Unstrung

Leonard Kraditor’s neighbour is unstrung. She stands in the corridor outside his parents’ flat (Leonard’s staying with them for sometime) as we hear her father yell at her from upstairs. Leonard offers her to come in for a bit and she seems glad at the suggestion. They look around Leonard’s parents’ flat. It is littered with books and photographs. So, she asks Leonard, are you what- the reading-reading, always reading type? Leonard gives a short laugh and looks down at the floor.
This not an extract from a novel or a short story- although it could pass for a very good read. This is how Leonard meets Michelle in James Grey’s film Two Lovers (2009). Michelle is volatile, teetering on the edge most of the time and played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Leonard, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is awkward, suffocated and stretched like a bow. He could also be unstrung and that is what one thinks right after the first scene of the film, when he drops a bag of dry-washed blazer and jumps into a river. Except, he doesn’t go ahead and kill himself. He thinks of something indistinct and swims to the surface. He goes home wet and gets his nice Jewish mother worried. Some way into the film, Sandra, who Leonard’s parents want him to get married to (Sandra Cohen), tells Leonard that she wants to take care of him, that she knows he’s not really well and she wants to be with him. Leonard says almost the same thing to Michelle after she tells him that she’s broken up with Ronald- a married man with kids. Leonard had been Michelle’s “new best friend” for sometime then- they hung out together, danced at a loud party until she got smashed and cried her eyeliner out because Ronald wasn’t coming. Her grief, coupled with the pills she had taken before the party, worked her up so bad that she passed out in the bathroom and Leonard had to return alone.
I don’t know if I’d have made the connection otherwise, but since I have also been watching Maya Deren movies, I thought the Michelle-stereotype is a bit like Maya Deren herself. Michelle is the kind who would imagine strange things to herself in the absence of concrete proofs of love and toss herself over the edge. It is not exactly spontaneity, but a meditated version of it. Yes, meditation does kill the idea of spontaneity, but I’m driving at the kind of spontaneous series of baseless meditations that culminate in an act of sudden violence towards oneself. Excessively imagined version of things, is one way to say how it begins. What should ideally have been dialogic are posed as queries to the befuddled Leonard: Do you think Ronald will ever leave them and come to me? Am I being foolish? and the wrong answer could spell relapse. Without extending my lecture on pop philosophy further, I would direct you to Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon. It’s a brilliant study of what I tried to say above. So is Meditation on Violence, in a slightly different vein. Interestingly, she has also written a film based on her Tahitian voodoo experiences entitled Pagan Hellcat. I wouldn’t mind paying a bit to watch a film with such an interesting title!

Needless to say, Leonard being on the edge himself is fascinated by Michelle. And it is true that Michelle’s character can look extremely attractive. So much so that Leonard doesn't mind acting strange and foolish in front of her, expecting her, perhaps, to focus her attention on him. Unfortunately, it’s not for Leonard to realize this wild obsession. I identified Michelle as a stereotype (and one may have one's problems with this) because, by the end, the decision she makes confirms it. She perpetuates her myth by keeping herself permanently out of the loop and Leonard has to make the right leap, tie the strings together and finally fall in with taking photographs at Sandra’s brother’s bar-mitzvah and getting engaged to her.
Two Lovers is supposedly inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. Although I’ve read the story- it didn’t occur to me at all when I was watching it, to be honest. Maybe the distractions were too many- cell phone SMSing as plot device, A Short film about Love-references (he tries to spy on her through his window), Brooklyn, how-dashing-Elias Koteas-is, etc.. But it still remains a pretty old-fashioned film on love; the days when things moved more on dialogue and smart people being completely foolish.

The picture above is a still from Meshes of the Afternoon. The actress is Maya Deren.