BRIAN LIBBY

Watching Melville's "Bob le Flambeur" slowly, silently

A few days ago our living room TV shorted out and, with Valarie gone to bed, I decided to watch a DVD on my laptop. The choice was Bob Le Flambeur, a 1950s French noir by perhaps my all-time favorite filmmaker: Jean-Pierre Melville.

A forerunner of the French New Wave filmmakers, Melville was inspired by American crime movies of the 1930s and 40s: noirs, gangster pictures. His movies take place in France, usually the Parisian underground, during the 1950s and 60s. But the characters still don the fedoras and trench coats of classic noir characters, intermingling with scantily clad femme fatales.

To me Melville's best films came from the late 1960s, particularly the two great masterpieces he made with Alain Delon (the brooding but charismatic French actor nearly handsome enough to make me give up my heterosexuality): 1967's Le Samourai and 1970's Le Cercle Rouge. But his 1956 film Bob Le Flambeur is a delight as well, a heist film with a Gallic sense of poignant despair starring Roger Duchesne as an aging gambler-robber seeking one last job before he rides his Cadillac convertible into the sunset. But the surrounding din of cops, thugs and a young girl of course compromise that film.

One blogger ably wrote of Bob le Flambeur, "Melville's classic anti-heist film is so wonderful on so many levels that I don't know what to say. It's a flawless piece of construction that never feels mechanically contrived; a celebration of human singularity that never stoops to maudlin psychologizing. To say that the movie is all style is no slight to its depth. Soul and wit, compassion and irony are made indistinguishable."

When I sat down in the recliner for a late-night viewing, laptop on my lap and headphones plugged in, it turned out that my cheap computer couldn't read the DVD signal quick enough to keep up with the film's intended pace. The sound was unbearably choppy and the action was too slow, at maybe 80 percent speed.

At first I planned to turn off the movie, distracted by the frustrating notion that my laptop DVD player didn't work anymore. (We'd also unsuccessfully tried to watch I'm Alan Partridge earlier that night.) But instead I quickly got sucked into watching the movie without sound and at its reduced speed. The subtitles of dialog allowed me to still follow what was being said, and the slowness made incidental shots--walking in or out of a room, a car driving by, Bob's long drag on a cigarette as he contemplates his mortality--resonate much more strongly.

I only watched about 35 minutes of movie time, but that translated into almost an hour of watching the modified version. In the few days since, the movie has been branded on my consciousness more than most of what I watch. This experiment certainly wouldn't work with any old movie, of course. Most of them I want to go by more quickly, not less, although back when I was reviewing lots of bad box office fare for Willamette Week, I surely would have preferred some have muted sound.

Even so, I find myself now wanting to watch other pictures with great cinematography and atmosphere--mise en scene, to the French--like Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love or Claire Denis' Beau Travail--on that same crappy Compaq laptop, the surprise engine of revelation.

Bad prunes, Velma Pate, and “darkness to the light” with Barack Obama

At about 11PM on Monday night, I felt an ominous discomfort in my stomach and a suddenly throbbing headache. Within moments, I was on my knees in the bathroom vomiting, the first of about ten times over the next six hours.

My mind immediately flashed to a decision made while cooking dinner earlier that night: to use a package of dried prunes even though they were a month past the expiration date. I don’t make a habit of eating dated food, but I thought there would be a bit of a buffer zone. Plus, the packet was still sealed and I’d be cooking the prunes, in a sauce with Dijon mustard over chicken. But I learned my lesson the hard way.

Wretched as the food poisoning bout felt, alternating chills and sweat as I’d sleep for fifteen minutes, scoot to the bathroom, sleep for a half hour and return, it occurred to me at some point that perhaps I this was my body’s way of purging eight years of the George W. Bush administration. My six hours of nausea, after all, had stretched into the first few hours of Election Day.

Later that morning after a few hours’ solid sleep, I felt much better and my stomach was settled enough to have a piece of toast and watch election coverage on TV. I quickly became engrossed by a phone interview on CNN with an elderly Illinois woman named Velma Pate. As a young child, her father and other family members had marched with Martin Luther King. Today, Velma wept while casting a vote for Barack Obama.

After a few minutes, the anchor was clearly trying to wrap up the segment, and began thanking the interviewee for her time. But Velma persisted, saying she wanted to tell the American people that today they were moving from darkness into the light, just as god had prophesized.

As I describe the episode and the moment, I’m of course aware of how maudlin or melodramatic it might sound. Yet it’s a testimony to what an extraordinary moment Barack Obama’s election as president really is that my usual cynicism, and that of so many others, has for a time cleared away like a rainstorm giving way to sunshine.

I’ve been thinking today, this glorious day after the victory, of exactly when it was I lost my faith in the country. Was it 2004, still to me the most baffling choice by the American electorate? Was it 2000, when the election very well may have been unfairly taken from Al Gore? No, I think for me it went back to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. I don’t know, and frankly today don’t want to know, what disappointments and tragedies lay ahead. But it’s not time for those worries and threats just yet. First I want to listen to Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” without apology.

It would be cause enough to celebrate merely having the Bush-Cheney era come to an end. Or to see a Democrat elected president. But this is something more. Granted, I thought that was the case with Bill Clinton, too. His election was transformative for me in a personal way, going from my conservative upbringing to left-siding political views. It was also a generational change, and the joy of watching such an effortlessly brilliant politician at work. Even for me, though, with the hindsight of history, Obama's moment feels like the greater opportunity to make a new history for the United States that is bright and promising as the last eight years were horrific and shameful. Regardless of Clinton's fans like me, he was a divisive figure. But with Obama, ironically, given his heritage and the racism that stil exists, it's clear that a greater power to unite exists.

Today I visited the Portland Art Museum to see two exhibits: a collection of historic 19th and early 20th century Columbia River Gorge photos, and M.K. Guth's "Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping", an installation that premiered earlier this year at the prestigious Whitney Biennial. It featured a single very long braid that contained hundreds of felt strips onto which people had written their ideas about what, either literal or conceptual, was most worth preserving. In both exhibits, I was moved by the notion of a river as a metaphor for the day, a narrative continually flowing with ideas. It feels better thinking of the country, and the democracy here, as a livng organism we can still renew and restore when it is needed.

During my bout of nausea, it was the middle of the night and I kept only a small nightlight on in the shadowy bathroom as I purged the prune sauce. By the time Obama’s election was secure as the clock struck 8PM Pacific Time it was dark too. But as I stood under a streetlamp outside our apartment in the rain, my slippers soaking up water like sponges and yelling “Woo-HOO!” like a gleeful child at a winning football game, or as I watched Jessie Jackson cry and cry on television, or Obama himself looking so exquisitely presidential at Grant Park making his acceptance speech, I thought for this night at least that Velma was right: that we had indeed made it from the darkness into the light.

And less than 24 hours after being KO’d by bad prunes, I was already back on cheeseburgers.