The Destiny of Nathalie X (2 page)

“Here we are,” Aurélien said. “This is perfect.”

“Where’s Hollywood?” Bertrand Holbish asked.

“Can’t be far away,” Aurélien said.

B
ERTRAND
H
OLBISH
. Immediately, when he asked me, I said to Aurélien that I didn’t know much about sound. He said you switch it on, you point the volume. No, you check the volume and you point the, ah, what’s the word?… What? Ah yes, “boom.” I said: You pay my ticket? You buy me drugs? He said of course, only don’t touch Delphine. [Laughs, coughs] That’s Aurélien for you, one crazy guy.

D
ELPHINE
D
RELLE
. Did I tell you that he is a very attractive man, Aurélien? Yes? He’s a real African, you know, strong face, strong African face … and his lips, they’re like they’re carved. He’s tall, slim. He has this hair, it’s like that tennis player, Noah, like little braids hanging down over his forehead. Sometimes he puts beads on the end of them. I don’t like it so much. I want him to shave his head. Completely. He speaks real good English, Aurélien. I never knew this about him. I asked him once how he pronounced his
name and he said something like “Ngoh.” He says it is a common name in Kiq. But everybody pronounces it differently. He doesn’t mind.

When Aurélien went out the next day to scout for locations, he discovered that the area they were staying in was called Westchester. He drove through the featureless streets—unusually wide, he thought, for such an inactive neighborhood—the air charged and thunderous with landing jetliners, until he found a small cluster of shops beneath a revolving sign declaiming
BROGAN’S MINI-MALL
. There was a deli, a pharmacy, a novelty store, a Korean grocery and a pizzeria-cum-coffee-shop that had most of the features he was looking for: half a dozen tables on the sidewalk, a predominantly male staff, a license to sell alcoholic beverages. He went inside, ordered a cappuccino and asked how long they stayed open in the evenings. Late, came the answer. For the first time since he had suggested coming to Los Angeles Aurélien sensed a small tremor of excitement. Perhaps it would be possible after all. He looked at the expressionless tawny faces of the men behind the counter and the cheerful youths serving food and drink. He felt sure these gentlemen would allow him to film in their establishment—for a modest fee, of course.

M
ICHAEL
S
COTT
G
EHN
. Have you ever seen
Le Destin de Nathalie X?
Extraordinary film, extraordinary. No, I tell you, I’d put it right up there with
Un Chien andalou
, J.J. Todd’s
Last Walk, The Chelsea Girls
, Downey’s
Chafed Elbows
. That category of film. Surreal, bizarre … Let’s not beat about the bush, sometimes downright incomprehensible, but it gets to you. Somehow, subcutaneously. You know, I spend more time thinking about certain scenes in
Nathalie X
than I do about Warner’s annual slate. And it’s my business,
what more can I say? Do you smoke? Do you have any nonviolent objections if I do? Thank you, you’re very gracious. I’m not kidding, you can’t be too careful here.
Nathalie X …
OK. It’s very simple and outstandingly clever. A girl wakes up in her bed in her room—

Aurélien looked at his map. Delphine and Bertrand stood at his shoulder, sunglassed, fractious.

“We have to go from here … to here.”

“Aurélien, when are we going to film?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe. First we walk it through.”

Delphine let her shoulders slump. “But we have the stock. Why don’t we start?”

“I don’t know. I need an idea. Let’s walk it through.”

He took Bertrand’s elbow and guided him across the road to the other side. He made half a square with his thumbs and his forefingers and framed Delphine in it as she lounged against the exit sign of the Dollarwize Inn.

“Turn right,” Aurélien shouted across the road. “I’ll tell you which way to go.”

M
ICHAEL
S
COTT
G
EHN
.—A girl wakes up in her own bed in her own room, somewhere in Paris. She gets out of bed and puts on her makeup, very slowly, very deliberately. No score, just the noises she makes as she goes about her business. You know, paints her nails, mascara on eyelashes. She hums a bit, she starts to sing a song to herself, snatches of a song in English. Beatles song, from the “White Album,” what’s it called? Oh yeah: “Rocky Raccoon.” This girl’s French, right, and she’s singing in English with a French accent, just quietly to herself. The song sounds totally different. Totally. Extraordinary effect. Bodywide goose bumps. This takes about twenty, thirty minutes. You are completely, but
completely
held. You do not notice the time passing. That something so
totally—let’s not beat about the bush—banal, can hold you that way. Extraordinary. We’re talking mundanity, here, absolute diurnal minutiae. I see, what, two hundred and fifty movies a year in my business, not counting TV. I am replete with film. Sated. But I am held. No, mesmerized would be fair. [Pause] Did I tell you the girl was naked?

“Turn left,” Aurélien called.

Delphine obliged and walked past the mirror glass façade of an office building.

“Stop.”

Aurélien made a note on the map and turned to Bertrand.

“What could she do here, Bertrand? She needs to do something.”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

“Something makes her stop.”

“She could step in some dogshit.”

Aurélien reflected for a while. He looked around him: at the cracked parched concrete of the street, the dusty burnish on the few parked cars. There was a bleached, fumy quality to the light that day, a softened glare that hurt the eyes. The air reverberated as another jumbo hauled itself out of LAX.

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “Thanks, Bertrand.” He called to Delphine. “OK, go up to the end of the road and turn left.”

M
ICHAEL
S
COTT
G
EHN
. I’ve written a lot about this movie, analyzed the hell out of it, the way it’s shot, the way it manipulates mood, but it only struck me the other day how it works. Essentially, basically. It’s all in the title, you see.
Le Destin
. “The Destiny of Nathalie X.” Destiny. What does destiny have in store for this girl, I should say, this astoundingly attractive girl? She gets up, she puts on her makeup, she sings a song, she gets dressed. She leaves her apartment building
and walks through the streets of Paris to a café. It’s nighttime. She sits in this café and orders a beer. We’re watching her, we’re waiting. She drinks more beers, she seems to be getting drunk. People come and go. We wait. We wonder. What is the destiny of Nathalie X? (It’s pronounced “Eeeks” in French. Not “Ecks,” “Eeeks.”) And then? But I don’t want to spoil the movie for you.

They started filming on their sixth day in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon—almost magic hour—and the orange sun basted the city in a thick viscous light. Aurélien shot the sequence of the walk in front of the mirror glass building. The moving cloudscape on the mirror glass curtain wall was disturbingly beautiful. Aurélien had a moment’s regret that he was filming in black and white.

Delphine wore a short black skirt and a loose, V-neck taupe cashmere sweater (no bra). On her feet she wore skin-colored kid loafers, so fine you could roll them into a ball. She had a fringed suede bag over her shoulder. Her long hair was dyed a light sandy blond and—after much debate—was down.

Aurélien set up the camera across the road for the first take. Bertrand stood beside him and pointed his microphone in the general direction of Delphine.

Aurélien switched on the camera, chalked scene one on the clapper board, walked into the frame, clicked it and said,
“Vas y, Delphine.”

Nathalie X walked along the sidewalk. When she reached the middle of the mirror glass she stopped. She took off one of her shoes and peeled the coin of chewing gum from its sole. She stuck the gum to the glass wall, refitted her shoe and walked on.

M
ICHAEL
S
COTT
G
EHN
. I have to say as a gesture of contempt for Western materialism, the capitalist macrostructure
that we function in, that takes some beating. And it’s not in the French version. Aurélien No has been six days in Los Angeles and he comes up with something as succinct, as moodily epiphanic as that. That’s what I call talent. Not raw talent, talent of the highest sophistication.

B
ERTRAND
H
OLBISH
. The way Delphine cut her hair, you know, is the clue, I think. It’s blond, right? Long and she has a fringe, OK? But not like anybody else’s fringe. It’s just too long. It hangs to her lower eyelash. To here [gestures], to the middle of her nose. So she shakes her head all the time to clear her vision a little. She pulls it aside—like this—with one finger when she wants to see something a little better … You know, many many people look at Delphine and find this very exciting, sexually, I mean. She’s a pretty girl, for sure, nice body, nice face. But I see these girls everywhere. Especially in Los Angeles. It’s something about this fringe business that makes her different. People look at her all the time. When we were waiting for Aurélien we—Delphine and me—used to play backgammon. For hours. The fringe, hanging there, over her eyes. It drove me fucking crazy. I offered her five hundred dollars to cut it one centimeter, just one centimeter. She refused. She knew, Delphine, she knew.

Aurélien filmed the walk to the café first. It took four days, starting late afternoon, always approaching the café at dusk. He filmed Nathalie’s
levée
in one sustained twelve-hour burst. Delphine woke, made up, sang and dressed eight times that day in a series of long takes, cuts only coming when the film ran out. The song changed: Delphine sang Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” with the pronoun changed to “He.” This was Delphine’s idea, and a good one Aurélien thought, the only problem was she kept forgetting. “He’s an artist, she don’t look back,” Delphine sang in her flat breathy voice as she
combed her hair, “He never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall.”

Every evening they would go to the pizzeria and eat. Aurélien insisted that Delphine get drunk, not knee-walking drunk, but as far as woozy inebriation. Of course the waiters came to know them and conversation ensued. “What you guys doin’ here anyway? Making a movie? Great. Another beer for the lady? No problemo.”

After a week’s regular visiting Aurélien asked the owner, a small nervy man called George Malinverno, if they could film at the pizzeria, outside on the “terrace,” for one night only. They agreed on a remuneration of two hundred dollars.

M
ICHAEL
S
COTT
G
EHN
. Have you ever heard of the Topeka Film Festival? That’s Topeka, Kansas? No? Neither have I. So you can understand that I was kind of pissed when my editor assigned me to cover it. It ran a week, the theme was “Kansas in the Western, 1970–1980.” It’s not my subject, my last book was on Murnau, for Christ’s sake, but let’s not get embroiled in office politics. The point is I’m on my way to the airport and I realize I’ve left my razor and shaving foam behind. I pull into this mini-mall where there’s a pharmacy. I’m coming out of the shop and I see there’s a film crew setting up a shot of the pizzeria. Normally I see a film crew and chronic catatonia sets in. But there’s something about this one: the guy holding the boom mike looks like he’s stoned—even I can see that it keeps dropping into the shot. So I wander over. The camera is set up behind these plants, kind of poking through a gap, like it’s hidden or something. And there’s this black guy behind the camera with this great hair with beads on it. I see he’s D.P. and clapper boy and director. He calls out into the darkness and this sensational-looking girl walks into the pizzeria terrace thing. She sits down and orders a beer and they just keep filming. After about two minutes
the soundman drops the boom and they have to start over. I hear them talking—French. I couldn’t believe it. I had this guy figured for some wannabe homeboy director out of South Central LA. But they’re talking French to each other. When was the last time a French crew shot a movie in this town? I introduced myself and that’s when he told me about
Nathalie X
and the Prix d’Or. I bought them all some drinks and he told me his story and gave me a videocassette of the movie. Fuck Topeka, I thought, I knew this was too good to miss. French underground movies shooting next door to LAX. Are you kidding me? They were all staying in some fleabag motel under the flight path, for God’s sake. I called my editor and threatened to take the feature to
American Film
. He reassigned me.

The night’s shooting at the pizzeria did not go well. Bertrand proved incapable of holding the boom aloft for more than two minutes and this was one sequence where Aurélien knew he needed sound. He spent half an hour taping a mike under Delphine’s table and snaking the wires around behind the potted plants. Then this man who said he was a film critic turned up and offered to buy them a drink. When Aurélien was talking to him, Delphine drank three margaritas and a negroni. When they tried to restart, her reflexes had slowed to such an extent that when she remembered she had to throw the glass of beer, the waiter had turned away and she missed completely. Aurélien wrapped it up for the night. Holbish wandered off and Aurélien drove Delphine back to the hotel. She was sick in the parking lot and started to cry and that’s when Aurélien thought about the gun.

K
AISER
P
REVOST
. I rarely read
film/e
. It’s way too pretentious. Ditto that creep Michael Scott Gehn. Any guy with
three names and I get irrationally angry. What’s wrong with plain old Michael Gehn? Are there so many Michael Gehns out there that he has to distinguish himself? “Oh, you mean Michael
Scott
Gehn, I got you now.” I’d like a Teacher’s, straight up, with three ice cubes. Three. Thank you. Anyway, for some reason I bought it that week—it was the issue with that great shot of Jessica, no, Lanier on the cover—and I read the piece about this French director Aurélien No and this remake
Seeing Through Nathalie
he was shooting in town. Gehn—sorry, Michael Scott Gehn—is going on like this guy is sitting there holding God’s hand and I read about the Prix d’Or and this
Nathalie X
film and I think, hmmm, has Aurélien got representation? This is Haig. This is not Teacher’s.