A response to the lovely Morgan Meis, who wrote to The Porch recently. Click here to read his original letter.
dear morgan
I’m not saying that The Green Ray is a laugh-a-minute thrill ride, but it did thrill me, and make me laugh, at myself as much as anyone, and our wondering about who we are and why. It’s a lovely film of honest emotion, in which the High Romance of medieval knights meets the ostensibly mundane conversational vacation plans of a mid-1980s twentysomething French woman (who might be a travel agent, but it’s not clear).
Don’t be so stubborn says one of Delphine’s friends early in the movie (although they seem to care about her, it’s sometimes hard to tell if they are really her emotional match. On the other hand, as annoying as I found them, I really liked being around these annoying people.).
When Delphine responds I’m not stubborn, life is stubborn, it’s easy to roll your eyes and wonder whether or not I want to spend a couple of hours in the presence of one so self-absorbed. But then - and how - Marie Rivière’s vulnerability beckons me to pay attention. With director (and her co-writer) Eric Rohmer, she illuminates a life touched with moroseness, but committed to not settling for the kind of compromise that causes us to lose ourselves in codependency - our own, or others.
Delphine is trying to say something meaningful but people don’t know how to listen, how to take her seriously. She is named for an oracle, but her kinds of prophecies include such revelations as Lettuce is more like a friend, in the midst of one of the most crisp articulations of the ethics of not eating animals (also: It’s more expensive to raise cattle in a field than to eat what grows in the field. And Your body is made out of what you eat. I don’t mean the methods [of farming and cooking], I mean how it makes you feel in your body…)
Perhaps our minds are also partly made out of the movies we watch?
Rohmer and Rivière have Delphine make this extraordinary intervention into the way things are while seated at a table, eating fruit in a garden. It’s a mythical moment, in which somehow innocence and authority meet. The idea that people who say what’s on their minds goes with the flow of our cultural streams, but it’s easier when the things on those minds are aggressive or at least loudly stated. (It’s not a coincidence that so much of The Green Ray takes place by water.) When the things are things like someone declining to go with the flow because I’m a bit in transit at the moment, or stepping into the radical honesty of To find the person who is right you need to show your feelings right away, or the heart-stopping sadness of We’re talking about showing things and I have nothing to show, the culture doesn’t know what to do.
Perhaps the best response is silence, or at least a willingness to be uncomfortable with how people comfortable talking about their discomfort stimulate the rest of us to feel it too. Loneliness is real, says Delphine, but at least the pain is within yourself. It’s something you can own, if not celebrate, because it can become a portal to both rgeatere self-knowlege and hopefully greater self-love. And it is those who love themselves enough to become their own best friends who are never lonely, even on days when they are solo walking in a field, and can only see the wind and its battering of hedges.
The irony, of course, is that the journey to such self-acceptance, seems to require a kind of isolation, at least temporarily, or even periodically - a life punctuated with voluntary, conscious quietude. To become a person “incapable of playing games” means being willing to risk loneliness; but to go through the initiation of authentic loneliness can result in the emergence of the most intimate of all community: unselfish love of self.
I’m not saying Delphine knows this, at least not at a conscious level, but she is showing it. And in this magnificent climax, she’s doing something wonderful - something of which the Irish singer-songwriter wrote when she said You can have my heart, if you don’t mind broken things. Like you said, morgan, she knows, or learns, or experiments with, or finally bumps into the moment when she has said No enough. She hears an inner Yes and sees colors many of us might never be privileged to glimpse, busy as we are with forcing our way out of experiencing today in favor of a tomorrow that will never come.
You wrote about Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! in relationship with The Green Ray, and that sparked a memory of a lovely documentary about Linklater, with some footage of what looks like the most wonderful film student summer camp. Jonathan Demme mentored some of the students, and in the documentary we see Demme, looking frail - he must have been ill with the esophegal cancer that took him in 2017. But he and Linklater were smiling, loving their students, loving the possibility of the work they might make.
Demme isn’t exactly renowned for making heart-centered films, but if you think about it, his films often have significant heart-centered characters. Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Thandiwe Newton in Beloved, the father played exquisitely by Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married. You’ve alerted me to an invitation in viewing characters with heart: to ask when they say Yes, when they say No, and to discern if their Yeses and Nos should or should not be a model for me. You’ve pointed out - as does Linklater, all the time, but I’m thinking especially of the Sunset films, in Boyhood, in Last Flag Flying - that the ways and occasions of a person’s No can make all the difference. When a No is discerned for the right reasons, at the right time, and asserted with authority - even if it comes from a place of uncertainty, or at the expense of social embarrassment, other discomfort, loss of influence, or more - that No can lead to a miraculous unveiling, as with what Delphine finally sees. That No can become an even bigger Yes. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop thinking about that.
A Postscript. You asked, morgan, if I would accompany you on a journey into Rohmer’s films, and boy am I up for that. But I’d like to offer a parallel path too. This opportunity to reflect on The Green Ray left me thinking about David Byrne (who once bought a used DVD of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi from me, but that’s another story. Or actually, that’s the complete story: I used to sell my old DVDs to make a bit of extra cash. David Byrne bought one from me once. End of story.) Of course David Byrne first entered my consciousness in his oversized suit, walking on stage at the beginning of Stop Making Sense, not the quintessential concert film, but maybe the most honest, because it’s about the people and not the spectacle. Jonathan Demme directed Stop Making Sense, and the last film he completed before his death is also a concert film: Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids. It’s a concert film about the people too, as is Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s most recent tour, American Utopia. I wonder if you might watch American Utopia while I watch whatever Rohmer you have up your sleeve, and we can talk about both of them, the next time?
Yours with love, affection, and learning something more about No,
Gareth
On behalf of The Porch
