La Vie de Boheme

Henri Murger's Scenes from the Lives of the Bohemians (Scenes de la vie de Boheme), a book published in 1847 and, then, 1849, is a collection of linked short stories about artists in the Latin Quarter in Paris.  The book was immensely popular and has had an interesting after-life.  Movie fans my age will recall old Laurel and Hardy movies, mostly two-reelers, in which the boys are on the lam in wintry European slums, holed-up in shabby rooms and harassed by brutish landlords and police goons.  There's a chill to these old comedies, a vivid sort of squalor and destitution (the lads are always starving) and the impoverished milieu is mirrored in these pictures' obvious low-budgets -- the two-reelers are shot on battered sets previously employed, it seems, for the production of long-forgotten operettas set in these vaguely Parisian and "left bank" locations.  (Old Laurel and Hardy pictures of this sort sometimes seem to illustrate sequences of hunger and homelessness in George Orwell or Henry Miller.)  Of course, the other later incarnation of Murger's Bohemians is more glamorous, Puccini's La Boheme and the glitzy Broadway musical Rent, as well as some aspects of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge.  Aki Kaurismaki's La Vie de Boheme (France-Finland 1992) adapts Murger's stories to the present-day but is filmed in a low-key murky black and white that is redolent of Jean Vigo or Renoir's Boudou saved from Drowning.  The movie firmly occupies the immiserated terrain of the old Laurel and Hardy pictures of this sort; it's a comedy about hunger and desires that are mostly thwarted.  And, yet, despite its bleak setting, the film isn't bitter and, in fact, is rather sweetly romantic.  Kaurismaki's self-deluded artists elude landlords and thugs, starve some of the time, but pool their resources for an occasional feast, pursue somewhat desultory love affairs and live by their wits.  Until the last reel, the characters, more or less, enjoy their freedom; of course, Mimi's death at the end of film (as at the end of La Boheme) casts a dark shadow over their adventures.

Marcel is a playwright.  When a bartender offers to read his work, Marcel drops a brick of manuscript on the bar counter -- it's a play written in 22 acts.  Evicted from his garret, Marcel meets a similarly homeless painter, Rodolfo.  They outwit the authorities; Marcel has the menacing, if comical, gangster sent by the landlord to extort money from him arrested as a bank robber.  It turns out that apartment has been rented to an avant-garde composer, Schaunard, also a congenial soul, who agrees to let Marcel and Rodolfo squat on the premises.  The men pursue their artistic endeavors with little effect, drinking in low-rent bars and gnawing on slices of crusty bread.  Rodolfo, who is Albanian, has a dog named Baudelaire, a morose-looking mutt and all of the artists are sweet-tempered, a bit sad, and courtly in their speech.  One night, Mimi appears at the garret looking for a female friend who is now missing -- she has just arrived in the big city.  Rodolfo sympathizes with her plight, alone and friendless in Paris, and invites her to spend the night in his room.  He announces that he is "hotblooded and passionate by nature" and that she is "very beautiful" and so it would be best if he spent the night on the streets so as to elude temptation.  In fact, he sleeps in a cemetery among graves piled up against one another and, then, stealing a bouquet of memorial flowers, returns to his room only to find that Mimi has departed.  He runs into her later in the company of a rather haggard older man.  Without a word of explanation, Mimi abandons her companion and accompanies Rodolfo to his rooms to live with him.  Everything goes well.  Rodolfo has a wealthy patron, played by the smirking Jean-Pierre Leaud, sells a  ridiculously unflattering portrait to his customer and the little commune of artists briefly has enough money to treat themselves to a feast.  Meanwhile, Marcel has acquired a position as an editor and staff writer for a gossip magazine.  The magazine is owned by Gosset, a cigar-chomping philistine who is played by the rather frail-looking Sam Fuller.  (Marcel uses the gossip rag to publish his enormous play, serializing it and, thereby, destroying the prospects for the magazine; this causes Gosset to fire Marcel.)  Rodolfo gets into a dispute and the police are called.  It turns out that his immigration papers are not in order and he is promptly deported to Albania.  After about six months, Rodolfo sneaks back into France in the trunk of a car, comically crowded together with a Bulgarian family.  He returns to Paris, retrieves his loyal dog, and, then, searches for Mimi.  Mimi is living with her previous companion, the haggard older man.  Rodolfo is saddened by her disloyalty.  No one has any money.  And Gosset fires Marcel for abuse of his magazine.  But as things take a turn for the worse, Rodolfo's wealthy patron appears again and buys one of his big canvases.  The three would-be artists have enough money for a picnic in the park, a scene that bears many traces of Renoir's films, mostly A Day in the Country.  Of course, Mimi is sick and dying.  She collapses one cold night and has to be hospitalized  The three artists pool their resources and sell everything they own to pay for Mimi's treatment.  (Rodolfo's patron buys his entire inventory of canvases).  Nothing avails and Mimi dies.  In the final shot, Rodolfo with his dog walks along an arcade exterior, presumably the hospital's facade, toward a pitch black doorway into which he vanishes.  Mimi, not wanting Rodolfo to see her die, has sent him to pick flowers in the mild Spring weather.  The bouquet of flowers that he plucked for her lies crushed and trampled on the hospital floor.  

The film achieves a poetry of desolation.  The characters are all gaunt and disheveled but they behave with great dignity.  There are a number of comic scenes, for instance, Rodolfo and Marcel sharing a trout with two heads in gruesome-looking cafe -- the worst part of a grilled trout is the head.  Schaunard plays one of his compositions involving chanting, fire sirens, and fist-blows to his piano -- the women listen impassively masking their dismay at the sound of this music.  The picture is very elegantly shot; it is exquisitely composed and lit -- the poverty in this movie is exemplary and poetic.  (There's a great frenetic dance scene in which a punk band performs "Papa oom maw maw", a song by Minneapolis' own "Trashmen" -- the credits tell me that the song is played by "The New Trashmen" and I think the song is actually called "Surfin' Bird".) This is a very intelligent, elegant, and well-made movie -- but there's not a lot to it and the audience simply traces in the shaggy-dog events depicted the skeletal outlines of Puccini's famous opera.  (In one scene, Mimi and Musette, Marcel's girlfriend, go to the opera.  We don't see what is being performed on-stage, but the music sounds not like Puccini but Mozart or, possibly, Rossini.)  Puccini somehow redeems this material.  Kaurismaki, true to his source, illustrates the lives of the Bohemians but without any tincture of glamor or transcendence.  In some ways, it feels like a pointless exercise in demystification -- who takes opera seriously as a portrait of any sort of literal reality?  We don't really need the demystification.  The acting is stoic and laconic but very effective.  Some of the romantic scenes between Rodolfo and Mimi have the naked power of Ozu or Carl Dreyer.  But Kaurismaki is so committed to his scrupulously mean vision of the plot that he withholds almost all of the emotion implicit in this material from the audience.  It's not just another take on Puccini's subject matter in La Boheme but a conscious, perverse attempt to make a sort of anti-Puccini, to undermine the opera and expose it as dishonest and meretricious. I'm not sure that this is worth doing.  

On the Worst Motel in Minnesota

 I drove to Moorhead, Minnesota where my grandchildren live.  It’s a six hour drive and, so, I booked a  room for overnight.

The motel where I stayed was a Microtel by Wyndham.  The place is new, set back from a grim frontage road running parallel to Interstate 90.  Three-stories high, the motel manages to look squat and flimsy at the same time, the sort of structure that a blizzard wind might level or that the summer sun could melt like a tallow candle.  The attendant at the front desk seems distracted.  Some kind of sinister melody is playing in her ear and she doesn’t exactly register that I am standing in front of her computer station.  Perhaps, she thinks that I’m virtual, a hologram, or some sort of automaton of the sort to which, perhaps, she aspires to become.  We are all inhuman here.  

The ground floor room assigned to me is at the end of a short hallway.  A glass door opens into an exercise room jam-packed with brutish-looking treadmills and weight machines, instruments of torture, it seems.  No one has ever entered this place.  Perhaps, the glass door is inoperable.  The motel room is dark.  There’s a narrow ledge under the TV that serves as a sort of desk or table.  But, when you press the light switch, only a faint, useless glow drizzles down from the wooden rim of the upper shelf.  The thermostat seems disconnected.  The room is clammy like a basement or a storage room in pole barn.  

About an hour before sunset, my son and my grandchildren are waiting for me in the parking lot. We go out to eat at a Chinese buffet.  The food is awful.  Overcooked chips of chicken in sugar sauce, dumplings submerged in a lukewarm, murky fluid, soggy egg rolls, ropy lo-mein that glints with grease.  The sushi tastes vaguely like caviar, a bad sign since, so far as I can detect, the dirty, sticky rice doesn’t have any fish embedded in its seaweed wrap.  The soda pop is diluted and, even, the ice-cream offered in little cartons in a cooler for dessert have no flavor.  An angel is dining in the buffet with us.  The angel has a swollen, bruised-looking face that is curiously hairless – I can’t tell if this seraphim is supposed to be male or female; perhaps, there is no gender in paradise.  Walking on tiny, pointed feet, the angel carries a plate of food to its table.  Over the angel’s shoulder blades, embossed on the back of the creature’s black blouse are two tiny white wings.  The angel has BDSM trousers, all spiky with zippers and silver bolts marking the garment’s seams, buckle rigging for chain tethers.  The other people at the table have bloated faces like drowned corpses fished out of the river.  

Back at the hotel, the room remains cold.  I put a bottle of cranberry juice in the small refrigerator under the window.  (Outside the window: an empty parking lot, widely spaced vehicles, a muddy vacant lot scarred by tire tracks.)  I can’t sleep and feel feverish.  Maybe, it is the effect of the Chinese buffet.  When I remove the bottle of cranberry juice from the refrigerator, it’s frozen solid.

There are no towels, no wash rags anywhere in the room.  The toilet stool is mounted six inches too close to the floor.  When you sit on the thing, you’re trapped; it’s all but impossible to struggle up to your feet.  I go down to the lobby where a couple of men who look like oil-patch roustabouts are eating the house breakfast.  A big TV warns of approaching thunderstorms.  A basin is full of fluffy scrambled eggs but there’s no salsa or ketchup or anything to impart the slightest flavor to the eggs.  The other half of the basin is full of leathery cinnamon toast, possibly intended to be dowsed in syrup and eaten as an approximation of french toast.  The cinnamon toast is not easy to slice.  When I try to cut the toast with my plastic fork and knife, the knife breaks in two and the fork leaves tines embedded in the shoe-sole sized piece of bread.  The orange juice in its dispenser is diluted so that the drink is merely a watery and tasteless infusion of yellowish fluid – the apple juice looks like urine.  

At the front desk, a woman is playing with her phone.  Her face is haphazardly painted on the front of her bald skull.  She ignores me.  At last, I clear my throat and she sullenly glares at me from behind her computer.  I tell her that there is no towel, no wash rag, nothing of that sort in the room.  Reluctantly, she leaves her post, vanishes into some back rooms that seem to be clogged with soiled laundry, and comes back to the lobby with a couple towels and wash rags draped over her arm – she looks like a waiter about to serve champagne or wine.  (In the room, a placard says that because of staff shortages, rooms will only be cleaned once every three days.) 

The shower drizzles metallic-smelling water into a bathtub that is slick as ice and a death trap.  The curve of the tub tries to catch your ankle and pitch you down onto the slippery surface.  There’s no purchase underfoot and the grab-rails are poorly placed – you would have to be a contortionist to use these wet metal rails.  Under the stream of bad-smelling water, I teeter as if stranded on a pinnacle at a great height above the earth.

Outside, in the parking lot, I look across to some warehouses with blunt, featureless walls, a collision center that is shaped like a squat pagoda, and a used car lot.  In the foreground, there’s a big earthmover, a front end loader with its hydraulic arm and dull, heavy bucket stretched out in front of its little cab with blue-tinted windows and a superstructure of feathery antennae and pipe-shaped roll bars. The loader is limp and inert, somehow abject/  It’s labeled Landwehr and Komatsu.  The heavy treads under the cab and engine look like a crouching animal, half-mired in mud.  The presence of the thing is inexplicable, as if it has fallen from the sky – I don’t see any trench or excavations or anything worth digging out of the muck and there are no tread tracks leading to where it has been abandoned.

Driving away from the place, the roads are broad and empty under cold skies.  But, whenever you have to switch lanes, a big pick-up or SUV roars up through your blind spot.  The road is dangerous with traffic that materializes out of nowhere.  Everything is flat, featureless, a landscape preparing for an enormous and lethal flood.  Already half the buildings are abandoned – several shuttered and morose restaurants with weeds growing in their parking lots, an extinct day care, an intersection with a febrile blinking light.  

This is by no means a cheap motel.  With tax, the charge for the room is $185 a night.