses to speak to or look at him — but won’t send off him without his favourite biryani.   

As Kumail argues, why did his parents make by their admitted sacrifices to bring their children to America if not to become Americans? Parents do their children no favour by rigidly proscribing their lives, especially their emotional engagements. The culture most securely survives by bending with the new climes and times instead of importing and perpetuating old prejudices. 

Perhaps the key scene is the stand-up performance to which Kumail brings Emily’s parents on the eve of her surgery. Like any storyteller he lies to tell a greater truth. He claims he has to go headline the show — to get away from them. When they insist on coming he arranges to perform. 

That public performance transforms his personal life. Beth and Terry warm to his act. They are mobilized to defend him when a frat-type racist heckles him. Beth attacks back with such wit and spirit that we understand why they will accept Kumail in their family, and where Emily gets the courage and warmth to embrace him. Terry threatens more violence toward the heckler than wit but is equally validating. 
     The fissure in Emily’s parents’ marriage is also a healthy sign. It parallels the ethnic division in the larger. society Hence the observation, you can't really measure your love for someone until you’ve betrayed them. As Beth and Terry recover their intimacy and trust, Emily eventually takes Kumail back. And the Pakistani and non-Pakistani families will connect and enjoy each other. For our differences are not to keep separating us but to enrich our connection by our bridging them. 

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent is a prime example of gay director Minnelli’s critique of American marriage as a stunting reduction of manhood. 

(As I recall, Robin Wood established this theme primarily in Minnelli’s comedies — e.g., Father of the Bride, Meet Me In St Louis, The Long Long Trailer, etc. — and may or may not have examined it in this melodrama. It’s decades since I read his work and my library is, alas, too long gone for me to check. So I may be reseeding Robin’s field.)  

Katherine Hepburn’s Ann is a spinsterish independent with no time for the conventional woman’s compulsive search for a husband. She’s content to work for her professor father in his home chemistry lab.  

Her father (Edmund Gwenn) is a cuddly, wise, loving man, as handy at the piano as at the test tubes, but he is utterly desexualized by his widowhood and name. She calls him Dinks! Her one suitor is a more paradoxically named prof, the boyish vapid Joseph Bangs (he doesn’t). 

Against that backdrop of male impotence stand the powerful two Garroway brothers. Ann is instantly awed by Alan (Robert Taylor), the slick operator who made his fortune on a long-distance control device he supposedly invented in time to win WW II. 

But his reputation and character are both false. He killed the German scientist whose device he then stole. In another manipulation to show his power, Alan lets his new wife Ann embarrass herself in a dowdy dress at a reception for his flashy friends. That’s to get their admiration for his ensuing remake. 

Only after marrying Alan does she hear he has a brother Michael (Robert Mitchum). Alan describes Michael as the family black sheep who robbed him to fund his wastrel life, then disappeared. The more he avoids discussing him the more Ann becomes intrigued by him.  

     The two brothers recall the two additives Dinks dropped into the test tube to demonstrate the irreversible effects of love on a placid element. The tube (Ann) bubbleth over.

Of course Taylor and Mitchum were box office and romance studs. Taylor was the pretty boy, Mitchum the seething danger. Their personae work here. This time it’s the pretty boy who proves the murderous threat, the ostensible Bad Boy the hero.

Ann becomes intrigued by what she hears about the mysteriously disappeared Michael. When she collects his rebound book of poems she finds a kindred spirit she initially thinks is her Alan — which ignites his anger and fear. When she visits Michael’s ranch (now Alan’s), she finds Michael’s “home” profoundly more comforting than Alan’s. To mislead her, Alan claims his mother, not Michael, played the Brahms she loves — and he hates. That music becomes the signature of Michael’s return and their union.  

Both brothers are “undercurrents,” Michael in his sensitive, creative and principled character, Alan by his willingness to kill. 

The film’s major “undercurrent” is the irony that Ann married a fake but thereby finds her true love. She finds it by going beyond the structure — and strictures — of her marriage. The sensitive idealist and firmly individualistic man has no space in this film’s institution of marriage.   As the parties reveal, this world is gaudily artificial and ritualized, a glib dance of power. Where seat the judge?
Michael spurned Sylvia’s love because he met her through Alan and couldn’t undermine him. So, too, he later suppresses his attraction to Ann. 

Michael disappeared because he couldn’t bear the burden of bis brother’s guilt — nor to betray him. He hoped the war would end his dilemma but he survived. Meeting Ann rouses him to confront him to save her. As nature overrules man’s fragile and arbitrary social constructions, the wild horse stops Alan’s attack on Ann and the truly civilized outsider Michael fulfills her. Notably, the film doesn't end on a marriage but upon an extra-institutional harmony, the lovers joined in their Brahms.

 

Cezanne and me

There are two films here. 

One is the lyrical short buried behind the end credits. An establishing shot of Mt St Victoire dissolves into the series of Cezanne’s increasingly abstracted oil paintings of that mountain. As it recalls Picasso’s (and later Lichtenstein’s) series of increasingly abstract representations of a bull, it helps to explain Picasso’s quote: “Cezanne was the father of us all.” This fluid montage of Cezannes shows — but doesn’t enunciate — his revolutionary genius as an original artist. Unfortunately, the titles distract us from the images and most viewers walk out during the sequence anyway. What could have been the core is a throwaway.

Then there’s the film narrative itself, which entirely omits any explanation of Cezanne’s specific importance. We see some of his major works and his exclusion from the establishment but we get no clear sense of what exactly made his art important. Even the film’s title veers us away from him to the perspective of his friend Emile Zola. 

Such a glaring omission or bias can only be intentional. That is, this film putatively about Cezanne and Zola is not really about their respective arts and achievements at all. Cezanne’s artistic breakthrough and Zola’s naturalist novels and his unfashionable defence of Alfred Dreyfuss are just alluded to, not explored. They’re just part of the setting, like the top hats and cravats — and all the beautiful young naked women.

Writer/director Daniele Thompson has rather other fish to fry. To wit, the human failure of the conventionally successful male in the patriarchal culture. She uses these two towering male authorities as a case study in the pathetic neediness and shallowness of the male ego. It’s a feminist’s anatomy of a classic bromance, with Cezanne as Butch, say, to Zola's Sundance. There’s even a gal-pal Ella to absolve them of any hint of homophilia. The working class Alexandrine passes from Cezanne’s mistress/model to Zola’s wife to oblivion. 

Thompson assumes we know the importance of the men so she opts not to explore or to explain their work. Instead she exercises the familiar conventions/cliches of the artist’s dilemma. The Romantic Artist (Cezanne) flouts all artistic and social convention and seems doomed to the purity of poverty and obscurity. To be an Artist is to be wildly, self-destructively independent. In the other corner, the compromised artist (Zola) bends his passion to the winds of the day, to succeed in the marketplace. He can be riskily political (cp Dreyfuss Affair) but his ambition will be bourgeois. Their disdain is mutual.

In an invented anecdote, our heroes first meet in a schoolyard when young Cezanne rushes in to save Zola from bullies. It’s love at first fight. That’s how their passion will continue. With another lad who shortly disappears, the boys grow into men, at home in the Paris streets and cafes, chafing with ambition and struggling to survive. 

The friendship survives through — not despite — the two men’s violent arguments and lengthy periods of separation. Zola hates but envies Cezanne’s libertinism, eventually surrendering himself to his new young laundress who gives him the children his long-suffering Alexandrine couldn’t. Cezanne believes that Zola exploited Cezanne’s life and character to find fame and fortune. To Cezanne, Zola exploited him the way he himself exploits his models.  

This is a story of two successful creators who failed at life and humanity. They became famous but remained needy and pathetic. Both are so insecure that their successes can’t attenuate their self-loathing (Cezanne) or smugness (Zola). In their last scene together Zola doesn’t know Cezanne hears him publicly dismiss the painter as a “genius, but stillborn.” Cezanne weeps for days at Zola’s death because their feeling for each other never found an acceptable form. 

Though both men constantly discuss their girlfriends past and present — equally marginal — neither has any true feeling for their supposedly beloved. They neglect them in favour of fresher, shallower mistresses. The painter is enchanted with the colours and shapes of his wife’s body while painting her, but shows no interest in the real woman before him. Zola puts a form of this complaint by Alexandrine into the novel that leaves his friend feeling ultimately betrayed. 
     The one woman artist Berthe Morisot appears briefly to flash her bosom and laugh off Cezanne’s insulting proposal of a snuggle. Despite being an artist the woman is treated as just another model. As Thompson knows, art has always been the male’s preserve, where boys will remain boys however old and brilliant they may become. They remain fascinated with the malleable outer form of women and too terrified to approach their individuating depths. So they save their passion for each other — carefully camouflaged and suppressed for respectability. Zola’s “Cezanne and me” is really about the aloof, needy little Zola himself, hiding his airy superiority behind his literary naturalism.