Bonjour Tristesse

Just finished the third edit of DANNY V2. Enjoyed it more this time, apart from the fact that it sunk me into a depression so low I could barely climb out it.

I seem to have some notion that on a recent blog I said that I had never found it a depressing book. What the hell was I   thinking of? Not DANNY V2 anyway, I can tell you. Obviously I haven't been paying enough attention.

This book is black. Actually those italics don't put enough emphasis on how dark this book is. Like pitch. If you thought the first one was relentless wait till you see this baby.

Of course it's a different kind of relentless. Volume 1 is more about relentless violence, with that Jacobean pall of impending disaster hanging over it. Volume 1 is rather like a Shakespearean dark castle with the plotting and scheming going on behind closed doors till someone is fatally run though behind the arras.

Volume 2 is different. You start out with what looks like a reformed Danny who's managed to pick his life up and turn it around, then you watch him make decision after decision that takes him down new roads to the same old place with the inevitable disastrous results.

What makes it worse though, is it doesn't look as if he is doing something wrong. If you're one of those people who likes to go back, visit old friends and places, keep in touch, you will be even more unperturbed by what he does, and the pernicious way he does it. Subsequently you might be left wondering quite how it takes such a wrong turn.

If you're like me, of course, and are phobic about never going back to people or places, you might be a little more wary of Danny 'returning to the fold'.

It has such a dark (I keep using that word, but I can't think of any other), gloomy pall over it. It doesn't take you long to realise that Danny is not as 'well' as you might first think. After that, Danny being Danny, you wonder if he actually knows what he's doing. Is he up to something and, if so, what?

Understand, it's not depressing in a Nil By Mouth or Monster's Ball kind of way. Although you might expect it to be nihilistic, it isn't. It's depressing as in a decayed, mildewed, blackened, overpowering sense of grief and loss kind of way. And, at the risk of firing up my ever-watchful critics, it is done so subtly, by such tiny increments, that you don't even notice it till you're in the middle of this screwed-up mess wondering how the fuck you got there.

I'm a case in point, boldly asserting to all and sundry on here that it isn't depressing, and I wrote the bloody thing.

Maybe it's because up until this last edit I had been concerned about the 'lack' of plot.

Because it doesn't have the same level of   dramatic events as V1, and because Danny is kind of free-falling in it (with a vengeance), I was always very focussed on its imaginary shortcomings.

I think I was also nervous about its reception because it's my weakling, my vulnerable one. But, as I think I said before, I am more convinced than ever that some people will love this one. If tales of grief-stricken loss and sad souls trying to fuck themselves into happiness are your cup of tea you will love it. Guaranteed.

Another plus point - although maybe only to me who's sick of hearing this drivel - is it's even further removed from being "porno". Not because it has less sex (it doesn't) but because it is so joyless and peculiar, and kind of desperate and sad, that you would need to be an even more tragic fuckwit than my past collection of tragic fuckwits to imagine it could pass itself off as pornography.

If porn generally makes you want to top yourself Volume 2 will do it for you.

My moment of satori about the true nature of 2 came when I was watching an 'art' film called Eros.

I was about half way through the third edit at the time and this film had come from my on-line library. It was a collection of three short movies on the theme of eroticism. I put it on, grumbling that if it was crap we weren't watching it through.

At the moment I don't really like anything heavy while I'm editing, preferring comedies and actioners and standard horror fare. Mainstream all the way. I don't want to think or be made to experience any emotions.

For some reason I hadn't noticed this as a phenomenon (I didn't experience it working on Volume 1). If I had I might have been alerted to the fact that Volume 2 was having quite a different effect on me.

I was driving Himself mad hiring TV (although he forgave me Lost), watching my way through all the O.C., The Reading Group, Black Books, kids movies, even animated features which you usually have to bribe me to watch. I was taking out Disney films.

I just apologised, said, "Don't want to watch anything heavy, edit's taking up all my brain" and thought no more about it.

So Eros comes on and the first film up is The Hand by Kar Wai Wong.

I, very strangely, because I watch a lot of Asian cinema, didn't know his work. What's more, both of us had forgotten why we wanted to see this film in the first place so we had no idea what to expect.

The Hand was an absolutely stunning exploration of love/erotic obsession. So good, in fact, that I'd go so far as to say that if I could make a film as good as this I'd die happy.

It's intense, despairing, tortured and breathtakingly beautiful.

The premise is a tailor in love with a courtesan he can't have. He takes clothes to her flat and that's all he sees of her.

She gives him a hand-job in the opening scene, which is a wonderfully understated piece of erotic domination/humiliation far more poetic than the delightful phrase 'hand-job' would lead you to expect. What's more it manages to be understated while it's quite explicit, and that's all the 'sex' in the entire film.

Nevertheless, that one ugly little 'hand-job' seals his fate and he becomes addicted to loving her from afar - all see and no touch.

It reeks of forbidden love and repressed sex. It's Danny and John/ Heathcliff and Cathy in spades. It is forbidden love, par excellence.

But, to cut a long story short, my moment of satori came at the end when the wellspring of their frustrated 'love affair', which never really is, comes out in this one scene of frantic, almost fetishistic, touching wherein they cannot kiss. And I howled. And howled. And howled.

As someone who only cries when the dog dies I was both deeply disturbed and completely thrown by this (not to mention profoundly embarrassed).

I couldn't fathom it. What the fuck was wrong with me? I mean, it is a superb piece of film-making but it did seem to be over-the-top. And it was then the satori light-bulb went off.

The film had just plugged right into the huge backlog of feeling Volume 2 was generating in me. It was like a backwash of grief and overwhelming loss that almost floored me. These two poor sods. One beautiful, worshipped, callous in a work-hardened way; the other devoted, silent, suffering, and then this loss as, at the last moment, the thing that he loves is taken away from him and he can't even really touch her, hang onto her.

And there was Volume 2 - staring me in the face.

My emotional deluge aside, The Hand segment of Eros is worth the price of the film forty times over.

Don't expect anything other than smooth entertainment from the Soderbergh segment and nothing but brick-throwing confusion at the last segment by 1960's Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni. But, if you like lush Asian film-making (it's not opulent, it's green and gloomy, but has the stunningly beautiful Li Gong and a wonderfully strained, highly-strung male lead) and tales of doomed love with a subtext forty foot thick you will not better this. It's something you could watch over and over and never get sick of it. And I can only think of a handful of films I'd say that about.

By the by, if any of you do watch it let me know if it makes you cry too, then I've got a sliding scale of just how deeply depressing Volume 2 actually is.

So that's it. My life in art.