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- Herausgeber: Leamington Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
La femme. Le mari. L'enfant. Le chat. Le petit dejeuner. Le journal. L'auteur. La festival du filme. La critique. L'agent. Le mort. La naissance. A novel starring Jean-Luc Godard. It's Edinburgh Film Festival 2020 and critic Victor Eaves meets filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in a novel blending mad vulgarity with slingshot satire. French Toast is a family farce and cinematic adventure starring a giant of the silver screen. "This is the story of my encounter with the venerable French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard. In 2020, when he was 90 years old, Godard was invited to Edinburgh to speak at the Film Festival and I was chosen to meet him, as I was the only journalist in the city who both spoke French and had seen any of his films." VICTOR EAVES "Burnett's latest novel is both a scabrous satire and a rollicking caper, and comes stuffed with big ideas, memorable set pieces, clever in-jokes and caustic asides. Buried within the mayhem lurk shrewd insights into artistic judgment." THE HERALD "Peter Burnett is not in the business of fuelling hubris. He is concerned with questions about meaning, value and the nature of authenticity." SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
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French Toast
PETER BURNETT
‘As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them. Were the cinema to disappear, I would simply accept the inevitable and turn to television; were television to disappear, I would revert to pencil and paper. For there is a clear continuity between all forms of expression. It’s all one. The important thing is to approach it from the side which suits you best.’
—Jean-Luc Godard (translated by Tom Milne)
Chapitres / Chapatis / Chapeaux
How’s It Going?
The moment Scotland Today called I knew the game was up. A newspaper doesn’t call you at 8am on a Monday morning to commission film reviews. Redundancy handling is a corporate skill and its envoys are well selected, and these bearers of bad news are known for their timing.
I said ‘Good morning,’ in a croaking whisper as I glanced across the kitchen towards my family, all of whom were waiting for a breakfast. On the line was a secretary, or an intern, or somebody’s PA—she introduced herself as Millicent. I didn’t catch her second name because I was too busy kicking myself. The arts editor herself would never have had the nerve to phone me because that might have suggested that I was in any way connected with the paper. As such I was a freelancer, for which read freeloader, and instead it was Millicent, whom I had never heard of and would never hear of again.
‘Hello Victor,’ she said. ‘I’ve been asked to call you with details of the reshuffling in the arts sections of the newspaper, most particularly in your case, the film reviewing.’
How could somebody with a name like Millicent fail to get a job at a Scottish national newspaper? It couldn’t have been that good a job, I thought, otherwise why would she be working at 8am on a Monday morning, informing me about the reshuffling going on across the newsprint industry? But it was a job and that was more than I had. I got the message hard as the next batch of market-town syllables dropped from my receiver.
‘As you know the editors met on Friday to discuss the cuts pertaining to the new style in the arts section and they’ve gone ahead 10and had to restructure the budget with the freelancers being the first to go.’
‘This is because of that Fenian thing,’ I stated. To silence.
I should have learned from my past mistakes never to say the word Fenian again. It wasn’t only impolite to say it out loud, but it was inconsiderate of the feelings of others.
‘We’ll put this in an email but—’
I’d been waiting for the word ‘but’ because ‘but’ was my cue to press the plastic stud on the phone and disconnected Millicent. I squashed the button into the telephone’s handset, secretly wishing it was Millicent’s nose I was pressing into her luxury London coupon. As an afterthought I took the batteries out of the receiver in case she should call back.
‘Who was that?’ asked Fiona.
I was in the process of making four breakfasts: a croissant for Eddie, a dedicated maternity feast for Fiona, cereal for myself and some butchered meat chunks for Lola, the cat.
‘It was the newspaper,’ I said. ‘And it wasn’t good news.’
I returned my attention to the croissant which needed to be specifically engineered or else I could lose another job. Breakfast instructions came clear in our house—the croissant need be heated up with butter and jam in the middle and butter on top, before the whole thing was cut into three. For Fiona, bread was soaked in a mixture of eggs whisked with cream, and then fried, before being served with maple syrup. Lola meowed for food but she was always last.
As the sights and sounds of the kitchen returned so did its demands. I sincerely hoped one of those was not going to be my three-year-old son Eddie asking me what a Fenian was. The food was ready and the child wasn’t dressed. I still had to cycle him to nursery and clean the breakfast things, before putting on my writer’s clothes and getting down to the Film Festival. The festival meeting had been a summons if you like. ‘Please be there promptly’ the email had said, and with no more newspaper work, it was perhaps going to be my best chance of meaningful service to the arts.11
‘Why don’t you feed the cat first?’ asked Fiona.
Damn it, I thought. Fiona had given in to Lola’s meowing and she’d torn open a gelatinous cat food pouch and squeezed out its contents, jellied chunks of noisome comminuted muscle meat. The bowl landed on the floor with a chink and the cat fell upon it.
‘I was going to feed her,’ I said.
‘So why don’t you feed her first?’ asked Fiona.
There was moment enough for me to expound.
‘A personal weakness,’ I said. ‘I don’t want Lola to think she can just wear us down like that until she has it all her own way.
‘She’s a cat,’ Fiona reminded me. ‘We’re her only source of food and the other cats come in at night and steal it. She’s defenceless.’
‘How could she be so fat,’ I asked, ‘—if the other cats are stealing her food?’
It’s true that Lola was a fatty. Visitors to our house asked us if she were pregnant although she wasn’t. She was merely gross.
‘If you feed her she’ll maybe respect you,’ said Fiona.
I eyed the cat in doubt. Could it be true that as with the newspaper, this animal had no respect for me?
Fiona was ready for work. Luxurious red hair tied in a bundle—purple suit secured at her waist above the splendid bump of our new baby—the pendant below her neck drawing the attention of the room to its nexus.
‘I much prefer you without makeup,’ I said, and I kissed her before she went to the bathroom to deploy her public face.
I surveyed the mess. We’d tidied up the night before so how come a man, a pregnant woman, a toddler and a cat had managed to make so much wreckage? Today’s special shambles was the cat’s water which had spilled in a cat-fight in the night and everyone had walked through it. To back it up Eddie had sprayed jam on the table and my first attempt at toast had resulted in three burned slabs of bread which had disintegrated as I’d tried to transfer them to the dustbin.
‘Eddie more one cwassy,’ said my son. ‘My no like this cwassy,’ he added, and he pushed it away.12
‘You can’t have another one,’ I said. ‘There are children starving out there.’
Eddie’s gaze followed my pointed finger and although I had been attempting to indicate the rough direction of Africa, it was possible that there were a few starving children in Edinburgh that would have welcomed Eddie’s abandoned croissant. I generally grudge every single household expense and typically I couple this parsimony with comment on the international situation. The net result in this instance was a five second silence as Eddie scanned the back garden for starving children.
Lola meowed, having eaten around the edges of her meaty by-products and cereal components. As an obligate carnivore, Lola wasn’t going to be satisfied with one dish of jellied oddments and I didn’t blame her.
‘My grandparents,’ I said to Lola, ‘you wouldn’t have known them—but they had a cat. They lived on a farm and as was customary at the time the cat was left to live from its own hunting. What I’m saying, is that the cat on the farm never saw cat food, nor even kitchen scraps. That cat had to survive on mice, shrews and baby rabbits if it could catch them. That cat had to work for its keep.’
Lola hated it when I spoke in Human so I gave up and poured a circle of milk on to a plate and she pressed her face into it. She was hungry but she wasn’t alone there. A billion people were hungry and despite her being the apple of our eye, Lola was further down the food chain than she knew.
I returned to the sink and its pile of dishes. ‘Where did these forks come from?’ I asked. ‘How can we have dirtied six forks this morning?’
Fiona stood waiting, she was made up for battle with the business community.
‘Please tell me what the newspaper wanted at 8am in the morning,’ she asked.
‘No more work,’ I said, and my eyes rested on my bare feet.
I had thought that it was going to take me at least a day to process this disappointment and break it to the family, so I was 13pleased I’d managed to get it out so quickly. That said, Millicent had been a great choice. She had succeeded in making me feel like failure merely by dint of her survival in the employment game. That and her faint upper-class accent. The blog didn’t make any money so it had been exciting for a short while to be a fully graduated print journalist, or maybe even a pretend one. It had been great taking home money for writing about films, too. What had all those years of movie watching been for, if not to serve my family pocket?
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fiona. ‘You did expect that though, didn’t you? They’re cutting down the books and theatre pages too, you know.’
‘Darling,’ I said. ‘Books and theatre were the first to go.’
‘Do you not get any notice?’ she asked.
‘There was a problem with one of my articles,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’ll be wanting to hear from me again.’
‘So no more swanning around the cinemas?’ she asked—and I am sure she was hopeful of a ‘yes’ on that count, although I couldn’t bring myself to utter it.
‘The perk of being a real critic is that people pretend to like you,’ I said. ‘But their fondness lessens the closer your influence reaches zero. And now with no newspaper freelance work, I will have no influence. So there will be very little point in me doing any swanning.’
‘They can’t drop you for doing your job,’ she said. ‘Can they?’
I shook my head. That was my way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t know’ was my way of saying ‘I don’t want to say,’ while ‘I don’t want to say’ was my way of saying ‘yes’.
‘I’m late,’ said Fiona. ‘At least you can get on with the book in the meantime.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I glanced at the coffee pot, the only thing in the house which could accelerate my sluggish limbs into work mode.
‘My no like this cwassy!’ shouted Eddie, and he tipped his plate on to the floor. He’d always been good at getting our attention. I touched Fiona’s bump. She was tired from carrying this baby and it was frankly huge, much larger than Eddie had been at seven months. It seemed impossible that a mother could continue under 14these circumstances.
‘Jayne Mansfield died when she was 34,’ I said, ‘and before that she had five children. Yet you never see a pregnant photo of her. Never.’
‘You’re full of fun film facts,’ said Fiona. ‘I hope someone pays you to use them again.’
‘The world was obsessed with Jayne Mansfield’s breasts,’ I continued, ‘but her breasts fluctuated from pregnancy and nursing. Trouble was that all the servicemen who put up posters of her didn’t see that—at least not consciously.’
‘What else have you got on today,’ asked Fiona, ‘other than study of Jayne Mansfield’s breasts?’
Eddie threw his fork on the floor.
‘I guess I’ll do some work on the book,’ I said, ‘although I do have a Film Festival meeting this morning.’
It was hard for me to hide my doubt about the whole Film Festival thing, but I did my best—smiling the word Festival out as if its very mention dug through the cynicism-saturated layers of my thought to a deeper level where a spark of hope for culture still lurked.
‘Is it work?’ she asked.
‘It’ll be work,’ I said. ‘But as to whether it’s paid work—who knows? Someone will have dropped out of hosting a discussion of Michael Bay and they’ll be desperate for a stand in stooge. That’s where I fit in.’
As Fiona turned, she knocked Lola’s cat dish causing drops of milk to scatter on her shoe.
‘Why did you put bloody milk there?’ she asked. But I didn’t answer. I was already down there with a cloth trying to save the suede.
‘I could have inserted any of many film directors into that joke,’ I said. ‘So don’t worry if you don’t know who Michael Bay is.’
‘Rubbing it in will make it worse,’ said Fiona and she pulled her foot away, but I followed fast with my moist towelette. Fiona was on her phone and typing HOW TO CLEAN MILK OFF SUEDE 15into a search engine.
‘A clean water rinse is best,’ I said. ‘We’ll shampoo it later.’
I stopped what I was doing and looked up. The bump was magnificent, although bump was a euphemistic description of the globe that was suspended from Fiona’s waist. This was going to be a huge baby and presumably a boy from the nightly kicking it delivered. We had even given the baby a name—Ordell. ‘Ordeal’ might have been more apt.
In the meantime, Fiona’s search engine had delivered.
‘You can buy these suede erasers,’ she said, handing me her phone.
I looked at the screen and scrolled up and down in alarm.
‘We can’t afford suede erasers,’ I said. ‘I don’t even have a job anymore.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fiona. ‘There’s still the book. And it was never a job. It was one film review a week, so it shouldn’t be hard to come back from that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I rose, and rinsed my towelette, and followed Fiona to the door. ‘There is still the book. And maybe it wasn’t a real job, after all—’
There was a light crash from the kitchen which could have been cat, or it could have been child. I glanced into my study, where the book-that-would-never-be-finished awaited me. The prospect of the book-that-would-never-be-finished did not in any way sweeten the grief of my redundancy, and in fact the book complicated it, and I decided for the sake of the children, those born and unborn, to push aside reality for the time being.
‘In a way it’s good not to be bogged down with journalism anymore,’ I lied. I wanted to tell Fiona about why the paper had released me but I couldn’t. The fact was that I was embarrassed about it and my bad conscience was stopping me from telling her (and so yourselves) the story.
I spoke my usual goodbyes and waved as Fiona left for the outside world, but I was thinking about the suede erasers. Simply typing those two words into the phone meant that we’d be seeing 16adverts for sneaker protection products and premium bristle brushes for months now.
I returned to the kitchen. Eddie had found my phone and was filming the crushed croissant. I let him get on with it. I have recently read that smartphones now do somewhere in the region of 45% of parenting, and I agree these moments of distraction are helpful. This moment in particular allowed to plug the telephone in once more and listen to the messages, maybe to see if there were any changes of heart from Millicent and Scotland Today. Of course, there was no such thing, but what I did find was just as embarrassing—a message from my agent asking as he did each month, where the hell my finished book was.
‘Victor. Charles. Where’s the book? I’ve got to see the book. Send the book. Send what you’ve got. Speak soon. Bye.’
I was five months late on my still untitled book on Jean-Luc Godard—a guide to his films with selected criticism, plus criticism of the criticism—and although I had watched Godard’s films to death, writing the book had ground to a creeping halt when I began to appreciate how much Godard criticism there was out there. I couldn’t in all conscience contribute another book on Godard, I kept telling myself. Not when I was supposed to be criticising the critics too. It seemed obvious to me in the case of this one man, that everything meaningful had already been said. Every Godard book that there ever could have been existed already, and every observation possible had been repeated and verified. My own book could only verify this again, by generally agreeing with everything. I’d begun this book on Jean-Luc Godard with no specific direction in mind, and in its way, that action had been my own germane comment on the great man’s films. However, I had merely turned in a sample chapter of my provisionally titled Jean-Luc Godard—A Critic’s Guide and received a small advance which myself and Fiona had immediately spent on a pram, nursery fees, and other parenting essentials. It was another book that would never be written, and were it not so metaphysical a complaint, I could tell you that I had a shelf of them.17
Having cycled with Eddie to the nursery, I hopped off my bike to chat with the mums for a moment. The mums asked how Fiona was doing and even though I tried to think of something original to say, all they wanted was ‘fine’. Thereafter, I knew that everything else I had to say would cause their faces to glaze over, but I tried to stay in command of my words, even though I found myself rabbiting in an effort to impress.
‘Parenting is a degrading occupation,’ I said. ‘No one can grasp it or fight against it. When the suffering is for a single instant broken by joy, as it often is, the whole thing is in a sense made worse.’
This observation was treated as it rightly deserved to be, as a sign of the epicurean corruption of my mind. I was about to continue on this theme when I was approached by one of the smiling nursery staff, who arrived to take Eddie inside.
‘It’s nice to have Eddie back after his horrible trip to hospital,’ she smiled.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘He’s so much better now.’
‘We were concerned,’ she replied.
The nursery junior patted Eddie on the head and he trotted away. There was a short silence while this bright young woman watched him go.
‘How was it really in the hospital?’ she asked.
There was a story to tell, but I knew that the story required batteries of digesters, descriptors and forcibly piled adjectives that would not come to me at that moment. It had been meningitis—one of the nastiest possibilities—and when the subject came up, my mouth clogged up with nothings.
‘It was fine,’ I said, and I waved as Eddie headed into the building. ‘He made one of his famous short films about it on his Cubbizoom. His teddy bears are in it and he is rightly proud of it. He did an interview with his mummy and he’s going to edit it this week. Maybe he could show the film to the other children?’
‘That would be super,’ beamed the nursery nurse and she smiled from shoulder to shoulder.
This is great, I thought. He’s three year’s old and developed an 18audience bigger than mine!
I cycled home and put on my writer’s clothes. These were the clothes that I had once worn as a freelancer with not-a-real-job when I had visited the atriums and courts of Scotland Today House, and the set I’d be wearing for my Film Festival chat. The dad-shorts came off and my legs were shelled within some Chinos. My t-shirt was replaced with a shirt and I then pulled out and draped over my arm my blue sports jacket into the top pocket of which I popped my reading glasses—which completed the look. I say ‘completed’ because a male wearing a blue jacket is seen as more competent than one wearing a brown jacket or no jacket at all—while people wearing glasses are always judged as more intelligent, hardworking, and successful. These are the rules I had learned and they never changed, and of course as everyone knows you cannot go wrong by being boring. The aim for my writer’s clothes was therefore restraint with minimal styling, letting the construction influence the look. The intention was contemporary relevance with the ultimate effect being my credibility as an intellectual with something interesting to say.
I checked myself in the mirror, and with one hour to wait before I left to meet with the Film Festival, I opened my computer to attend to the matter of Clint.
Argument: The men portrayed by Clint Eastwood do nothing for the mental health of males. If Dirty Harry broke down and sobbed once in a while, it might give the rest of the male population permission to talk about problems when life just gets too much.
I leap in and type: There isn’t anything in ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan’s persona that men are supposed to emulate. In The Enforcer (1976), Dirty Harry bullies his colleagues, harasses civilians, beats up suspects and verbally abuses people in his city’s administration, is sexist in the face of everybody knowing he is a sexist. This is not like Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire (1976) in which he does actually cry. A film incidentally in which we are supposed to think he is a good example. Neither are good movies in my opinion.’
Once I replied to this and all other arguments on social media, I reviewed my latest works-in-progress, a selection of unfinished blog 19articles. My blog reviews had been going the same way for quite some time, and I think it was for lack of readership. I wondered if I had lost my ability to care. Flicking through my back blog posts it looked to me suspiciously like my insight on the silver screen had been reduced to the following list of words:
Badass
Hot
Awesome
Woesome
Tripped-out
Freaky
My fingers rested on the computer’s keys awaiting decisive corroboration between my thoughts and my fears. Following that undying edict ‘write what you know’ I wondered if I shouldn’t write an article explaining the funny side of how I managed to cause widespread offence by the simple inclusion of the word Fenian in a film review which was then published in a national newspaper. But then I thought again. If that article had been the blog then something could have been done. But it was not a blog, and it was in proper print and that was hard to alter. I had published in a newspaper and there was no delete and no revision. Not unless you were one of these censors that Joseph Stalin used to purge public archives and the press. And even they failed, badly. No—no other media would wish to drag up this up on my behalf, not even the Internet. So all I had to do was keep my head down and carry on blogging. Maybe I thought, I should learn to appreciate my station and maybe finish the book. In fact, I thought, I could finish any of the many books I would have written had I not been blogging.
As I moved to type my first words of that week, an email arrived from Millicent and it predictably began with a query along the lines of ‘we appear to have been cut off this morning’. I wanted to write back and tell her that it’s such a pity you can’t slam phones down these days—you are left squashing rubber buttons or sliding 20your thumb up and down a glassy screen and that’s no outlet for anybody’s madness. Instead I deleted the email, blocked her, and for good measure reported her as spam.
Operation Concrete
The festival director, Alison Cutlette, had asked to meet me in the Filmhouse Bar, which was telling. I knew the rules. A meeting in the bar meant that a favour was being requested and for that favour there would be no money. A meeting in the office indicated that you were of sufficient importance to be asked upstairs, and that meant you would be paid—but there was something very different here. She had merely repeated that the meeting ‘wasn’t official’.
It was a bright spring day in Scotland—perfect conditions for agriculture but lousy for the dwellers of the city. A robust wind blew me to my meeting, pushing me past doorways in which men and women that had long ago divested themselves of any sex-appeal were struggling to fire up cigarettes. By mid-morning, the city’s capable players were at work leaving only a few drifters like myself and the looming cavities of empty buses on the roads. I got to The Filmhouse and took a seat and I was fiddling on my phone when Alison Cutlette moved sedately into the room.
I had known Alison Cutlette for years and I liked her enough. There was nothing coarse about her and she knew her job well. She approached everyone with the same smile of patronage and seemed to know little about cinema except that she LOVED IT. She was smart in appearance, and slender was her shape, and even though I had socialised with her at creative events across the city she had never called me for a meeting like this. I was intrigued—and best of all I was but a mere blogger and the person in the room, for example, most likely to print sentiments such as—well:22
Arts administration in Edinburgh is a crook’s paradise.
That was one of mine. There was also:
Budgets are large and salaries are prodigious, the lunches are monumental and the holidays are whopping, the parties are lively and the adjectives are cyclopean, and best of all there’s very little work to do. Generally, if you work for one of Edinburgh’s festivals your job amounts to one month of heavy socialising, followed by a month’s holiday and then ten months of bathing in the glory of the reputations of others. Pacified by the quaint desires of your board of directors you inform artists what ‘will work’ and what ‘will not work’, and the rest of the time is spent on social media, your days punctuated by functions and the enormous satisfaction of knowing that you are better respected than any of the artists you patronise.
That is what I had written about this woman, or this class of person I might be safe to add, and so I did feel adversarial here. I might have come across as awkward, but I was trying in the most indurate manner known to me to be professional.
Alison Cutlette was with her PA, whom she kissed and dismissed. Then she gave me that ‘delighted to see you smile’ that is quintessentially arts admin and she opened her diary at today’s date. Other than a doodle and the mention of my name (followed by a question mark) the page was starkly blank.
Cutlette shared a moment as we consider the page together:
VICTOR EAVES?
‘How are you doing Victor?’ asked Cutlette.
The PA was at the bar, purchasing the coffee.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. Would I have had it in me to include the unfortunate details of my day to date, I would not have said that I was fine, but feigning fineness is always wise. ‘The Festival 23programme looks great—congratulations,’ I added.
I had said this to Alison Cutlette before, and it had been in passing at a Festival party, twice before, maybe four times before. Each year I’d shake her hand having blagged-not-blogged my way into a Festival party and I always wondered if she knew me, and maybe she just thought I was called ‘Congratulations’. I’d never had the chance to speak to her in a non-party environment, so this was a kind of promotion, I felt.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ve grown again, we’re bursting at the seams in fact.’
‘All the more reason for all the more congratulations,’ I said.
‘How is your book on Jean-Luc Godard progressing?’ she asked next.
I was taken aback here by the pre-interview research that Alison Cutlette had brought to bear, and I instantly felt far less maladroit, positively encouraged that good news might be near in the shape of my acceptance as an authority.
‘The book’s OK,’ I lied. ‘It’s hard with a young kid—but guess what? We’re due our next baby in a few weeks. So I don’t know if I’ll get the book finished any time soon. Nice of you to ask though.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Cutlette.
Had she seen me play the baby card to try and avoid something, or impress her with either my capacity as a man? I don’t know, but sometimes I wished I was more careful and didn’t always mention my children.
‘About your book though,’ said Alison. ‘It said on your blog that you’d have it finished by Christmas—but that was three months ago, wasn’t it?’
Damn my blog.
Alison Cutlette’s PA arrived with a chock-ass super-colossal ceramic bowl of Americano for myself and a tiny cup for her boss, which looked like it contained rubber. The PA placed a spoon beside the rubber-filled demitasse and I stared in wonder as Cutlette picked it up and prodded the contents. The coffee was fashionably presented, but what the hell was it? Once the PA had retreated 24Alison Cutlette offered an explanation.
‘Caffè gommosa,’ she said. ‘A shot of espresso poured over a marshmallow.’
All I could feel in that moment was that somehow I had been left behind. I tended to think of my coffee as just a drink that at most amounted to a form of liquid intelligence, but here on the streets it meant so much more. Why hadn’t I heard of that one before?
‘Victor,’ said Cutlette, ‘I have a favour to ask.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and I smiled with the emphatic politeness of somebody who would really like a job—any job.
‘As you might know, we are profiling Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work at the Film Festival,’ she said. ‘It’s by special arrangement with the Office Fédéral de la Culture.’
I nodded. I liked the way she said that. It was amusing that while she didn’t speak French, Cutlette was able to stress the pronunciation into something that sounded authentic, but wasn’t. Of course I’m being uncharitable. Alison Cutlette gave the French a good go but for someone that speaks fluent French like myself, it was hideously funny, and impossible to reproduce.
‘Well, Godard is coming,’ she said.
Now that was news. In this land-of-no-surprises it was good to hear something as exceptional as this from time to time. It was also a great act of social inclusion, as Godard was often thought to be quite anti-social in person.
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘What would you like me to do?’
Alison bowed her head and I could tell she didn’t think that it was great at all. In fact, from the way that she looked at her spongy black coffee it was all gloom. Perhaps she had heard tell of Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that cinema was dead? More likely it was the case that as an enfant terrible Godard would be a Film Festival risk, either by not turning up, or by turning up and making one of his notoriously dangerous pronouncements. Every Film Festival event was policed for content that might trigger the ideologues who made up the body of the audiences, and this meant that the Festival always chose guests who would avoid the topics of gender, race, religion, 25politics, atheism, right wing populism, drugs, actual descriptions of war, discussion of consensual sexual activity, terrorism, banking and most especially the Holocaust. Tragically for culture in Edinburgh that only left clothes and cooking as the subjects open to discussion, but Jean-Luc Godard, known across the world as a loose cannon, would never agree to those—especially when it came to the Holocaust. For those who were willing to accept these limits, subjects such as cuisine and the choice of the correct trousers were acceptable. But for years now, Godard had been too unpredictable to be passable as event material. And it was probable, I think she suspected, that he might mention the Holocaust.
‘Yes,’ said Cutlette. ‘Godard is coming to Edinburgh and he wants to show an excerpt of video and we have agreed to that. Certainly, he’s welcome. But it does put us in a bit of a bind.’
‘How so?’ I said.
‘Godard has made a few requests,’ she said, ‘and we’re doing our best to meet them. And that’s why you’re here.’
‘Anything I can do to help,’ I said.
Cutlette frowned. She poked her supple black coffee as if the unpronounceable emulsifying agents within it had depressed her into quiescence, and I wondered at the oddity of Godard having anything to do with her—with us.
‘Thing is,’ said Cutlette, ‘Godard wants someone to pick him up at the airport, and we think it might have to be you Victor. So for the duration you are going to be Film Festival staff. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds all right,’ I said. ‘Why me?’
My question was fair. There were others I could name whose salaries would have included their partaking of adventures such as this and even if they hadn’t wanted to, there were plenty individuals who were higher on the pecking order than myself when it came to such privilege.
‘We wanted Linda Suliman,’ said Alison wistfully, ‘but she seems to be off the grid. I couldn’t find her at all.’
‘I wonder if I could find her?’ I added weakly. As a Palestinian 26film director who spent much of her time in Scotland, Linda was the natural choice. Linda Suliman had even worked with Godard before, and she could speak French, and as far as I know she and the great man were politically aligned. She was the one to do it, I knew it.
‘I did email Linda,’ said Cutlette. She swirled her finger round on the spot a couple of time. ‘I would go to meet Godard myself,’ she said, ‘only I don’t speak French. Between you and me, I haven’t seen that many of Godard’s films, anyway. I’m trying to catch up but it isn’t really my thing. I like most French directors, but Godard leaves me cold.’
‘Well Godard is Swiss and not French,’ I said—a statement which caused Cutlette to wheeze out a chunk of melanoid marshmallow.
‘You’re kidding?’ she gasped. With her mouth open she looked like a frightened horse. I could see the marshmallow poised in her mouth, all black with a white centre. ‘You are mmmph, absolutely kidding?’ she asked through the pulpous cushion of her half-swallowed coffee.
As soon as I said ‘No,’ Cutlette spat the marshmallow on to her spoon, scrambled for her phone and began a text.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she typed. ‘This doesn’t look good. I’ve written two press releases this morning and fifteen fucking tweets.’
Alison Cutlette waved frantically towards the door of the Filmhouse bar. There was the PA.
‘Godard—is—Swiss.’
Cutlette mouthed the words but the PA could not comprehend. The PA shook her head and Alison Cutlette spoke the words at a slightly increased volume, although the PA remained confused—as smiling as ever, but in essence out of her depth.
‘Go get a fish?’ mouthed the PA in return. Glassy-eyed, she stared in painful hesitation. PAs in Edinburgh are used to the most finical requests. It happens all the time that they are asked to fetch some fish or complain about the quality of cocktail cherries.
‘You can virtually get away with saying that Godard is French,’ I said. ‘He was born in Paris but his father was Swiss, and I think 27you’ll find he holds a Swiss passport.’
‘He’s Swiss!’ shouted Cutlette, loud enough to be heard by the whole room. Loud enough, but not clear enough, and so the PA was bid approach. It was only when she neared us that the PA received her text message, read it, turned a hue of crimson and ran from the bar. In running the PA resembled a wounded wading bird, her legs forced by her skirt into an unnatural twist.
‘Good God,’ said Cutlette. ‘I’m glad I called you now. You see Victor, this is a good sign.’
We were being watched by the many early lunchers in the Filmhouse bar. People take this sort of excitement seriously in Edinburgh. They know that if anybody raises their voice at lunch then a cultural disaster is near. Alison Cutlette wrote GODARD IS A SWISS in her diary and circled it. Then she stared at the statement as if she could make it last forever.
‘There isn’t anyone here that can pick up Godard,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody has seen any of his films.’
‘They’re not shown often,’ I said, ‘but the enthusiast can always find the basics on DVD. For a long time, even cinemas wouldn’t distribute what he made.’
‘I saw Le Weekend,’ she said, ‘but I don’t remember much about it.’
‘It’s just called Week-end,’ I said, as nicely as I could, but of course I regretted it. Correcting people more than once isn’t a good way to make friends in the arts.
‘We asked at the university,’ she went on. ‘Someone was doing a paper on Godard but they don’t speak French and the person that does speak French is too shy. There were postgrads who could speak French and thought they might be able to go. Some of them had seen a few Godard films.’
Alison Cutlette turned the pages of her diary until she found the list. The page was scored with markings, phone numbers and doodles, there must have been twenty names there. She ran her pen down the page.
‘Nightmare,’ she said. ‘None of them were any good. And these 28ones didn’t respond.’
The pen hovered on one person’s name and then drifted at a curious angle to the next.
