Reflections on ... Nico in Philippe Garrel's Le bleu des origines (1979)

/ Nico in the film Le bleu des origines (1979) by Philippe Garrel / 

“I film women with a soul.” Interview with Philippe Garrel

[I recently had the high honour of being referenced as a source on Dennis Cooper’s blog. OK he didn't mention me by name, but Cooper recently devoted a blog entry to uncompromising French filmmaker Philippe Garrel and the paragraph on Garrel’s ultra-obscure / rarely-seen 1979 film Le bleu des origines was lifted from my IMDb review. I saw the film at The British Film Institute in 2007. It prompted me to post it here in its entirety and make it look prettier than it does on IMDb.]

Le bleu des origines is an uncompromising example of old school avant-garde cinema at its most cryptic, enigmatic and inscrutable. Made by Philippe Garrel in 1979 using a hand-cranked silent camera, bleu represents absolute year zero in film-making, a return to the starkest basics of film's origins in early silent cinema, replacing any trace of narrative or even dialogue with an emphasis almost exclusively on close-ups of women's faces. The film is black and white and absolutely silent for its near 50-minute duration. 

The total silence feels oppressive: silent cinema, after all, was accompanied by music. The silence, though, serves to ensure the focus on the actresses' faces is absolute, with no distraction.

The faces in question belong to the former Velvet Underground German chanteuse, Warhol Superstar and cult figure Nico, and bohemian French starlet Zouzou. By 1979 Nico had been Garrel's lover, muse and collaborator for a decade. Le bleu des origines was the seventh and last film they made together and marked the end of their off-screen relationship as well.

The film's tone is intimate but mysterious and ultimately despairing. It is essentially a portrait of two women, Nico and Zouzou, who are offered up for endless existential contemplation. There is no hint of even the most basic narrative but it is human nature to try to construct one, to try to thread together scenes, which are alternately jagged and brief, and sometimes-long Warholian takes that frankly court boredom. 

Garrel offers hints of symbolism that are probably highly significant but remain opaque: Nico examining a jewel in her hand; many shots of both women reading manuscripts or poetry by candlelight; a glimpse of Nico's passport; Nico pointing at the sky; Zouzou writing; Nico folding a letter and putting it in an envelope; Zouzou wielding a knife; Nico as an angel of death with waist-length hair in a billowing black cape, filmed in high winter on the roof of the Paris Opera House among the stone gargoyles. Most strikingly, Nico in some kind of dungeon or prison slowly climbing a stone staircase, pausing on each step, in jerky zombie-like movements straight out of a lost German Expressionist masterpiece. 




/ Consider this a trailer for Le bleu des origines: eerie dirge "We've Got the Gold" from Nico's 1974 album The End providing a soundtrack to clips from Le bleu des origines /

Nico and Zouzou are mostly filmed alone but sometimes together. What links them? Both women were frequent collaborators with Garrel and had appeared in his films several times separately before. Nico was romantically linked with Garrel: I’m uncertain whether Zouzou was. Like Anita Pallenberg, both women had been involved with the doomed Rolling Stone Brian Jones. In the 1960s both Nico and Zouzou had been glamorous art-y girls of the moment, fashion models turned singers and actresses. By 1979 both women had hit hard times. Nico, Zouzou and Garrel are all known for their heroin addiction. (Later in her life Zouzou did jail time and was reduced to selling the Parisian equivalent of The Big Issue outside Paris metro stations).

Again and again Garrel films them in scenes that emphasise their alienation, anguish, distress, isolation, solitude. Both Nico and Zouzou were great beauties and there is genuine pleasure in lengthily scrutinising them in long silent takes; from shot to shot, though, depending on how the light hits their faces, both can look suddenly, startlingly ravaged, older than their years. Maybe the film is about the hell of heroin addiction? 

There is actually a third woman in the film who appears so briefly she is almost subliminal: Jean Seberg. (Seberg and Nico had already appeared together in the earlier Garrel film Les hautes solitudes in 1974). In some shots a barely glimpsed heavy-set but still beautiful older woman appears, standing behind Nico while Nico plays the piano like the phantom of the opera. Later, and shockingly, Seberg inexplicably slaps Nico hard across the face. Seberg committed suicide in 1979, the year this film was released. This surely represents her last-ever film appearance.

While Zouzou gets equal screen time and is certainly charismatic, it must be said the film belongs to Nico. In her haunting close-ups she suggests the post-punk Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich of underground art cinema. Even in the “talkies” of the 1930s some of Garbo and Dietrich's most mesmerising on-screen moments were silent close-ups of their faces (i.e. the concluding scenes of Queen Christina and Morocco). Their allure was non-verbal, not dependent on dialogue or voices – they cast a spell with just their eyes. In Le bleu des origines Nico does the same. 

/ The famous concluding close-up of Queen Christina (1933) in which the serenely impenetrable Greta Garbo stares into the horizon, her inner world sealed off to us. I’d argue this anticipates the lengthy, unfathomable close-ups Andy Warhol and then Garrel would devote to Nico in their underground art films  /

As the film continues, the mood of distress and impending tragedy grows more overt. Towards the end Nico is shown wrapped in a headscarf, crying genuine inconsolable tears, her breath visible in frosty night air, seemingly not acting. Her depression is tangible. For someone frequently lazily described as an ice queen who sang in a bored monotone, Nico here convincingly projects raw emotion: her presence aches with a heavy sadness. 

Sometimes hypnotic, sometimes catatonic, Le bleu des origines is as bleakly beautiful as Nico's best music and was obviously a heartfelt personal and artistic statement. If the film does represent the end of their relationship, it is certainly a last cinematic love letter from Garrel to Nico.

/ Portrait of Nico circa her 1981 album Drama of Exile /



/ You can watch Le bleu des origines in its entirety on the Youtube link above. How lucky I was to see it in an exquisite sparkling print at The British Film Institute: this is clearly a bootleg (I think someone filmed it sitting in a cinema!) but Garrel has never released it on DVD and for now this represents your best viewing source. For a soundtrack to this silent film I suggest you load your CD player with Nico's essential trilogy (her "gravest hits" if you like) - The Marble Index (1969), Desertshore (1970) and The End (1974) - and crank it up loud /

Further reading:

Read the Dennis Cooper blog for an excellent overview of Garrel's career

Fascinating 2002 interview with the then-58 year old Zouzou in The Guardian. What a life.

I've blogged about the ever-inscrutable Nico (“possessor of the most haunting wraith cheekbones of the 20th century” - thank you, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair) many times: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard "My Funny Valentine" (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; and  finally, When Patti Smith Met Nico.

Reflections on Susan Tyrrell (18 March 1945 - 16 June 2012)

“Actor often cast in sleazy, raunchy roles.” That was the headline for The Guardian’s obituary of the maverick cult movie actress Susan Tyrrell (18 March 1945 – 16 June 2012), who died last month aged 67 after a very tough life. Seriously: what greater career summary could an actress possibly hope for?

Since her death I’ve devoured all Tyrrell’s obituaries and found the outrageous anecdotes about this tempestuous outlaw / outsider actress so fascinating, it prompted me to do my own (belated) tribute. I hadn’t thought of Susan Tyrrell much since reading the tragic news of her losing both her legs in 2000 (they had to be amputated when she was stricken with a rare blood disease; considering her health problems, Tyrrell's death wasn’t entirely unexpected) or kept abreast of her subsequent film appearances. It’s sad when it takes death for someone to be reappraised, but there’s been a genuine outpouring of affection for Tyrrell online in the past month – a recognition we’ve lost a true original. I hope I can do justice to Tyrrell’s weird charisma.

Prior to her death, I mainly knew Tyrrell from just two films. Like many people of my generation, she made a vivid impression as raspy-voiced, gum-snapping hillbilly matriarch Ramona Ricketts in the John Waters juvenile delinquent rockabilly musical Cry-baby (1990). Many years later, I saw her as Carroll Baker’s mousey, tremulous and down-trodden daughter-in-law in Andy Warhol’s BAD (1977). (I know I’ve seen Big Top Pee Wee (1988) at some point, but it’s been so long I need to re-visit it to refresh my memory of Tyrrell in that).

Polaroid of Tyrrell as Ramona Rickettes and Iggy Pop as Belvedere Rickettes in John Waters's Cry-baby (1990). I want to look like them when I grow up

Tyrrell as Mary in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977). You can read my blog about this film and Tyrrell's performance in it here

Since then, I’ve loaded my LOVEFiLM request list with Susan Tyrrell films (not many of which are available on DVD in the UK, sadly) and seen Forbidden Zone (1982). But what all of Tyrrell’s obituary writers unanimously agree on is that her crowning achievement was her performance as the volatile alcoholic Oma in Fat City (1972).

When people lament wistfully about the golden age of gritty, small-scale 1970s character-driven American films, they mean films precisely like Fat City, John Huston’s downbeat and soulful study of melancholy losers. Set in a peeling, shabby vision of skid row Stockton, California, Huston’s tone is hard-boiled but sensitive and compassionate if ultimately pessimistic (“Life is a beeline for the drain,” one of the characters despairs towards the end). The action mostly shuttles between boxing gyms, derelict welfare hotels and dark dive bars where the characters chain-smoke and drink away their troubles while mournful Country & Western music emanates from a Wurlitzer jukebox. (The Kris Kristofferson ballad “Help Me Make It through the Night” plays under the opening credits and sets the mood for the ensuing film).

Fat City contrasts the stories of two couples: Jeff Bridges as a promising teenage boxer on the ascent and his naive girlfriend Candy Clark, and the stoical, battered Stacy Keach as a past-his-prime boxer and Tyrrell as his booze-sodden love interest Oma. (The older pair is far more interesting).

Tyrrell as Oma in John Huston's Fat City (1972)

The role of juicehead Oma was originally intended for Faye Dunaway, then at her zenith. No doubt Dunaway would have been fascinating in the part, but Tyrrell invests it with a totally idiosyncratic frowsy, bleary-eyed kewpie doll strangeness. (Dunaway would eventually get to interpret a similar role much later in her career, as the drunken Wanda Wilcox in the 1987 film Barfly).

It’s jarring to realise Tyrrell was only 26-years old in Fat City: with her matted rat’s nest hair, face screwed into a mask of misery and slumped, defeated body language she could pass for someone a good fifteen years older. (Tyrrell always looks vaguely forty-something in all of her films, regardless of her actual age). Her performance is the quintessential study of the jaundiced bar stool mama, the kind of drunk you pray doesn’t spark up a conversation with you at a bar while you’re waiting for someone (and they always do). She’s such a hardened barfly that when Oma makes a rare sojourn outside in daytime, the jolting unfamiliarity of sunlight makes her blink and turn unsteady. Tyrrell nails the stormy mood swings of an alcoholic: sherry-swilling Oma is alternately tearful, petulant, maudlin, raucous, self-pitying and needy. When angered she turns shrewish, a harridan. “Screw everybody!” she slurs. She and Keach have a piquant argument at one stage (Him: “Screw you!” Her: “Up yours, cowboy!”). She’s also prone to drunken philosophising: “The white race has been in decline since 1492 when Christopher Columbus discovered syphilis!”

Once Keach’s initial infatuation with Oma wears off, he realises what exactly he’s lumbered with. “Every time she opens her mouth, I think I’m going to go crazy!” he despairs. Yes, Oma is a nightmare, but Tyrrell scalds the screen every time she appears. While the rest of the cast give low-key naturalistic performances, Tyrrell is on an entirely different register – out-sized, bravura, Bette Davis-ish intensity. She’s an actress out on a limb, risking embarrassment. Tyrrell was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, but rather than herald greater things Fat City sealed her fate and set a bar she’d never be able to reach again for various complex reasons -- perhaps her own tumultuous personality, or maybe Tyrrell was so convincing as an unstable drunk it scared off producers?

Fat City certainly guaranteed Tyrrell would never be a conventional leading lady (probably not her destiny anyway). Luckily she saw herself as primarily a character actress: she was beautiful enough to be a mainstream star (sculpted cheekbones, feline eyes, heart-shaped mouth), but instead opted to embrace her inner freak. (One of the defining characteristics of Tyrrell's career was her willingness to look grotesque).

But looking back at Tyrrell's wayward, erratic filmography, she deserved better films. Tyrrell probably belongs to the elite tradition of actresses too uncompromising, eccentric, decadent and individual for Hollywood to know what to do with: think of loose cannons / trouble makers like Louise Brooks or Tallulah Bankhead (and more recently, Sandra Bernhard). In fact, in Barry Paris’s essential 1989 biography of silent cinema’s wild child Louise Brooks he quotes a friend of hers recalling asking Brooks how – when she was almost overburdened with beauty, potential and star quality – she wound up exiled from Hollywood and unemployable. Brooks admitted, “I like to fuck and drink too much.” I suspect that’s equally true of Tyrrell (who could swear like a truck stop prostitute). And it clearly rankled her: in interviews Tyrrell repeatedly bewails the quality of her films. In 1992 she starred in an avant-garde one-woman performance art stage piece about her career disappointments entitled My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta. You can watch it here: it’s like David Lynch meets Kurt Weill and Tyrrell is on scathing form.


Susan Tyrrell - MY ROTTEN LIFE; A BITTER OPERETTA from Norn Cutson on Vimeo.


The other Tyrrell film I’ve seen since her death is Forbidden Zone. Very deliberately striving for cult movie status, this zany musical looks great and has some amazing moments (it’s remarkable what was achieved on a clearly small budget) – but it’s also frequently shrill and annoying, and the music of Oingo Boingo is pretty much nails on a blackboard for me. As the vicious Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension, Tyrrell walks off with the film. Boiling with sexual energy and fury, gleefully luxuriating in her own evil (Eartha Kitt's Catwoman in the 1960s Batman TV series would appear to be her template), Tyrrell demonstrates (for a heterosexual woman) a profound understanding of camp in this performance. In fact her only potential threat in the film is the superbly deadpan former Warhol superstar Viva, who makes a cameo appearance and delivers with peerless nonchalance the killer line, “See you guys later – I need to change a Tampax.” (In a climactic moment, Tyrrell and Viva roll around on the ground in a cat fight. It needs to be seen to be believed).


Once you’ve seen this clip, you’ve pretty much seen the highpoint of Forbidden Zone. Tyrrell clearly knew how to deliver a musical number with real verve. A definite added bonus in this song is The Kipper Kids in go-go boys mode shaking their asses in jock straps. Damn, those two were built like tanks! One of them is now married to Bette Midler. Boy did she luck out!

In Forbidden Zone, the sadistic Queen Doris is married to King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension, played by dwarf French actor Herve Villechaize (yes, Tattoo from Fantasy Island). In one of the extra features on the Forbidden Zone DVD, Tyrrell is interviewed and discusses her relationship with Villechaize (they’d been romantically involved, but split by the time they co-starred in the film). She reminisces about the first time she ever saw Villechaize, onstage in a play. As the play progressed, Tyrrell found herself drawn to him and it gradually dawned on her: “I want to fuck a midget!” When the interviewer splutters with nervous laughter, Tyrrell clarifies, “In a very loving way!”

As a nice postscript, this is Tyrrell interviewed in Lee Server’s excellent 2006 biography of Ava Gardner, recalling her encounter with the ailing veteran actress in Spain in 1984. It reveals much about Tyrrell's warmth, generosity, hedonism and ribald sense of humour.

“I was in Spain doing a film ... had two fabulous lunches with (Gardner). She had saddlebags of vodka on the sides of her eyes. But what a beauty. You’re just in awe, it’s like taking in the Taj Mahal of beauty. But she was a real girl. “Honey honey” and smoking smoking and the beauty of this face and drinking and laughing our asses off. She was trying to get me out of Madrid. She said I had to get out of there – get the fuck out of the country. And she leaned over the table, and she said, “You need to get the fuck out of Spain, because the guys all have little dicks and they’ll fuck you in the ass before you can get your panties off.” I loved her so much. We laughed so hard ... What a genius. She had a lot of vodka in her, boy, that’s for sure.”

I think I want to go to for a boozy, debauched lunch with Susan Tyrrell and Ava Gardner ...

Tyrrell is survived by her mother, but sadly they were estranged and hadn't reconciled by the time of her death. In 2000 Tyrrell recalled, "The last thing my mother said to me was, 'SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry.' I've always liked that, and I've always tried to live up to it." “A celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry”: talk about words to live by. RIP Susan Tyrrell.

Further reading:

Tyrrell’s leading man in Fat City, Stacy Keach pays her a sensitive and lyrical eulogy in the Huffington Post online. “I loved her whiskey voice, always reeking of soul and sweetness,” Keach recalls. “She was like the Billie Holliday of the dispossessed. She sang the blues with every word she spoke, and the unique colors she brought to the behavior of the characters she played always embraced a vivid portrait of a highly sensual woman. Sexy and vulnerable, not unlike the qualities of a battered Marilyn Monroe.”

Michael Musto (doyen of the downtown NYC nightclubbing scene and Village Voice gossip columnist) has posted some hilarious recollections of the times he interviewed Tyrrell in the 1980s (once for Soho Weekly News and then for Details magazine, when it was still hip). Read some scathing excerpts from the 1983 Details interview here and here.

Nice, thoughtful piece on Dangerous Minds, praising Tyrrell's ability to "ignite flicks that strained to be weird with flashes of her eccentric brilliance, often salvaging otherwise unwatchable pieces of crap" and calling her "Cinema's Gonzo Goddess."

It was Dennis Cooper’s typically excellent blog about Tyrell (a treasure trove of photos, clips and juicy info) that prompted me to do my own in the first place.

Susan Tyrrell's own website (check out the outrageous photo gallery!)

Finally, the mother of all Susan Tyrrell interviews is Paul Cullum’s insightful and incendiary masterpiece from The LA Weekly News in 2000, subtitled “Susan Tyrrell’s Sentimental Journey through Money, Fame, Sex and Amputation.” Against a soundtrack of rap music (“Thank God for rap music — without it, I would slit my throat”), Cullum meets Tyrrell (accompanied by her geriatric poodle Willie) right after her legs have been amputated and finds her in a remarkably sassy, un-self pitying frame of mind – what a resilient tough cookie. I especially love Tyrrell tenderly reminiscing about her friendship with the doomed Warhol drag queen superstar Candy Darling. Less happily, her account of how she got the role in Fat City will forever tinge your opinion of John Huston (the man, not the director) and make you recall his sinister role in Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

Reflections on Accattone

After French actor Pierre Clémenti died, cult author Dennis Cooper lovingly dedicated a blog to the androgynous and perverse poster boy of 1960s European art cinema. One of the motivations Cooper gave for his tribute was simply because the Bardot lipped, doe-eyed Clémenti is “what beauty looks like.” After recently seeing the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Accattone (1961) for the first time, for me the equivalent of “what beauty looks like” is closer to the Italian actor Franco Citti. (OK, Alain Delon figures in there somewhere too). Citti is of a similar vintage to Clémenti (who of course worked with Pasolini himself) but of an entirely different, butch-er and swarthier type.

Accattone represents the film debut of both the great uncompromising Italian auteur Pasolini (who wrote and directed it) and neophyte 26-year old leading man Citti. In the Italian Neo-Realist tradition, Pasolini cast his films with non-professional actors. Pasolini certainly struck gold with Citti, who he’d go on to use in several subsequent films. Accattone entirely centres on Citti’s astonishingly natural performance and charismatic physical presence. As writer Judy Bloch has pointed out, his “rough-hewn beauty is like a slap in the face.”

I actually saw Pasolini’s second film, Mamma Roma (1962) before Accattone. (I love Mamma Roma slightly more than Accattone simply because it features a lacerating performance from the volcanic Anna Magnani, the earth mother / she-wolf of Italian cinema. Citti pops up in Mamma Roma too – again playing a pimp as he does in Accattone, this time with a sleazy little moustache). Both Accattone and Mamma Roma firmly share the same sensibility as Luis Bunel’s Los Olvidados (1950): they’re devastating politicised studies of how grinding poverty defines peoples’ lives and their options.

Anna Magnani, the great tragedienne of Italian cinema, in Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962)

Pasolini in conversation with Anna Magnani during the filming of Mamma Roma (1962)

Pasolini was fascinated and inspired by the uncorrupted and marginalised peasant culture of the cafone (the Italian equivalent of hillbillies; in English subtitles, when characters in Accattone and Mamma Roma argue their insult of choice is frequently translated as “hick”, which seems to be a scathing put-down). This is the milieu of Accattone, depicting the underclass of pimps, prostitutes and thieves struggling for survival in the post-war borgate (slum or shanty town) outside of central Rome. (Accattone, like Mamma Roma, was filmed in the Pigneto district – one of my favourite, most atmospheric neighbourhoods of Rome. At the time Pigneto would have been a slum. It’s been gentrified considerably since these films were made, but for me Pigneto is still haunted by Accattone and Mamma Roma and the ghost of Pasolini).

Citti plays the film’s anti-hero, a sullen young pimp. He’s named Vittorio but everyone calls him “Accattone” (Roman slang for beggar or scrounger). Accattone and his gang of lay-about friends reject work for a life of sponging, hustling and pimping -- and who can blame them, when the film implies the only alternative would be back-breaking hard physical labour at starvation wages anyhow? “Work?” Accattone howls, incredulous, at one point. “Animals work!”

At first you think how brave Pasolini is to base a film around such a callous, amoral and unsympathetic character, especially when you see how abusive Accattone is towards his dim-witted whore Maddalena and realise he has a wife and young child he’s abandoned. So Accattone is a prick, but as portrayed by Franco Citti he's a sexy and compelling prick. And as the film progresses we see chinks of despair, self-loathing and stoical suffering in Accattone -- revealed mostly wordlessly through Citti’s soulful expression and sorrowful hooded eyes. One of Citti’s best moments is after his brother in law kicks the snot out of him, while the entire extended family and neighbours cheer him on. With jeers of, “Pappone!” ("Pimp!") ringing in his ears, the battered Accattone makes his abject walk of shame home; we alone see the dejected expression on his face. It’s a heart-wrenching moment.

Pappone! Pappone!

Seen today, Accattone is still viciously hard-edged and unsentimental. Men beat whores for the sheer sport of it, and because they can. Cartagine (a rat-faced, feral teenaged psychopath and one of Accattone’s partners in crime) brags in a bar about how the night before he and his friends assaulted a prostitute. “What a beating! You should have seen us,” he laughs. “How she begged us!”

(An aside: one of the prostitutes (Margheritona) is played by actress Adriana Moneta, who's like someone out of Fellini's Le notti di Cabiria (1957). She’s instantly recognisable as Ninni, the prostitute who gets picked up by a slumming Marcello Mastroainni and Anouk Aimee in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). According to IMDb, these were her only two film credits – if true, her filmography may be modest but she can claim to have played the archetypal earthy, tough but good-natured Roman prostitute for two of Italian cinema’s great maestros).

Marcello Mastroianni, Adriana Moneta and Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita (1960)

Pasolini ennobles the struggles of his characters while never romanticising their poverty. (To his credit, he’s never guilty of poverty chic or poverty porn). These are people who are genuinely at risk of going hungry, who are reduced to stealing and selling their father’s false teeth in order to eat; it’s shown as virtually inevitable that a pretty girl will turn to prostitution. Accattone is simultaneously squalid and lyrically beautiful. What Pasolini does do is elevate the harsh, grinding suffering of the impoverished cafone to the level of operatic high tragedy in beautifully composed shots that evoke Renaissance paintings, with classical music swelling on the soundtrack. When Maddalena is driven to a deserted wasteland and savagely beaten by some vengeful Neapolitan henchmen of her previous pimp, Bach soars on the soundtrack as the camera observes her lying like a broken doll on the ground, swooping down on her abandoned handbag and a solitary shoe.

Maddalena is played by Silvana Corsini, presumably another non-professional actor. Pasolini obviously liked her, as she would later play Bruna, the town tramp with fuzzy arm pits who seduces Anna Magnani’s teenaged son in Mamma Roma. Information about Corsini is scarce: maybe she was simply a pretty local girl and Pasolini liked her face, but Corsini has an interesting screen presence and is exceptional at suggesting credulous, slightly uncomprehending not particularly bright child-women. After Maddalena’s assault, there is a memorable scene in the police station where the local thugs and pimps are brought in for her to try to identify her attackers. A true connoisseur of firm Mediterranean male flesh, Pasolini’s camera lingers over the handsome criminals’ tough insolent faces in loving close-ups. In retrospect, you can’t help but shudder and recall Pasolini was murdered by a psychotic teenaged rent boy in 1972 - if they represent his ideal type, Pasolini certainly paid the consequences.


The subtitles are in French for this clip, unfortunately

From the start, it’s hinted that Accattone painfully recognises the futility of his life and harbours a death wish. We see funeral processions, premonitions of death, and nightmares about impending death. “Either the world kills me, or I’ll kill it!” Accattone wails towards the end of the film. One guess who wins that challenge. Suffice to say, the film ends with a character exhaling, “Ah, now I’m fine ...” with cruel irony, while someone else stands over them making the sign of the cross with handcuffs on their wrists.

A drunk Accattone with tears running down his face

Only In Archway

I first moved to Archway in North London almost exactly three years ago now (March 2008, I estimate) and used to post the occasional blog about it on Myspace (remember Myspace?). Haven’t written anything about the neighbourhood in ages because either nothing eventful has happened, or I’ve become used to the dysfunctional freakiness of Archway after living here for so long. Until last night ...

Friday night around 6pm after work I was cutting down Marlborough Road (off Holloway Road) on way home from work with my iPod cranked up loud. I noticed a teenage boy walking directly ahead of me. He was only noteworthy because he was strikingly scrawny and unwell-looking: hunched little shoulders, pasty complexion, red-haired, wearing an oversized baggy grey tracksuit that hangs off him.

As I overtake him (I walk fast) he glances back at me and makes burning eye contact, which felt strange and made me almost flinch. Marlborough Road forks in two directions: I walk down Hatchard Road, he stays on Marlborough Road.

But the next thing I know, when I’m almost home, he’s caught up with me and is walking fast to keep pace with me. It feels genuinely odd and almost threatening: he’s right next to me, invading my personal space in a way that brings out the primal skin-prickling fight or flight instinct. Even though he’s an emaciated runt I almost expect him to attempt to mug me, or pull out a knife. I immediately think of the dwarf in the red parka in the film Don’t Look Now ... just because someone is small doesn’t mean they’re innocuous.

I’m naturally a fast walker and keep staring straight ahead and he is really struggling to keep up with me. Finally, he reaches out and taps me on the shoulder to get my attention – which makes me shudder. I stop and turn around. By now am really curious what he wants. I turn and take out my headphones.

Boy: Do you live around here?
Me: (Am so stunned, I answer truthfully) Yeah, on Sussex Way (straight ahead).
Boy: Do you live alone?
Me: Yeah.
Boy: Because I have nowhere to go. Can I come over for an hour?
Me: (Putting headphones back in and walking away) No. Sorry, buddy.

He looks disappointed but doesn’t pursue it. What a strange, David Lynch-ian experience: sexually propositioned on the street around the corner from where I live by this creepy, damaged teenaged waif straight out of a Dennis Cooper novel. It actually felt eerie. He seemed doomed: If he keeps up this kind of behaviour his decomposed remains are destined to be found in a tip or wasteland somewhere.

In a way, it was a flashback to another encounter I had on 11 April 2008. Cutting and pasting from Myspace blog ...

Am still getting accustomed to living in Archway after about five years of living in Finsbury Park, which is only a ten minute walk away but feels like a whole other world. Finsbury Park was pretty impoverished but buzzing and multicultural; Archway seems so defeated, so dysfunctional. Walking home from work last night I estimated every other person I passed on Holloway Road seemed to be either a mentalist or some kind of meths drinker. Most notable was an apparently suicidal, haunted-looking black guy wearing one of those hats with ear flaps who kept wandering into oncoming traffic; he'd stand on the curb until a bus was coming towards him, then turn around and cross the street again, testing his luck. A motorcyclist had to honk at him and swerve.

Tonight after work was cutting down Fairbridge Road to get to Sussex Way and noticed two men walking in the opposite direction across the street. I made the major mistake of making the most fleeting of eye contact with one of them. Sure enough he shouts after me, "Hey! Hey!" and runs across the street to catch up with me. He is compact (shorter than me and I am only 5'6) but tough, Irish and obviously a bit nuts. He is smiling as if he is really pleased to see me. "It's me! I saw you at Mary's last week!" I say, "I don't think we know each other …" and he keeps insisting we do. I was thinking, there are always the alcoholic regulars at The Kings Head on Holloway Road, which is the new venue for the monthly Virginia Creepers rockabilly club. Maybe he saw me there?

He tells me his name, as if reminding me. I instantly forget it because all I can concentrate on is that he is standing too close, he's invading my personal space and rousing that "fight or flight" instinct. He's outwardly friendly, even childlike but volatile, mercurial. He suddenly flings his arms around me and hugs me hard. I brace myself in case he tries to pick my pockets. In a rush he admits he's drinking again, I know what it's like, he's just come out of prison after 11 years. He's got to go meet his probation officer and only has £1 (he holds out his hand with the one pound coin to demonstrate, as if I've asked him for proof), he needs another pound to get there. I thought, I knew that was coming, it was inevitable. He was just setting up the context.

I actually only have small change in my wallet (which is true), which I explain to him as I get my wallet out of my back pocket. He suggests, "You can hit me if you like" and he tilts his head, offering me his jaw to punch, as if this is a fair exchange for him asking me for money. I tell him, "That's OK" and give him handful of small change (maybe 50p). While my wallet is out he clocks that I have a wad of pound notes (my What Katie Did wages, which is what I try to budget to live on during the week) and asks, "Can I have ten pounds until next week?" (As if it's a loan between friends and I will see him again next week), I say "No" and mercifully he bounds off, seemingly happy enough with the small change I have given him.

Am still wondering why he singled me out and stopped me: did he genuinely think he knew me and mistook me for someone else? Was it because he assumed I was a fellow Irishman (people assume I am Irish all the time) and would be sympathetic? Do I look like a soft touch? Anyway, let's hope he isn't a neighbour I bump into on a regular basis.