Christopher Marlow (The Jew of Malta)

What made people like Guy  Burgess or Anthony Blunt rebel against their society, betray their  country and spy for the soviet union?  Was it a reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism, or was it the rejection of a brutal class system?   Did their experience of having to hide their homosexuality from a bigoted society cause them to turn against the very establishment they were supposed to be members of?   I blame the father.  ‘Another Country’  highlights the projection of the strict father to be found in the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school.  Guy Burgess was at Eton.  The school was run not by the Masters, but by the Gods, the only boys who were allowed to wear coloured waistcoats.  And Guy, the aesthete, aspired to be elected to the Pantheon (if only to display the waistcoat).   

Miranda Carter, in her biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, fostered a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination – insecurity and moral superiority – fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses.

The regime of the Gods was repressive, militaristic and essentially corrupt, a system designed to create the rulers of Empire.  Guy was beautiful, louche, artistic and openly homosexual. He was confident enough to love whom he wanted;  after all several of the Gods had been his lovers.  And he was clever enough to be feared.  But when Martineau is discovered in flagrante in the boiler room and hangs himself in shame, the Gods clamp down on homosexuality in order to contain the threat of scandal.  Guy at first escapes public humiliation by threatening to expose his lovers.  But as desperate as he is to become a God, he is also desperately in love with James.  And this love leads him to indiscretion and exposure.  So he shields James him from possible expulsion, accepts the blame and the punishment and is customarily debarred from elevation to the Pantheon. 

So, was it his humiliation at school that that made Guy Burgess turn against the English class system and betray state secrets to the Russians?   Was it rejection by a system he secretly admired and aspired to?  Was it envy, revenge, the feeling of the outsider?   Was it then, on the verge of his adult life,  that he realized how much the British class system relied on outward appearance and how devastating being openly gay was for a diplomatic career?  Was that the point that he allowed himself to become radicalised by his best friend Tommy Judd – an intellectually committed Communist?

Or was it in part his betrayal by his adored mother?   In a tender moment with James at night in a punt on the river, he discloses how he had to release his mother, trapped in bed after his father collapsed and died while making love to her.  Quite soon afterwards, she married an army officer. 

Another Country portrays the road to betrayal as a personal, emotional crisis, rather than an intellectual identification.  As a young man, Guy was portrayed as mischievous, sensitive, intelligent, in love, but tragically crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? He was being bred to inflict rule and punishment in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled.

The theme was composed, as with all of us, early in Burgess’s life, and had to be worked through.  Always an outsider, he ended his life, a broken, isolated, embittered man, living in a seedy apartment in Moscow with only the faded sepia prints of Eton hanging on his walls to remind him of the turning point.     

‘Another Country’ made me think of my time at Taunton School.  In the early sixties, the ancien regime of the English public schools still held sway; Taunton was still attempting to produce young men to run the Empire, even though that institution was all but dismantled.   They still had a combined cadet force; they still do, I think.   Sport, an essential component of the school curriculum,  encouraged teamwork, loyalty and identification with the system.  The establishment still didn’t foster original thinking and expression; it indoctrinated.  At the time, I had a strong sense of duty.  My parents admired that system and I felt bound by obligation to uphold it, but I never felt that emotional sense of belonging that many of my friends of that time still do.  My life has been patterned by ambivalence.   

For one of my school friends, Maurice, Taunton school fostered a deep sense of entitlement and rebellion.  What he did at school could be contained. Now, fifty years on, he is pitted against the Justice system, the General Medical Council and the House of Lords all at the same time.  But for every one damaged by the system, there were nine created by it.  Sir Peter Westmacott, one time our ambassador in Paris, was one of our contemporaries at school. 

‘Another Country’, starred Rupert Everett as Guy and a younger Colin Firth as Tommy Judd.  It was  directed by Marek Kanievska in 1984.

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The King’s Speech, which was released on Saturday and stars Colin Firth as King George and Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, is a moving and humorous account of Bertie’s relationship with his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who helps him overcome his fears and deliver wartime speeches that rally the nation. 

The Royal Family have always been conscious of their role and their distance from the rest of society.   Some of the best bits of the film show how the King struggles to deal with Lionel Logue’s down to earth familiarity.  He is propelled to an apoplectic eloquence by the sight of Lionel lounging in the Coronation chair in the Abbey. 

Bertie is stuck between his instinctive desire for human affection and contact and his overwhelming sense of duty and obligation.  He is a fully paid up member of the firm, but he is also a loving father and husband and  needs Lionel as a friend as well as a therapist.  During the war, he had a close and understanding relationship with Churchill, who had also suffered with a speech impediment when he was younger and was also frightened of his father. 

Bertie, like many Royals, was brought up, not by his parents, who were always on duty, but by a nurse.  But the nurse preferred his older brother and was callous and cruel to Bertie, pinching him and depriving him of food so he lost weight.  David also used to tease him and his father,  King George V, had no patience with his stammering.  Queen Mary, his mother was stiff and distant, embarrassed by expressions of intimacy.  So Bertie, despite being second in line to the throne, had a lonely and abusive childhood.   

Bertie was also naturally left handed, but compelled to use his right hand.  This experience is not uncommon in people who stammer.    He had knock knees and suffered the pain of splints for years. 

The film revealed how stammering is not so much a fixed mechanical defect of speech but more an emotional disorder; the overwhelming effect of fear, fear of humiliation and with the loss of an effective means of communication with other human beings, of loneliness.

Bertie did not stammer if he sang the words, or when music was played into his ears at the same time.  When Lionel encouraged him to swear, utter the rudest words he could think of,  it threw Bertie into conflict; he was brought up to repress any expression that was improper.  But once he had permission,  he swore with gusto and no hesitation.  All these techniques facilitated emotional expression and eliminated his self consciousness.  He could communicate with his wife and daughters quite confidently,  but his brother, David and his father could readily reduce him to a state of paralysis.       

Lionel and Bertie remained friends for the rest of the latter’s life.  He was there to inspire confidence during all the King’s wartime speeches.  This was the Royal Family’s finest hour.  The audible and visible presence of the King and Queen in London during the blitz, their refusal to emigrate to Canada, the  bombing of Buckingham Palace, the young Princess Elizabeth driving ambulances endeared them to the British people.   But the King’s nervousness caught up with him.  Always needing cigarettes to relax him, the King died of bronchial carcinoma in 1952.

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Some time later, they meet again in Paris.  Jules and Catherine invite Jim to their mill on the Seine.   Jim tells Catherine he is going marry Gilberta.  Catherine produces a revolver and threatens to shoot him.  He wrestles the revolver off her and escapes through the window.  Some time later she calls him.  They all go for a picnic by the river.  Catherine invites Jim to go for a drive with her; she has something to tell him and she invites Jules to watch them.  She then drives the car off a broken bridge into the river, killing them both.  Jules is destroyed.   

So what kind of person is Catherine?  They say she is La Reine.  She has to be obeyed.  Impulsive, controlling, charismatic and sexually provocative, she is the sort of free spirit that has men in her thrall.  Although they might be able to possess  her sexually, they can’t tie her down.  She will always find someone else who is more interesting, more exciting.  What is the point of life if it is not exciting?  Catherine falls in love at the drop of a eyelid, but she cannot love.  She cannot tolerate the day to day living, the routine of it, the struggles. She is too hedonistic, too easily dissatisfied.  She has to have drama.  Like a spoilt child, she needs  attention; it’s her life’s blood.  But if she doesn’t get it, look out, there will be trouble; she will betray, abandon, and is even prepared to kill.   She has a split personality.  She can be delightful and entertaining when it suits her, but she also has a dark, murderous side with  little empathy and no sense of guilt or shame.  She will manipulate and exploit men to achieve power and excitement, but never quite realises how she hurts them.  She never thinks how her behaviour affects Jules or her daughter.  She can’t help it.  It’s the way she is.  Her men either have to worship her or be destroyed.  Jim refuses to play the game and is sacrificed.  Jules has to suffer – forever.

Jeanne Moreau plays Catherine in Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece of French cinema.

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The difficulty is that she used her philosophy and the attention it attracted to justify her excesses of self aggrandisment and selfish behaviour.  Her’s was the philosophy of the narcissist.  Rand opposed every grouping that was not hers.  There had only ever been three great philosophers; the three A’s, Aristotle, Aquinas and Ayn Rand.  Her followers were disciples of a personality cult. 

Ayn was a formidable personality.  The film of the same name focussed on her love affair with the young Nathaniel Brandon, who together with his wife Barbara, had fallen under Ayn’s spell while callow psychology students.  Nathan was in thrall with Ayn and she soon exploited his infatuation to seduce him, but she insisted that they inform their partners and limit their relationship to a year, a strategy Ayn justified philosophically.  Of course,  it went wrong.  Barbara, not long married to Nathan, was deeply unhappy and found somebody else.  Nathan tired of Ayn’s demands and in turn exploited one of his own students.  When Ayn discovered this ‘infidelity’, she was furious.  How dare anybody betray her?   She slapped him across the face and excommunicated him from the Ayn Rand foundation;  assuring him that he could be nothing without her.

Ayn was so fascinating because she was so dangerous and forthright.  She demanded absolute devotion and control.  Hyperbolic and emotional, she possessed the passion of the hysteric.  She held her disciples in a vice-like grip of life and death; such was the unyielding power of her personality.  She could be effusive and kind to those who worshipped her, but woe betide anybody who ignored or betrayed her.   And her disregard for society was ruthless and uncompromising.  ”What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”  

 Ayn, was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg  and grew up during the revolution,  escaping to America in 1931.   The alienation of the Russian jew,  the insecurity and danger of the civil war, the mobile allegiances, escape to a foreign culture; all of these had implanted a backbone of steel;  the single-minded self-centered determination of a remarkable survivor.  Her philosophy emanated from a unique and unusual experience.  It is worth studying as an idiosyncratic social commentary, but so dangerous to adopt as a template for western society. 

But I wonder how much influence she has had.  Doesn’t her attitude justify the narcissistic culture and the decline in community and society over the last 50 years.   Hasn’t ‘because you’re worth it’ has become the catch phrase for the material meaninglessness of a generation?

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It is the autumn of 1913 and strange things have begun to happen in the village.  First it is the doctor’s ‘accident’.   His horse trips on a wire stretched across the gate to his house, throwing him heavily,  the end of his collarbone sticking out through the skin of his shoulder.  Next the farmer’s wife falls  through the rotten floor of the baron’s sawmill and is killed instantly.  In revenge and anger with his father, who refuses to claim compensation or grievance,  their  eldest son destroys the baron’s field of cabbages and is instantly dismissed, committing the family to starvation.  Then Sigi, the Baron’s son is kidnapped, flayed and found in the middle of the night hanging by his ankles in the barn in a state of severe shock.   Then the steward’s baby son is left exposed to the freezing cold.  Finally Karli, the midwife’s son, who has Down’s syndrome is attacked and nearly blinded.  The culprits are never discovered though a sinister group of children always seem to materialise offering to help after each an atrocity is committed.  It might appear that, led by Klara, the pastors eldest daughter, they are  taking their revenge for the cruel repression they had endured at the hands of their fathers, but we never quite know for sure.   

When Klara and Martin arrive late for supper, the pastor forces  them to wear white ribbons as a sign that they have not learnt to be responsible.   Martin is further humiliated by having his hands tied to the sides of his bed to stop him masturbating while Klara collapses while being severely and unjustly reprimanded by her father in front of the whole class.   

And then there is the doctor,  who, not just content for abusing his housekeeper, is also forcing his attentions on Anni, his fourteen year old daughter.  And the steward, who thrashes his son within an inch of his life for taking Sigi’s whistle from him and throwing him in the pond.   This is a highly dysfunctional village that seems to thrive on malice. 

And Eva, who is unfairly dismissed by the Baron and then prevented by her father from marrying her sweetheart,  who teaches at the village school. 

It is the schoolteacher who finds out what has happened,  but when he confronts Klara and Martin, they lie; they know only too well the penalties for being honest.  Their father, the parson, grows angry and accuses him of spreading calumny on innocent children and threatens to report him to the school board.  

The note attached to Karli notes that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children.  It would seem that Klara and her gang become avenging angels.  Klara even kills her father’s pet bird, though her youngest brother poignantly offers to replace it with the bbird he has rescued because his father is so sad. 

The film ends with the news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the imminence of war.  We are left with the sense that in some way the children have brought about the horror that was the first world war.  They didn’t, but the narrator, who is the schoolteacher as an old man, says that the events in Eichvald in 1913/14 might clarify what was eventually going to happen in Germany.  Theirs was the generation who became Nazis and perpetrated their own cruel repression on the Jews.      

White Ribbon was directed by Martin Hanneke and released in 2009,  being awarded ’ La Palme d’Or’ in Nice.   It is a powerful and disturbing film.  It is the children are the  stars of the film; they act their parts with such convincing realism while the cimetography with its long gothic shots of the snowbound village and its protestant inhabitants reinforces the dark repression.    

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He is one of those slightly odd  anti-heroes who confound and irritate the hell out of those who take themselves too seriously.   Playing tennis, he  has his own idiosyncratic method of serving, a back and forth movement of the racquet as if he was putting a pizza in the oven and then a smack, leaving his more professional opponents muttering darkly.  But don’t we love him just because he has a go?  His  car breaks down at the funeral gates but when he opens the boot to get his tools, the inner tube rolls into the wet leaves where it is mistaken by the funeral director as a wreath and hung on the tomb.  The wreath deflates but the mourners pretend not to notice and come up to shake M. Hulot’s hand for his courtesy.   And of course, it‘s Monsieur Hulot who gets to dance with the pretty girl, but there is no hint of guile or seductiveness is his behaviour.  He is just enjoying the innocent fun of being  Monsieur ‘Ulot on ‘oliday.   

If it wasn’t French, we would say that Monsieur Hulot’s holidays is a charming example of British humour,  the precursor of Mr Bean and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but it’s more subtle than either of those.  M. Hulot is not so much a belly laugh as a whimsical set of observations of people doing the sort of things that people do on holiday.  We are laughing at ourselves.  Jacques  Tati has a wonderful girt of mirror to all of us and saying with a slight smile,  ‘aren’t we all a bit absurd when we think about it?’

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waits at the window wearing the face that she’s kept in a jar by the door.  What is it for?  

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

All the lonely people where do they all belong?

Father Mackenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near. 

 Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.  What does he care?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

All the lonely people where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people.

Ah, look at all the lonely people. 

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came.

Father Mackenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.  No one was saved.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

All the lonely people where do they all belong?

She’s a strange girl; pretty in a child like way.  She dresses in a frock and big boots, she collects smooth pebbles that she skims on canals, works in a cafe in Montmartre and lives by herself in an apartment block with other lonely people, Raymond, an artist with brittle bones, who constantly retouches his copy of Renoir’s ‘Le dejeuner des canotieres’, Madeleine,  the concierge abandoned by her husband who escaped with his mistress to South America, the greengrocer, Collignon, who bullies his assistant, and the stewardess who is rarely there but leaves her cat for Amelie to care for.  

 Amelie is quiet and introspective; she keeps herself to herself.  She lives in her own world.  Her mother, who was always afraid of what might happen,  was killed upon emerging from Notre Dame by a Quebecois, who committed  suicide by leaping off the tower.   Her father, a surgeon, cold and clinical, builds a shrine in the garden topped by the garden gnome her mother hated.  He decided many years ago that Amelie had a heart complaint because her heart raced whenever he listened to it through his stethoscope.  She didn’t.  It was just that she craved her father’s affection and these weekly examinations were the only contact she had with him.  Deprived of emotional contact all her life,  Amelie grew up wary of society.

Her life changed on the 29^th August 1997.  The radio was on when the news  broke of Princess Diana’s tragic death in the tunnel by the Seine.   Amelie was in the bathroom.  The top fell off the perfume bottle she was holding, rolled across the floor and dislodged a tile at the bottom of the wall.  Amelie knelt down, felt in the gap behind the tile and pulled out a rusty tin containing childhood treasures; the photograph of a footballer, a model of the winner of the Tour de France, a toy racing car.  Amelie recognised the emotional significance of her discovery and was determined to find the owner and return his memories, but she can’t reveal herself.   So she concocts the elaborate device of ringing the phone booth he is passing so that he finds the box she has left there for him.  This instigates her mission in life, to help others cope with their loneliness by a clandestine series of good deeds,  each conducted indirectly with quirky imagination and providing her with a  secret social connection.       

She wants her father to get out more.  So she steals the garden gnome and gives it to the stewardess, who photographs it at all the tourist venues and sends the polaroids to her father’s address.   It works.  Her father decides to travel.  There is a news item of the discovery of objects that survived an air crash on Mont Blanc.  Using words and phrases photocopied from his old love letters, she creates a last letter to Madeleine,  discovered after a gap of 25 years on the side of a mountain and expressing his sincere and undying affection.   She engenders a passion between one of the cafe’s regulars, an oddball who records the comings and goings on a Dictaphone and Georgette,  the cigarette vendor.  And she destabilises the bullying greengrocer by sabotaging his appliances, clothes, mouthwash and alarm clock so that he begins to doubt his own sanity and his assistant becomes more confident.   

But she discovers a kindred spirit poking around under a passport photo booth at Le Gare de l’Est.  There is eye contact, a recognition, but both are so wary.  She follows him.  In trying to discover the identity of the mystery man who repeatedly leaves his photos in the rubbish bin, he drops his bag and she finds the album he has created of scraps of photos from the booth.  She finds that he works in a porn shop during the day and on the ghost train at the funfair in the evenings.  His name is Nino. She stalks him and returns his book by luring him to a viewpoint telescope, which reveals her holding up his album and placing it in the bag on his bike.  Now it is her turn to be stalked.  He finds where she works and where she lives and after numerous escapes and evasions, and assisted by Raymond’s insight,  they find the love they have both craved all their lives.           

From a social perspective, loneliness is the most common ailment of our time.   Between 35 and 40% of adults in the UK and probably more in the USA are living alone with just the television and the computer for company.    With little opportunity to make meaningful contact with other people,  except perhaps through the dubious media of email and text messaging,  people find it difficult to work through their fears and despair and many develop depression and a variety of physical symptoms.  And, like Amelie, too many children are deprived of emotional contact and numbed by television and gameboy, so that they lose the confidence to interact with anything resembling community even if it were there.  This is no training for life.  Like other social species, human beings all too readily succumb to isolation and become ill.

Amelie craves love; that complete security that comes from feeling really understood and cared for, but how can she find this when she is so nervous of people?   She will only find the soul mate she is searching for in somebody she recognises has had a similar life experience; otherwise there is always the risk that her naivety will be exploited.  For her and her lover,  the path to true love is going to be more difficult than most, with many mistakes, evasions and misunderstandings.   One false step and communication will be severed and their dreams destroyed.   But this is make believe, a film, it has to leave us with hope and they have help from a guardian angel with brittle bones.  

 Amelie or ‘Le Fabuleux Destin de Amelie Poulain’  is a bitter sweet comedy on loneliness directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet in 2001 with Audrey Tautou playing the leading role to shy perfection.  All the nuances of loneliness, shyness, fear, suspicion, oddness and paranoia,  are so well observed by Jeunet.  There’s a dream-like quality in French film, that encourages  quiet reflection on human relationships.   

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