JOIN USAbout love and living with lost chances
Since Geoff Dyer’s deservedly highly praised novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, set in those two watery cities, is being widely read and reviewed, this seems a good time to bring up another marvellous little take on Thomas Mann’s little classic. This one is both a book and a movie: Love and Death on Long Island.
The movie, which I want to focus more on, is an unsung British gem about lost chances. Love and Death on Long Island is also about “the closeted nature of love and how all of us are capable of finding love objects in the least likely of places.”
In this sly, contemporary update of Death in Venice (it’s also a neat twist on Lolita by the way) based on Gilbert Adair’s cult novel, an older man falls in love with a younger man. Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) a reclusive, academic finds himself one day near a multiplex showing the new EM Forster adaptation. Once seated inside, he’s puzzled to see American teenagers in bikinis and cars romping near the beach.
It slowly dawns on him: “This isn’t EM Forster”, he growls to himself. And is about to walk out when he is transfixed by one of the actors on screen (played by Jason Priestley) and stays for the whole picture, which happens to be Hotpants College -II. He discovers the boy’s name is Ronnie Bostock and decides to come out of hiding and seek the boy out, even if he must leave London and travel to Long Island.
In this teen idol, the older academic sees a contemporary embodiment of the Romantic ideals he has devoted his life and scholarship to. He is quick to tell us what this obsession is not: “As a classicist by both education and temperament, I know nothing more shaming and tedious in literature of my contemporaries and near-contemporaries than the maudlin neo-Hellenist cult of the ephebe, with middle-aged men like Wilde and Gide tastefully salivating over sleeping youths and making mawkish comparisons with asphodels and eglantines.
In once answering the famous Proust questionnaire: “What is the thing that most depresses you in life?” He answered: “The unequal distribution of beauty.” And so we see this classicist (who scorns even high culture) in wanting to learn more about Bostock, immersing himself into pop culture: soap operas, fan-zine magazines, VCRs, B-movies, science fiction, Stephen King and finally a trip to the land of Philistinism itself, America, home of his beloved. It’s the meeting of high culture and popular culture and the result is hilarious and heartbreaking.
Some stand-out scenes from the movie: De’Ath’s reply to the cab driver who has just pointed to his ‘thank you for not smoking’sign: “Well I am smoking and so don’t expect to be thanked”; De’Ath looking even more puzzled than the delivery boy with the new VCR — the boy discovers De’Ath doesn’t own a television.
De’Ath taking out a video library membership (“Can I keep them for a week?”) and the ensuing exchange with the clerk at the counter.
De’Ath finally alone with Bostock, confessing what he feels: “In years past, I told him, there had risen almost a tradition of such romantic friendships, and I mentioned Cocteau and Radiguet, Verlaine and Rimbaud — my allusion to Rimbaud seeming in particular to confuse him, I don’t know why, I unguardedly hastened to explain it and made my second fatally wrong move — ‘Rimbaud’, I said, ‘the French poet, who was Verlaine’s lover.’
I’ve read the slim Adair novel and can report that the film, for once, is even better: There’s not a scene or line or moment that is false, wasted or not in place here. First time Brit director Richard Kwietniowski’s adaptation is breathtakingly astute, knowing, funny and oddly moving. John Hurt’s performance here is not only his greatest, it must also rank with all the great English performances because it is, at once, a caricature and the apogee of English-ness but with a twist.
Hurt’s raspy voiced English recluse is a baroquely comic performance. Priestly, a mediocre actor having to actually play a mediocre actor, surprises us with a complex piece of acting, particularly in this key scene when Hurt confesses his love for him.
Failure is a rare theme in literature and cinema. There are really only just a handful of novels, plays, short stories and movies on the subject of the unlived life. Novelists and filmmakers seem reluctant to explore failure and its attendant emotions and baggage: Self-pity, lovelessness, regret, addiction (sexual or substance abuse), boredom, a death wish, and self-destruction. Like Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Love and Death on Long Island doesn’t flinch from looking at these things.
All these stories of the unlived life illustrate that art illuminates life in a very special way when its subject is failure, not success. Success seems the boring subject of commercial art, failure is far more interesting. Failure, paradoxically, is more compelling and complex than success.
There’s a sameness and universality to success; the theme of failure (to me at least) in literature seems more personal, more individual than success.
Is it perhaps because we truly live in our failures?