Auden, Breugel, Icarus and Eurostar - 21/05/08

Have you seen the movie Laurel Canyon? It has one of the most erotic sex scenes I have ever seen in a movie and nobody gets their kit off. Natascha McElhone and Christian Bale just sit in a car in a car park talking about what they would do if they were to engage in an affair that sorely tempts them both.

Or have you seen Steven Soderbergh's remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris"? Whoa. A movie about love and loss to take your breath away. Natascha McElhone's in that one too, playing the corporeal memory of George Clooney's dead wife Rhea, brought back to life by the power of a sentient planet. It's the stuff of crazy Russian mid century sci fi, but it is also quite moving.

Anyway, I've found myself quite moved by Ms. McElhone and her performances, the few that I have seen. Thus I found myself a little giddily star struck back in January when Lyndsay and I were waiting for our Eurostar train back to London from Paris' Gare du Nord and we saw her making ready to get on the same train. We watched as a small drama unfolded. There she was, hair blonder than we've seen in any movie, distressed because she and her husband seem to have lost their tickets. She is tall and statuesque, and he is tall and heroic; together, even is a place as mundane as a train station they seemed together to cut an otherworldly figure between them. I think they eventually got on the train.

Today, Lyndsay tells me that as she is coming home on the tube, she reads over someone's shoulder in one of the free papers they plaster the city with each day, that McElhone's husband was found dead last night, slumped against the front door of their house, dead of an apparent heart attack. He was 42.

There is a word that has come down to us from old English: fey. As it is most commonly used now, it refers to someone or something that is vaguely otherworldly. But in its original sense, it meant "fated to die."

It is so strange to think back to that brief brush with a star and to watch her and her husband engaged in such a banal task as looking for tickets and to think of him breathing his last breath against the door to his house last night, unheard and unnoticed, while his eight year old, four year old sons and as yet unborn third child played or slept somewhere oblivious; a heart breaking tragedy coming home to roost.

I am saddened and unsettled. I think what moves me most, is not that this was the tragedy that befell someone famous, but more that I specifically remember looking on this man, thinking that "Of course a woman that beautiful is married to a man that impossibly handsome"; a man who, at that time, had a scant few months left to live.

It makes me think of W.H. Auden's poetic response to Breughel's painting "Icarus."

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940

It's just so sad...

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