The Magic World of Orson Welles (47 page)

Figure 10.1: Clay in
The Immortal Story
.

When the drama begins these two are seated in Clay's library, a wide space between them, the warm lights of the room contrasting with blue twilight outside. The old man is lost in a huge chair across from Levinsky, who sits tiny and hunched over, reading his accounts. At the end of the nightly routine, Clays asks, in his perpetually crusty and harsh way, if Levinsky knows of anything else to read. Whereupon the conversation turns to various kinds of books. Besides the accounts, Levinsky has at hand the biblical prophecy of
Elisha, which he carefully unrolls from a sheet of aging paper and recites to his master. The prophet speaks of how “God will come with a recompense. . . . Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened. . . . Then shall the lame man leap as a hart . . . for in the wilderness shall waters break out. And streams in the desert.”

Clay, who is all too aware of his own dryness and his gouty foot, recalls another kind of story, about how a lonely sailor was once invited by a rich old man to spend the night with his young wife and make him a child; at the end of the evening the sailor was given five guineas and sent on his way. Levinsky, too, has heard this story, which is told everywhere by sailors, but he reminds Clay that it never happened. “If this story has never happened before,” Clay says angrily, “I will make it happen now. I do not like pretense. I do not like prophecies. I like facts.”

The rest of the film becomes the tragicomedy of Clay's attempts to turn prophecy into an account book and art into life—to possess the story by becoming both its author (or, more precisely, its auteur) and one of its characters. Life, however, resists his efforts. Instead of a randy sailor he hires a virginal and decidedly mystical young castaway (Norman Eshley), who has just been rescued from a desert island and who is trying to find passage to his homeland; instead of a demure young wife he is forced to use a slightly aging local prostitute (Jeanne Moreau), who is the daughter of his former business partner. The lovers—ironically named Paul and Virginie, after the famous couple in Bernardin de St. Pierre's novel—slowly become willing participants in the drama, meeting in a sweet encounter that is one of the most explicitly sexual scenes in Welles's films. But on the morning after, the sailor refuses Clay's money and announces to Levinsky that he will never tell his companions at sea what has happened. Clay dies, having served briefly as puppet master; his striving for omnipotence and immortality is frustrated because the events he has recreated will have no audience.

Late in the film, in a speech that belongs to Levinsky in the original source, Welles has Clay explain the perpetual appeal of the “immortal story” to sailors: “The sailors who tell this story are poor men who lead a lonely life on the sea. That is why they tell about that rich house and that beautiful lady.” Art and fantasy, in other words, grow out of isolation and a longing for impossibilities, and Clay's attempt to bring a platonic second nature down to the real world is an expression of tragic hubris. A dying man, he tries to become what Pirandello calls a “living character”; meanwhile he tries to dominate Paul and Virginie, asserting his power over their passions, turning them into
objets d'art like the figures on Keats's Grecian urn: “forever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever panting and forever young.” “You,” he announces to the lovers from his voyeuristic position on the balcony outside their room, “are young . . . you believe that you are walking and moving according to your own will. But it is not so. . . . You are two young, strong, and lusty jumping-jacks within this old hand of mine.” Standing outside and listening to the sounds of their lovemaking, he tries to deny his own age, rousing himself vicariously and hence bringing waters into his own wilderness.

As a symbol of humanity, considered apart from his boorishness and cruelty, there is something both vulnerable and sympathetic about Clay. Even though he boasts about money and claims to make other humans move at his will, his control has obvious limits; there is a naïveté and defensiveness in his very seclusion, which is an attempt to wall himself off from those aspects of life he cannot govern. He is also humanized by the fact that he is trying to achieve not just power, but life itself. His age and his sense of being cut off from the living, sexual juices of life are pathetic—indeed Welles seems to heighten the erotic elements of Dinesen's story so as to bring out this theme more forcefully—and toward the end of the film, in the wake of the lovers' passionate night together, one almost wishes him success.

There is a sense, moreover, in which he and all the other characters achieve a kind of victory. Despite the grotesque little charade he produces by hiring an impoverished sailor and a
putain respecteuse
to spend the night in his house, Clay indirectly gives a gift to himself and everyone else. For a time at least, Elisha's prophecy comes true, creating sexual joy and love in the midst of barren lives. Paul and Virginie, after all, are as lonely as Clay and Levinsky and are linked to them in certain ways. Paul has been lost on an island, where he could only imagine a woman he has never seen. “I sometimes fancied that I had a girl with me, who was mine,” he tells Virginie. “I brought her birds' eggs and fish, and some big sweet fruits that grew there. . . . We slept together in a cave.” As for Virginie, who as a little girl lived in the house now owned by Clay, her life has been filled with disappointment. A potentially warmhearted prostitute (Welles photographs her playing with fortune-tellers' cards, like Tanya in
Touch of Evil
), she wistfully recalls her first love affair, when an earthquake had literally coincided with her pleasure. Ever since, she has been in decline, and as Dinesen remarks, “she would have liked her lovers better had they left her free to love them in her own way, as poor pitiful people in need of sympathy.”

Once Clay's little drama begins, however, the story seems to take possession of the actors, their separate longing for renewal and communion being fulfilled in a way that is beyond anyone's control. Reluctantly and contemptuously, the sailor and the woman agree to Clay's plan, Virginie plotting a kind of vengeance upon the man who has been responsible for her father's failure and death, the sailor resisting the corrupt old merchant until the last moment. But when they meet, the lovers are transformed into a Paul and Virginie worthy of St. Pierre's fiction. The sailor approaches a gauzy, flowerbedecked bedroom where a nude lies waiting for him, and in the romantic dimness he mistakes her for the young girl of his dreams. Welles photographs their lovemaking in a series of almost static images, showing the curve of a back and the flutter of an eyelash, each shot magnified with a telephoto lens in a style uncharacteristic of him. At the height of her passion, Virginie suddenly rises in terror, imagining that the earth has moved as it did in her first affair. Outside on the veranda Clay listens to everything, growing more and more heated, and when the scene is finished the sound of crickets in the garden gives way to the early morning call of birds, the desert having come to life.

At the conclusion all the characters seem fatigued and slightly changed by what has happened. The sailor scoffs when Levinsky asks if he will talk about his adventure. “To whom would I tell it?” he says. “Who in the world would believe it if I told it? I would not tell it for a hundred times five guineas.” At the same time, he leaves behind a gift for Virginie—a large pink shell, “as smooth and silk as a knee,” that he found on his island. “When you hold it to your ear,” he tells Clay, “there is a sound in it, a song.” In another modest alteration of his source, Welles has the sailor present the shell to the merchant instead of the accountant. As the youth exits, closing the door to the veranda, Welles cuts suddenly to a close-up of the shell, which is rocking gently on the porch floor; Clay has dropped it in his dying moment, and the rounded pearly shape is an obvious echo of Kane's paperweight. The symbolic meaning of the object is also reminiscent of Welles's first film; it suggests an ideal realm—globed, compacted, and pure—which in this case gives the listener an intimation of immortal beauty. We do not know if Clay has listened to the shell before his death, but Levinsky comments to Virginie that the old man's cup of triumph has been too strong for him. “It is very hard on people who want things so badly,” he says. “If they cannot get these things it is hard, and when they do get them, surely it is very hard.”

Unlike Kane's death, Clay's suggests a possible triumph, an achieved glory just before extinction. The other characters, too, have been moved by the experience. Virginie comes out of her room and stands on the balcony with Levinsky and the dead Clay, watching her sailor walk away through the garden; he turns as he leaves, and they exchange significant glances, having shared the experience of love. By acting out the “immortal story” they have participated in one of those eternalized “moments” so common to romantic literature, making contact not only with each other but also with something transpersonal and hence ideal. In a less direct sense, Clay, too, has been moved by passion and beauty, recapturing the spirit of “jumping-jacks.” The world, as Yeats said, is “no country for old men,” but the aging merchant has been able to transcend his own body.

The final triumph is reserved for Levinsky, the dark-suited, rather insect-like accountant who has been a silent witness to the action and a go-between for Clay and the lovers. In the last shot he sits before his dead master's big chair on the veranda while Virginie stands off in the distance watching the sailor depart. Lifting the shell and placing it to his ear, he listens to the song. “I have heard it before,” he says, “long, long ago. But where?” Those passions that we were told have been washed, bleached, and burned out of the man have momentarily returned; he, too, is able to hear the joy of life and is at least dimly in touch with the “big deep-water fish” of his unconscious. With this recognition, this memory of an elemental life force, the film ends, the screen fading to a white tinged with pink, like the color of a seashell.

The film as a whole has been structured like a nest of boxes, containing a story within a story and reminding us, with constant references to Welles's previous films, that the director himself is like Clay. Thus Welles strives to create fictions that will live, standing outside his actors like a puppet master, always aware of his mortality; also like Clay, he acts as well as directs, and inevitably there comes a moment when he and all the players are moved more by the fiction itself than by any controlling hand. The director sets a process in motion, only to be consumed by a collective imagination.

It is, to be sure, a highly idealistic notion of art, reducing everything to a fable about eternity, totally unconcerned with the specifics of time and place that made Welles's early work so lively. On its own terms, however, the film succeeds, achieving a serenity and simplicity of visual effect unlike any of Welles's previous movies. The wide-angle views are uncluttered and generally rather static, the backgrounds containing only a few carefully chosen details, such as the tiny figures of Chinese coolies running through a courtyard as
Levinsky and Virginie discuss Clay's proposition. The colors are rich and often symbolic—as in the red and gold dining room where Clay reveals his plans to the sailor—whereas the characters themselves are dressed in simple blacks and whites, their bodies making a subtle contrast to the passionate world behind them. There is only one point where it seems Welles fails to create the effect he wants; his own makeup consists of smeared greasepaint and a false pointed nose that looks painfully artificial in close-ups. One could argue, of course, that this artificiality is consistent with most of his other films and that here as in
Mr. Arkadin
he wanted the false face to be noticed. But such quasi-Brechtian theatrics are as much out of keeping with this movie as the painted backdrops that appear at crucial moments in Hitchcock's
Marnie
. The fact is,
The Immortal Story
tries to charm its audience, drawing them into a lovely mise-en-scène and sustaining a mood with Erik Satie's music. There is barely any aesthetic justification for Welles to call attention to himself as an actor with a disguise, and he almost destroys several crucial scenes when his painted face appears on the screen. In every other way, he has created a work of modest but real virtue—a film that is ideal for television, if not for the purely theatrical distribution it received in the States.

Welles seems to have arrived at the rather awkward title of this film reluctantly, after trying
Hoax, Nothing but the Truth
, and
?Fake
. In France it is called
Verités et Mensonges
, which, with its suggestion of a pun on “lies” and “dreams,” is perfectly appropriate. At any rate the American title is fitting for a movie that in some respects is bogus, having been composed largely from an old documentary by François Reichenbach. In 1968 Reichenbach took cameras to the Spanish island of Ibiza to profile the art forger Elmyr de Hory, a minor criminal whose adventures and philosophy had been described in Clifford Irving's book
Fake!
Welles saw the film after the Clifford Irving/Howard Hughes affair had broken into the news and realized that it had taken on a new significance. As a result he bought up the entire documentary, reedited huge parts of it, and interspersed Reichenbach's footage with scenes of his own making—some of these composed of scraps of material he had photographed years before under totally different circumstances. What he produced is a nearly unique form of movie; neither documentary nor fiction, it resembles a Chautauqua-speech-cum-magic-show, bound together by Welles's own celebrity presence.

Welles appears throughout in the role of narrator and guide, discussing the relationship between art and forgery, reminiscing about the
War of the Worlds
hoax, interviewing old associates like Joseph Cotten and Richard Wilson, and performing magic tricks. Near the beginning of the film, and periodically thereafter, we catch glimpses of Oja Kodar, the beautiful Yugoslavian sculptor Welles met while working on
The Trial
. In footage that was actually shot some time before
F for Fake
was conceived, we see her strolling through Paris streets in a miniskirt. Ultimately Welles explains her importance. It seems she is the granddaughter of a talented art forger, and she once played an elaborate trick on Picasso. In return for acting as his nude model, she received a series of paintings that she then took to her grandfather; the old man forged copies and destroyed the originals, thus becoming responsible for a whole period of Picasso's career. At the conclusion of this ironic episode, which is impressively edited and dramatized, Welles reminds the audience that near the beginning of the movie he had claimed everything we would see in the next hour would be true; according to his watch, however, we have been viewing the film for ninety minutes, and have ourselves become victims of a sort of confidence game. The Picasso story has been a lie, even though it contains an imaginative truth.