Binoche, Brando, Bye Bye

Sunday, August 24, 2014

In the 15 minutes I have before a tv special on the Tower of London's history, let me put Juliet Binoche atop Marlon Brando, so to speak, and of course mention Ecuador.

Last night's tv showing of A Streetcar Named Desire sent me to my last blank video tape, but the film I saw today made me glad that last night's taping ended before the immortal last lines of Vivian Leigh and Kim Hunter, however sad I was when the tape ended before the film last night.  The tape reached its end before it could record Leigh saying,  "I've always appreciated the kindness of strangers" and Hunter saying, "I'll never go back there."  Today's superior film stopped my lament for those lost lines.

I'd have been wiser to record Binoche's film Certified Copy, better scripted, acted, set, and directed than the Elia Kazan USian film of Tennessee Williams' play about dissolute Southern USians and brutish immigrant conditions in New Orleans.  Kazan did betray progressive people to a 1950s US government committee intent on purging leftists.  What quality from such a compromised artist?

Happily, France and Italy had no such purge, then or since.  Artists could produce art without looking over their shoulders for official approval.  Binoche and co-star William Shimell, an opera singer, far more deeply and sensitively and realistically probe the depths of human relationships than howling Marlon Brando, his earnest wife, and her nutty sister do.

So see it, even if you move to Ecuador, as someone I met today plans to do.  A retired ironworker, single with dog, told me today that he planned to pension himself in that equatorial clime.  I told him of a person I know who recently moved to Europe and I commended him for bravery and open-mindedness similar to that person's.

Now to the Tower of London's history on tv, which, had tv existed when the Tower was doing its bloody work for England, might have reduced the level of injustice of that work.  That's something to put your head around.  Also, rejoice that you have a head.