Paul s'en va (2004) - full transcript
The opening sequence serves as a brief individual curtain raiser for the characters. Introduced individually by title they all dispose of something: breakfast left-overs, tissues, a fag end or in one case a condom, each with a similar exclamation and a convention-defying smile direct to camera. The film borrows formal elements from theatrical and literary tradition. It has chapters subdivided into sequences marked by day, character and famous writer. Each character has an individual role to play in these sequences. The plot is that of drama students (which they were in real life) reacting to the disappearance of Paul, their professor, receiving individual missions to fulfil despite his absence. The tasks are discovered in his flat, uncovered through the curiosity of his students and the imperative of one of them for a place to squat. Paul's fate is constantly speculated on, provoking our curiosity and masking the fluidity of a project which crosses ambiguously but fluidly between a movie project and student presentations. Shot mostly in naturalistic light and close up, with occasional location shots the film is sustained by speculation about Paul's disappearance and the energy of its young cast. It's not commercial but it's engaging.
PAUL IS LEAVING
A THEATRICAL GAME PROPOSED
TO 17 YOUNG ACTORS AND ACTRESSES
AT THE DRAMATIC ARTS
CONSERVATORY OF GEVEVA
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY ALAIN TANNER
PROLOGUE
MONDAY, MAY 5
BETWEEN 5 AND 10 A.M.
You really want me to go?
You hate me that much?
Don't be ridiculous.
Things are great between us.
But I don't want you to sleep here.
Why?
Because I don't want
to wake up beside you.
Why?
It would be like we were in love,
and we're not.
I like you.
I like having sex with you...
You like that with everyone.
That's not true.
I have someone in my life,
but he's never here.
I could wake up next to him,
not with anyone else.
-But you can sleep with other people.
-Yeah, I like that.
So you're kicking me out?
-Where am I gonna go?
-I don't know. Wherever you want.
You know I'm homeless.
So you're used to it.
That's real nice.
You'll find someplace.
And don't forget to take your condom.
Here's a Kleenex.
The garbage can is behind the door.
How romantic.
You could take the garbage down.
Then I won't have to get up early.
Here we go.
Ew.
Gross.
Bingo.
Gross.
Shit!
Hey!
Let's go.
Is everyone here?
Let's do the salon scene.
Trissotin, Armand, Henriette,
Belize, and Philamatte,
places, please.
Everyone else, be quiet.
Thank you.
"Will she, nill she, quick,
"Out she goes!
From your apartment richly lined,
"Where that ingrate's
outrageous mind
"At your fair life
her javelin throws."
"Ah! gently.
Allow me to breathe, I beseech you."
Marion, please.
You're doing too much.
You're saying to Trissotin,
"Stop, I can't bear it,"
but no need to swoon.
-More concrete.
-Yes.
Let's go from there.
"Ah! gently.
Allow me to breathe, I beseech you."
"Give us time to admire, I beg."
"One feels, at hearing these verses,
an indescribable something
"that goes through one's inmost soul
and makes one feel quite faint."
CHAPTER 1
THE DISAPPEARANCE
TUESDAY, MAY 6
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
"The widely and rapidly spreading
"devastation of language
"not only undermines
" aesthetic and moral responsibility
"in every use of language.
"It is rooted
"in the destruction
of the human being."
-You're leaving?
-Yeah.
I don't feel like listening
to Mr. Paul B.
I don't care for his grand theories.
I want to be an actress,
not a sociologist
or an anthropologist
or any other kind of -ologist.
If you enjoy this stuff, stay.
-You'll get in trouble.
-I don't care.
Do you like this stuff?
Not really. I don't really get it.
But he's nice.
And it can be good
to get out of the theater sometimes.
No.
You should never leave.
You have to live with the texts,
breathe them constantly.
Acting isn't an occupation.
It's a vocation. It's absolute.
You want to die on the stage,
don't you?
The saint and martyr of the stage.
You're screwed.
What's he doing?
Did you see?
Margot's not here, either.
That's odd.
What's that got to do with it?
Paul's obviously a lady's man.
What time is it?
What time is it?
10:15 a.m.
The teacher's late.
He's usually on time.
Sorry, I'm late.
Hey, Momo, did you bring Paul B.?
-Why, is he not here?
-Not yet.
What are you always carrying around
in that bag?
My treasure, or my house,
depends on the day.
Did you notice?
Paul and Margot are both missing.
I always thought
Margot had a thing for Paul B.
Maybe they're on a lover's cruise.
Oh, shut up.
I know he has seduced all of you,
and Margot had the winning number.
Yeah, right.
Two hours of break.
He's not coming.
You like that, huh?
Oh, yes.
He bores me stiff.
He's probably sick.
Did he call the administration?
No news from them.
They called his house. No answer.
Isn't that odd?
Yeah.
Maybe Margot can explain.
Again with that? You're idiots!
Should we sit there?
Don't you think
he's been acting strange recently?
I didn't notice. Strange how?
I don't know.
Weird. Less close to us.
He was always a bit distant.
He's not from the same family.
What family?
Oh, right,
"the big family of actors."
Sounds like you know
more about him that we do.
Did you see him outside of class?
It happened.
"It happened"?
What's that supposed to me?
What's "it"?
Is '"it" private lessons?
-Ah...
-Come on, tell me.
I have no comment.
So you're hiding something.
If you saw him outside of class,
it wasn't to decode
-the signs of the contemporary world.
-No.
-It's my business.
-You could have told me.
We don't have
to tell each other everything.
Some things you keep to yourself.
I knew Paul was a skirt-chaser.
So, Margot took up the baton?
No. Leave Margot alone.
You're going to regret it.
Regret it?
You three, you militants,
you're his groupies.
You should know where he is.
We went by his house.
Nobody answered.
His voicemail has been shut off.
We have no idea.
Hello, ma'am. I'm calling
from Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Did you get our catalog?
Did anything catch your eye?
You don't have skin problems?
Everyone does.
He just wants some peace and quiet.
We went to see him a few days ago.
We had an argument.
But that's not why he's gone.
I'm not so sure.
You argued?
Hello, sir. Is your wife home?
I'm calling
from Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
She's not home?
We have products for men, too.
There's no reason why men
should neglect their skin.
Pardon me?
You want to know
whether the skin on my butt
is too fat or too dry?
He hung up.
I didn't even have time to check.
Butt-skin or not,
we did have an argument.
About what?
He doesn't believe
in activism anymore.
And you do?
We want to fight. Don't you?
Depends on what it's about.
Not necessarily in the streets.
What's the use
of getting beat up by riot police?
I learned lots of stuff.
It was good for me.
Well, he figured that out
30 years ago, so of course he's done.
It's not normal.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Did you get our catalog?
Oh, you have perfect skin?
Shall I call back in 50 years?
How old are you?
Ah, twenty years old, I see.
Well, 50 years is a long time.
That'll be around 2050.
Unfortunately, that'll be
the year of the great panic.
The great panic?
You really want to know?
Well, with the greenhouse gases,
all the mafias,
the polar ice caps
will have melted...
We'll have water up to our knees.
Panic.
Our current lifestyle is doomed.
By the time we realize that,
it'll be too late.
You didn't know?
It'll be too late.
The world will be chaos.
I'm scaring you?
No, the scary times are 2030.
That's not the panic.
The scare of 2030?
That's when capitalism breaks down.
No big deal.
The panic?
That's when everyone
is trying to flee.
Your neighbor is getting the hell
out, so you do, too,
because you assume
your neighbor knows something.
You don't get it?
That's OK. I'll call back in 2050.
Bye now.
Paul told you that?
No, that's the Maison Soleil.
He told us we didn't understand,
that violence doesn't work anymore.
He has lost his illusions.
He's kind of bitter and cynical now.
Not cynical...
He got upset when we said
his generation screwed things up.
He said there's no utopias anymore
and that the world
will collapse
without us having to help it along.
He calls it
"the slow-motion apocalypse."
-So he thinks it's funny.
-No, it's not funny.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Excuse me. Goodbye.
Shit! I'm sick of this.
So he doesn't have
any ideas anymore?
No, he does.
That instead of destroying,
we should create something beautiful.
Why not?
With his past,
we were hoping for something else.
-Like blowing up the system.
-And he's talking about beauty.
There was a misunderstanding.
He thinks his points of reference
aren't useful to us,
that he can't help us anymore.
It's up to us now.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
It was a nice summer Sunday.
I was walking in the countryside
with my son, who was eight then.
He was picking dandelions
by the road,
making a bouquet for his mom.
I pointed out that the sky
was completely blue,
not one cloud.
He looked up,
pointed at the peaks
of the Jura mountains, and said,
"No, look, there's a cloud there."
He was right.
And he said,
"The Good Lord is sitting on it."
"The Good Lord?" I said.
"Yes," he said back.
"He made everything:
"the mountains, the animals,
the flowers."
I didn't want to contradict him.
I thought about what I might tell him
in a few years.
First, this:
that the simple act of saying
"believe in God"
is irrefutable proof
that He doesn't exist,
because if He did,
there'd be no need to believe in Him.
He would simply exist,
like the little cloud in the sky.
If you have to believe He exists,
that means you can just as well
not believe it,
that there is doubt,
and in the case of doubt,
err on the side of caution.
God is therefore merely an idea
adopted by humans
to ward off their fear
of the unknown and of death.
And as the centuries passed,
we started to realize
that it wasn't such a great idea.
We kept walking,
and my son went on
gathering dandelions.
I remembered a Jacques Prévert line
that goes,
"What could God have been up to
before Creation?"
In the sky,
the little cloud had frayed apart,
and then it disappeared completely.
-How's the pizza business?
-Fine, fine.
I don't know how people eat
that stuff, but they do.
Maybe you should
open your own business.
We would make a good team.
With you in the kitchen...
We'd get married.
Sounds great!
You only got five bucks of gas?
That won't get you very far.
Yeah, could you help me out?
Sure. Take 12 bucks more.
I'll reset the counter on the pump.
With any luck, the next customer
will cover your little gift.
-When do you get off?
-Ten o'clock.
-I'll pick you up.
-To go where? Have pizza?
No. Since we're going to work
together, we could cut to the chase.
Not the wedding: the wedding night.
Oh, really?
I'm too tired.
I'm going to go to bed.
All alone?
All alone.
I don't think people
have enough sex in life.
Margot!
Margot!
Someone's calling you.
Stop! It's Momo.
This is ridiculous. It's 11:00 p.m.
Jesus Christ!
If he does this every night...
We have better things to do.
THURSDAY, MAY 15
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
"The world is not only
dominated by the masters.
"It is also dominated
by the intellectuals.
"The cultural mastery of the world
brings happiness.
"Don't let yourself be tempted
by the champions of misfortune,
"of stupid hostility, of seriousness
joined with ignorance."
"Be happy!"
"Gentrification is an integral part
of the class struggle.
"That is why I have cited
and continue to cite
"Marx's expression:
genocide, cultural genocide."
-Is it good?
-Needs salt.
-It has no flavor.
-Nothing has any flavor.
"The dominant class,
whose new mode of production
"has created a new form of power,
"and, as a result,
a new form of culture,
"has carried out in recent years
a genocide
"of Italy's distinctive
working-class cultures.
"It is the greatest cultural genocide
in Italian history."
-May as well eat at McDonald's.
-No, that's gross.
These are fresh carrots at least.
And the chicken's not so bad.
It has flavor.
It's a fake flavor.
Tastes like a factory.
These chickens are raised in cages
by the million.
And they're blind.
They poke their eyes out?
No, it's because they live
their whole lives in the dark.
"The young Roman underclasses
have lost their culture,
"that is, their way of being,
of behaving,
"of speaking, of assessing reality.
"They have been given a model
of a consumerist, bourgeois life.
"They have been destroyed
and gentrified in the classic sense."
Will you stop reading us that stuff?
We're here to eat.
-What is it?
-It's Pasolini.
-What's it about?
-Cultural genocide.
What's that got to do
with hormone-raised chickens?
Where'd you get it?
Mr. Paul B. gave it to me.
I knew it. The guru strikes again.
He's not coming.
Hi, everyone!
Margot! Where have you been?
Did you have a nice trip
with Mr. Paul B.?
What are you talking about?
You left without a word,
so we started to wonder.
-Do I owe you an explanation?
-Paul B. has gone missing.
Missing? So?
I was in Ticino.
You just go off on vacation
like that, whenever you want?
No, I wasn't on vacation.
Paul asked me to go film an interview
with an old guy who fought
in the Spanish Civil War
with the International Brigades.
He was so interesting.
He was 16 when he went to Spain
to fight fascism.
Sixteen years old, can you imagine?
I hitchhiked back last night,
all the way from Ticino.
It's like the other end of the world.
So Paul disappeared?
-Disappeared how?
-Off the face of the Earth.
So you weren't with me.
Obviously.
I gotta run.
I have to go to the vet.
"When was life every truly ours?
"When are we ever what we truly are?
"We are ill-reputed, nothing more
than vertigo and emptiness,
"a frown in the mirror,
horror and vomit.
"Life is never ours.
It always belongs to the others.
"Life is no one's. We are all life.
"Bread of the sun for the others,
the others that we all are."
"When I am, I am another.
"My acts are more mine
when they are the acts of others.
"In order to be, I must be another,
leave myself,
"search for myself in the others,
"the others that don't exist
if I don't exist,
"the others that give me
total existence.
"There is no me.
We are always us.
"Life is other, always there,
further off,
"beyond you and beyond me,
always on the horizon.
"Life which leads us astray
and makes us strangers,
"that invents our face
"and wears it away, hunger for being,
O death, our bread."
No news, no messages.
No one's answering at his house.
It's becoming worrisome.
It's been two weeks. This is weird.
Well, it's 10:20 a.m.
He's not coming.
See you, crew!
Something happened to him.
I bet he jumped in the Rhone,
where he liked to go for walks.
He's not suicidal!
Lots of people go missing,
thousands every year.
Most of them are teenagers
who run away from home
and come back three days later.
We have to do something.
We can't just wait around like this.
Let's go to his place,
open his door with a locksmith,
go to the cops,
go check the hospitals.
Maybe his past caught up with him.
Some other old leftists
came after him.
Yeah, right.
That's all ancient history.
History is never ancient.
It's never over.
Maxime, can you bring me
the blackboard, please?
Recall Marx's observation,
dear students.
Karl Marx, in his "18th Brumaire."
All great events and characters
from world history appear twice.
First as tragedy, then as farce.
He uses the example of
Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III.
But think about today.
Bush the Father
and the Bush the Son,
it's the same carnage.
Not quite.
George H. W. Bush,
the Gulf War, that's the tragedy.
W., the son, with his liar's
poker face, that's the farce.
It's the same thing repeated,
but worse or with less credibility.
Zero credibility!
It's the conception of history
as a spiral.
If you look at the spiral from above,
it's a circle.
Things repeat in the same spot.
Looks like an apple.
If you take a cross-section,
you can see that the two events
are superimposed, but differently.
They're not in the same spot
on the spiral. I rest my case.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21
PIERRE GUYOTAT
"The last man in human history
will be a slave.
"There is no arms race.
"There is only a race toward slavery,
"for whom politicians
will be the last master.
"I am not interested in sex.
I am a politician.
"I am hunting down
the perfect slave.
"The last man, the last slave,
"will die with my insane language
in his throat.
"In my view, prostitution,
free or not, consenting or not,
"has always been
and still remains slavery.
"My insanity
"is this attempt to develop
a language, a music,
"that the last man, this last slave,
"will be able to use
to say to his master, his politician,
"that his master has the means
to take ownership
"of his body and of his voice,
"but that he does not have the means
to take ownership of his thoughts.
"Thought
"cannot be bought or sold.
"No master can own
"both the sexual organs
and its thoughts."
-Do you come here often?
-Every day.
Every day?
I come to see if Paul B.'s body
is floating in the Rhone.
You're crazy.
I don't see anything.
THURSDAY, MAY 22
PIERRE MICHON
"I have rarely prayed.
"In early September 2001,
"my mother, who, as an adult,
"had attempted
to be both my father and mother,
"and who, in her advanced years,
could have been my daughter...
"My mother was dying in the hospital
in the small town of G.
"There were huge trees by her window,
a wall of leaves.
"Every day of that late summer
was beautiful.
"The sun shone a thousand
different ways on that green wall
"under the eyes of a dying woman
who had loved trees.
"I saw her every day,
"but when September 7th came,
"I saw that the time had come.
"My mind saw it,
"but my heart couldn't follow.
"She was gasping.
She couldn't speak.
"She had entered that phase
of the wandering soul
"that the Tibetans call the Bardo.
"I sat beside her and,
"after a moment
whose duration I cannot define,
"hours or minutes,
"I stood up quickly, went out
and ran into a bookstore
"to buy some books."
"When I went back into my mother's
room, she wasn't gasping anymore.
"She wasn't breathing anymore.
"I held her hand.
It was still quite warm.
"The nurse having declared her dead,
I was left alone.
"Only my mind was there,
and I observed, like before.
"The books were sitting patiently
at the foot of the bed
"in their little envelope,
"near the feet of the body
that are so small.
"The green wall
was good for the mind.
"The mind was warm, too,
as it always is.
"I should pray, call to the heart
and the soul, which she deserved.
"I tried one of the things
I had learned in Sunday school,
"probably the Lord's Prayer.
"I very quickly stopped.
"And then the text,
"the prayer, asserted itself.
It came from far away,
"as though sent by another,
"and I spoke it aloud, so that, in
some way, the dead woman would hear:
"'Brothers, men who live after us,
"'Harden not your hearts against us,
"'For if you take pity
on us poor men,
"'God will have more mercy
toward you.'
"My heart and soul came running.
"I recited the poem from beginning
to end as it should be:
"in tears.
"I stood before my mother's body
"as one should:
"in tears."
"I prayed one other time,
"in October, a few years earlier.
"A child was born at night.
"I had just returned home near dawn.
"Something came to me,
the desire to pray,
"to open myself.
"Sitting on my bed, calm,
"smiling, if one smiles
when one is alone,
"I recited aloud,
from beginning to end,
"Boaz Asleep.
"I recited it as should be:
"calmly, accepting of everything,
"hoping against all reason,
the glory that always comes."
How's it coming?
Why'd you ask me to come?
This is Paul's house.
I have the keys to his place.
You have his keys? Why?
-That doesn't concern you.
-I see.
If I'd guessed...
We have to figure out
what's going on.
I'm scared to go alone.
What if he's dead in there?
-We should call the cops.
-I don't want them involved.
I can't stand not knowing.
Maybe we'll find something:
a letter, a clue, something.
You're good with computers.
He has one.
OK, let's go.
Have you found anything?
A letter, anything?
I don't see anything.
There's no dead body.
That's something.
Here's the computer.
I don't know anything about them.
You just open it.
But it's not very legit...
There might be confidential stuff.
Given the situation,
it's worth a shot.
Look.
There's an autobiography.
Looks like he was involved
in the revolutionary groups.
Anything more recent?
Yeah, hang on.
There's a file called "Project 17."
17... There are 17 of us
in his class. Maybe it's about us.
Yeah, look.
There are 17 icons,
each one with our names.
That's funny.
Is there anything
about his disappearance?
Hang on.
I don't see anything.
But there's a document
which is an introduction.
Look. Read that.
"Who, in light of the current
intellectual suffocation,
"does not feel the senseless
but visceral, necessary desire
"to, through the power
of one's mind,
"leave this world
completely defined by money,
"a world that risks
drifting toward barbarity?"
That sounds like him.
Quiet! Quiet!
Listen up, everyone.
I have a lot to say.
Can we turn the music down? Michel?
Michel and I went
to Paul's apartment.
-His place? Did you see him?
-He wasn't there.
He wasn't dead, either.
Michel looked on his computer
and found messages for each of us.
-Messages?
-Yeah. In addition to some quotes,
he gave each of us a mission
to carry out now that he's gone,
as a goodbye.
But where is he? You don't know?
No. No idea.
We printed the missions out.
We'll read that to you.
There are really all different types.
Mathias, you're going swan hunting
in a mall,
and you'll say:
"Hey,
swans are an endangered species.
"Go duck-hunting instead."
Even after he's gone,
he's still a pain in the ass.
I want to be an actor,
not a swan hunter.
I'll take it.
I want to do the swan hunting.
This one's for Marina.
It's pretty mysterious,
but it means he knew a lot about us.
Especially the ladies...
What is it?
It must be related to your
environmental focus. It's simple:
"Marry your river."
Does that mean anything to you?
I think so.
Smells like mystery to me.
Probably.
Theater is Marina's calling.
But marrying a river...
-For Marie, it's Pasolini.
-No marriage there.
He mentioned a book for you,
but we didn't find it.
I already have it.
He gave it to me a few weeks ago.
This one's funny.
It's for the shock troops:
Mirabelle, Madeleine, and Monica.
You're supposed to write
a little play,
around ten minutes long,
so it's not too much,
based on a quote from
the British newspaper The Guardian.
He suggests checking out
Alfred Jarry.
-That's weird.
-What's the quote?
Here we go:
"American has an umbrella the size
of Manhattan up its ass."
That's a tough one.
I'm going out. It's bad luck
to open an umbrella indoors.
You could do a five-act tragedy
on that.
OK, next. For Mouche,
he wants you to think
about what is truly pornographic
these days.
Now there's something interesting.
I'll do the photos.
-As a model?
-No, as photographer.
Thank God. I was afraid for a sec.
You can just read the TV guide.
Momo, this one's for you.
He wants you to draw up
a list of useless objects
that our lives are full of.
He's got the wrong man.
Why would he ask me that?
I don't have a pot to piss in.
The last time I had an apartment,
the court bailiff
said I was "unseizable."
Actually, Momo, there's a new law
that says garbage bags
are seizable property.
Margot, if you're telling the truth,
then your mission is complete.
The truth about what?
Your interview with the guy
who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
-Mission accomplished!
-Now, on to Marion.
Think about and write
a short text on the following quote
from a contemporary author:
"One man who prays alone,
that's his business.
"Two men who pray together,
that's when things get dangerous."
What? Can you repeat that?
Look around.
A guy who prays alone
never makes war.
Two, that makes them want to.
That's why there aren't
any more wars of religion.
OK, yeah...
For Matteo, it says:
"Is it still possible today
to be a resistance fighter,
"like, for example, during
the German occupation of France?
"Can we still imagine
a resistance fighter
"in the age of surveillance?"
Make a list of the tools
used to surveil society.
-Sure: cell phones.
-Credit cards.
All kinds of cards.
I don't have any.
All the video cameras
on the streets, in stores,
and banks, all over.
-The Internet.
-Et cetera, et cetera.
Resist!
One last one, for Marco.
Uh-oh. I'm scared.
You should be.
You're supposed to draw up
a list of what's intolerable:
intolerable in the strong sense
or the little everyday stuff.
You did a good job
handing out gifts to everyone.
Some were more curses
than blessings, but...
We don't have to accept them,
since the gift-giver isn't here.
You didn't tell us what you got.
This.
The Man Without Qualities,
by Robert Musil. "Read and reflect."
He'd already given it to me
a while back.
Sounds like you two were close.
For a while, yeah.
-Close, close?
-Yeah.
I feel like that book
helped me understand why he left.
And why is that?
It's the end of a world
he once belonged to,
with all its values and requirements,
its sense of proportions,
its revolutionary aspirations...
And a new world comes along
that he doesn't want to belong to,
a world that surely has
its own dreams and beauty,
but he doesn't understand them
and doesn't want to.
FRIDAY, MAY 23
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
"For the time being,
we won't sing of love,
"which sought refuge
beyond the underground passageways.
"We'll sing of fear,
which paralyzes embraces.
"We won't sing of hate,
because it doesn't exist.
"There is only fear,
our father and companion,
"the great fear of prairies,
"seas, and deserts,
the fear of soldiers,
"of mothers, of churches.
"We will sing of the fear
of dictators and of democrats.
"We will sing of the fear of death
and the fear of the afterlife.
"And then we will die of fear,
"and up from our graves will sprout
fearful yellow flowers."
SATURDAY, MAY 24
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
"Thought is nearly impossible
in this day and age.
"It comes at a high price.
"It is true
that one can buy ready-made ideas.
"They're for sale everywhere,
sometimes even for free.
"But that which is free
always proves expensive.
"We're already starting to notice.
"What's the result?
"No advantage and persistent unrest."
Look at our cart! We have too much!
How much money do you have?
Twenty bucks. What about you?
Same. Do you have a credit card?
No, do you?
-Yeah, but I already hit my limit.
-Look at us...
Plus, we wanted to go to the movies
after.
OK, back to square one:
First, we get rid
of everything we don't really want.
Two,
everything we don't have to have.
Three, everything that isn't truly
necessary.
1.60 francs, please.
1.60 francs. That's 80 cents each.
One big one is cheaper
than two small ones.
Hey, what are you doing here?
I'm on my mission.
Remember? I'm swan hunting.
How many have you bagged?
They're everywhere here.
It's hunter heaven.
Heaven or hell.
Want to grab a bite to eat?
I'm starving.
-No, we're going to the movies.
-What are you going to see?
We don't know yet. Thirteen movies
are showing. We'll find one.
OK. Peace!
Everybody looks terrible.
It's making me depressed.
Life makes you not like people
these days.
It's because they don't like
themselves.
On the other hand...
Remember when Breton meets Nadja?
"She carried her head high, unlike
everyone else on the sidewalk.
"She looked so delicate that she
scarcely seemed to touch the ground.
"What was so extraordinary about
what was happening in those eyes?
"What was it they reflected?
Some obscure suffering
"and, at the same time,
some luminous pride?"
I don't feel like it.
But look. There are lots of movies.
That's the problem.
They all seem the same.
Maybe you're right. I don't feel
like it either. Are you hungry?
There's nothing but sweets.
I don't like that.
You never want anything!
Popcorn isn't sweet. Come on!
No way am I letting you eat popcorn.
Let's go!
We have to pay.
I thought it was free
for the first hour.
Shit, we just barely went over.
It's more than the tub of yogurt.
We have bad luck today.
We screwed everything up.
What a disaster.
Thanks. We can cut. Thanks.
Take ten. Thanks.
-How's your mission going?
-What mission?
The ones Paul gave us.
I'm done.
What about you, Mouche?
I haven't had a chance
to think about it.
What about you, Momo?
Me neither.
I have to find an apartment.
Isn't that more important?
What about you?
It's none of your business!
Yes, it is! You don't get it.
There's something bigger going on.
Like what? What a joke.
That's what we're supposed
to figure out, all together.
We could make a video.
You just want to play with a camera.
A project...
There was never any project!
I have enough work,
plus I have to deliver
pizzas at night...
It was just his way
of saying goodbye,
that's it, Margot.
We can make of it what we want.
Throw it out!
There was never any project.
I'm sure you're wrong.
You're all chickening out.
Not us. Ain't that right, Monica?
Yeah, we wrote the play.
About the umbrella?
Yeah. You'll see, it's amazing.
-Is it funny at least?
-Super funny.
See? They did their job.
Yeah, but Paul was their guru.
Ah, the revolution!
Or what's left of it.
He and his friends ruined it all
with their big ideals.
We're fed up.
You all seem to have forgotten
that someone has disappeared.
That's serious.
You keep talking, but I've been going
to the police stations,
to the hospitals.
-And?
-Nothing.
Nothing.
MONDAY, MAY 26
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
"At the end of daybreak,
the disparate stranding,
"the exacerbated stench
of corruption,
"the monstrous sodomies of the host
and the sacrificing priest,
"the impassible beakhead frames
of prejudice and stupidity,
"the prostitutions, the hypocrisies,
the lechery, the treasons,
"the lies, the frauds,
the corruption,
"the panting
of a deficient cowardice,
"the exasperating enthusiasm
of additional chicks,
"the greeds, the hysterias,
the perversions,
"the harlequins of misery,
the cripplings, the itchings,
"the hives,
the tepid hammocks of degeneracy."
"The teratic bulb of the night,
"sprouted from our vileness
and our renunciations."
-Are you closing?
-In five minutes.
How much do you need?
500 bucks. Is that possible?
Yeah, but it has to be worth it,
or I'm screwed.
OK. We'll come in through the back.
I'll give you the key.
Lock the door behind you.
And don't forget to break the window,
or they'll suspect me.
You're a doll.
Thank the lords of oil instead.
Hey, Melanie!
Momo, what are you doing here?
I'm squatting.
What are you carrying around?
I'm making a list of useless objects,
and I'm gathering them, too.
Gathering or stealing?
That's for me to know.
Want to grab a drink? On me.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
"That's exile, a foreign country,
"the inexorable perception of reality
"as it really is
"during those long, lucid hours,
"rare in the flux of human time,
"when the ways of the old country
"abandon you but the new ways
"haven't sufficiently stupefied
you yet."
You've got a nice place here.
You can stay a few nights.
It'll be a nice change from
couch surfing wherever you've been.
But what if Paul comes back
and finds me here?
I don't think he's coming back yet.
But if he did,
I'm sure he'd understand.
Come on, I'll make you a coffee.
There's a big bed back there.
Big enough for two.
CHAPTER 3
THE WORLD
"Ours is a life of puppets,
"and those who control us
"and hold the strings
of the dirty puppet theater
"are banking,
"above all else,
"on the inveterate self-regard
of each and every one of us,
"which makes it so that
under no circumstances
"would anyone wish
to believe himself unfree
"and to admit,
and honestly and sincerely recognize,
"that he is not free."
So, friends, like Paul asked us,
we've prepared
a little theatrical game for you.
It's a little one-act play.
What was the quote
he gave you again?
"America has an umbrella
the size of Manhattan up its ass."
Depending on who plays America,
I'd love to be the umbrella.
In fact, Mathias,
we have just the role for you.
Oh, yeah? I hope it's the umbrella.
Nope. George W. Bush.
Oh, great, here comes the politics
lesson. Everybody, turn to the left!
No, no. This is just for fun.
It's a take-off on Ubu Roi
by Alfred Jarry.
And Ubu, of course, is Bush.
Of course.
They are pretty alike.
Margot, you can do the set design,
if you want.
Why not?
Dubya! Dubya, wake up, Dubya!
Goddamn! By my green candle,
how dare you wake us?
We were just having a nice dream,
like an angel, shit!
God was talking to me,
straight through the Internet.
I'm sorry,
but people are here
who want to see you.
They've already been waiting
for a while now.
Who are these people
who come and disturb our sleep?
They're some weirdos.
They don't look like
people from here.
They said they've come a long way
to see you.
From what I can understand,
they're from the deserts of Barbary.
Perhaps they have come bearing
gifts, like the magi?
Some nice Cubans and coke?
-How many of them are there?
-Two.
Buggery pshite, Mama!
There were three magi.
You should read
the Good Book again, Goddammit!
Did they...
Did they give you their names?
Did they give you their names?
I think...
You think...?
What are you waiting for?
I'm waiting!
My ears are wide open!
-My ears.
-My ears.
Hang on.
One of them was named... Sdam,
King of Babylonia
and a great oil merchant.
He has a big black mustache.
The other was named,
if I'm not mistaken,
Yussama.
He says he's prince of the pump
of finance of the Arabian deserts.
He has a long, thin, gray beard,
and a towel on his head.
Buggery pshite, Mama!
That's them all right!
They're here, in our white house?
Oh boy.
You shouldn't have kept them waiting.
They're friends of mine.
Well, kind of.
-Did they say what they want?
-No.
Idiot! You should have asked them.
You know I can't talk
and think at the same time.
What do I do?
I don't know. Should I show them in?
Of course! Shit!
But these Barbarians scare me.
Bring my faithful friends,
Uncle Berlu and Blair-Blair.
You never know with these two.
My Lordships!
What brings you to my white house?
We finally meet.
We know all about you,
and at last we meet.
Introductions are called for!
You, you're Sdam!
You look just like him!
And you must be Yussama!
You're famous the world over,
now that you blew up
my biggest castles
with your flying muskets.
What a pleasure to have you here!
Allow me to introduce
my faithful servants:
Blair-Blair, King of Great Brootan.
Your faithful servant.
And Uncle Berlu, from Ritaly!
The honor is all yours.
Well, my Lordships,
what brings you to my white house?
What brings you to my kingdom?
What brings you to my kingdom?
We have a request to make of you.
Yes, a favor to ask of you.
You? But you are exiles,
terrorist from the Axis of Evil.
And you come to ask a favor
of the Emperor of Good?
I wonder how you even made it
this far.
And where are my guards?
They were napping.
I'll have them whipped!
In any case,
you would have left us alive,
because you need us.
How's that? Explain yourself.
You need us,
for how could you be
the Emperor of Good
without Evil?
Good exists only because evil exists.
So you need us.
And you know it.
You've used us quite a bit already.
I don't understand a word
of the philosophical gobbledygook,
all right?
You got what you wanted.
Thanks to us,
you're swimming in oil.
The route through the Muslim lands,
through Asia and the Caucasus,
has been opened to you.
And when you die,
you will have earned a seat
beside the god of the infidels.
That's what you wanted.
By my green candle!
Now you will pay your debt to us.
-A debt?
-Yes, a debt.
The time has come to repay the favor.
What's this?
You want to go to Paradise!
What we want
is to live like you.
-Like me?
-Yes, like you.
In your big kingdom, in the light.
What? In Amoorica? Are you kidding?
I'm gonna go nucular!
You're crazy.
What am I supposed to do
with these freaks?
My God, the world is complicated.
Once I get out of Tooxas,
I don't understand a thing.
It's just towelheads
and illegals everywhere,
Barbarians and rich foreigners.
Plus, you've never read a book
in your life.
How do you expect to understand it?
Help me out here.
Call my advisor on foreign countries.
What's she good for?
Find her for me, Mama Dubya!
She's always running around like
a mouse around my white house.
Little Condolence Risotto?
That's the one! Go get her!
Of course.
You're right, Risotto.
We don't need them anymore
Goddamn, the Empire of Good
can stand on its own two feet now!
It can do whatever it wants.
Let's break some heads!
Guards! Guards!
Go get your big shit sticks
and throw these Barbarians
down the trapdoor!
Down the hatch! Down the hatch!
SUNDAY, JUNE 1
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Never let yourself
be put in a coffin!
SAME DAY
BERTOLT BRECHT
What surprises me
is that he adopted the habit
of counting people
and recording them,
like he was scared of losing them.
Usually, they're not like that.
But they want to know
that we're exactly X
and not Y.
As though that mattered
in the slightest
for those dying of starvation.
MONDAY, JUNE 2
PETER HANDKE
"When the child was a child,
it walked with its arms swinging,
"wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
"and this puddle to be the sea.
"When the child was a child,
"it didn't know that it was a child.
"Everything was soulful,
"and all souls were one.
"When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
"had no habits."
"When the child was a child,
"it was the time for these questions:
"'Why am I me,
"'and why not you?'
"'Why am I here,
"'and why not there?'
"'When did time begin,
"and where does space end?'
"'Is life under the sun
not just a dream?'"
CHAPTER 4
PROMISE MADE
SUNDAY, JUNE 8
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
"I would arrive sleek and young
"in this land of mine,
"and I would say to this land
"whose loam is part of my flesh:
"'I have wandered for a long time,
"'and I am coming back to the
deserted hideousness of your sores.
"I would go to this land of mine,
and I would say to it:
"'Embrace me without fear...
"'And if all I can do is speak,
it is for you I shall speak.'"
Oh my God!
Mr. Paul!
Quiet, everybody.
Shut up! I have big news.
Where are you bags?
Did you lose your treasures?
Did you get robbed?
It's serious.
Oh yeah? What happened?
I saw Paul B.
I saw Paul B.
Well, at least he's alive.
-You saw him?
-That's what I'm saying.
-Where?
-In Carouge.
-You weren't dreaming?
-No.
It was him. I'm positive. I saw him.
-How did he look?
-It's hard to say.
Did you talk to him?
No. He turned the corner
and disappeared.
Yeah right. Sounds like a joke.
It's true. It was him.
SATURDAY, JUNE 14
DIDIER-GEORGES GABILY
"Corpses must be
an obsession for me...
"Or they became one
as a result of all this."
"Someone gave me a book, and last
night, I came across this passage:
-'"Corpses if you want.'"
-Let me see.
"Nothing happens, as we all know.
"Or so many things happen that,
"as we all know,
we can't do anything about them.
"We are walking on corpses,
and yet we go on trying to act
"and think as though
we weren't walking
"and trampling upon the corpses of
over a half-century of catastrophes,
"of all manner
of defeat and abdication.
"Today, the corpses have piled up
to our very streets.
"The corpses
of advanced liberal society
"in a state
of advanced decomposition."
"If it's not too late,
"we would like for that
which makes us citizen-actors,
"including our own blind-spots
of still-living citizens,
"including without a real space
for hope, serve to resist,
"even partially,
even infinitesimally,
"the domination
of 'ready-not-to-care' for everyone."
"Because, in spite of it all,
"as with art, so it is with theater:
"that which is best is always
against worldliness
"and all against the world.
"That probably won't stop
the almost-corpses
"from proliferating on our streets.
"It might just make it possible
to see them as beings
"and to give each of them
a face, a name,
"a voice that also speaks
in the theater
"and not on reality TV,
without pity, without pathos,
"the way they envision the world,
and us in it,
"senseless, defeated specimens,
"dying by the force of our dead eyes,
"announcing that which lies in wait
for us if we renounce ourselves,
"if we refuse to fight,
saying: 'Nothing happens.'"
Do you know the Uzbek saying?
"When all has been destroyed,
continue to seek out beauty."
Let's get to work, comrades!
I'm sick of always being
against this, against that.
Anti-globalization.
Anti-constitutionality.
That's the longest word in French.
-Anti-clerical!
-Antinomic!
-Antibiotic!
-Antechamber!
-Anti-tank.
-Antitrust!
-Antifreeze!
-Antilope!
-Antispasmodic!
-Anti-rust!
-Antiquarian!
-Antiquity!
-Let's be anti-anti!
-Two negatives make a positive!
-Let's be for!
-For what, though?
-For dreams!
-For poetry.
For sex!
Yeah, who wants some?
Yeah!
We have to come up with new slogans.
Quiet!
SAME DAY
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
On the blue summer evenings,
I shall go down the paths
Getting pricked by the corn,
crushing the short grass.
In a dream, I shall feel
its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind
bathe my bare head.
I shall not speak.
I shall think about nothing.
But endless love
will mount in my soul.
And I shall travel far, very far,
like a gypsy,
Through the countryside,
as happy as if I were with a woman.
A THEATRICAL GAME PROPOSED
TO 17 YOUNG ACTORS AND ACTRESSES
AT THE DRAMATIC ARTS
CONSERVATORY OF GEVEVA
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY ALAIN TANNER
PROLOGUE
MONDAY, MAY 5
BETWEEN 5 AND 10 A.M.
You really want me to go?
You hate me that much?
Don't be ridiculous.
Things are great between us.
But I don't want you to sleep here.
Why?
Because I don't want
to wake up beside you.
Why?
It would be like we were in love,
and we're not.
I like you.
I like having sex with you...
You like that with everyone.
That's not true.
I have someone in my life,
but he's never here.
I could wake up next to him,
not with anyone else.
-But you can sleep with other people.
-Yeah, I like that.
So you're kicking me out?
-Where am I gonna go?
-I don't know. Wherever you want.
You know I'm homeless.
So you're used to it.
That's real nice.
You'll find someplace.
And don't forget to take your condom.
Here's a Kleenex.
The garbage can is behind the door.
How romantic.
You could take the garbage down.
Then I won't have to get up early.
Here we go.
Ew.
Gross.
Bingo.
Gross.
Shit!
Hey!
Let's go.
Is everyone here?
Let's do the salon scene.
Trissotin, Armand, Henriette,
Belize, and Philamatte,
places, please.
Everyone else, be quiet.
Thank you.
"Will she, nill she, quick,
"Out she goes!
From your apartment richly lined,
"Where that ingrate's
outrageous mind
"At your fair life
her javelin throws."
"Ah! gently.
Allow me to breathe, I beseech you."
Marion, please.
You're doing too much.
You're saying to Trissotin,
"Stop, I can't bear it,"
but no need to swoon.
-More concrete.
-Yes.
Let's go from there.
"Ah! gently.
Allow me to breathe, I beseech you."
"Give us time to admire, I beg."
"One feels, at hearing these verses,
an indescribable something
"that goes through one's inmost soul
and makes one feel quite faint."
CHAPTER 1
THE DISAPPEARANCE
TUESDAY, MAY 6
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
"The widely and rapidly spreading
"devastation of language
"not only undermines
" aesthetic and moral responsibility
"in every use of language.
"It is rooted
"in the destruction
of the human being."
-You're leaving?
-Yeah.
I don't feel like listening
to Mr. Paul B.
I don't care for his grand theories.
I want to be an actress,
not a sociologist
or an anthropologist
or any other kind of -ologist.
If you enjoy this stuff, stay.
-You'll get in trouble.
-I don't care.
Do you like this stuff?
Not really. I don't really get it.
But he's nice.
And it can be good
to get out of the theater sometimes.
No.
You should never leave.
You have to live with the texts,
breathe them constantly.
Acting isn't an occupation.
It's a vocation. It's absolute.
You want to die on the stage,
don't you?
The saint and martyr of the stage.
You're screwed.
What's he doing?
Did you see?
Margot's not here, either.
That's odd.
What's that got to do with it?
Paul's obviously a lady's man.
What time is it?
What time is it?
10:15 a.m.
The teacher's late.
He's usually on time.
Sorry, I'm late.
Hey, Momo, did you bring Paul B.?
-Why, is he not here?
-Not yet.
What are you always carrying around
in that bag?
My treasure, or my house,
depends on the day.
Did you notice?
Paul and Margot are both missing.
I always thought
Margot had a thing for Paul B.
Maybe they're on a lover's cruise.
Oh, shut up.
I know he has seduced all of you,
and Margot had the winning number.
Yeah, right.
Two hours of break.
He's not coming.
You like that, huh?
Oh, yes.
He bores me stiff.
He's probably sick.
Did he call the administration?
No news from them.
They called his house. No answer.
Isn't that odd?
Yeah.
Maybe Margot can explain.
Again with that? You're idiots!
Should we sit there?
Don't you think
he's been acting strange recently?
I didn't notice. Strange how?
I don't know.
Weird. Less close to us.
He was always a bit distant.
He's not from the same family.
What family?
Oh, right,
"the big family of actors."
Sounds like you know
more about him that we do.
Did you see him outside of class?
It happened.
"It happened"?
What's that supposed to me?
What's "it"?
Is '"it" private lessons?
-Ah...
-Come on, tell me.
I have no comment.
So you're hiding something.
If you saw him outside of class,
it wasn't to decode
-the signs of the contemporary world.
-No.
-It's my business.
-You could have told me.
We don't have
to tell each other everything.
Some things you keep to yourself.
I knew Paul was a skirt-chaser.
So, Margot took up the baton?
No. Leave Margot alone.
You're going to regret it.
Regret it?
You three, you militants,
you're his groupies.
You should know where he is.
We went by his house.
Nobody answered.
His voicemail has been shut off.
We have no idea.
Hello, ma'am. I'm calling
from Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Did you get our catalog?
Did anything catch your eye?
You don't have skin problems?
Everyone does.
He just wants some peace and quiet.
We went to see him a few days ago.
We had an argument.
But that's not why he's gone.
I'm not so sure.
You argued?
Hello, sir. Is your wife home?
I'm calling
from Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
She's not home?
We have products for men, too.
There's no reason why men
should neglect their skin.
Pardon me?
You want to know
whether the skin on my butt
is too fat or too dry?
He hung up.
I didn't even have time to check.
Butt-skin or not,
we did have an argument.
About what?
He doesn't believe
in activism anymore.
And you do?
We want to fight. Don't you?
Depends on what it's about.
Not necessarily in the streets.
What's the use
of getting beat up by riot police?
I learned lots of stuff.
It was good for me.
Well, he figured that out
30 years ago, so of course he's done.
It's not normal.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Did you get our catalog?
Oh, you have perfect skin?
Shall I call back in 50 years?
How old are you?
Ah, twenty years old, I see.
Well, 50 years is a long time.
That'll be around 2050.
Unfortunately, that'll be
the year of the great panic.
The great panic?
You really want to know?
Well, with the greenhouse gases,
all the mafias,
the polar ice caps
will have melted...
We'll have water up to our knees.
Panic.
Our current lifestyle is doomed.
By the time we realize that,
it'll be too late.
You didn't know?
It'll be too late.
The world will be chaos.
I'm scaring you?
No, the scary times are 2030.
That's not the panic.
The scare of 2030?
That's when capitalism breaks down.
No big deal.
The panic?
That's when everyone
is trying to flee.
Your neighbor is getting the hell
out, so you do, too,
because you assume
your neighbor knows something.
You don't get it?
That's OK. I'll call back in 2050.
Bye now.
Paul told you that?
No, that's the Maison Soleil.
He told us we didn't understand,
that violence doesn't work anymore.
He has lost his illusions.
He's kind of bitter and cynical now.
Not cynical...
He got upset when we said
his generation screwed things up.
He said there's no utopias anymore
and that the world
will collapse
without us having to help it along.
He calls it
"the slow-motion apocalypse."
-So he thinks it's funny.
-No, it's not funny.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
Excuse me. Goodbye.
Shit! I'm sick of this.
So he doesn't have
any ideas anymore?
No, he does.
That instead of destroying,
we should create something beautiful.
Why not?
With his past,
we were hoping for something else.
-Like blowing up the system.
-And he's talking about beauty.
There was a misunderstanding.
He thinks his points of reference
aren't useful to us,
that he can't help us anymore.
It's up to us now.
Hello, ma'am.
Maison Soleil Beauty Products.
It was a nice summer Sunday.
I was walking in the countryside
with my son, who was eight then.
He was picking dandelions
by the road,
making a bouquet for his mom.
I pointed out that the sky
was completely blue,
not one cloud.
He looked up,
pointed at the peaks
of the Jura mountains, and said,
"No, look, there's a cloud there."
He was right.
And he said,
"The Good Lord is sitting on it."
"The Good Lord?" I said.
"Yes," he said back.
"He made everything:
"the mountains, the animals,
the flowers."
I didn't want to contradict him.
I thought about what I might tell him
in a few years.
First, this:
that the simple act of saying
"believe in God"
is irrefutable proof
that He doesn't exist,
because if He did,
there'd be no need to believe in Him.
He would simply exist,
like the little cloud in the sky.
If you have to believe He exists,
that means you can just as well
not believe it,
that there is doubt,
and in the case of doubt,
err on the side of caution.
God is therefore merely an idea
adopted by humans
to ward off their fear
of the unknown and of death.
And as the centuries passed,
we started to realize
that it wasn't such a great idea.
We kept walking,
and my son went on
gathering dandelions.
I remembered a Jacques Prévert line
that goes,
"What could God have been up to
before Creation?"
In the sky,
the little cloud had frayed apart,
and then it disappeared completely.
-How's the pizza business?
-Fine, fine.
I don't know how people eat
that stuff, but they do.
Maybe you should
open your own business.
We would make a good team.
With you in the kitchen...
We'd get married.
Sounds great!
You only got five bucks of gas?
That won't get you very far.
Yeah, could you help me out?
Sure. Take 12 bucks more.
I'll reset the counter on the pump.
With any luck, the next customer
will cover your little gift.
-When do you get off?
-Ten o'clock.
-I'll pick you up.
-To go where? Have pizza?
No. Since we're going to work
together, we could cut to the chase.
Not the wedding: the wedding night.
Oh, really?
I'm too tired.
I'm going to go to bed.
All alone?
All alone.
I don't think people
have enough sex in life.
Margot!
Margot!
Someone's calling you.
Stop! It's Momo.
This is ridiculous. It's 11:00 p.m.
Jesus Christ!
If he does this every night...
We have better things to do.
THURSDAY, MAY 15
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
"The world is not only
dominated by the masters.
"It is also dominated
by the intellectuals.
"The cultural mastery of the world
brings happiness.
"Don't let yourself be tempted
by the champions of misfortune,
"of stupid hostility, of seriousness
joined with ignorance."
"Be happy!"
"Gentrification is an integral part
of the class struggle.
"That is why I have cited
and continue to cite
"Marx's expression:
genocide, cultural genocide."
-Is it good?
-Needs salt.
-It has no flavor.
-Nothing has any flavor.
"The dominant class,
whose new mode of production
"has created a new form of power,
"and, as a result,
a new form of culture,
"has carried out in recent years
a genocide
"of Italy's distinctive
working-class cultures.
"It is the greatest cultural genocide
in Italian history."
-May as well eat at McDonald's.
-No, that's gross.
These are fresh carrots at least.
And the chicken's not so bad.
It has flavor.
It's a fake flavor.
Tastes like a factory.
These chickens are raised in cages
by the million.
And they're blind.
They poke their eyes out?
No, it's because they live
their whole lives in the dark.
"The young Roman underclasses
have lost their culture,
"that is, their way of being,
of behaving,
"of speaking, of assessing reality.
"They have been given a model
of a consumerist, bourgeois life.
"They have been destroyed
and gentrified in the classic sense."
Will you stop reading us that stuff?
We're here to eat.
-What is it?
-It's Pasolini.
-What's it about?
-Cultural genocide.
What's that got to do
with hormone-raised chickens?
Where'd you get it?
Mr. Paul B. gave it to me.
I knew it. The guru strikes again.
He's not coming.
Hi, everyone!
Margot! Where have you been?
Did you have a nice trip
with Mr. Paul B.?
What are you talking about?
You left without a word,
so we started to wonder.
-Do I owe you an explanation?
-Paul B. has gone missing.
Missing? So?
I was in Ticino.
You just go off on vacation
like that, whenever you want?
No, I wasn't on vacation.
Paul asked me to go film an interview
with an old guy who fought
in the Spanish Civil War
with the International Brigades.
He was so interesting.
He was 16 when he went to Spain
to fight fascism.
Sixteen years old, can you imagine?
I hitchhiked back last night,
all the way from Ticino.
It's like the other end of the world.
So Paul disappeared?
-Disappeared how?
-Off the face of the Earth.
So you weren't with me.
Obviously.
I gotta run.
I have to go to the vet.
"When was life every truly ours?
"When are we ever what we truly are?
"We are ill-reputed, nothing more
than vertigo and emptiness,
"a frown in the mirror,
horror and vomit.
"Life is never ours.
It always belongs to the others.
"Life is no one's. We are all life.
"Bread of the sun for the others,
the others that we all are."
"When I am, I am another.
"My acts are more mine
when they are the acts of others.
"In order to be, I must be another,
leave myself,
"search for myself in the others,
"the others that don't exist
if I don't exist,
"the others that give me
total existence.
"There is no me.
We are always us.
"Life is other, always there,
further off,
"beyond you and beyond me,
always on the horizon.
"Life which leads us astray
and makes us strangers,
"that invents our face
"and wears it away, hunger for being,
O death, our bread."
No news, no messages.
No one's answering at his house.
It's becoming worrisome.
It's been two weeks. This is weird.
Well, it's 10:20 a.m.
He's not coming.
See you, crew!
Something happened to him.
I bet he jumped in the Rhone,
where he liked to go for walks.
He's not suicidal!
Lots of people go missing,
thousands every year.
Most of them are teenagers
who run away from home
and come back three days later.
We have to do something.
We can't just wait around like this.
Let's go to his place,
open his door with a locksmith,
go to the cops,
go check the hospitals.
Maybe his past caught up with him.
Some other old leftists
came after him.
Yeah, right.
That's all ancient history.
History is never ancient.
It's never over.
Maxime, can you bring me
the blackboard, please?
Recall Marx's observation,
dear students.
Karl Marx, in his "18th Brumaire."
All great events and characters
from world history appear twice.
First as tragedy, then as farce.
He uses the example of
Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III.
But think about today.
Bush the Father
and the Bush the Son,
it's the same carnage.
Not quite.
George H. W. Bush,
the Gulf War, that's the tragedy.
W., the son, with his liar's
poker face, that's the farce.
It's the same thing repeated,
but worse or with less credibility.
Zero credibility!
It's the conception of history
as a spiral.
If you look at the spiral from above,
it's a circle.
Things repeat in the same spot.
Looks like an apple.
If you take a cross-section,
you can see that the two events
are superimposed, but differently.
They're not in the same spot
on the spiral. I rest my case.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21
PIERRE GUYOTAT
"The last man in human history
will be a slave.
"There is no arms race.
"There is only a race toward slavery,
"for whom politicians
will be the last master.
"I am not interested in sex.
I am a politician.
"I am hunting down
the perfect slave.
"The last man, the last slave,
"will die with my insane language
in his throat.
"In my view, prostitution,
free or not, consenting or not,
"has always been
and still remains slavery.
"My insanity
"is this attempt to develop
a language, a music,
"that the last man, this last slave,
"will be able to use
to say to his master, his politician,
"that his master has the means
to take ownership
"of his body and of his voice,
"but that he does not have the means
to take ownership of his thoughts.
"Thought
"cannot be bought or sold.
"No master can own
"both the sexual organs
and its thoughts."
-Do you come here often?
-Every day.
Every day?
I come to see if Paul B.'s body
is floating in the Rhone.
You're crazy.
I don't see anything.
THURSDAY, MAY 22
PIERRE MICHON
"I have rarely prayed.
"In early September 2001,
"my mother, who, as an adult,
"had attempted
to be both my father and mother,
"and who, in her advanced years,
could have been my daughter...
"My mother was dying in the hospital
in the small town of G.
"There were huge trees by her window,
a wall of leaves.
"Every day of that late summer
was beautiful.
"The sun shone a thousand
different ways on that green wall
"under the eyes of a dying woman
who had loved trees.
"I saw her every day,
"but when September 7th came,
"I saw that the time had come.
"My mind saw it,
"but my heart couldn't follow.
"She was gasping.
She couldn't speak.
"She had entered that phase
of the wandering soul
"that the Tibetans call the Bardo.
"I sat beside her and,
"after a moment
whose duration I cannot define,
"hours or minutes,
"I stood up quickly, went out
and ran into a bookstore
"to buy some books."
"When I went back into my mother's
room, she wasn't gasping anymore.
"She wasn't breathing anymore.
"I held her hand.
It was still quite warm.
"The nurse having declared her dead,
I was left alone.
"Only my mind was there,
and I observed, like before.
"The books were sitting patiently
at the foot of the bed
"in their little envelope,
"near the feet of the body
that are so small.
"The green wall
was good for the mind.
"The mind was warm, too,
as it always is.
"I should pray, call to the heart
and the soul, which she deserved.
"I tried one of the things
I had learned in Sunday school,
"probably the Lord's Prayer.
"I very quickly stopped.
"And then the text,
"the prayer, asserted itself.
It came from far away,
"as though sent by another,
"and I spoke it aloud, so that, in
some way, the dead woman would hear:
"'Brothers, men who live after us,
"'Harden not your hearts against us,
"'For if you take pity
on us poor men,
"'God will have more mercy
toward you.'
"My heart and soul came running.
"I recited the poem from beginning
to end as it should be:
"in tears.
"I stood before my mother's body
"as one should:
"in tears."
"I prayed one other time,
"in October, a few years earlier.
"A child was born at night.
"I had just returned home near dawn.
"Something came to me,
the desire to pray,
"to open myself.
"Sitting on my bed, calm,
"smiling, if one smiles
when one is alone,
"I recited aloud,
from beginning to end,
"Boaz Asleep.
"I recited it as should be:
"calmly, accepting of everything,
"hoping against all reason,
the glory that always comes."
How's it coming?
Why'd you ask me to come?
This is Paul's house.
I have the keys to his place.
You have his keys? Why?
-That doesn't concern you.
-I see.
If I'd guessed...
We have to figure out
what's going on.
I'm scared to go alone.
What if he's dead in there?
-We should call the cops.
-I don't want them involved.
I can't stand not knowing.
Maybe we'll find something:
a letter, a clue, something.
You're good with computers.
He has one.
OK, let's go.
Have you found anything?
A letter, anything?
I don't see anything.
There's no dead body.
That's something.
Here's the computer.
I don't know anything about them.
You just open it.
But it's not very legit...
There might be confidential stuff.
Given the situation,
it's worth a shot.
Look.
There's an autobiography.
Looks like he was involved
in the revolutionary groups.
Anything more recent?
Yeah, hang on.
There's a file called "Project 17."
17... There are 17 of us
in his class. Maybe it's about us.
Yeah, look.
There are 17 icons,
each one with our names.
That's funny.
Is there anything
about his disappearance?
Hang on.
I don't see anything.
But there's a document
which is an introduction.
Look. Read that.
"Who, in light of the current
intellectual suffocation,
"does not feel the senseless
but visceral, necessary desire
"to, through the power
of one's mind,
"leave this world
completely defined by money,
"a world that risks
drifting toward barbarity?"
That sounds like him.
Quiet! Quiet!
Listen up, everyone.
I have a lot to say.
Can we turn the music down? Michel?
Michel and I went
to Paul's apartment.
-His place? Did you see him?
-He wasn't there.
He wasn't dead, either.
Michel looked on his computer
and found messages for each of us.
-Messages?
-Yeah. In addition to some quotes,
he gave each of us a mission
to carry out now that he's gone,
as a goodbye.
But where is he? You don't know?
No. No idea.
We printed the missions out.
We'll read that to you.
There are really all different types.
Mathias, you're going swan hunting
in a mall,
and you'll say:
"Hey,
swans are an endangered species.
"Go duck-hunting instead."
Even after he's gone,
he's still a pain in the ass.
I want to be an actor,
not a swan hunter.
I'll take it.
I want to do the swan hunting.
This one's for Marina.
It's pretty mysterious,
but it means he knew a lot about us.
Especially the ladies...
What is it?
It must be related to your
environmental focus. It's simple:
"Marry your river."
Does that mean anything to you?
I think so.
Smells like mystery to me.
Probably.
Theater is Marina's calling.
But marrying a river...
-For Marie, it's Pasolini.
-No marriage there.
He mentioned a book for you,
but we didn't find it.
I already have it.
He gave it to me a few weeks ago.
This one's funny.
It's for the shock troops:
Mirabelle, Madeleine, and Monica.
You're supposed to write
a little play,
around ten minutes long,
so it's not too much,
based on a quote from
the British newspaper The Guardian.
He suggests checking out
Alfred Jarry.
-That's weird.
-What's the quote?
Here we go:
"American has an umbrella the size
of Manhattan up its ass."
That's a tough one.
I'm going out. It's bad luck
to open an umbrella indoors.
You could do a five-act tragedy
on that.
OK, next. For Mouche,
he wants you to think
about what is truly pornographic
these days.
Now there's something interesting.
I'll do the photos.
-As a model?
-No, as photographer.
Thank God. I was afraid for a sec.
You can just read the TV guide.
Momo, this one's for you.
He wants you to draw up
a list of useless objects
that our lives are full of.
He's got the wrong man.
Why would he ask me that?
I don't have a pot to piss in.
The last time I had an apartment,
the court bailiff
said I was "unseizable."
Actually, Momo, there's a new law
that says garbage bags
are seizable property.
Margot, if you're telling the truth,
then your mission is complete.
The truth about what?
Your interview with the guy
who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
-Mission accomplished!
-Now, on to Marion.
Think about and write
a short text on the following quote
from a contemporary author:
"One man who prays alone,
that's his business.
"Two men who pray together,
that's when things get dangerous."
What? Can you repeat that?
Look around.
A guy who prays alone
never makes war.
Two, that makes them want to.
That's why there aren't
any more wars of religion.
OK, yeah...
For Matteo, it says:
"Is it still possible today
to be a resistance fighter,
"like, for example, during
the German occupation of France?
"Can we still imagine
a resistance fighter
"in the age of surveillance?"
Make a list of the tools
used to surveil society.
-Sure: cell phones.
-Credit cards.
All kinds of cards.
I don't have any.
All the video cameras
on the streets, in stores,
and banks, all over.
-The Internet.
-Et cetera, et cetera.
Resist!
One last one, for Marco.
Uh-oh. I'm scared.
You should be.
You're supposed to draw up
a list of what's intolerable:
intolerable in the strong sense
or the little everyday stuff.
You did a good job
handing out gifts to everyone.
Some were more curses
than blessings, but...
We don't have to accept them,
since the gift-giver isn't here.
You didn't tell us what you got.
This.
The Man Without Qualities,
by Robert Musil. "Read and reflect."
He'd already given it to me
a while back.
Sounds like you two were close.
For a while, yeah.
-Close, close?
-Yeah.
I feel like that book
helped me understand why he left.
And why is that?
It's the end of a world
he once belonged to,
with all its values and requirements,
its sense of proportions,
its revolutionary aspirations...
And a new world comes along
that he doesn't want to belong to,
a world that surely has
its own dreams and beauty,
but he doesn't understand them
and doesn't want to.
FRIDAY, MAY 23
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
"For the time being,
we won't sing of love,
"which sought refuge
beyond the underground passageways.
"We'll sing of fear,
which paralyzes embraces.
"We won't sing of hate,
because it doesn't exist.
"There is only fear,
our father and companion,
"the great fear of prairies,
"seas, and deserts,
the fear of soldiers,
"of mothers, of churches.
"We will sing of the fear
of dictators and of democrats.
"We will sing of the fear of death
and the fear of the afterlife.
"And then we will die of fear,
"and up from our graves will sprout
fearful yellow flowers."
SATURDAY, MAY 24
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
"Thought is nearly impossible
in this day and age.
"It comes at a high price.
"It is true
that one can buy ready-made ideas.
"They're for sale everywhere,
sometimes even for free.
"But that which is free
always proves expensive.
"We're already starting to notice.
"What's the result?
"No advantage and persistent unrest."
Look at our cart! We have too much!
How much money do you have?
Twenty bucks. What about you?
Same. Do you have a credit card?
No, do you?
-Yeah, but I already hit my limit.
-Look at us...
Plus, we wanted to go to the movies
after.
OK, back to square one:
First, we get rid
of everything we don't really want.
Two,
everything we don't have to have.
Three, everything that isn't truly
necessary.
1.60 francs, please.
1.60 francs. That's 80 cents each.
One big one is cheaper
than two small ones.
Hey, what are you doing here?
I'm on my mission.
Remember? I'm swan hunting.
How many have you bagged?
They're everywhere here.
It's hunter heaven.
Heaven or hell.
Want to grab a bite to eat?
I'm starving.
-No, we're going to the movies.
-What are you going to see?
We don't know yet. Thirteen movies
are showing. We'll find one.
OK. Peace!
Everybody looks terrible.
It's making me depressed.
Life makes you not like people
these days.
It's because they don't like
themselves.
On the other hand...
Remember when Breton meets Nadja?
"She carried her head high, unlike
everyone else on the sidewalk.
"She looked so delicate that she
scarcely seemed to touch the ground.
"What was so extraordinary about
what was happening in those eyes?
"What was it they reflected?
Some obscure suffering
"and, at the same time,
some luminous pride?"
I don't feel like it.
But look. There are lots of movies.
That's the problem.
They all seem the same.
Maybe you're right. I don't feel
like it either. Are you hungry?
There's nothing but sweets.
I don't like that.
You never want anything!
Popcorn isn't sweet. Come on!
No way am I letting you eat popcorn.
Let's go!
We have to pay.
I thought it was free
for the first hour.
Shit, we just barely went over.
It's more than the tub of yogurt.
We have bad luck today.
We screwed everything up.
What a disaster.
Thanks. We can cut. Thanks.
Take ten. Thanks.
-How's your mission going?
-What mission?
The ones Paul gave us.
I'm done.
What about you, Mouche?
I haven't had a chance
to think about it.
What about you, Momo?
Me neither.
I have to find an apartment.
Isn't that more important?
What about you?
It's none of your business!
Yes, it is! You don't get it.
There's something bigger going on.
Like what? What a joke.
That's what we're supposed
to figure out, all together.
We could make a video.
You just want to play with a camera.
A project...
There was never any project!
I have enough work,
plus I have to deliver
pizzas at night...
It was just his way
of saying goodbye,
that's it, Margot.
We can make of it what we want.
Throw it out!
There was never any project.
I'm sure you're wrong.
You're all chickening out.
Not us. Ain't that right, Monica?
Yeah, we wrote the play.
About the umbrella?
Yeah. You'll see, it's amazing.
-Is it funny at least?
-Super funny.
See? They did their job.
Yeah, but Paul was their guru.
Ah, the revolution!
Or what's left of it.
He and his friends ruined it all
with their big ideals.
We're fed up.
You all seem to have forgotten
that someone has disappeared.
That's serious.
You keep talking, but I've been going
to the police stations,
to the hospitals.
-And?
-Nothing.
Nothing.
MONDAY, MAY 26
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
"At the end of daybreak,
the disparate stranding,
"the exacerbated stench
of corruption,
"the monstrous sodomies of the host
and the sacrificing priest,
"the impassible beakhead frames
of prejudice and stupidity,
"the prostitutions, the hypocrisies,
the lechery, the treasons,
"the lies, the frauds,
the corruption,
"the panting
of a deficient cowardice,
"the exasperating enthusiasm
of additional chicks,
"the greeds, the hysterias,
the perversions,
"the harlequins of misery,
the cripplings, the itchings,
"the hives,
the tepid hammocks of degeneracy."
"The teratic bulb of the night,
"sprouted from our vileness
and our renunciations."
-Are you closing?
-In five minutes.
How much do you need?
500 bucks. Is that possible?
Yeah, but it has to be worth it,
or I'm screwed.
OK. We'll come in through the back.
I'll give you the key.
Lock the door behind you.
And don't forget to break the window,
or they'll suspect me.
You're a doll.
Thank the lords of oil instead.
Hey, Melanie!
Momo, what are you doing here?
I'm squatting.
What are you carrying around?
I'm making a list of useless objects,
and I'm gathering them, too.
Gathering or stealing?
That's for me to know.
Want to grab a drink? On me.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
"That's exile, a foreign country,
"the inexorable perception of reality
"as it really is
"during those long, lucid hours,
"rare in the flux of human time,
"when the ways of the old country
"abandon you but the new ways
"haven't sufficiently stupefied
you yet."
You've got a nice place here.
You can stay a few nights.
It'll be a nice change from
couch surfing wherever you've been.
But what if Paul comes back
and finds me here?
I don't think he's coming back yet.
But if he did,
I'm sure he'd understand.
Come on, I'll make you a coffee.
There's a big bed back there.
Big enough for two.
CHAPTER 3
THE WORLD
"Ours is a life of puppets,
"and those who control us
"and hold the strings
of the dirty puppet theater
"are banking,
"above all else,
"on the inveterate self-regard
of each and every one of us,
"which makes it so that
under no circumstances
"would anyone wish
to believe himself unfree
"and to admit,
and honestly and sincerely recognize,
"that he is not free."
So, friends, like Paul asked us,
we've prepared
a little theatrical game for you.
It's a little one-act play.
What was the quote
he gave you again?
"America has an umbrella
the size of Manhattan up its ass."
Depending on who plays America,
I'd love to be the umbrella.
In fact, Mathias,
we have just the role for you.
Oh, yeah? I hope it's the umbrella.
Nope. George W. Bush.
Oh, great, here comes the politics
lesson. Everybody, turn to the left!
No, no. This is just for fun.
It's a take-off on Ubu Roi
by Alfred Jarry.
And Ubu, of course, is Bush.
Of course.
They are pretty alike.
Margot, you can do the set design,
if you want.
Why not?
Dubya! Dubya, wake up, Dubya!
Goddamn! By my green candle,
how dare you wake us?
We were just having a nice dream,
like an angel, shit!
God was talking to me,
straight through the Internet.
I'm sorry,
but people are here
who want to see you.
They've already been waiting
for a while now.
Who are these people
who come and disturb our sleep?
They're some weirdos.
They don't look like
people from here.
They said they've come a long way
to see you.
From what I can understand,
they're from the deserts of Barbary.
Perhaps they have come bearing
gifts, like the magi?
Some nice Cubans and coke?
-How many of them are there?
-Two.
Buggery pshite, Mama!
There were three magi.
You should read
the Good Book again, Goddammit!
Did they...
Did they give you their names?
Did they give you their names?
I think...
You think...?
What are you waiting for?
I'm waiting!
My ears are wide open!
-My ears.
-My ears.
Hang on.
One of them was named... Sdam,
King of Babylonia
and a great oil merchant.
He has a big black mustache.
The other was named,
if I'm not mistaken,
Yussama.
He says he's prince of the pump
of finance of the Arabian deserts.
He has a long, thin, gray beard,
and a towel on his head.
Buggery pshite, Mama!
That's them all right!
They're here, in our white house?
Oh boy.
You shouldn't have kept them waiting.
They're friends of mine.
Well, kind of.
-Did they say what they want?
-No.
Idiot! You should have asked them.
You know I can't talk
and think at the same time.
What do I do?
I don't know. Should I show them in?
Of course! Shit!
But these Barbarians scare me.
Bring my faithful friends,
Uncle Berlu and Blair-Blair.
You never know with these two.
My Lordships!
What brings you to my white house?
We finally meet.
We know all about you,
and at last we meet.
Introductions are called for!
You, you're Sdam!
You look just like him!
And you must be Yussama!
You're famous the world over,
now that you blew up
my biggest castles
with your flying muskets.
What a pleasure to have you here!
Allow me to introduce
my faithful servants:
Blair-Blair, King of Great Brootan.
Your faithful servant.
And Uncle Berlu, from Ritaly!
The honor is all yours.
Well, my Lordships,
what brings you to my white house?
What brings you to my kingdom?
What brings you to my kingdom?
We have a request to make of you.
Yes, a favor to ask of you.
You? But you are exiles,
terrorist from the Axis of Evil.
And you come to ask a favor
of the Emperor of Good?
I wonder how you even made it
this far.
And where are my guards?
They were napping.
I'll have them whipped!
In any case,
you would have left us alive,
because you need us.
How's that? Explain yourself.
You need us,
for how could you be
the Emperor of Good
without Evil?
Good exists only because evil exists.
So you need us.
And you know it.
You've used us quite a bit already.
I don't understand a word
of the philosophical gobbledygook,
all right?
You got what you wanted.
Thanks to us,
you're swimming in oil.
The route through the Muslim lands,
through Asia and the Caucasus,
has been opened to you.
And when you die,
you will have earned a seat
beside the god of the infidels.
That's what you wanted.
By my green candle!
Now you will pay your debt to us.
-A debt?
-Yes, a debt.
The time has come to repay the favor.
What's this?
You want to go to Paradise!
What we want
is to live like you.
-Like me?
-Yes, like you.
In your big kingdom, in the light.
What? In Amoorica? Are you kidding?
I'm gonna go nucular!
You're crazy.
What am I supposed to do
with these freaks?
My God, the world is complicated.
Once I get out of Tooxas,
I don't understand a thing.
It's just towelheads
and illegals everywhere,
Barbarians and rich foreigners.
Plus, you've never read a book
in your life.
How do you expect to understand it?
Help me out here.
Call my advisor on foreign countries.
What's she good for?
Find her for me, Mama Dubya!
She's always running around like
a mouse around my white house.
Little Condolence Risotto?
That's the one! Go get her!
Of course.
You're right, Risotto.
We don't need them anymore
Goddamn, the Empire of Good
can stand on its own two feet now!
It can do whatever it wants.
Let's break some heads!
Guards! Guards!
Go get your big shit sticks
and throw these Barbarians
down the trapdoor!
Down the hatch! Down the hatch!
SUNDAY, JUNE 1
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Never let yourself
be put in a coffin!
SAME DAY
BERTOLT BRECHT
What surprises me
is that he adopted the habit
of counting people
and recording them,
like he was scared of losing them.
Usually, they're not like that.
But they want to know
that we're exactly X
and not Y.
As though that mattered
in the slightest
for those dying of starvation.
MONDAY, JUNE 2
PETER HANDKE
"When the child was a child,
it walked with its arms swinging,
"wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
"and this puddle to be the sea.
"When the child was a child,
"it didn't know that it was a child.
"Everything was soulful,
"and all souls were one.
"When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
"had no habits."
"When the child was a child,
"it was the time for these questions:
"'Why am I me,
"'and why not you?'
"'Why am I here,
"'and why not there?'
"'When did time begin,
"and where does space end?'
"'Is life under the sun
not just a dream?'"
CHAPTER 4
PROMISE MADE
SUNDAY, JUNE 8
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
"I would arrive sleek and young
"in this land of mine,
"and I would say to this land
"whose loam is part of my flesh:
"'I have wandered for a long time,
"'and I am coming back to the
deserted hideousness of your sores.
"I would go to this land of mine,
and I would say to it:
"'Embrace me without fear...
"'And if all I can do is speak,
it is for you I shall speak.'"
Oh my God!
Mr. Paul!
Quiet, everybody.
Shut up! I have big news.
Where are you bags?
Did you lose your treasures?
Did you get robbed?
It's serious.
Oh yeah? What happened?
I saw Paul B.
I saw Paul B.
Well, at least he's alive.
-You saw him?
-That's what I'm saying.
-Where?
-In Carouge.
-You weren't dreaming?
-No.
It was him. I'm positive. I saw him.
-How did he look?
-It's hard to say.
Did you talk to him?
No. He turned the corner
and disappeared.
Yeah right. Sounds like a joke.
It's true. It was him.
SATURDAY, JUNE 14
DIDIER-GEORGES GABILY
"Corpses must be
an obsession for me...
"Or they became one
as a result of all this."
"Someone gave me a book, and last
night, I came across this passage:
-'"Corpses if you want.'"
-Let me see.
"Nothing happens, as we all know.
"Or so many things happen that,
"as we all know,
we can't do anything about them.
"We are walking on corpses,
and yet we go on trying to act
"and think as though
we weren't walking
"and trampling upon the corpses of
over a half-century of catastrophes,
"of all manner
of defeat and abdication.
"Today, the corpses have piled up
to our very streets.
"The corpses
of advanced liberal society
"in a state
of advanced decomposition."
"If it's not too late,
"we would like for that
which makes us citizen-actors,
"including our own blind-spots
of still-living citizens,
"including without a real space
for hope, serve to resist,
"even partially,
even infinitesimally,
"the domination
of 'ready-not-to-care' for everyone."
"Because, in spite of it all,
"as with art, so it is with theater:
"that which is best is always
against worldliness
"and all against the world.
"That probably won't stop
the almost-corpses
"from proliferating on our streets.
"It might just make it possible
to see them as beings
"and to give each of them
a face, a name,
"a voice that also speaks
in the theater
"and not on reality TV,
without pity, without pathos,
"the way they envision the world,
and us in it,
"senseless, defeated specimens,
"dying by the force of our dead eyes,
"announcing that which lies in wait
for us if we renounce ourselves,
"if we refuse to fight,
saying: 'Nothing happens.'"
Do you know the Uzbek saying?
"When all has been destroyed,
continue to seek out beauty."
Let's get to work, comrades!
I'm sick of always being
against this, against that.
Anti-globalization.
Anti-constitutionality.
That's the longest word in French.
-Anti-clerical!
-Antinomic!
-Antibiotic!
-Antechamber!
-Anti-tank.
-Antitrust!
-Antifreeze!
-Antilope!
-Antispasmodic!
-Anti-rust!
-Antiquarian!
-Antiquity!
-Let's be anti-anti!
-Two negatives make a positive!
-Let's be for!
-For what, though?
-For dreams!
-For poetry.
For sex!
Yeah, who wants some?
Yeah!
We have to come up with new slogans.
Quiet!
SAME DAY
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
On the blue summer evenings,
I shall go down the paths
Getting pricked by the corn,
crushing the short grass.
In a dream, I shall feel
its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind
bathe my bare head.
I shall not speak.
I shall think about nothing.
But endless love
will mount in my soul.
And I shall travel far, very far,
like a gypsy,
Through the countryside,
as happy as if I were with a woman.