existential crisis at the brutalist after party
venice film fest, mapping dance steps & grids everywhere
You must catch a boat to the Lido every day, our bodies squashed against the sea of Nonno’s and Nonna’s, sweating as we sail down the lagoon, passing taxis, gondolas, cargo boats, and speed boats with bare-chested men at the stern flashing gold watches. Everything long and thin and sleek on the water.
I run to my first screening and get lost crossing over many small bridges. My phone is dead, so I study the map they gave us crouched below a tree for shade, but it seems to be just a series of squares. Film festival reimagined as blocks. Eventually, I find the Palabiennale, and I am left to sit in a corner seat of the Maria screening, so Jolie as Maria Callas is slanted diagonally. As Callas lilts, “As of this morning what is real and not real is none of my business,” her lower lip creeps towards me and her upper lip away to the upper right corner. Everything is tilting on this island. The movie is slow and languid and boring, and I feel like I am waiting to die with her. Across from me, a man’s head repeatedly droops and shoots back up as he tries to wake himself, and I spend the film worrying about whiplash.
After, we go down to the privatized beach with paid-for loungers and tents that crowd together before opening out into a vastness of sand. Unoccupied except for the lifeguards in their truncated towers watching the shallow waters to make sure everyone stays within the buoys. There is an infinity of space available to sit, which means there is nowhere to sit. Finding space requires boundaries or encasement, a feeling of squeezing yourself in. Sitting is no fun where there are no limitations.
Instead, we go to the pier to hide our bags in the rocks, but the guards won’t let us jump in. Charon and Cerberus guarding the void. You never make it to the deep sea as you must walk and walk through the knee-high pools and get stung by jellyfish on the way, so you lose your nerve before it gets above the belly, and the guards keep you in their listless eyes. I dream of the high cliffs of Marseille, where the only watchmen are the cliff-jumpers in their Nike TNs who sit in rock pools and play games of cards, directing you to the best spots to jump from.
On the beach, I crave grids—in the water, I wish to free myself of them.
So there it is: the Venetian sea is shallow for miles and mildly warm in a way that makes your body disappear from the lack of sensation, privatized and guarded, and for all their efforts at control, it is still full of jellyfish, dirt, and sediment.
We have no towel, so we dry by standing in the sun. Getting dressed behind a cabin, my breasts are making smiley face imprints in my top and feet wet and sandy in the impractical leather boots. J points at someone with a towel and flip-flops and says they must be rich, but this seems a pretty low marker of wealth.
We go to sit on the riverbank for sunset and sit on the floor bare-footed, eating watermelon and drinking beers while we try to get tickets for Korine’s new film. N tells us about her dream i am watching a horse as it folds in on itself into thirds, breathing softly, i run my hand cupped just above its body, and as i do so i see it in extreme close up as if my hand is an eye and i can see every hair its the most perfect creature, beautiful, golden brown, so perfectly formed, and the horse is singing to me in its mind. then i knew the horse is god.
We manage to get seats for the premiere at midnight. My clothes are sweaty and dirty, so I change in the darkness behind a car as ladies walk by in their long, draping gowns. We have to look elegant enough to get access to the Hotel Excelsior toilet so we can raise ourselves above girls who piss on the floor but we are denied entry so we return back to girls who piss on the floor but now in evening gowns.
I have been trying to learn to write in the dark while keeping my eyes fixed on the screen but my notes seem to be getting worse rather then better. Baby Invasion fills me with indescribable rage and my notes reflect that, stamping over eachother, crowding into nonsensical angry swirls.
Its a mosquito-like film.
We go to a party at a cocktail bar that is dark and golden like a strip club with nail polish on. The bathroom has a million mirrors, so I see myself surrounded by a kaleidoscope of wide-eyed and underdressed doppelgängers. We’ve missed the free bar and the cocktails cost twenty euros, so I scour for drinks the wealthy and famous have forgotten about. The foraged drinks are all too sweet and coat my tongue in sugar. In the smoking area, I chat with a producer about my writing. I tell him about my essay on desire, but wants me to tell him stories of recklessness, and horniness, but all I have are slow, obsessive ponderings and theory—nothing action-packed or Hollywood-packageable.
I go back inside and fixate on a Tamagnini slicer, unused and untouched in the corner of the room. It looks like the same one as in the shop. Sparkling in its silver, it sits quiet and still against the noise—almost haloed. I stare at it and fantasize that I’m in a black room with one spotlight, throwing translucent slices of prosciutto that catch the light as they fly towards the mouths of the rich and famous. I want to grip its solid black handle and listen to its swish as it glides through the air. No, we must dance and laugh and talk with people who have the money to make movies, who store thick résumés under their belts that propel them up onto pedestals made of paper.
Body constantly leaning, shifting through space. Earlier at dinner, I had been convinced the restaurant had become detached, and we were floating away at sea. Now, without any windows, I sense that I will be at this party forever, that we are out in the atmosphere where nothing exists other than this room filled with emptiness, and outside is just the infinite blackness of space. We will be doing this forever and ever saying what do you do? what have you made? how many shoes in your closet? how do you know you can live if no one has told you you’re worth something? who is a human without a wikipedia page? did you know you are so small, I didn’t notice you when I stepped with my heel across the cold black tiles? soon there will be no films and no art, just star-rating systems that detach and float around us, becoming the new lights of the solar system, which has been robbed of all its fillings because the planets had no worth without reviews.
I think of the line from Luca Guadagnino's Queer that we watched at the Palabiennale: "I am not queer, just disembodied."
B has lost her voice and spends the whole party communicating via her iPhone notes. We read back through the transcript the next day, these fragmented conversations with no sense of who the speaker is and when one chat ends and the next begins. It is a perfect representation—everyone unreal, detached from their souls, blending into each other, no speaker X or Y.
As a means of gaining back control or ownership of my body, or to separate myself in some way, I try to dance to the hollow house music that some of the gowned women are swaying and clicking their fingers along to. Bodies have an ability to equalize.
Across the black-and-white tiled floor, stepping between the squares, I am designing a sort of pattern, like a code for gaining subjectivity. In a trance, I am no longer there in that room, but on an endless chessboard where I spin and step diagonally, navigating across this coordinate of squares, and everything begins to feel more manageable.
On the way home, M creating an uneven drum beat from her broken heel, so one side clicks loudly, echoing down the cobblestone streets, and the other makes a quiet dull sound that stops short. There is something unsettling about it in the empty narrow alleyways. Venice is not a city that comes alive at night, rather it seems to hemorrhage itself of all inhabitants past 11pm, so when we go for drinks it is in large ghostly palazzos with small clusters of tables in its corners and quiet conversation and there is a sense we should be in bed already.
The next day, I go to an early morning screening of Familia and start crying five minutes in and never stop. Next to a stranger who I feel turn to me in the dark, I do not remember his face, but for 120 minutes he experienced the drenching of my body while we sat inches away from each other in the invisible light. Unconsensually bonded to me as part of this unraveling—and all I remember is his silver watch that occasionally glinted, reflecting the blue of the screen.
When the little boy comes on screen I think he looks like my father, he grows up and I think he looks like my father. I am thinking of my father. I write in my notebook it is a brave brave thing to be vulnerable and it feels like a mantra. Holding my breath and pinching my eyes to quiet myself as that wet loose sort of snot makes its way soundlessly to my chin. It is one of the best things I watched at the festival.
The moment the credits come, I run out of the cinema. I want to go swimming, but they can't find my bag, so I just sit in the square and watch the promenade as the ladies in rhinestone ball gowns pass by with their PAs and photographers following behind, and school children and press camping out, and the dark-suited and radio show hosts, and there is I as well, part of that mismatched swell. I go to write, but I have lost my pen, and I can’t afford lunch, and my phone is dead. Everything is difficult today. I am ready to sink into that.
When the evening comes, we all meet for drinks, and I feel better, like a child. We are sat next to a sponsored stall with the slogan “Discover Full Sensation,” and it turns out to be advertising e-cigarettes. They offer us a try, but it does not give full sensation—more a lack of it. Like smoking a representation of a cigarette.
- M x
Your writing style in the first half reminds me a lot of Rachel Cusk. So good
Completely yes.