Category: Art, Film & Music

Just back from seeing The Well-Digger’s Daughter for the second time, but not for the last time!

I see it’s called an art house film… so a film that has no violence or sex pictured in it, seems to be an art house film apparently. Good for art. So I didn’t feel like a voyeur having to watch heaving bottoms, and listen to other people’s orgasms, and I didn’t have to feel like an accomplice watching fighting, stabbings, shooting, and mayhem.

Instead I watched a story of life and death, love and birth, human pain and human greatness. It was set in the magic countryside of Provence, harsh, rocky, grey mountain ridges giving way to long stretches of olive groves, long avenues of ancient poplars, clear pebbly streams with dappled water beneath the branching pale green trees, and empty, dusty white roads. The well-digger’s farm house was the dream of most westerners, a weathered stone house with faded green shutters at each window, stone sinks and arched door-ways inside, pottery jugs and big old- fashioned soup plates for the cassoulet for dinner. Old barns, a stone parapeted well, and views over empty country-side completed the dream. Long shadows lay across green meadows, and grasses swayed in the evening breezes.

It was that time before telephones, so children ran errands, and felt useful, people wrote letters which were kept and treasured, instead of e-mails quickly deleted, everyone walked miles for lack of public transport and was fit and healthy, while children got enough sleep every night without TV or computer games to keep them awake. It was that time before sprays and pesticides, wind farms and traffic fumes, tourists and agribusiness had changed the old ways, the old beauties, the centuries-old peace.

The music – some of it from old twenties and thirties recordings – pulled at the heart strings the way those wistful plangent sounds of old records always do. And the clothes! – old fashioned thirties summer dresses, elegant coats and hats and shoes. A green crocodile pochette that matched a shapely green coat… a clotted cream coloured cardigan edged with wine dark ribbon, matching the thin maroon stripe in the girl’s cream dress… the scalloped collar on a simple black dress, embroidered round the edge of the scallops in dull red and green.

But these were the delicious details. The people were the story -the well digger- implacable and generous, warm hearted and narrow minded, honest and angry all at the same time; the other father, weary, hen-pecked, dignified and distant; the possessive, petulant mother; the spoiled only son; the well-digger’s troubled, tragic daughter. The emotions of love and lust, anger and unrequited devotion, shame and guilt, grief and joy, swirled round these people as the Second World War broke out. And the birth of an unwanted baby brought together all these warring people and humbled their pride, softened their grief, opened their hearts, melted their anger, dissolved their arrogance and dispelled their petulance.

There were some lovely lines. The rejected lover, prepared to marry the girl he loved, who was carrying another man’s child, is told by her angry, bitter father: “Felipe, you have no honour”, to which Felipe replies, “I have no honour, but I have plenty of love”. (How much pain and grief men’s honour has brought to women, and still does, as we read of so-called honour killings, and women strangled, stoned and even shot by machine gun, so as not to diminish this strange concept of murderous egotism, false pride, and cruelty wrongly named honour.)

When the possessive grandfather tries to claim authority over the baby, his new son-in law says, “He doesn’t belong to you. You belong to him.” And the other grandfather replies, “That’s right, the old can only serve the young”, like all grandparents, putty in the hands of his grandchild.

No doubt everyone who sees this film will understand it differently, depending on their age. But as a grandparent, it reminded me of the days when my grandchildren were small, and I discovered for the first time the bliss of giving unconditional love. The sort of love which accepts the loved one as a perfect and beautiful soul, knowing that all the foibles and problems that parents see, don’t really exist; the sort of love that knows with perfect certainty that their grand-children will grow up to be strong and good even if they don’t eat all their vegetables!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Padding is what families need in cold weather, and these two puddings fill the bill. They are hot plain puddings, but also delicious, and old-fashioned puddings are becoming fashionable again. They both need sultanas, washed and then soaked in boiling water to plump them up and make them juicy.

The first, batter pudding, needs the same ingredients as Yorkshire pudding, eight ounces of self raising flour, two eggs, and enough milk and a little water to mix to a pouring batter, plus a pinch of salt. Beat the eggs into the flour and salt, and add the liquid gradually. Leave in the fridge for half an hour. Heat a baking pan with a knob of fat until smoking, and pour in the batter, which you’ve just beaten again. Add the drained sultanas, and bake in a hot oven for an hour, or until risen and cooked. Serve immediately with knobs of butter and brown sugar sprinkled over. A hot and homely pudding.

Bread and butter pudding is the same. You need six slices of good bread – not white supermarket pap. Slice them, butter them and cut them into squares or triangles. Arrange them in a two pint pie dish. Sprinkle over the drained sultanas, and then beat three eggs with three to four ounces of sugar. Add the milk, and pour it over the bread. The pie dish should only be half full. Leave to soak for at least half an hour, before baking in a moderate oven (about 350degrees) for about an hour, or until the custard is set. Eat hot.

Food for Thought

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, 1881 – 1955. Jesuit, philosopher, eminent palaeontologist and mystic, who was banned from teaching, preaching and writing by the Catholic church, his books denied publication, and his most important book, ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ only published after his death. He is still persona non grata with the church fifty three years after his death.

I saw La Traviata yesterday for the second time in three days, and I’d see it again if I could. Typically, the ultra-modern designer had imposed his ideas on the story and the staging, but he couldn’t change the glorious music, and the heart-breaking love story – so much more moving than Romeo and Juliet.

So Natalie Dessay was required to play Violetta as a heavy drinking tart, not the elegant refined courtesan the real Marie Plessis was. On the other hand, the power and the glory of Il Magnifico, the Russian bass-baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, lifted the angry, arrogant, interfering father, the in-advertent villain of the piece, to heights of nobility. There was hardly a woman in the audience or at the New York Met, from which this opera was beamed, who wouldn’t have flung herself at his feet, as the roar from the audience testified. And of course, he’s not just a glorious voice, but also a pretty face – named one of the world’s fifty most beautiful people in a People magazine poll.

But tart or not, Natalie Dessay reduced me to tears with the pathos and beauty of her singing and acting in this part. She looked as ravaged at the end as though she really was dying both of TB and a broken heart..

I hurried home and googled Greta Garbo playing the same role in the film ‘Camille’ in 1936. When I was a teenager, my stepmother asked me to go to a cinema matinee with her. I went from politeness to see this old film from her sentimental past.

I sat through the matinee with her, and she left to go home. I sat through the next showing, and finally the last showing that evening. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. When I looked at it again yesterday I felt the same. Garbo, at the height of her beauty was utterly ravishing, and the young Robert Taylor was an arrestingly beautiful young man. Garbo played Violetta, or Marguerite, as she was called in this film, with infinite refinement, delicacy and tenderness. Her clothes were exquisite, and even her shoulders emerging from glorious confections of tulle and taffeta, were achingly beautiful. I don’t think there has been another cinema star as beautiful and refined as she was.

The interesting thing was that the real Marie Plessis was just as beautiful and refined. Brought up by an alcoholic father, begging on the streets at ten, sent to be a comfort woman at twelve to an old man, escaping to be a seamstress in Paris, she didn’t earn enough to live on, but found, in conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s notorious phrase, that she had a gold mine between her legs. By the age of sixteen she had taken up with the young nobleman who was the model for Alfredo in the opera, she had learned to read and write, to ride side-saddle, and acquire all the accomplishments she saw that other women had. She was a fast learner. And by then she had already become a celebrated courtesan.

The country idyll with her young nobleman was broken up by his father just as in the opera, which was based on Alexandre Dumas’ book ‘La Dame aux Camellias’, expensive camellias being her favourite flower.

She was eventually re-united with the young nobleman, and they married in England, though the marriage was invalid in France. But it gave her a title and respectability. The nobleman faded out of her life, but she continued her amazing career, having an affair with Liszt, who appears to have been the only man she ever really loved, and with Dumas who wrote her story. Her salon in Paris included some of the most eminent men of the age, including Honore de Balzac, Alfred de Musset and Theophile Gautier. And then she died at the age of twenty-three.

I’m humbled at what she achieved in such a short space of time, totally self-educated, never showing any sign of her appalling childhood, but personifying grace, beauty, “ a great deal of heart, and a great liveliness of spirit” according to her lover, Franz Liszt.. She conquered one of the mostly highly civilised societies in the world. What a woman. What a girl.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets.

When I was a single mother supporting two children on a tiny wage, tins of salmon were a staple in my cupboard. This recipe for fish cakes involves a tin of salmon or tinned herrings, mashed potato, an egg, and mixed dried herbs.

Boil and mash the potatoes with butter but only a dash of milk since you want them to be quite firm. Break up the salmon, or herrings in tomato sauce if you can get them, and mix them into the potatoes, including the tomato sauce. You need to work out the right balance of fish to potato, but I find one tin will make about eight round fishcakes. Add an egg to the potatoes and fish to bind them, plus lots of mixed herbs to taste, salt and pepper. Divide into fishcakes and roll in flour. Fry till both sides are nice and crisp and the inside hot. If you have any left over, they can be re-heated in the oven, and I often made a double quantity so there were plenty the next day. Serve with green vegetables or a salad, and make a tomato sauce with fried tomatoes, olive oil, and a touch of sugar if you feel like it.