The Neptune Room by Bertrand Laverdure

Author:Bertrand Laverdure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2020-06-07T17:38:33+00:00

Tiresias, 2012—The story of Carson McCullers

Shim pops the DVD into the external DVD drive of hir computer.

Sandrine is quiet.

January 2012.

From the very beginning of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the soundtrack of the opening credits—a childlike, innocent melody in the style of Morricone—distils the necessary melancholic syrup. An earworm composed by David Grusin and played on the harpsichord, this quasi nursery rhyme sets the film’s tone. We’re about to enter Carson McCullers’s universe of emotional solitude and sexual awakening.

For a few hours, the young patient has been hankering for a movie, any movie, to forget the dismal temperature, rain, freezing ice, slush, sky stuck in the rinse cycle. Shim dipped into the centre’s video library, supplied by hir own purchases for the most part. Hir medical practice had reaffirmed the fact that in palliative care, culture constitutes the least harmful and most effective remedy against our obligation to withstand the hammers of time. These rhythmic drummers, coxswains of the Roman galleys, remind the body to row, function, whatever the cost, defying the extraordinary obstacles dragging the boat toward the bottom.

In the collection of films for sensitive young girls, Tiresias considers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a classic. Besides informing them about a major American literary work of the twentieth century, a critical and popular success that propelled the twenty-three-year-old author, Carson McCullers, to the forefront of the literary scene, the film addresses a subject relevant to adolescents: sexual awakening. The novel presents the development of a tender relationship between a teenage girl and a deaf-mute man renting a room in her parents’ house. Budding feelings, emotional development, and initiation into the adult world are the themes explored.

Sandrine has been raised more or less by this art and its kindness, frightened by its violence, educated by its historical films; she cherishes the cinema. She also reads, but spends more time with moving images, with cinematic, television, or YouTube stories.

For Tiresias, a film never adds up to a simple representation of passive entertainment. Shim sees all the dramatic motivations, settings, characters, subject matter, music, costumes, actors’ performances as potential material for development, ideas for workshops, or pretexts for brief catharsis. In this case, the doctor is counting on the fascination exerted by sign language, used by the characters of J. Singer and his pal, Antonapoulos, to get Sandrine interested in this art. Hir goal: show her three or four ways of expressing affection or anger using the words/gestures of such a language. Not to mention that the film’s tragic ending will draw forth some beneficial emotions, pull some inhibited existential questions out of the drawer.

To entertain, amuse, and at the same time develop a sincere camaraderie with hir patients is what interests Tiresias. Locking away sorrows in a lead trunk is pointless. Evoking the prospect of death makes sense—talking about it a little, if only through gestural signs, a choreographed anger interpreted by hands, in order to obtain some temporary respite, momentary relief, in the face of our laughable fate.

Only

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