Une Promesse

Lui, lei, l'altro: per quanto irregolare e imprevedibile possa essere la sua forma, il triangolo schiera i suoi vertici sullo scacchiere sentimentale esattamente nel modo in cui ci saremmo aspettati, senza lasciare nulla al caso e riempiendo attese e speranze disilluse di lacrime e sospiri. A divenire più interessante delle storia stessa e del chi e del quando è allora l'involucro che la avvolge, il ricamo di colori e sfumature che a ragione di un particolare contesto storico, ideologico e sociale complica e arricchisce l'apparentemente semplice vicenda dei nostri innamorati rendendola il più prezioso dei pezzi unici, un oggetto da maneggiare con cura e da vedere e rivedere, per ammirarne al meglio ogni singolo dettaglio: è questa l'operazione di accurata cesellatura che Patrice Leconte compie per Una Promessa(A Promise, o Une Promesse volendo tener fede alla nazionalità del suo regista), presentato al Festival di Venezia 2013 e giunto nelle nostre sale con "appena" un anno di ritardo.

A great English Landowner

"Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval, good-humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter’s lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. Like Yorkshire on a Saturday afternoon; if you looked down on the whole broad country you would not see a single village green without its white flannels. That was why Yorkshire always led the averages… Probably by the time you got to heaven you would be so worn out by work on this planet that you would accept the English Sunday, for ever, with extreme relief!

With his belief that all that was good in English literature ended with the seventeenth century, his imaginations of heaven must be materialist – like Bunyan’s. He laughed good-humouredly at his projection of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game… Like baseball or Association football… And heaven?… Oh it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chatauqua, wherever that was… And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views… He hoped to be out of it before the cessation of the hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last train to the old heaven. . ."

Ford Madox Ford

No More Parades

Parade's End

He must. He must!

"Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He must!’ The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair—like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint. ‘You must! You must!’ she said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall…She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night..."

Ford Madox Ford

Parade's End

The structure of the novel is, indeed, very difficult to follow(a nightmare!), but I think I'm deeply in love with it anyway.

Peculiarly English

"It has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotion puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. In the smaller matters of the general run of life he will be impeccable and not to be moved; but in sudden confrontations of anything but physical dangers he is apt—he is, indeed, almost certain—to go to pieces very badly.

This, at least, was the view of Christopher Tietjens, and he very much dreaded his interview with Lord Port Scatho—because he feared that he must be near breaking point.

In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control—for, though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits—Tietjens had quite advisedly and of set purpose adopted a habit of behaviour that he considered to be the best in the world for the normal life. If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigrammatically imbecile over inessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs, thinking of nothing at all—or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death—except at sea, by fire, railway accident, or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or—and particularly—prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantages of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914. Death for man came but once: the danger of death so seldom as to be practically negligible: love of a distracting kind was a disease merely of the weak: public dishonour for persons of position, so great was the hushing-up power of the ruling class and the power of absorption of the remoter Colonies, was practically unknown.

Tietjens found himself now faced by all these things, coming upon him cumulatively and rather suddenly, and he had before him an interview that might cover them all and with a man whom he much respected and very much desired not to hurt."

Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

Mr Ford, just being very Austenesque at the beginning of a chapter.

Here's a Valentine

"They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale...They agreed that they had no responsibilities; and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous...Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea...

Tietjens had said:

'You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse...' She had plunged in...

And he had sat, feeling, he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts--intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; [...]

He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men, free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings...

The girl said:

'I'm coming up now! I've found out something...' He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.

Her otter-skin cap had beads of dew; beads of dew were on her hair beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.

Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse!"

Parade's End,

Ford Madox Ford

I'm sorry, I'm reading Parade's End and Little Miss Wannop is the only Valentine I can give you today. Anyway, Have a great Valentine's Day!

Poet's corner No.10

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 

 Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle 

 Can patter out their hasty orisons.

 No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

 Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, – 

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; 

 And bugles calling for them from sad shires. 

What candles may be held to speed them all?

 Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

 Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

 The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; 

 Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

 And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen
Anthem for Doomed Youth

 

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

 That is for ever England.

There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

 A body of England's breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

 Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness.

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke
The Soldier

Sean Bean and others read first world war poetry – Guardian

Downton Abbey complete series 2

"I very much regret to announce that we are now at war with Germany": nelle parole preoccupate di Lord Grantham(Hugh  Bonneville) la prima serie di Downton Abbey si era conclusa con un cliffhanger inevitabile quanto efficace, lasciando alla Prima Guerra Mondiale il compito di minacciare gli equilibri che per secoli avevano saldamente sostenuto l'aristocrazia inglese.

La seconda stagione non poteva allora che aprirsi nel bel mezzo del Conflitto, con Matthew( Dan Stevens) e Thomas(Rob James-Collier) pronti a combattere nella stessa trincea, luogo dove le differenze di classe sono rese inutili dal freddo e dal fango: il Fronte della Somme è lontanissimo dalla serena campagna inglese, ma i venti di Guerra del 1916 alla fine arrivano persino a Downton, con la dimora dei Crawley che apre le porte ai feriti per trasformarsi in un vero e proprio ospedale.

Mentre la Storia fa il suo corso, i numerosi personaggi continuano ad attraversare gli  splendidi saloni a noi ormai tanto familiari alla ricerca del proprio destino, uniti più che mai dalla tragedia collettiva del Conflitto, per affrontare ostacoli che nel gusto dello sceneggiatore Julian Fellowes sembrano sempre più insormontabili: peccato che una volta vinta la Guerra e superata così la commovente prima parte della serie, l'elemento sentimentale tanto importante e sempre trattato con delicatezza dallo script abbia finito per sovraccaricare la storia oltremisura, introducendo soluzioni patinate e colpi di scena tanto improbabili quanto non particolarmente ispirati.

War Horse

"Can you imagine flying over a war and you know you can never look down? You have to look forward, or you'll never get home. ...What could be braver than that?"

La guerra è guerra sempre e comunque, ma la preferenza del grande schermo è inequivocabile: se il Secondo Conflitto Mondiale ha portato con sé tanti e tali orrori che i film sull'argomento non sembrano mai abbastanza, l'interesse ad affrontare la Grande Guerra non può certo dirsi altrettanto.

Il perché di questa strana mancanza non è facile da comprendere, ma nel confrontarsi con una memoria che ancora oggi, soprattutto nei paesi anglosassoni, continua a tenere viva la fiamma del ricordo(la fine delle ostilità l'11 novembre 1918 è a tutt'oggi celebrata in pompa magna con l'Armistice Day), il cinema non  dovrebbe imporsi barriere.

A rendere il periodo più spinoso di altri è però senza dubbio il suo essere un drammatico e definitivo momento di cesura, salto nel vuoto di un mondo pronto a combattere una guerra antica e che invece seppellirà la sua innocenza in trincea, svegliandosi all'alba di un'era nuova e aspra dove niente sarà più come prima.

Che a raccontare una pagina di storia tanto europea sia un regista americano potrebbe sembrare ingiusto, ma non se quel regista si chiama Steven Spielberg: suo infatti l'onore di trasformare "War Horse", tratto da un famosissimo romanzo per ragazzi di Michael Morpurgo e già spettacolo teatrale di successo, in un esempio di  grande cinema. 

Downton Abbey: il grande romanzo inglese arriva in Italia

è una gelida notte d’Aprile del 1912 quando il Titanic si inabissa nell’Atlantico spezzando le vite di oltre 1500 persone: la notizia corre attraverso i fili del telegrafo e arriva in fretta persino nello Yorkshire, dove la vita di una ricca famiglia di antico lignaggio sta per cambiare per sempre.

Downton Abbey, splendida dimora immersa nella campagna inglese appartiene ai conti di Grantham da generazioni, al punto da spingere Robert Crawley, l’ultimo Conte, a sposare  per salvarla dalla rovina la ricca ereditiera americana Cora: il destino vuole però che dal matrimonio, rivelatosi una felice unione nonostante le fredde premesse, nascano solo tre figlie femmine e che Patrick Crawley, il cugino destinato ad ereditare tenuta e titolo e a sposare una delle ragazze per mantenere intatto il patrimonio, muoia insieme al padre proprio nel naufragio del Titanic.

Date le infauste circostanze, i Crawley sono così costretti ad accettare come nuovo erede un lontanissimo quanto inadeguato cugino: Matthew, giovane avvocato dalla tranquilla esistenza borghese, entrerà nel microcosmo di Downton con un certo disagio verso le abitudini e i lussi della nobiltà e diventerà subito un interessante partito per Mary, primogenita e figlia favorita del conte, con la quale inizierà una lunga e sofferta altalena amorosa.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow.
In Flanders fields.