Tales of Terror: Lesbians in the Scary Past
Il Conformista at Film Forum; Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Met; Reading Mr Ripley; etc.
On Seeking Dominique Sanda
When I was in my late teens, I met an elegant older woman at a dinner party who told me that in her youth she had been obsessed with the actress Dominique Sanda. So intense had been her feelings for Sanda, the woman had travelled all the way to Paris. Not to stalk—she’d had no idea where Sanda lived: “It was enough that I was in the same city as her, breathing the same air.” Then the woman startled, as if taken aback by her past self’s behavior. We didn’t talk much after that.
I think of this woman often. Who was she? All I remember was her attractive black hair that was streaked with grey, her slender wrists, and that she had also been an actress at the Burgtheater in Vienna. I never saw her again. But I never got over how well I thought she knew me, who I was or would become. Or maybe she didn’t know me and for that matter didn’t even know herself. Her story of seeking out Dominique Sanda in Paris left a lasting imprint, intentionally or not. I’ve wandered Paris too, when I longed to feel a proximity to the French actresses I loved—in my case, it was Catherine Deneuve and Anna Karina, whom sadly I did see one day, drunk and washed out, at the Champo Cinema—in the same way I still wander the West Village in New York, thinking of the writers who lived here long ago: Patricia Highsmith, Lorraine Hansberry, and Louise Fitzhugh…
For the first half of my life, the determining of Lesbian culture came like a whisper in a cupped hand, an oral history that was passed along via anecdote and hand-burnt DVD, reconstructed through footnotes, bibliographies, and library visits. Messages were relayed indirectly. It was the days before smartphones, and after my encounter with the elegant woman, during which I couldn’t look up Dominique Sanda immediately, I had only to go on that Sanda had starred in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which I had seen, and so when I got home, I was immediately able to look her up and recall her name. I remember finding then, and watching, in a terrible pixelated file, Il Conformista (1970), and feeling with a rush of blood instinctively that there was more to the elegant woman’s story and what she had been telling me. But the anecdotes quickly split apart here, where I labelled Sanda as a Lesbian actress (not that she herself was lesbian, but that she left her mark on Lesbian culture), the way I labelled Il Conformista a Queer movie: and indeed I still call Il Conformista that, with its strange and layered examination of the spectrum between masculinity and femininity, and how essential deviant sexuality plays into this spectrum. Il Conformista traces the story of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who would rather be a murderer and a fascist than a homosexual; meanwhile Dominique Sanda’s character, Anna Quadri, appears halfway through the film, usurping and destabilizing Marcello’s brutal ambition by actively attempting to seduce Marcello’s wife.
Throughout most of this January, Il Conformista was playing at Film Forum in a gloriously restored copy. I went twice, and I wish I could go see it again, for its visual richness and narrative succinctness alone. My trips to the movies also made me think about how much of a political compass and guidebook films and novels about the past have become to me in the present. At the brink of the pandemic, just before everything shut down, I was immersed in Julien Gracq’s eerie and almost silly 1958 novel about 1938, Balcony in the Forest—its tone of quiet, isolation, and boredom before a momentous military aggression is the only literary equivalent I feel to the present, or especially to early March of 2020, as the strange shift that came slowly and then all of a sudden broke in on us.
Films and stories about the 1930s are fascinating to us as orientation for the confusing contemporary: it’s a period we see as drenched with the decadence and unease of the society we know today, where we see fascism everywhere, but as of right now all groups disagree on which groups are the fascists. I wonder if we look to the past in our wish for an orientation because we want to see the steps for reaching the side we wish to see ourselves on, a weird impulse and yearning for a “correct” side, perhaps so that we can be glamorous and fatal as characters like Anna, who entices Marcello and then makes him bleed. But while Anna rejects and injures Marcello with such glee because she despises him politically, I love that Il Conformista is the opposite of saccharine or simple about political idealism; in the end Anna Quadri’s primary goal may have less been righteousness or heroism than homosexual desire.
Quiet protest, invisible exchanges: Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Met
A similar historical-political orientation, though more uplifting, was happening at the Met: the Dialogues of the Carmelites returned with a star-studded cast containing, among others, Alice Coote (🥵 of that seminal 1999 Alcina 🥵) and out queer Jamie Barton (🥵).
Even to those who, like me, are not particularly spiritual, Francis Poulenc’s opera about a group of nuns who chose martyrdom during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror can be absolutely cosmic. Dialogues is truly unique in that it showcases a world run exclusively by women: women negotiating theology, political action, the function of fear or bravery, and the literal meaning of their lives. Conversation and conflict occur, but never as a plot device: instead, Dialogues becomes one of those rare works of art (like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019) that powerfully turns into an act of female solidarity and resistance. Poulenc (a gay composer, at the time struggling with the death of his partner) wrote these dialogues and collective spirituality using brief, stirring themes, emphasizing how each of our acts takes on a new life outside of ourselves. When the old prioress dies in terror, renouncing her faith, a younger nun suggests that this act might serve as an exchange: allowing another anxious novice a peaceful, courageous death. The new prioress, Mme Lidoine, defines martyrdom as a prideful act, while the sub-prioress, Mère Marie, successfully convinces her sisters into martyrdom—only to become, by a cruel strike of fate, the single nun to not suffer the guillotine and carry on the cult of the Carmelites by herself. The finale, with the guillotine cutting off the singers at irregular intervals, is absolutely chilling.
In a culture that highlights the ego above all else, the collective conscience of this ensemble in an engaging performance transcends the stage and instills in the audience a sense of hope above terror. I ran home and immediately started watching the 1960 movie adaptation of the opera’s storyline, which exchanges Poulenc’s music for the famous faces of Jeanne Moreau and Alida Valli. Is this a Lesbian opera or movie? If the prerequisite for a Lesbian movie is romance, maybe not. But when it comes to community, collegiality, and cooperation, even shared love, I think so. If anything, it might be the most feminist of operas out there. Last month, prompted by Elif Batuman’s latest New Yorker Essay, a friend and I finally read our way through Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality” text from over a generation ago. Batuman cites this historical essay in almost everything she does or writes these days; meanwhile, in revisiting the conversation, I found myself reconsidering both Il Conformista and Dialogues through Rich’s lens.
When Blanche de la Force renounces her brother and aristocratic titles for the Carmelites, we feel a hint of what Adrienne Rich is talking about in her essay, in that the convent becomes a system of empowerment for an anxiety-riddled young woman who resists heteronormativity:
If Il Conformista is bleak and disastrously cynical (Bertolucci called it a “catharsis of evil”) about repression and politics, then Dialogues of the Carmelites is its inverse.
Other Gay Things I am Reading/Watching
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
Halfway through this coming-of-age novel set in in a Pakistani-American community in Corona, Queens, and narrated by a queer first-gen adolescent, I feel like I am reading a book that has been around for much longer, while also being completely fresh and new. Here’s a cultural item that functions as a passport, allowing an intimate look at a world one can’t easily access as an outsider, even if geographically the space is just a bike ride away.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (again)
Last month, Criterion Channel placed my favorite hidden lesbian Hitchcock movie front and center, and friends invited us over for a re-watch. I hadn’t seen the movie since they made an opera four years ago, and the shock and glee of Marnie persists. Marnie is ridiculous, but I cannot help feel seen by Hitchcock, by his placement of yonic symbols in the shape of pouches and purses, by the strange side-eyes cast by women at one another.
The American Friend + Ripley’s Game (again)
I love Patricia Highsmith, but I was strangely disappointed by Talented Mr. Ripley-follow-up Ripley Under Ground, which plodded along until it came to an extremely macabre and disturbing conclusion. I much more enjoyed part three, Ripley’s Game, and recently re-watched the gorgeous Wim Wenders rendition of elements from both novels, The American Friend (1977), as well as Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002). The book and its adaptation brim with a complicated homoeroticism in which two characters are drawn in by their opposing moral standpoints. Cavani, of course, made the grotesque La pelle (1981) as well as messy cult classic The Night Porter (1974). Ripley’s Game might be one of the best Ripley adaptations out there, with a terrifying John Malkovich who goes from slaughter to cultural relish within literal seconds. Highsmith would have loved Ripley’s Game, as much as she hated the casting of Dennis Hopper in The American Friend. Wim Wenders Adaptation seems more allegorical than Cavani’s, a depiction (like so much of Highsmith’s work) of post-war expat-ism in the 20th century, of American-ness (represented by Dennis Hopper and Nicholas Ray) and German-ness (Bruno Ganz’ Swiss dialect makes an appearance), and highlighted by amazing displays of urban infrastructure (Hamburg, Paris, Tribeca).
Notes in the Margins
Links and other Morsels of Lesbian/Queer Culture I Recently Indulged
Zadie Smith wrote the essay to break all essays on Tar, so did Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. I have a crush on both.
Susan Sontag would have counted her 90th birthday this past month; I’ve been picking my way through the Sigrid Nunez memoir, Sempre Susan, that is simply dripping with gossip and Nunez’ signature, tender-as-a-sharp-claw scrutiny (I love it, but all the TMI is almost making my teeth hurt).
Maggie Millner’s taught, sexy poetry has thrilled me since I read her, blushing, in the Paris Review last summer—Kamran Javadizadeh summed up her work, which includes an upcoming collection, neatly in the New Yorker.
I loved this vulnerable story of queer desire, up at Evergreen Review, by Braudie Blais-Billie
Finally, I had a short story published in the Missouri Review last week! It’s been ages since I have published any fiction at all, and this is a big honor.