Scene 14.
Int. Night. Pierre’s room.
A tracking shot will sweep Pierre’s bedroom and pause on its door,
left slightly ajar. As though drummed by a single finger on a toy piano,
a riveting song will accompany this “jeu de porte” amid the
splashing rain and lightning. It will be the camera’s task to endow
the communicating door with its overwhelming oedipal charge. Swinging
to and fro, buffeted by wind, (it will be) like a silent appeal in the
night, coming ever so close, each time, to the sleeping young man or his
mother next door, but not quite.
Fade to black. Continuation of same scene.
Sounds precede seeing and understanding. The loud and sudden opening of
the door coincides with a fierce flash of lightning outside the hotel
grounds. Awakened, Pierre hears bare feet moving in his room. It is his
mother calling his name as she stumbles in the dark. He takes her in his
arms. They cover each other with kisses. Her nightgown slipped off her
shoulders, hair unloosened and drenched, she’s reeling. Pierre helps
her to a chair.
She goes on talking. Raving, crying and smiling through her tears. It
doesn’t matter. It is over. Her gown restored to decency, she sits
bent over as if about to vomit, her heart in her throat.
You’re too
good for me. Too nice. I deserve something else. I should find myself
some stud who would do what he knows to do best. I’d much rather.
Gutter filth, that’s where your mother feels at home. You shall
never know what horrors I am capable of. I want you to know, though.
I love my filth. I’ve had too much to drink today. I think I better
throw up. Even if I were to shit in front of you, do my worst in your
presence, you’d still think me pure, wouldn’t you?
Then that smutty laughter
of hers cuffs his ears, slaps him upside the head, leaves him cracked.
The camera frames him standing up, shoulders and head drooping. She gets
up and starts toward her room. Another laugh makes her turn around and
falter. She touches Pierre on the face:
Forgive me. (lowers
her voice) You must forgive me. I am disgusting and I’ve
had a lot to drink. But I love you and respect you and I couldn’t
stand to go on lying. Yes, your mother is revolting, and you’ll
have to be very strong to overcome your revulsion.
Almost in a gasp,
after a visible struggle, she brings out the rest.
I could have spared
you all this, gone on lying. I could have treated you like an idiot.
I am an evil woman, I am rotten and I drink, but you are not a coward.
It took courage to tell you what I did. Think of that. If I’ve
been drinking all night it’s because I needed help and perhaps
it was to help you. So now, please help me, take me into my room and
lay me down to sleep.
Music at the cut.
Scene 15. Int. Later that night.
In a dark suit, Pierre returns to his room, dazed and worn out. Forward
track towards his receding back, almost stumbling, tragic and desperately
alone.
Fade.
Scene 16. Int. Night.
Placed under the sign of imposture, and what the French like to call representation,
this scene will have the added merit of providing the viewer with a diegetic
series, however spurious, marking the father’s final departure—this
dismissal of the father being the very condition of what the movie is
about.
A close-up of Pierre in mourning in an empty theater. Without warning,
the camera will cut to screen projecting a funereal procession, on foot
from house to graveyard. Pierre’s mother, swathed in black veil,
priests, chanting. The camera will once again quickly cut to Pierre, the
spectator, getting unhinged by the mounting falsehoods of the situation:
son père impie et la veuve éplorée. What
a charade!
Scene 17. Int. Pierre’s room. Night.
Pierre sits in same slumped position as before in the empty theater. The
room’s practically obscured save a thin light coming from the street.
We follow Pierre’s gaze which shreds everything he encounters. It
will be a scene of internal accounting: whatever emerges undissolved will
be inscribed on Pierre’s tattered shield. The camera can slowly
pan across the darkened room but what it can’t show is Pierre’s
soul trapped in the double bind to both forget and never be able to, the
blinding light he suffered during the kiss. He kneels at the bottom of
his bed and is heard saying his second prayer:
In the solitude
I enter
The norms of this here world
If they subsist, do so to maintain
An impossible feeling of enormity:
This solitude, this indifference,
It is God.
Like a semiotic rectangle,
this scene will deploy its binaries with stabbing insistence. Whether
it is used or not matters less than having tracked the booby trap arc
between norms and enormity.
Scene 18. Int. Day. Pierre’s bedroom.
In purely topological terms, this scene will recall a previous frame the
viewer may have filed under the caption, “the sick child.”
Shutters. Bed. A deeply interior and private corporeality as if the outside
world were an unopened letter. The camera walks the doctor to the door.
He shrugs in the direction of Pierre’s mother.
Nothing very serious;
he’ll be dancing the jig in no time.
Fade to black. Continuation
of the same scene.
Pierre: I’m
not sick.
Mother: I knew you weren’t.
Pierre: I’m getting up now. I’ll have lunch in the dining
room, if it’s okay with you.
A long shot locks
their gaze, trying to outstare each other. Having gained nothing by the
fake illness, Pierre’s distress is no match for the terrifying hostility
now facing him. Behind the flawless features, Pierre reads his mother’
face like an open book.
After her shame in Vannes, she is making it up to herself, Pierre thinks.
The smoldering memory of the outburst has exalted her and leaves in its
wake an undiluted lavish scorn for anyone who fails to accept her as she
is.
Mother: It is good
to see you again, Pierre.
There’s nothing wrong with you, you heard the doctor. I knew that.
I told you so before; running away won’t get you anywhere. First
of all, that means stop running away from me. I know that you still
feel a deep respect for me, but I will not have some sort of madness
between the two of us. I would ask you to go on respecting me as fully
as ever in the past. You must remain the submissive son of the woman
you know to be unworthy, do you hear?
Pierre: I was afraid you’d take my uneasiness as a sign of disrespect.
I am weak. I unhappy. (Pierre’s eyes start tearing) Unhappy
is hardly the word. There’s more to it than that. I’m afraid.
Added to the hostility
in her voice, Pierre now hears the unmistakable notes of suffering.
Mother: You are
right to be. But your only chance lies in facing up to what frightens
you. You shall get back to your studies. First though, you are going
to help me. Your father left a mess in the house, I would like you to
pull yourself together and deal with the chaos in his study. There are
books and papers to sort through and arrange. I haven’t the energy
to take on the job myself and I don’t want things left unattended
any longer. Anyway, I have to go out. Kiss me goodbye.
As Pierre’s
mother readies herself to go out, the camera will return to the burning
metaphor by closing up on her flushed cheeks. A quick pan gathers Pierre
fixing his mother while she carefully puts on her hat and adjusts a black
lacy widow’s veil. In spite of the sumptuous evening gown, Pierre
realizes that mourning is a poor alibi for the indecency of her beauty.
Mother: I know just
what you’re thinking. From now on, I’m not going to spare
you. I made up my mind. I will not change my desires. You shall respect
me as I am now. I am not going to hide anything from you. No more pretences;
that, at last, is over with, and I’m glad.
Pierre (with genuine fervor): Nothing you could do would alter
the respect I have for you. I may tremble as I utter these words but
you know I say them with all the strength in my heart.
Mother exits in wild
haste. Left alone, Pierre sifts his feelings which fold into a vicious
pattern: on one hand, her addiction to pleasure, corruption, debauchery,
nausea; on the other, the unappeasable purity of his worship. Delineated
by the inexorable movement of his thoughts, Pierre literally slumps down
to the floor where he meets the pendulum of his own terror the way one
enters a long-awaited delirium. In other words, he lets go.
Slow fade to black.
This black-out scene could of course be replaced with creative substitutes
the director will only be too happy to furnish, provided he adhere to
the tightening grip/release type of logic that Pierre’s torment
commands. The iconography of mysticism, horror film and the like could
be useful here.
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