Fascination (6 page)

I think Tanja would hate
Slang
. Positively loathe it.

I spotted bad looping, boom-mike shadow and a clumsily inserted repeat shot. I guess all directors have this tic – we can never be simple
cinéphiles
.

The lead girl, Michaela Wall, is beguiling (a blonder, rangier Tanja). Ultimately, any genre film is only as good as its characterization.

There is a woman sitting opposite me who smoked a cigarette in about ninety seconds: small puffs in sequences of three, then a beat,
then another three quick small puffs. She didn’t seem to inhale. One wonders what pleasure she derives from smoking.

Behind her, a mother and daughter with two screaming kids. The din! Quite middle-class too, judging by their accents. They just let the children wail, really – everyone in the café very pissed-off but not saying anything in true English fashion.

Tanja is forty-three minutes late.

Fascinating-looking girl serving in the Syndicate today. Russian? East-European certainly. Long ballet-dancer’s back. Moley – mole on her cheek, moles on her neck. She’s tall with a thin, patrician face, hair pulled back in a tight bun. What’s she doing here? What’s her story, her
parcours
? There’s a sustained, slightly contemptuous expression on her face as she goes about her business serving drinks, clearing tables.

Just back from lunch at the Garrick with Leo Winteringham. Everyone in the place seemed to be over fifty, male – naturally – overweight, raddled-looking. Cigars and booze: the slightly
louche
end of the British establishment. Leo W. volunteered to fund any film I cared to direct – he must have made me that offer a dozen times, now. Strange figure, Leo: irreducibly American despite all his years in England. Lean, saurian, brusque – a curious player in this privileged English world (he was greeted warmly by everyone) admitted only because he has money.

As we were gossiping about the business (who’s in, who’s out, who’s hot, who’s cold) he mentioned that Tanja Baiocchi had left her husband. I managed to hide my massive shock and said that I didn’t know she was married. Wasn’t she in your last film, he asked? I said she was but there had never been any talk of a husband. Well, perhaps, not husband, he said – boyfriend, then, that French director, Duprez. Oh, I said, I know all about that, oh yes, and could confirm that the rupture,
entre nous
, was true – absolute and final.

3.30. The bar at the Syndicate is quiet but the people in it are still drinking steadily, as if reluctant to let the afternoon and the
afternoon cafard begin. I should call Janet and see how the invitations are going for the cast and crew screening and get her to book me into the hotel in New York.

Drink: I had a glass of champagne before I went to the Garrick, a glass of white wine in the bar, two glasses w/wine at lunch and a port (Leo doesn’t drink) and am now on my second glass of white wine at the Syndicate: effectively a bottle of wine. More than a bottle of wine: I must stop now. I never drink nearly as much when I’m with Tanja.

New York. Carlyle Hotel. Sitting here having my pre-pre-prandial drink (a bloody mary) – a new bad habit which is explained by the fact that I am just a few hours away from the screening of
The Sleep Thief
. I feel unusually apprehensive (this is my ninth film, for God’s sake) and I know why: I’m expecting too much. Because I know the worth and merit of the film I’m expecting it to experience no problems – Cannes, a US distributor, a prize or two: no worries. I should just be patient – look at the slow burn of appreciation that delivered the success of
Escapade
. The film is finished, it is good work, we had fun, what more can you ask? (And I met Tanja, of course.) So let’s see how the dice roll. Nothing may come of this screening – we may have to wait until Cannes, or even the UK release – we may have to wait longer, until Venice or Berlin.

I wish Tanja were arriving today so she could be here for the screening. Why does she have to come tomorrow?

Vague worries about the quality of the print, about the projector, about the sound level. But what can I do?

Sitting in F.O.O.D. on Lexington. Tanja has postponed her visit – another three days to wait. It would have been good if she’d made the screening (thin crowd – disappointing – but it seemed to go down all right. No offers yet. The print was appalling).

Two very groomed women sit beside me, talking to each other, with gratifying volume and clarity. Clearly they don’t know each other very well.

‘Where do you live?’ one asks.

‘Mexico.’

‘Even further away than me – Vermont.’ Pause.

‘Where in Mexico?’

‘San Miguel. It’s very beautiful.’

‘Oh, there are a lot of expatriates, there.’

‘There are a few of us.’

‘I hear you can get a very cheap face-lift.’

‘Cheap face-lifts, cheap domestic staff. It has its advantages.’

Men have more boring conversations than women, I find, speaking as a professional eavesdropper. Tanja was once in a movie shot in Mexico. She met Duprez there. I think.

‘You may not have a drinking problem but I have a problem with your drinking.’ Overheard in Bemelmans.

Bizarre sight in Going Loco (East Village). A young mother (twenty-one? twenty-two?), suckling her child in the corner of the café, receives a call on her cell-phone. She answers it, rises to her feet and walks to the window of the café chatting on the phone, the baby still at her breast. The unconcern, the utter absence of
pudeur
was entirely admirable – made me feel old, crabbed and confined by my upbringing and the received wisdom of my attitudes and values – as hard to remove as a tattoo. I like the atmosphere in this place – rackety, worldly – I am eating a pungent, garlicky gazpacho at the bar. Very smoky. Tanja flies in tomorrow.

4.00 p.m. Bemelmans. Drinking beer and eating cashew nuts. The place is full of older people: that generation of New Yorkers who like a cocktail mid-afternoon. There is a man beside me who has just ordered a second dry martini.

I lunched with Tanja. I went to her suite in the Plaza and to my astonishment there was a young boy there, about six or seven. ‘This is Pascal,’ she said as if his presence were the most natural
thing in the world. Then Pascal said something to her in French and referred to her as ‘
Maman
’. What on earth does he mean by that? I asked. He’s my son, she said, looking at me as if I were a crazy fool, that’s what he calls me. A nanny came to take him away but I had lost my appetite. During lunch I managed to ask if Duprez was the father and Tanja reassured me he wasn’t. Throughout our eight weeks of filming together on
The Sleep Thief
she never once referred to Pascal. Is this normal for a mother? Was she hiding the fact from me in case it interfered with our affair? Maybe she thought I knew and because I never brought his name up she felt it more discreet to do the same? She’s coming to the hotel tonight once the boy has been put to bed.

Curious: I seem only to drink beer in France or the US. Never touch a drop in England.

In the pub, The Duke of Kent, Monday lunch. No food in the flat so I came here. An empty fridge in an empty apartment – how depressing is that? I was about to call Janet and have her order in a take-away when I remembered she was working on another film in Malta. Janet and my two assistants, gone. A film director, when a film is finally over, has to return to the unfamiliar state of actually doing mundane things for himself – like going to the bank, fetching clothes from the dry-cleaners, buying food and provisions. Strange to be self-reliant again, strange to be back in London after New York. Missing Tanja desperately, achingly – she flew to L.A. to meet her agent. She promised she would be in Cannes… I’m obsessed by her nervous, mobile beauty. She’s never still –
agitée
, they would call her in France.

Opposite me three fat guys – heavy, enormous men. Eating pork sausage and mash, brown bread and butter. Two with pints of lager on the go, plus a bottle of red wine on the table between the three of them. I must start thinking about my next film, but I can’t let
The Sleep Thief
go. While I still dream about Tanja all the time – the film, our film, lives on, as if we’re playing out the lost, last reel. They’ve just ordered puddings and more beer. I try to imagine
myself as Pascal’s step-father: I have to come to terms with the fact that there would be three of us in any future arrangement. Perhaps we could find him a place in a boarding school. Benji and Max went away at his age and seemed perfectly happy all those years at Farnham Hall – which reminds me: where are they now? What’re they doing? My salmon-caesar has arrived: scant sign of any salmon.

Café Méridien, Cannes. I ate here when I first came to Cannes with
Two-and-a-Half Grand
. I remember this little bistro so well, remember the surging, irrepressible confidence of my mood – my first film and selected for ‘Un Certain Regard’ – nothing could stop me. I remember walking past this place one early morning and pausing to watch as the patron hosed down the pavement and began setting out the tables. I saw a saturnine man performing the very same routine this morning and had the odd sensation of being aware that all those years ago I had stood on this exact spot and watched the same ritual – that here one’s life had, for once, come a genuine full circle. Flash back: I was twenty-nine years old. Benji was two, Max was on the way… To think Annie and I were happy then…

Tanja called from Prague, where she’s filming. They’re overrunning, she doesn’t think she can make the screening. It’s in her fucking contract, for Christ’s sake: she has to be released for publicity. I have to call the studio: a screening of
The Sleep Thief
at the Cannes Film Festival and no Tanja Baiocchi – what’s that going to look like? What signal will it send?

The little hotel I used to stay in is now called the Hotel Carlone. In a video-shop I found an old copy of
Dix-Mille Balles
(
Two-and-a-Half Grand
). I almost wept.

What colour is Tanja’s hair? Caramel. Butterscotch. Fudge. Toffee… All edible, all sweets.

Idea for my next film, to be called
Blue on Blue
– the term used in the British Army for those occasions in warfare when you accidentally kill someone on your own side.

Meditation on the navel: a scar that every human being carries… A baby’s cry requires no translation… A scream has no accent… A yawn is understood the world over… The banal truths of life are no less true, despite their banality.

Saw Terry Mulvehey’s new movie
The Last Rebel
(how did he get into Director’s Fortnight and not me?). Completely preposterous and yet beautiful film. The story of
Wings of a Dove
grafted on to the American Civil War. No attempt to make the men’s hairstyles look remotely nineteenth-century. Mulvehey will sacrifice anything if it will provide a beautiful shot – narrative plausibility, character development, pace, suspense: everything yields to the lovely image. Compositionally, the film is flawless, but as a real story about real people –
rien
. Vanity and nullity. Tanja has not returned my calls all week. I sent her a text-message demanding to know who was Pascal’s father. I worry, perhaps, that I’ve made a crucial error.

The Duke of Kent has been renamed The Flaming Terrapin in my absence. Curious name for a pub, but what do I know? We now have music (all but overwhelmed by the collective bellow of conversation), we now have mute televisions showing a rain-lashed golf tournament between competing bright umbrellas. I push my chargrilled Thai chicken around my plate and order another glass of golden, sun-pervaded Australian Chardonnay (my third).

It is Friday lunchtime and you can sense the rowdy, burgeoning, weekend release of appetites. These young people in their twenties and thirties are eating and drinking and smoking as if their lives depended on it. And they do of course: their lives depend on them ceasing to eat, drink and smoke like this. Fuel Britannia. What is it about us? On the evidence of the crowd in this pub we have become a nation of careless, reckless trenchermen and trencherwomen. Strapping girls drinking pints of stout and extra-strength lager; young men with goatees and shaven heads bowed in front of their heaped plates of carbohydrate, shovelling in the pies and the burgers, the spare-ribs and the bangers, packing their pot-bellies and pot-faces. I can’t finish my Thai chicken.

I have just pushed through to the bar to fetch another brimming glass of wine. I now realize with some alarm that these are in fact ‘large’ glasses of wine that I’ve been drinking, which is to say one glass contains two normal glasses of wine. No wonder I feel suddenly a little flushed and unsteady.

How To Become A Successful Film Director
: page one, paragraph one, line one. Don’t fall in love with your leading lady.

A table of four dapper Japanese businessmen have just asked me to take a photograph of them and I have complied. Little do they know who framed that snapshot. Is there something odd in this image? Perhaps I should use it for the last moments of
Blue on Blue
– just put the four Japanese businessmen in the scene in the caff, before the hero shoots himself – in the background, taking photographs – make no comment. Cool.