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Friday, August 24, 2007

Films don't always help.

What sort of dentist actually starts a conversation about The Marathon Man while you, the patient, are in the dentist’s chair?

I suppose it argues a great deal about the dentist’s confidence in his own ‘chair-side’ manner that he assumes that the patient will not leap for freedom screaming for help as he remembers the terrifying deliberation of Lord Olivier as he sets about his grisly work with the drill!

But this guy had rowed at Henley – there was a picture on the surgery wall. Surely no one as pukka as a Henley chap could possibly do anything as nasty as a Nazi with a predilection for diamonds. To be frank, you wouldn’t have thought, given the prices that dentists charge that they would have any difficulty at all in getting as many bloody diamonds as they pleased when they pleased.

This was a private dental clinic. I was seen on time; every stage of the procedure was explained to me and, as far as I can tell he did a good job. His English (he was Dutch) was good enough to encourage you to be expansive, and then to realise that it wasn’t quite as fluent as that. It is astonishing how colloquial normal English speech is, especially when you are sensitised to its nuances considering the partner in your conversation is talking with pointed instruments in his hand!

His most interesting comment came after my non committal response to his question about the level of pain he was inflicting. “Well,” he said, “seeing the dentist is not often a pleasurable experience.” Short of his doing my teeth and then handing me a winning lottery ticket, I don’t really see how it can ever, ever, ever be a pleasurable experience. However charming and explanatory a dentist might be.

Talking of films we have just watched “Regreso al infierno” which is the Spanish version of (I imagine) “Return to Hell” [I was wrong the English title is ‘Home of the Brave’ - director Irwin Winkler, USA, 2006 - which, after seeing the film I am not convinced is an intentionally ironic take on the American National Anthem] a meretricious story of four service people returning from a stint in the Iraq war.
This mundane story of harrowing personal experience after the life changing trauma of participation in a war adds nothing in terms of perception to what is already on film. It uses the contemporary frame work of a continuing war to cover the lack of development in the narrative which describes the reactions of the different characters. Its answers are simplistic and fundamentally unsatisfying, with loose ends being waved in front of our faces before being neatly tied into a big yellow ribbon bow (quite literally towards the end of the film.) The actual end of the film has a quotation from Machiavelli which, while appropriate for a description of war, is wildly out of the class of this slight film.
A thoroughly turgid experience and Samuel L. Jackson should be ashamed of himself for not rejecting this script on a first reading. A waste of an interesting actor.
Yesterday evening developed into a clear, bright night with a gibbous moon (not often you get the chance to use an adjective like that) casting a light so bright on the sea that it made it look like a poorly painted amateur oil painting. We are both getting quite lyrical about the changing appearance of the sea which, truly, presents a different arrangements of colour and texture each day.
Some days, especially in the afternoons, with the right combination of the angle of the sun and the corrugations of the waves the whole sea looks like a vast swathe of material from one of Miss Bassey's more glittering frocks. One day, early in the morning, there was an overcast sky and a slight sea mist which melded sand, sea and sky into one ethereal wall of colour-drained grey and ochre and out of which it would have been entirely appropriate for some tawdry pirate ship to venture onto the beach.
Most of the time it is picture book blue, which is fine with me!
Blue = sun.
That's all I ask.

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