Part Of The Picture: Visions and Versions

VISIONS AND VERSIONS

AUG 1, 2009 – THE WRITER KNOWN AS GERARD REVE (Jeroen Krabbé) experiences the oddest of train journeys. At first, the issue appears to simply be his misanthropy, which manifests itself when a vendor saunters down the compartment aisle, calling out, “Coffee, rolls, beer, sherry!” Gerard holds his hand up. The vendor stations his cart. “Care for some beer or sherry, sir?” Gerard says, “Coffee… please.” The vendor was possibly hoping for better sales. He protests, “Just coffee? There’s wine… red wine.” Gerard barks, “I said coffee, damn it!” The vendor knows he’s getting nowhere with this grouch. “Take it easy, it’s coming. One coffee, sir.” Without looking, Gerard hands over some money. The vendor exclaims, “That’s just right.” Gerard smirks, “Yes, so you don’t have to think.” As the vendor leaves, Gerard finds another reason to complain. “Can’t you shut the damn door?”

Gerard rises, shuts the damn door and is about to seat himself, when his eyes fall on the painting opposite. It’s one of Samson and Delilah, which prompts Gerard to run his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t know it yet, but at some point, he will undergo a haircut, from a beautician who has her own line of cosmetics named… Delilah. Is he prescient? As he confesses later, is he psychic? Is that why he stared at the painting for a second longer than necessary? Did it speak to him about the future? And now, a woman enters the compartment, cooing to her infant, “Oh, don’t cry. Is my little darling teething…” Gerard is clearly not one of those passengers who smiles at strange babies on trains. He looks outside. A sign flashes past, announcing, “Jesus is everywhere.”

The woman continues to talk to her child. “Want Mom to peel you an apple? Look at the pretty long peel.” Gerard turns to look. And he’s startled by the sight. As if corroborating the sign that just flashed past, the peel has fashioned itself into a halo around the infant’s head, which makes this mother and child resemble… Madonna and Child. Again, Gerard stares a little longer than necessary. Again, after a later point in the film, we look back and wonder, “Did he know he’d be saved by the Madonna? Is that what his psychic self is sensing right now?” And when a carton of tomato juice bursts open in the overhead luggage rack, and when its blood-red contents drip all over an advertisement for Hotel Bellevue, does he intuit that he has been booked into that very hotel and that he will unearth a few murders?

The film, however, is ambiguous enough to present to us an alternate truth – though one based on a lie. Perhaps Gerard is not psychic. Perhaps it’s just that he’s a writer and his imagination is always working overtime. He reaches his destination and is chauffeured to the hotel where he’ll be addressing a literary gathering. (And wouldn’t you know it, the hotel is right beside… Hotel Bellevue!) He dives into his speech, which is inspired by a sight at Vlissingen Station, while he was still searching for the person who will take him to the hotel. He thinks he’s found his man. “Good evening, I’m Gerard Reve. Have you come for me?” The man replies drolly, “Come for you?! I doubt it, sir. You still look pretty healthy.” Then we see the reason for the drollness. A coffin is wheeled past. “This can hardly be you!”

It is this incident that informs Gerard’s address – though not exactly. He begins, “When I arrived at Vlissingen Station tonight, they were unloading a coffin from the train.” He spreads his hands wide. “A gigantic coffin. So large that it didn’t fit into a regular hearse but had to be loaded on a truck. There were some thirty dwarfs standing around it.” Once again, he extends an arm to demonstrate a measurement. “They were no taller than this. They were members of a circus act who were going to bury their colleague, the world’s tallest man. A grotesque tragedy, don’t you think? But why am I telling you this? What is so special about this story?” A member of the audience pipes up, “That there is no circus in town.”

And Gerard comes to his point. “Exactly. I invented most of it. Yes, there was a coffin, but an ordinary one. Of a man who died in Benidorn of an overdose of love.” The audience titters despite not having heard the best part. (As the droll gent informed Gerard on the platform at Vlissingen Station, it was a beautiful death. The man died in bed… “on top of some Señora.”) Gerard continues, “No dwarfs, no giant, nothing. But if I tell the dwarf story often enough, I’ll start to believe it myself. And that, I think, is the essence of my writing. I lie the truth. Until I no longer know whether something did or did not happen. That’s when it gets exciting. What you make of reality is infinitely more interesting than reality itself.” He could almost be talking about cinema itself.

De Vierde Man (1983, Dutch; aka The Fourth Man). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Starring Jeroen Krabbé, Renée Soutendijk, Thom Hoffman.

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Posted in: Cinema: Foreign