Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

‘How sad it is in here,’ the people said, standing inside the ruin of Nick. ‘There certainly is a lot of empty space inside an ogre!’ And then Nick stepped out from behind a candlestick. He was just as big as your thumb. Everybody fell silent, and Nick said, ‘See how small I am! This is what it's really like inside big ogres.’ Everybody was very surprised. So they all went home that night and felt happy because Nick was telling the truth, and the truth always makes people happy. So by telling the truth about ogres, Nick had also got rid of some of the sadness inside the people and everybody was very grateful to him. Nick was the most truthful ogre there had ever been!

And they never forgot those four wonderful pictures. (New York Stories, Q&A, Cape Fear, Affliction.)

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Jim rang me from Liverpool but whatever had passed between him and Eric had cut deep and he was too proud to come back. ‘It's the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking I see you.’ And it was the strangest thing – I didn't keep thinking I saw him, but I did feel like he was seeing me, or a ghost of me I had shed and seen on to a northbound train at Euston.

London felt empty. Down none of the fifty-five thousand streets of the city was a long yellow coat moving quickly. Somewhere, on one of them, was Wilson, if Wilson was alive. How strange men were, how unanchored, that they contained within them this show-stopping coup de théâtre. They could disappear. It was the male miracle, this neat erasure, this tidy and total cancelling, the negative of giving birth. Men had secret powers. They were private in a way that women weren't. They seemed to know something we didn't about voids. They were amazing.

24 (#ulink_9a4c0651-88bf-5fa9-bf84-ad2f7ca1d2ae)

This is what I did. I watched films to cheer me up when love had made me unhappy. The oldest problem in the world and the twentieth century's greatest solution to it. Plus this was my job, right? Because Eric had actually run my Oliver Stone interview with its two extremely approximate quotes – the only thing I could accurately remember Stone saying was ‘Is the Camden New Journal like the Village Voice?’ – I'd been given a slot on Saturdays at a local radio station filling in holes in the programming with film reviews. It seemed to get easier the more I steered clear of relating everything to Engels. Another ten pounds. I was closing in on the Equity minimum wage.

I knuckled down. I tapped the fan and it opened. Not directors – who the hell were they? – but actors. Whereas some people might see, say, Women in Love and then go on to The Devils because they're interested in Ken Russell, I would see Women in Love for Alan Bates, and then chase after him in Britannia Hospital, bump into Malcolm McDowell there and follow him into If and O, Lucky Man! and then back to Bates in In Celebration, and without even realising it I would have seen most of the cream of Lindsay Anderson. Had you asked me if I'd ever seen any Godard, I'd have said, ‘Oh, no no no!’, even though I'd seen Breathless, Pierrot le Fou and Une Femme est Une Femme during a Belmondo binge and followed him to Is Paris Burning? where I recognised Glenn Ford among the ruins and hitched myself to him through Gilda and The Courtship of Eddie's Father by Vicente Minnelli and some rather duff westerns to The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee over Gloria Grahame, and then careered after Marvin in everything (he was always brilliant) until we (Lee and I) tracked down the erotically brainy-looking John Cassavetes in The Killers, which got me to Rosemary's Baby – Christ, he's good in that – and a film called Brass Target which had good old George Kennedy in it playing Patton, who in Cool Hand Luke I sort of preferred to Newman and then in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I even preferred to Clint, meaning that I could no longer avoid The Dirty Dozen, what with him, Marvin, Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan, who was so fantastic in Bad Day at Black Rock (with Marvin again!) that I went on a Ryan safari, stalking the wounded beast through Billy Budd, The Set-Up, Men in War and Crossfire, where the mighty Mitchum loomed, and that was me gone, an acolyte in the Mitchum temple, where one day (Cape Fear) I formed an attachment to a mid-ranking avuncular type I saw around a lot, Martin Balsam, that virtuoso of shirtsleeves, who has in fact appeared in every film ever made apart from Trainspotting and Raise the Red Lantern. Balsam's forearms were particularly compelling in All the President's Men (which I can never understand and is anyway not all that good but nonetheless my favourite movie of all time), wherein Hal Holbrook, playing Deep Throat, stank so much of cigarettes that I became passively addicted to him (even his hair looks emphysemic) and got out Capricorn One for another fix – though I had Jeff Bridges by now to take care of and Hoffman and Redford and Robards and Harry Dean Stanton and Terence Stamp from Billy Budd and Gregory Peck, obviously, and Jack Palance who was in Second Chance with Mitchum – and who do you think was running around in Capricorn One, in a flapping tie, but Elliot Gould, trying to rescue James Brolin, who at one point uses his medallion to break out of his prison, an action which perfectly describes Brolin's entire career. (In the ruinously expensive illustrated version of this book, the ‘Connoisseur's Edition’, there will be a full colour fold-out wall chart detailing these connections more lucidly.) It was always the actors. You could track actors through the cities of their films, and they would never disappear.

The best example of how my actor tracking worked is Woody Allen. I developed an enormous crush on Tony Roberts (oh, Tony Roberts!), Allen's microphone-haired sidekick in Annie Hall, and ignored Manhattan (for years) in favour of the Roberts flicks – Radio Days, Play It Again, Sam, Stardust Memories (great thighs, Tony Roberts) and Hannah and her Sisters, in which I saw, sort of for the first time, Max von Sydow (‘Haf you been kissed tonight? You can't fool me, Lee, I'm too smart!’), whom I hunted down through Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Three Days of the Condor and The Seventh Seal, during which I tumbled head over heels for the acrobat played by a man called Nils Poppe. Since I couldn't find Poppe in any more Bergman films, I callously discarded the great Swede and sought out Tony Roberts again, who I mistakenly thought had a part in Allen's September (even better than Gene Kelly's thighs in a way – he's taller) in which I saw Sam Waterston, who I went on to fancy even more in Capricorn One of course and even more, so meticulous and lonely-seeming, in The Killing Fields, which had the effect, I remember, of splitting me in two directions – towards Malkovich and also towards Patrick Malahide, who happened to be on television at the time as Casaubon in Middlemarch, in fact it was on tonight, oh, good!

In short, I didn't get out of the house much. I was promiscuous. The actors just kept on coming, and it's not like when an artist rearranges your head leaving no room for others and you go into a Dylan phase or a Ted Hughes zone or a Godard jag. It's a broad church, the church of actors. The Church of the Beautiful Strangers. It's always got on my nerves, the affected way with which some people try to lay claim to a kind of screen monogamy – ‘I'm a Monica Vitti man.’ Oh, you liar! Monica Vitti and not Claudia Cardinale? Not Sophia Loren? Such fidelity! ‘For me it was only ever Gary Cooper.’ What and not Gregory Peck? Ooh, you lying cow! Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour. And it did make me happy. If you'd have seen how happy I was, going through my stack of Lee J. Cobb videos like so many digestives, you'd have called me sad. But I really was sad. Because I really was happy.

25 (#ulink_5836eb7c-fb5e-56ab-a439-f3dae5254759)

Perhaps it was the result of a slight difficulty in adjusting from one reality to another, but when one Saturday I saw one of the production assistants at the radio station reveal a Quaid-cobbled stomach as he changed his shirt, I determined to doorstep him in an effectively cinematic fashion, which is to say like Sean Young in No Way Out or Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, that is, in nothing but a fake fur coat and a pair of heels, thinking keep it snappy, keep it flirty, keep it The Big Easy, as I rode the tube to his flat on the Edgware Road inside which Tom, the Quaid-cobbled production assistant, asked me why I had such a guilty look on my face, to which I had no reply other than to attempt to shrug the coat to the floor, struggling with the buttons in an un-Sean Youngian fluster which nonetheless carried enough weight of intent to make him, maladroit himself, lurch towards me and sort of accidentally knock me to the floor, where, after rather a while of polite tussling, he scrabbled for a condom and put it on, tentatively, like he was potting a cactus, and, once inside me, became oddly static, allowing me to observe his beautiful silky hair (of a paler, more delicate red than Jim's, hard to describe) and wonder, with steadily diminishing enthusiasm, whether he were doing some sort of tantric sex on me, a semi-debacle which I amended a week later with a twenty-year-old trainee chef who had curls like James Frain and who, to my horror, turned out to be fifteen in the morning (that skin, I knew it!), an offence which I assume, perhaps overconfidently, the police will regard as having happened a long time ago etc. etc. should they ever read this or subpoena my diary of the time, which records that I attempted to remedy, and then – what do you know – remedied the child-chef-non-semi-debacle over the following few days with several other legal (take note, police!) men, the last of whom was an ethical banker with a garland of rose-tattoos around his neck, just low enough to be invisible under a T-shirt, with whom I enjoyed a lovely fortnight before his tetchy tutting at Walter Matthau's casual, rather gentle sexism in The Odd Couple drove a wedge between us, leaving me with nothing to show from the fling except an American acquaintance of his called Ilana, from New Jersey, a chestnut-bright young woman simultaneously hard and soft like all the great movie stars, with whom I felt I was going to be permanent friends, and who in fact set me up with a Canadian who lived alone, bald as Kurtz, in a condemned house on Plimsoll Road in Arsenal which he had decorated with the most staggering murals of Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and other gods whose names he must have told me but I have since forgotten, and who comforted me the day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer by making me watch In the Heat of the Night, which did indeed help keep my spirits up until I received a call from the hospital two days later informing me that they had mixed up their smear tests and I wasn't going to die after all – a relief which had the paradoxical effect of somehow sundering me from the Canadian and propelling me into a, no doubt, easily explicable series of one-night stands over the next ten days, as England rolled past their opponents in the European Championships on a growing wave of belief that this time, finally, they were going to prevail, and I found myself considering the question of promiscuity and wondering about the motives of the promiscuous, maybe 50 per cent of whom are Don Juans, mere number-crunchers, and maybe two-thirds of whom are sex-addicts and maybe nine-tenths of whom are frightened of commitment, and for maybe four-fifths of whom promiscuity is an index of their unhappiness, and wondering what proportion simply liked a lot of people, could simply be marked down as slow learners, could be thought of as just needing lots of lovers, lots of lessons, before they understood about their own capacity to absorb other people, such as the apple-picker from Somerset whom I attempted to console after Gazza had stretched to make that Sistine Chapel contact with the ball in front of the gaping German goal (which he would never, never do, freeze-framed forever in memory a millimetre from redemption) and who had been so thoroughly consoled he broke, that very night, into his estranged father's house in Greenwich where we lived an idyllic life for three weeks before the police, called by a neighbour, arrested us, sending me on my way that afternoon with no charge against my name but with a note from the apple-picker in my hand which read, ‘Good luck with everything and, well, just don't put people off by making too great a display of yourself and by overdoing things’ which, although with hindsight I can see that he was on to something, royally pissed me off at the time: so much so that it was rather self-consciously in defiance of this advice that I went out and overdid things a bit, thinking it's not me that's doing this, it's the movies as I learned about the absolutely crucial importance of beryllium to the Russian economy, and what it was that banks did exactly in the bed of a precious metals dealer, and just how hard it was to be an amateur boxer in London if you were from Paris, and that blue Y-fronts are acceptable underwear among Brazilians, and that being an officer in the British Army does not preclude a high intelligence, and even softness, and that ‘good in bed’ is pretty much a meaningless and vicious term imposed upon life by a public discourse that revels in encouraging neurosis, and that the anxiety I felt in the company of a dimple-chinned Sinn Fein man (whose smoke-and-mirrors face seemed to incarnate all the shape-shifting of his political life) with whom I conducted a stop-start affair at this time was different from the kind of nervousness I had felt around Jim, because Jim's violence was social and unconcealed whereas the Sinn Fein man's was something altogether more unreadable, so that I felt, when I was with him, like William Hurt faced with the opaque obelisk of Lee Marvin in Gorky Park, to the extent that even though I idolised him, I would come over with a fit of the vapours like Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons whenever he undressed me, causing the affair to fizzle out, and I thought, about that time, how incorrect it was that the promiscuous should be thought of as jaded where they were really innocent, that they were not so much fools slow to understand the fact that human variety is far from infinite, that the exploration should be in oneself rather than of others, but a different kind of fool, happy in the illusion that human variety was infinite – having said all of which, and despite the fact that I was hardly Catherine M. (and doubtless sixteen-year-old readers will at this point be asking themselves, ‘Where's this promiscuous patch she keeps talking about?’), I must have been feeling a slight lesion of identity, a slight blurring of definition, a slightly stretched kind of feeling, because when a man with curly hair and a long nose asked me who I was one night in a bar, I surprised myself by saying, and almost meaning, ‘Oh, just some girl.’

26 (#ulink_06055603-05d7-5212-bcbe-77104bed0ac0)

Marcus Denning was an actor who had appeared in a series of adverts for instant coffee in the early 90s as a thirtysomething vet who goes to work in the country because, as he tells his mother in the first commercial: ‘I'm a vet, Mum. I belong in the country. Country air, country people, country ways.’

No sooner has he arrived (‘But I haven't even unpacked yet!’) than he is doing something indeterminate to an ailing but photogenic cow. ‘That's that, then,’ says the kindly yet curmudgeonly farmer. Marcus, transmitting with great delicacy a millisecond of umbrage, counters with: ‘A coffee would be nice …’ (the embedded catch-phrase). But the farmer doesn't have any!

‘Good job I brought my own,’ Marcus says, still cleverly conveying a scintilla of urban disdain for rural hospitality. Fences are mended over a cup of instant at the farmhouse table. Indeed, so taken is the farmer by this metropolitan concoction that he threatens to retain the jar ‘until next time’. Marcus now has to convey, in one-and-a-half seconds,

shock

reflex urban possessiveness

the softening of that possessive impulse as he comprehends the farmer's disguised compliment

and soul-deep satisfaction as he realises he's been accepted, thus escaping the surly bonds of his transparently suffocating maternal relationship

Don't knock the ad actor, master of micro-technique. So recognisable was he as this vet at the time, that he'd come out of his house the week before I met him to see a group of people standing round an injured bird, and they'd turned and looked at him, clearly expecting him to do something about it. He'd even been in the News of the World under the headline ‘RAT VET LOVER – Coffee Vet Cheats!’ when an ex-girlfriend sold her story about how he'd left her for another woman.

The girl who he'd left the kiss-and-tell artist for, he told me, used to lounge around in front of the telly and would, bored, shout through to him in the kitchen, ‘Come on, Maz, shove it up my box!’ Marcus was a master of that very thespian accomplishment – the unimaginably dirty one-liner, or indeed any story to do with sex, and over the next year I would ask for my favourites again and again. My very favourite was a story about a friend of his whose sex life with his wife had deteriorated to the point where sex had become a once-weekly treat scheduled for the weekend. One Wednesday night, Marcus's friend had reached out to touch his wife on the hip as they lay there in bed and the wife had turned to him and hissed: ‘IS it Saturday?’ The best storytellers always know how to make your flesh creep. Is it Saturday? became a catch-phrase between us, the sort of totem lovers use to ward off bad luck when they're rich in love themselves.

They're exactly the kind of dirty stories Brian Blessed might tell to break the ice at a read-through. But they used to make me laugh and laugh, putting my hands together with a satisfied clap: ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

Marcus's family were aristocratic and deeply eccentric. His maternal grandfather had been an hereditary baronet (‘rare as rocking horse shit these days’) and the whole lot of them (mother, father, three sisters and Marcus) went around on motorbikes. When Marcus had been younger, they used to go on nudist holidays together on their motorbikes, the kids in sidecars. The family had once been invited to a drinks party on the compound to which they went, naked, on their motorbikes. Their hostess, wearing an evening gown and pearls, ushered them into a room full of similarly dressed people. Marcus insisted on leaving, but his father was mortified and ticked him off for being so rude. ‘Rude?’ Marcus sobbed. ‘Aubrey, we're naked.’ It was like a grand trumping of my own Adam and Eve indiscretions with the draught-excluding snake. He'd do an impression of Aubrey getting back from the party, sitting on the stairs with his balls out, sighing, ‘I met a wonderful couple. She's seventy-one and has just taken up the piano and is already on grade 5. He's just designed the postgraduate centre at Maidstone General Hospital. Such a lovely airy room …’

Aubrey was a GP who operated an out-of-hours service and used to take calls during the family's suppers, which Marcus relayed to me: ‘Mister Coombes, if you think I'm coming out to provide digital manipulation to your wife's recalcitrant stools, you can think again!’ ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

He had a cousin called Marie who had won Best Actress on the Edinburgh Fringe six years earlier for playing Nora in A Doll's House. She'd received a fan letter from a man who maintained that her Nora was the only English one he'd seen who retained a hint of the phonetic hardness of Ibsen's Norwegian. ‘In short,’ it said in a PS, ‘you were so good I pissed my cords.’

And each time he told it, the letter would get funnier and funnier, and he'd do a perfect little impression of Marie's face falling as she got to the bottom of the page.

Aubrey was posh, but his dreamy wife Janie was incredibly posh. She was a twin, and fiercely proud of it, as if it were a personal achievement. She and her twin sister Duzz (Dorothy? Dolores? Dusty? Doris?) once volunteered to have tests done on them at the Great Ormond Street Hospital and arrived there expecting to be fêted and shown through to a buffet, only to find literally hundreds of other twins in the corridors. Already somewhat put out, they were poked and prodded and urine-sampled and thoroughly out of temper when Marcus and I went to pick them up:

‘Goodness. What a day!’

‘What did they do to you?’

‘It would be much easier to tell you what they didn't do.’

‘What didn't they do?’

‘Well, they didn't fuck us.’

I had been there but I would still be asking him what had happened: ‘Oh, tell it again …!’

And they were like this all the time, each one of them, his father, his mother, his sisters, his brothers-in-law, his five-year-old niece with her imaginary friends Dot Com and Direct Debit. It wasn't as if Marcus cherry-picked these stories, it was normal. The first time I went to visit the clan in Dorset for the weekend, Janie came downstairs to breakfast holding an enormous vibrator and asked me in the nicest possible way, as if it were a paperback that she'd found on the stairs, ‘Antonia, my love, is this yours?’ I demurred and went for a wander around the house, the rooms upon rooms, a colossal ballroom with just a single bed in the corner and a bowl out to catch the leaks from the ceiling. A nursery in the attic entirely filled with an ancient train-set. A four-poster bed with tights blatantly knotted around each post. In one of the corridors I ran into Aubrey: ‘Oh, hello! I've been walking around the house and do you know everybody is in bed with their lover. It's marvellous’

That evening over dinner, the family tirelessly berated Marcus's brother-in-law for failing to go down on his wife, Marcus's sister Jennifer. The indictment lasted well into coffee. ‘But why?’ Janie kept saying, gripping the brother-in-law's hand, genuinely distressed.

‘We're not trying to make you feel bad; it's just so unfair!’ It was Jennifer's vibrator which Janie had been hefting over the breakfast table. ‘Oooh, can I borrow it, Jen?’ said Marcus's other sister, Harriet.

Next morning Marcus flew me back to London himself, in his yellow two-seater aeroplane which he kept at the BBC flying club at Denham.

27 (#ulink_c67fa9a3-7620-5be5-8309-722b6d6bd88e)

What is love? Let's ask Barbra Streisand.

It's like going to the movies, and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells and we buy it, right? So when my date takes me home and kisses me… (This is The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) and she's playing a professor of English at Columbia University who is adored by her students but, being plain, can't attract a man of note, although in about fifteen minutes she'll be approached by a maths professor played by Jeff Bridges who, cynical about long-term love, will suggest they marry purely for companionship. Bridges has come to spy on her, here in a student-crammed lecture hall the size of the Coliseum. Crammed with more than students, actually: there are people standing at the back, suggesting that perhaps even the janitors, or tutors from other disciplines, are gatecrashing Streisand's Nurembergian weekly address.) Barbra, in black dungarees and big specs, continues – and if I don't hear the Philharmonic in my head I dump him, right? From the students, appreciative, democratic laughter. It's the one lecture they've been looking forward to all week, and note-taking has been superseded by the desire simply to drink this all in. Now the question is, why do we buy it? Cut to the leonine Bridges, whose gravitas suggests that this is truly an exceptional college lecture and he is responding to it as one should to a serious contribution to the social sciences. Unfortunately his pager goes off, causing a rapt black student to look daggers at him, and he is forced, reluctantly, to drag himself away, looking perplexed yet intrigued. Had I reviewed The Mirror Has Two Faces, I might have been tempted to write something like: Jeff Bridges looks as if he wishes he were elsewhere. It's a classic reviewer's white lie, designed to let a favourite actor off the hook. Can you really imagine it: ‘Jeff! Can you please concentrate?’ Yet it appears in reviews all the time. Here's one, from a review of Chicken Tikka Massala, a ‘British Asian comedy’, in The Times a while back (May 2005). The reviewer, Wendy Ide, wishes that she'd been somewhere else rather than watching the movie, and ‘from the bloodless crushed look on Chris Bisson's face, I'd say he feels the same way’. Can it really be the case? It's a kindness. But in The Mirror Has Two Faces, I submit, we have a genuine once-in-a-lifetime example. No beautiful teen asked to fall for Woody Allen could ever have looked so stunned and reluctant and nauseated as Jeff does looking at Barbra Streisand. Rent the DVD and if you spool to the final credit sequence where Streisand and Bridges kiss and dance on the street, you'll notice that Bridges suddenly makes a break for it and runs to a taxi – and even though Barbra drags him back for another clinch, it unmistakably looks like the great Bridges has miscalculated by a mere twenty seconds how much time he must spend sentenced to this mishagas and is trying to get the hell off the set of what, to extend this digression, I further submit, is the worst film of all time, worse even than Peter's Friends or Maybe Baby. Worse even, possibly, than The Godfather Part III. A little charge goes off in reviewers' heads when it becomes apparent that such a possibility is in the offing. I have sat through screenings of Battlefield Earth, The Brylcreem Boys and Sex Lives of the Potato Men, and felt the electricity in the room, the silent commencement of an unspoken inter-critic competition to write the most freakishly abusive response. It's a perk of the job. And this really is the worst scene in the worst film ever made. We buy it because whether it's a myth or a manipulation, let's face it, we all want to fall in love, right? Cut to student with a red rinse, solemnly nodding. The blond guy in front of her looks a little confused, not because he can't follow, but because of the intellectual head-storm Barbra has whipped up in his cortex. Why? (Streisand's accent is becoming increasingly twangily Brooklynite.) Because the experience makes us feel completely alive! Where every sense is heightened! Every emotion is magnified! Our everyday reality is shattered and we are flung into the heavens! It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon, but that doesn't diminish its value. Because these are memories we will treasure for the rest of our lives. (Or resent, of course. Or possibly be tortured by.) She pauses, and takes off her spectacles, enjoying a well-earned breather while the camera moves towards her, triggering an unusual effect: the closer we get to Barbra, the less visible she becomes, so smudged and blurred and vaselined is the film texture. I read an article a while ago– she flicks her hair from above her left eye with an un-academically long and manicured fingernail, and one wonders momentarily if those nails were ever the subject of battles at executive level before wearily realising that Streisand is both director and a producer – that said when we fall in love we hear Puccini in our heads. (God, Puccini ? What kind of article was this? Not Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books, surely?) I love that. Balding mature student with moustache and cricket jumper raises a fist in salute and silently mouths the word yes like a tennis player who has just aced a volley. I think it's because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love. Shot of a transfixed bank of female students in polo necks and tweed jackets, almost tearful, as if they were watching David Helfgott swing through the Rach II. So, the final question is – why do people want to fall in love when it has such a short shelf life and can be devastatingly painful? Stacey? She points to a female stooge in a lumberjack shirt who offers: ‘It leads to propagation of the species?’ Ray? ‘Because psychologically we need to connect with somebody?’ Barbra cedes Ray's theory with a nod, but points to a third student – Cath? And suddenly it dawns on us that this woman knows every single one of her students by name. Cath stands up to put her full weight behind her answer – Is it because we're culturally preconditioned? The camera pans to Barbra, who smiles. (One imagines that the Reverend Gary Jones gave the same smile to his doomed acolytes minutes before the Jonestown Massacre.) Awawall good answers, but way too intellectual for me. There's a near-hysterical buzz in the room, and the viewer is already anticipatorily cringing at the by now completely inevitable bathetic definition that Barbra is unswervingly heading towards, like the Titanic towards its iceberg. I think because, as some of you already may know, while it does last– again, the smile, and one's sinking spirits now register the absolute certainty of an incipient deflationary profanity (a scientific curiosity: studies among both rats and humans have shown that if you stab somebody at this point in the film then they will actually pull the blade into them) –it feels FUCKING great! The room erupts into wild applause. Joseph Fiennes has just pulled off Romeo and Juliet. Cuba Gooding Jnr has just followed his touchdown with an amazing little dance. Liam Neeson has just won the Second World War. And Barbra raises a thumb up to the crowd and shouts Thank you! Thank you!

She's right about one thing of course, but it doesn't feel like Puccini.

28 (#ulink_a45593c3-3725-5699-a575-8f2f78d98f9b)

To me it felt more like this:

Jeremy Irons says I've been waiting for you and Patricia Hodge says What do you mean? They're in a bedroom upstairs in a smart house; music is thudding below. I knew you'd come he says, and she says I've just come in to comb my hair. He says I knew you'd have to comb your hair. I knew you'd have to get away from the party.

He's drunk but he looks like he means it. She laughs – he's her husband's best friend and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about her which suggests that flirtation or infidelity has ever crossed her mind. So when she asks Aren't you enjoying the party? and walks amusedly to the dressing table to pick up her hairbrush, she is just humouring an old friend, no more, no less. He just comes out with it. You're beautiful. Listen. I've been watching you all night. I must tell you, I want to tell you. You're incredible.

You're drunk.

Nevertheless. Irons delivers this word beautifully. It is a beautiful word to say, after all. I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white.

I wasn't in white.

I should have had you in your white before the wedding. I should have blackened you in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress before ushering you into your wedding as your best man …