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by Steve Johnson
Henry Jaglom
doesn't make movies so much as hold séances. Even when their situations
involve a simple gathering of friends or a war vet transporting
a comrade's body home, there's always the sense in his stories of
characters detached from the contemporary, physical world and left
to inhabit a parallel plane. All take place in such isolated locations
as a commune, abandoned theater, or resort town, where their characters
must search for either some missing part of themselves or the resolution
of some missed opportunity before they may find their final peace
and rest. From the distracted beauty of his first feature, A
Safe Place, who yearns to fly, and the accountant type
who falls under her spell, to the gaggle of second-string Hollywood
players and European luminaries whose careers have long since arc'ed
in his most recent, Festival
in Cannes, what brings all these apparitions together
is a shared quality of need, a desire to locate his or her own authentic
self, or "spirit." And the medium by which these spirits are invoked
is, of course, film itself, which can not only give form to our
most spectral imaginings but also preserve such images long after
the deterioration and death of their earthly progenitors. (Not surprisingly,
the logo for his production company, Rainbow Films, features his
longtime friend Orson Welles pulling a rainbow out of a magic box,
about as suitable a metaphor for what Jaglom means to do with his
camera as any.) Their removal from the everyday, material realm
then allows their greater meaning, or "truth," to be revealed.
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If we are to believe the portrait of
him in H. Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman's documentary Who Is
Henry Jaglom?, which has the feel, sometimes, of a put-on,
or stunt, Jaglom has conducted practically his entire life behind
or in front of the camera, making |
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of himself a ghost in both worlds. A favorite of
many women, his films embrace qualities or dynamics traditionally
equated with femininity: a disinterest in the masculine "thrust"
of Hollywood narrative in exchange for a looser, more freely associative
"flow" following on the give and take of character interaction,
their situations driven more by a desire to relate than to instruct.
Playing like what used to be called "happenings" organized
events not unlike performance art intended to provoke a response
in the spectator they are an at times uneasy coalition of
verité, improvisation, deliberate scripting and direction, and that
magical fifth quality, poetry.
They are demanding films, requiring a viewer to
shift gears with them without notice, be patient when they seem
not content to end when you want them to or where you think that
they should, even to endure their characters when they veer into
the self-indulgent or precious, as they frequently do. You must
be willing, while watching them, to do what
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their characters themselves
eventually realize they must do with each other to let them
be free to follow their own course, even when that path leads very
far away, and your reward, most times, will be finding yourself somewhere
down a road you might never have expected taking, yourself. What Jaglom
expects from the movies he nurtures and creates is the same we might
ask of our lovers, or of a seance: a transformative experience, an
epiphany, via a similar encounter with an often unanticipated Other.
As a result, many times what may start out as a thoroughly realistic
drama will conclude in a moment of either sublimity or the outright
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uncanny: the disappearance of lead characters from
A Safe Place, Someone
to Love, and Venice/Venice
(the latter film resolving in the recognition that the movie his
characters have been making all along is the movie we've just watched)
or the unlikely coming together of opposites for a roadside dance
in Cannes. A good Jaglom film can provide the same
out-of-body experience for the viewer, as well, transporting one
to greater worlds of possibility than this often incongruous and
contentious sphere.
How Jaglom gets us there is by
this very collision of opposing points of view, combining disparate
elements until they yield the stuff of transcendence. While hailing
from an avant garde tradition c/o John
Cassavetes and remaining far from the mainstream throughout
his career (his films all produced without studio backing, employing
students,
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devotees
and his artist and celebrity friends and acquaintances playing sometimes
thinly veiled versions of themselves for minimum pay few of
his works to date have cost more than a million dollars), Jaglom is
yet a romantic when it comes to influences and origins. Paying tribute
to the past in story structure the Vietnam war by way of Bierce's
"Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in Tracks,
Chekhov via Renoir's Rules of the Game in Last
Summer in the Hamptons as well as in his soundtrack
selections "I'm Old Fashioned" from the still very modern
Safe Place, and the title Bulgarelli song from Someone
Jaglom fashions a world that naturally blends the past
and present. Though an avowed atheist, as well, his films often display
a straightforward mystical sense through such warpings of the reality
he so ardently records. In fact, it is through this emphasis on natural
physical and material expression free of the glamour of Hollywood
that the revelations his characters reach gain their sizable spiritual
import: without bringing God or the supernatural into the argument,
the feelings his characters touch off are all the more fundamentally
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human, and true. So it makes a certain sort of sense
that his most traditionally "movie" movie should also be his least
realistic, the one least seemingly "Jaglom" the one which paradoxically
brings the spectral undercurrents of all his films to the surface
-- the putative supernatural romance, Déjà Vu.
Written, as were Hamptons
and Babyfever, with his wife and co-star Victoria
Foyt and released in 1998, Déjà Vu carries much of
the ambience of its pre-millennial era, a vaguely mystical air of
expectation grounded in an inchoate sense of dissatisfaction. Its
opening in a marketplace hints at the source of this disquiet, confirmed
by its resolution in the opposite of such a location, a work of
art. The path its lost-soul main character follows from beginning
to end and the discoveries to which this leads her reflect
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the film's own efforts to realize itself through
the improvisatory efforts of its cast. Along the way, the romance
facilitating both journeys serves as a metaphor for any erotic relationship,
whether between individuals, an artist and his or her medium --
as the film artist and his or her collaborators -- finally, that
between the spectator and finished work.
Déjà Vu proceeds like an odyssey
taking its fashion-storeowner heroine Dana Howard from Jerusalem
to Paris by way of Dover, London and California, spurred by a chance
encounter with a serene older woman at a café who, inadvertently
or otherwise, leads her to abandon her slightly daffy aspiring hotelier
fiancé Alex for seemingly levelheaded, married artist Sean Elias.
Somewhere in the middle she ends up where else but in a Jaglom film,
in the form of an impromptu gathering at the London home of a friend
of her father's, peopled by dotty older residents the Stoners; their
architect, Sean, and his wife, Claire; Alex; John Stoner's flighty,
self-possessed sister Skelly and her companion Konstantine, and
Skelly and John's mother, Colette. Here the various characters mingle
in everything from offhand vignettes to fully developed set pieces
as Dana and Sean wrestle with their seemingly fated attraction and
the several complications this arouses. Through it all, Dana experiences
a series of revelations that leave her with no choice but to go
with not only her heart but with all the signals she believes herself
to be receiving from the finite physical as well as
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eternal "other" realms. When it turns out that the
mystery woman of the opening could not have been in that location
at that time, the spiritual nature of their meeting comes clear
even as it throws the seemingly mundane exchanges that follow into
a deeper relief.
This concept of "meeting," as Irene Claremont de
Castillejo puts it in her book KNOWING WOMAN:
A Feminine Psychology (1997 Shambhala Books, Boston and London),
is of signal importance to Jaglom. In true meeting, ego and artifice
are transcended in order to forge a more resonant spiritual connection,
abetted by an indefinable third party -- "a something else." "You
may call it Love, or the Holy Spirit," she writes; "Jungians would
say it is the spirit of the Self" (p.12). It's the method by which
Jaglom derives his own brand of epiphany as well, the alchemy between
actors letting
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down their guard producing that quality of truth
that can't be attained by a single ego fashioning its own private
reality.
So it's fitting that the meeting which sets Dana's
journey in motion involves a being who already inhabits this numinous
realm, the woman Dana discovers later to have died fifteen years
before -- the mother of Sean and, most amazingly, the great love
of her father's life. For Dana, she is the senex, or Wise
Woman aspect neglected in her life of commerce. For Jaglom, many
of whose films involve such similar outdoor encounters, she's suggestive
of his public "meetings" with his audience in the greater world
of the movie theater -- the "medium" of film itself. (The scene
of their encounter, in fact, takes place in a real-life setting
above the Israeli Cinematheque.) Through this intermediary, he finds
that place where men and women -- as well as self and other -- meet
and transcend their otherness, where they find their mutual "spirit"
of humanity.
If Dana herself has a mother, she is neither seen
nor referred to throughout the picture. Given this, the woman at
the café then would figure as a literal Spectral
Mother, as Madelon Sprengnether has termed her in her 1990 book
of the same name (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London; tellingly,
no one else at the restaurant sees or notices her), a figment of
Dana's yearning for completion called forth to spirit her toward
the next step in her character development. Tranquil, and with an
empathic gaze that
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sees into Dana
-- because she is a part of Dana -- she insists that the younger woman
take a lapel pin to which she ascribes great sentimental value, and
tells the story behind it: One half of a pair, it was given her as
an engagement present by a young American in Paris at the end of World
War II, "when everything was possible again" and she was young and
poor. He returned to the 'States to break up with his girl back home
but succeeded in marrying her instead, later sending back a photo
of himself and his new daughter. The narrator herself then married
and moved to Israel. (Compare this scenario with that of 1951's short
film "Return to Glennascaul,"
featuring Welles, wherein a similar wartime romance is recounted by
a woman who later turns out to have been long gone. The 1980 film
Somewhere in Time
employs a similar setup as well, in which a ghost-figure proffers
another talisman conveying the romantic lead back in time; |
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it's also a function of Jean Rollin's poetic 1975
Levres de sang.)
There are so many layers to the woman's story that
the more information Dana receives about it and her, rather than
clearing things up, the more complicated its inferences become.
Besides being a partial retelling of the myth of the androgynes
-- creatures legendarily split into two bodies but destined to reunite
-- as the history of a figure out of Dana's imagination as well
as familial experience the tale suggests also a personal mythology,
a description of some spiritual truth which has brought her to this
meeting in this place at this point in her life. The woman represents
for her some lost or unknown character it is now necessary to reclaim,
the romantic, pre-materialistic Origin to which we all aspire in
consumer culture. When her relation to Dana's father is revealed
toward the ending, the histoire becomes a fable of the daughter's
displaced love for her own dad come back to her, the leaf pin a
symbol of her own incompleteness after the mystical separation from
him which had left her, in fact, a ghost in her own life. In
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standard Electric fashion, the film's elision of
the birth mother then leaves room for the daughter to take her place
in the father's affections, which is what happens when she accepts
the totem (symbolic also of her turning "a new leaf" in life)
from the "true," spiritual, intermediary, Spectral Mother. When
this woman abruptly leaves and is never seen thereafter, she echoes
the real mother similarly disappeared from the daughter's experience,
the hotel she claims to live in having burned to the ground twenty
years previously the unrecoverable old life lost at Dana's approximate
adolescent turning-point.
For the father, the woman's story is an allegory
of his postwar reunion with the anima, or the complementary creative
feminine element "back home" -- within: the pun in the "United States"
to which he returns -- in the
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form of his daughter. Left with this facsimile,
he has spent his life in mourning for the real thing, which has
migrated now to a figurative Holy Land in his heart and will eventually
hearken back to him through his daughter at a similar emergency-point
in his life. This occurs on the event of his "heart" attack, whose
function as a climax to the film suggests the drama as ultimately
his own, a crisis in the soul of a mostly absent or unseen father-God
at the putative turn of a century.
When it is revealed much later that not only was
Dana's father the soldier in the story but that the narrator herself
was the mother of the artist with whom Dana falls in love, another
set of implications ensue. For the father, Sean represents the creative
masculine self also regenerated through the encounter with the anima,
unseen and unknown all these years and introduced to him courtesy
of his daughter's exploration within the cultural heartlands. For
Sean, who is, when he meets Dana, painting a portrait of some
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woman he knows
not whom but who, as his knowledge of this new love deepens and progresses,
ultimately turns out to be his mother, finding
Dana fulfills his own oedipal desire to know that inchoate, similarly
lost mother-figure whose absence in his life has left him wed to earthly
matters and concerns in the form of his architectural day job and
wife, herself a director of TV commercials.
Meeting Dana and learning of her experience reconnects him to the
lost "spirit" of his own life's work, resulting in the concluding
transfiguration of both lovers in the painting
he gives her on their first meeting.
Ethel S. Person, in her book on
DREAMS OF LOVE AND FATEFUL ENCOUNTERS (1988 Penguin Books,
NY), emphasizes all these notions, stressing "love as restoration,
the end point of a lifelong quest to gain
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restitution for what was
lost long ago -- in personal history, or in the history of our species
-- as the result of prior separations" (p.92). For Jewish-born Jaglom
the importance of separation, reunion and restitution is central,
the history of his people as well as own family replete with exiles,
Holocausts and exterminations, making the postwar origin of this
romance even more resonant. His Ukrainian family's wealth and prominence
kept the devil from the door for a period of time until leaving
much of this behind became necessary as the 1919 pogroms swept through
their hometown of Proskurov (memorialized in Last Summer's
eponymous theatrical company). His father later relocated to London,
where Jaglom was born and where Déjà Vu settles in
for its longest stretch and greater improvisational explorations.
The culmination of much of this history was, then, the establishment
of Israel in 1947, where, again, this film -- as Dana's journey
-- begins.
Opening in such a spiritual location also suggests
a removal from one's natural state -- a separation from the ego,
as from waking life. It's in just such a place one opens oneself
up to love, as to the greater transcendence of self, as Person also
relates: Free of one's traditional borders and boundaries, one becomes
more permeable to outside influences and persuasions. So it is that
so much Jaglom unravels in places of remove, from the eponymous
festivals of Venice and Cannes to the
Tracks train, Summer enclave, Someone
theater, and Safe Place commune, and why so many of
these features are dramas of psychological dissolution. It's the
creation also of a dream-space, a similar location of blurred or
imprecise boundaries where self and other can phase in and out of
definition, like the interaction of lovers or of the filmmaker with
his actors, set, and material. It's where Jaglom breathes most freely.
His material is reality, as it is with the unconscious, but his
object is the hyper-phenomenal.
The fact that the hotel in which the woman says
she lives has burned down also resonates. It suggests first of all
that a former transient state is over and that the soul must now
find new lodgings. That this happened long ago indicates that it
has taken Dana some time to acknowledge this change, for which the
woman had served as an emissary, an intuition; Skelly intimates
as much later, when speaking of illusions as "the scent of something
real coming near." The larger implication is that the enterprise
Dana and Alex are about to embark on (synonymous
with their upcoming nuptials, suggesting the marriage as more akin
to a business partnership than a union of souls), of renovating
a similar hotel back in the 'States, is already passé in her heart,
and he with it. That the ground had been built over since the hotel's
razing demonstrates that there is a new occupant in that heart,
another presentiment soon to acquire features and independent emotions.
All come together at the Stoners' house, an impromptu hotel where
each gathers to bicker, kid, and share stories and advice with one
another. It's a grand, kinetic metaphor for the
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vacillations within the similarly many-chambered
mind of the film's dreamer, leading to its transcendent resolution
and restoration.
Before Dana can get there, however, she has to dislocate
herself from her present situation and focus on a separate pursuit
from that of material wares. So it is that while in Paris validating
the pin she glimpses a man's face beyond the jeweler's window and
leaves the item behind to follow him down unfamiliar streets. He
turns out, of course, to be Sean, but when next they meet he denies
having been there, suggesting her experience as another intuition
and dream-pursuit. What she has really seen is her own creative
next-self, one accustomed to gazing into and beyond the surfaces
to which her buyer's eye has until recently been attuned, observing
the jewel within and leading her to follow instead the erotic allure
of risk and
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uncertainty. (There is also the possibility that
Sean has in some sense projected himself there without knowing it,
the scene exemplary of his unconscious search for that "jewel" in
the city of romance which would find its way to him and offer the
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possibility of another life, the fulfillment of
the love his own mother symbolized as childhood romantic ideal.)
Dana's intuition is guided by her overhearing a
woman on her train to Alex humming "The White Cliffs of Dover,"
similarly to the way the main character of
Someone is inspired to convene a gathering of peers
on hearing his girlfriend singing snippets of the title song. The
half-heard melody in both cases functions as a voice within akin
to Skelly's "scent." Likewise the manner in which music appears
in all of Jaglom, the pop standards lacing their soundtracks arising
as more than just accent or commentary but as resonances from the
self as well as milieu, spiritual choruses to and catalysts for
both the inner and outer flow of the characters' lives as well as
the course of their films -- "invoked," again, as
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by a spiritualist. Following these voices brings
Dana to those very cliffs, where she finds her elusive man from
Paris painting. Their encounter on the Olympic heights suggests
the immensity of their longing and the mightiness of their calling,
a condition of which only she seems aware at first.
Sean invites Dana up to his studio, which serves
as a womb for their germinal romance and reinvention. It's a creative
space,
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his unfinished
portrait of an as-yet unidentified woman the indefinite Dana herself,
who will be given new life through the agencyof the Spectral Mother;
her eventual materialization on the canvas affirms the development
of Dana's own mature self-image on finding the artistic Love of Her
Life. Here, Sean gifts her with another picture, of a postwar couple
regarding the Eiffel Tower, suggestive of his mother and her lover
but also conveying "Dover's" message of possibility. The phallic
gate represents the same regenerative principle that gave the children
themselves life following such massive devastation, made meaningful
anew to these two childless early-middle-agers only now finding their
true source of eros. From this space Dana finally flees to the arms
of her fiancé, without her purse -- separated from both materialism
and her old i.d. -- and seemingly falling apart, her breakdown in
order to rebuild similar to the destruction |
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and reconstruction of the spirit's hotel and the
remodeling job she and Alex are at present undertaking.
So begins the vacillation between attraction and
uncertainty the couple will experience for much of the rest of the
picture. With both characters missing a parent, neither has been
able to fully see him- or herself through to an integrated self-image
of harmonious contrasts. It is perhaps this mutual need, then, which
brings both to the home of surrogate parents the Stoners, friends
of Dana's father who have engaged Sean to do some remodeling work
on their house. They meet in the Edenic courtyard,
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where the initially
aloof architect is flummoxed into recognition that larger forces are
at work in their lives. But, as if to reinforce the connections tentatively
established in the last womb they shared, this womb begins acquiring
even more personalities, in the form of free-spirited Skelly and Konstantine
(his name a punning indication as to the constancy of his devotion
to her despite her mercurial quality), and later Colette. It's also
a description of the mind's process of accumulating facets or viewpoints
it will variously pair off and convene in order to examine the problem
in a Cubist form of colloquy, resulting in, finally, the self-determination
of its main constituents.
One afternoon, while everyone is gathered around
a hearth, Fern and Skelly tell stories of unconsummated romance.
Fern's yarn, attributed to Katherine
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Hepburn, is the classic Citizen Kane
vignette about an infatuation with someone barely glimpsed but never
forgotten and hints at Dana's sighting Sean through the jeweler's
window, but Skelly's tale goes deeper into the emotional situation.
While hospitalized as a child during the war, she shared a room
with a Cockney girl who taught her "The White Cliffs of Dover,"
which she then
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shares with a wounded airman, obscured beyond
a partition behind her, before he's spirited away by a nurse
when they make physical contact, never to be properly seen.
It's a compelling tale, sensitively told by real-life participant
Vanessa Redgrave, bearing on both Dana and all women's experience
and carrying with it the power of a dream.
Read accordingly, then, the Cockney suggests
a lower part of Skelly psychologically, an "earthier," less
socialized or repressed aspect offering her similar hope to
that expressed in the song and providing her with a connection
to another, even less familiar and accessible part of herself,
the mysterious man behind the curtain. He is the animus within
all women, the characteristically masculine image of agency
and ascendance downed at a pivotal moment in her development.
For Dana, he first appears in the
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similarly prophylactic form of Sean behind
the glass, who is himself dealing with the complementarily
feminine anima in his own makeup, as signaled by the indistinct
female portrait in his studio. Skelly has spent a lifetime
trying to reclaim this ghostly figure
through her own "flightiness" as well as short-cropped hair.
The purpose of her story -- as of the entire gathering, like
a séance -- is to induce both potential lovers to recognize
the living face of this spirit in their lives -- in that room
-- and to not let the social barriers of their marriage and
engagement (the nurse of her story an agent of similar Institution)
to keep them from realizing the force of this acknowledgment
and leaving them, like her, eternally longing for what was
once within reach.
For Jaglom, this "screen" between lovers represents
the movie screen , which he attempts to tear away via his
actors' as well as his own directorial improvisations -- the
film, not atypically, initiated with a beginning and an end
in mind but without a map as to how it would get from one
to the other. In Who Is?, Jaglom tells of his
frustration with sticking to a script -- another, similar
impediment -- on his first film and how he resolved to not
even bother thereafter, though his works themselves indicate
a longstanding tension
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to reconcile this breach with the past (those
vintage ballads) with his own need to explore in real life,
in real time. Though he posits Skelly here as devil's advocate
between the otherwise engaged couple, encouraging them to
go with their instincts and "Jump into life," he also provides
a scene played with Redgrave's own mother, actress Rachel
Kempson, in which Skelly wriggles out of responsibility for
her mother's well-being and leaves it at the door of her more
grounded brother, John. Similarly, he draws the characters
of estranged wife Claire and fiancé Alex sympathetically enough
that the damage done by following Skelly's imperatives --
as their own -- is indelibly acknowledged.
Ethel Person describes the tendency amongst
illicit lovers to hyperbolize or mythologize their romance,
elevating it to the same mystical terms
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Dana, and later Sean, do,
partly in order to hedge the real-life consequences of their actions.
Unfortunately, this usually causes a rupture in the denied real world,
leaving the habitues of that world to do the mopping up after. When
Dana and Alex bicker in an open-air market like the one in which the
film began, indicating that time is about to restart for her and that
the vague apprehension haunting the solo woman there now has a face
and an independent voice, Dana stalks, off carrying a vase for which
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Alex will now
have to pay. Their argument is a philosophical one, she speculating
on the history of a picture frame and the many faces that must have
passed through it and what they might have meant to each owner, gesturing
toward the mutability of truth within a timeless structure and a clue
to Alex that her own perspective has undergone a change and that a
new object of affection is occupying her frame of reference. He cracks
wise about the bacteria also transmitted, betraying his focus on the
pragmatic physical plane she so desires to transcend. On abandoning
him, Dana runs into Sean at a café -- reiterative, again, of her encounter
with his mother, suggesting that the "ghost" itself has taken physical
form -- and makes love with him back at his studio after more talk
of the rightness and inevitability of their being together. Naturally,
Alex and Claire don't see things that way, and when a call from the
'States regarding Daddy's heart |
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attack interrupts everybody's acting-out, it's as
if the emotional center of the movie itself were hemorrhaging and
calling for a re-evaluation. It's also a comment from within on
the tension between narrative and improvisation, an indication that
the latter element -- this similar absorption of the film into itself,
outside of the rules of conventional cinema -- had gone as far as
could be
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allowed and that an at least temporary return to
form and structure were necessary to get the film, as well as lovers,
where they are going before alienating the affections of the audience
as well.
The opening Jerusalem location is once again evoked
when everything shifts to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles with
the Star of David atop it, taking us to the spiritual heart of Dana
and her dilemma. Here, her father talks of the "phantom pains" discomfiting
him now -- he, too, beset by ghosts -- setting us up for the historical
revelation to follow. It's also an invocation of the pull of the
comforting past and known for the conflicted Dana, as well as a
sympathy pang on the part of the elder for his daughter on the verge
of a choice he could not make or carry through himself. So powerful
is this draw to the familiar that afterward Dana nearly marries
Alex
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-- who has accompanied her
on the return and whom we see resembles her father superficially,
indicating that rather than finding |
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her complement in the world Dana is instead dwelling
within a vicarious romance with her own father -- and perpetuates
this history back home just like her father did. His wedding-day
gift of the matching leaf pin, however, leads her to realize, "Oh
my God, it was you," and to demand the story behind it.
Her expression carries several suggestions, not
the least of which is an acknowledgement of the primacy of her father
in her attraction to Alex, as well as the recognition that our search
for a soul mate has as much to do with who we are as what we wish
to be: We marry what we are already married to. It also comes in
answer to Sean's comment on the portrait in his studio, "I'm not
sure who it is just yet," which is itself similar to the Jagloms'
initial approach to their own sketch of a movie. Dana's realization
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provides an important step in Sean's development
as well, as is confirmed when she returns to him to find the picture
completed, symbolizing the resolution of their
own love as well as that of their parents.
The elevation of the mother from serendipitous agent
of change to pure spiritual force when Sean reveals the fact of
her death puts perhaps the final spin on Dana's reaction, the realization
that our parents themselves are God. In a monotheistic culture that
posits its deity as Love but cannot offer a model of divine union
composed of equal parts man and woman, it can be hell trying to
formulate a reasonable facsimile of that romantic relationship in
life. We are all children of a broken heart. It takes a visionary
act, therefore, to heal this rift -- meaning, a sensitivity to the
resonance of everyday experience, and a recognition that our actions
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create mythology, too: If the gods cannot provide
this example for us, then we must provide it for them. So when Dana's
plane takes flight for England, it is the ascendance as well of
her father's romantic heart returning to its hearth, as if he had
truly died there in that hospital bed from which he has dreamed
this whole adventure, his soul finally finding its way to heaven
on the wings of his daughter's love.
Jaglom concludes his movie with the couple emerging
from a subway to unite in front of the Eiffel Tower and dissolve
into the painting Sean had given Dana after their first meeting,
indicating a resolution of the physical world into the stuff of
art and romance. It is for the director a statement
on how all art is created as well, through a meeting of those masculine
and feminine aspects of the intellect as well as of the real and
spiritual-poetic
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worlds, present and past,
narrative and elliptical, scripted and spontaneous, personal and familial,
traditional and innovative, egoic and other, audience and object,
and the transcendence of each of these in the contemplation of uplifting
works. He dedicates his film to an ambiguous "love of my life" --
meaning, at once, his wife, muse and collaborator Victoria, but also
the medium itself in which he has immersed himself, and the romantic
drama always at its heart. Finally, it suggests a love for life itself
and the divine dimensions it encompasses, which can only be reached,
for him, via meaningful exchange. The experience of déjà vu may be
no more than a trick of the mind, ghosts in an empty room, but the
sensation is real nevertheless and it can make lovers of us all, if,
united in our desire to believe (as spectators as well as participants),
we can close the séance circle and become one, as Jaglom intends us
to do, and free the spirits to speak. |
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