1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 30: Antonia’s line

This Belgian-Dutch production belongs to a genre we used to see more of in the 1980s and 1990s:

HERE IS THE STORY OF EVERY PERSON IN THE VILLAGE

Among this genre’s highlights are My Life as a Dog (Sweden, 1985) and Cinema Paradiso (Italy, 1988). At the turn of the millennium, the concept was shrunk down to

HERE IS THE STORY OF EVERY PERSON IN THE CAFÉ

(Amélie – France, 2001)

Since then, we’ve not had many notable specimens.

Such movies are often sprinkled with quasi-magical images and situations. Antonia’s Line follows this trend while staunchly rejecting the supernatural. The titular character’s great-granddaughter asks if there is a heaven. “This is the only dance we dance,” Antonia replies.

She and the other villagers go to church, but they’re performing a charade.

This is no gritty Pelle the Conqueror: it is shot in warm colors, and the soundtrack plays triumphant-sounding classical music. Still, the movie has a hard edge. For example, one of its characters is the Village Rapist.

Other stock characters include:

• the Intellectual
• the Child Prodigy (the Intellectual’s great friend)
• a couple of Lovers who are Slow of Mind
• the Lecherous Priest
• the Woman who Cries Out at the Moon
• the Woman who Gives Birth Every Year
• the Kindly Farmer who Harbors Unrequited Feelings for Antonia

Antonia herself isn’t so easily pigeonholed. Unlike the others, she makes up her own mind, and she raises her daughter, Danielle, to do the same. So, when Danielle decides that she wants a child but not a husband, Antonia takes her to the city and helps her to pick out an aloof Sex God – a blond greaser on a motorcycle – for procreation and nothing else. (It’s this union that issues the Child Prodigy.)

There’s lots and lots of feminism. Perhaps you approve of feminism. You still might object to having feminism preached to you for your entertainment.

Then again, some viewers do enjoy being preached to, and for them Antonia’s Line would be just the thing.

Husbands’ Irrelevance: CHECK

Rapist’s Comeuppance: CHECK

Conversation about the Artichoke’s Many Fascinating Layers and, Especially, Its “Heart” (“Artichoke” Is Code for Something Else): CHECK

Not everything is so trite. In one sequence, the Priest is blackmailed into giving a rather lovely feminist sermon (and so, by a clever trick, the viewer is literally preached to). Antonia and Danielle smirk in their pew:

Antonia and her friends form a clique. Many nights, they and their expanding families eat together in the farmyard, at a long table. The Kindly Farmer brings his Strapping Sons. Women and men all get along in harmony together.

The villagers outside this enlightened clique are left to weep and gnash their teeth.

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Then, three-fifths of the way through, the movie gets interesting. The characters who populate this (mostly) idyllic village begin to die off. (Antonia’s mother already has had a rather horrific death, but it’s quickly forgotten.) The deaths have a wide range of causes. Murder. Childbirth. Suicide. Misadventure. Brokenheartedness. Illness. Old Age. Death comes with equal certainty for the antinatalist Intellectual and for his polar opposite, the Woman who Gives Birth Every Year.

Antonia’s death is different. She’s the character who always decides what’s in store for herself. In the movie’s first scene, she wakes up and decides that it is time, that she’ll simply die surrounded by friends and family before the day’s end. She summons her loved ones. The movie ends with her last flicker of consciousness.

How could one die like this, expecting nothing? It seems unutterably bleak. Clearly, to Antonia and to the authors of the movie, it doesn’t seem this way: life is to be embraced and then nothingness is also to be embraced (or at least accepted). Well, as I see it, Antonia’s acceptance of death seems overly placid, smug, just as her attitudes toward religion and toward conventional sexual morality seem smug.

The movie hints that Antonia will endure in the memory of her great-granddaughter. But if the movie’s underlying philosophy is correct, then all human consciousness is ephemeral, worth nothing or virtually nothing.

The movie’s reliance upon stock characters isn’t a problem. Its embrace of feminism and unconventionality isn’t a problem – indeed, to some extent, it’s to be welcomed. What I don’t like is the smugness.

It’s not often that I view an intelligent, memorable movie so at odds with my own temperament.

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Reuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby / Did earn an honest living (and did right), / I would not have you think that Reuben Bright / Was any more a brute than you or I; / For when they told him that his wife must die, / He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, / And cried like a great baby half that night, / And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid / The singers and the sexton and the rest, / He packed a lot of things that she had made / Most mournfully away in an old chest / Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs / In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

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(Edward Arlington Robinson)

For a very different take on the movie, see this review by Roger Ebert.

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P.S. One reason I’m glad to have seen the movie is the performance of Els Dottermans as Danielle, Antonia’s daughter. Danielle has few lines. Her role, especially at the beginning, is to stroll around the village with her mother and to quietly affirm her mother’s judgments and actions.

It could have been a thankless task. But Dottermans is very good at projecting intelligence with her face, which glares and smirks and glows.

Danielle also performs the movie’s most memorable physical actions: a pitchfork jab, a gleeful handstand, an ebullient run across a lawn, an enraged overturning of easels and paint in her artist’s studio. Antonia’s actions seem rather calculted. Danielle follows her mother in most things, but in key moments she acts instinctively. Hers isn’t a juicy role, but Dottermans gives one of the most interesting performances of the year.

R.I.P. Nick

My teacher, the philosopher Nicholas Sturgeon, has died. Ours was a rather lopsided relationship: he was generous, encouraging, and constructively critical; I benefited. (I assisted him one semester, so I suppose he also benefited – although, since he seemed to review everything I graded, I may not have saved him all that much work.) I’ve already written how, last year, made frail by illness, he went out of his way to serve as one of my dissertation examiners. Now I’d like to say a little more about his work, character, and influence.

Nick was best known as a defender of “Cornell Realism,” a cluster of views about the function of moral discourse (it purports to describe objective facts) and the nature of morality (it’s a mind-independent part of the natural world, and, for all we know, it isn’t reducible to anything we can describe in purely non-moral terms). Although, as a supernaturalist, I didn’t quite adopt Nick’s position – I continue to think about how much of Nick’s picture of morality a Christian could agree with – his influence led me to break decisively with moral subjectivism and all deep forms of moral relativism.

Nick was the best classroom teacher I ever had. His colleagues and graduate students were in awe of his lecturing, which he famously did without notes. The lectures were thorough, rigorous, clear – and often pleasurably dramatic, even suspenseful. I remember perching on the edge of my seat as he explained to beginning ethics students the intricacies of Joseph Butler’s refutation of psychological egoism. Though the topic is a staple of ethics surveys, I haven’t seen anyone else explain Butler’s argument better (Butler himself comes close).

It was typical of Nick to pay close attention to a historical figure. I regret that I never found time to read through the British Moralists under his guidance (which he agreed to provide). I also envied the undergraduates and graduate assistants assigned to him when his turn came to teach Introduction to Philosophy: I would’ve loved to hear him lecture on Russell’s Problems of Philosophy and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, two of his chosen texts. I did profit from his lectures on Butler, Thomas Hobbes, J.S. Mill, G.E. Moore, Philippa Foot, J.L. Mackie, and Bernard Williams. He knew all these distinguished moralists inside and out.

Many who passed through Cornell will recall his goodwill. With me he was rather withdrawn, though always kind (and I was quite shy in his presence). He was very helpful when I had to clear hurdles for my M.A. and Ph.D.

David has a good story about meeting Nick at a conference. He told him, “My brother John-Paul really likes you!” and Nick said, “Ho, ho! Well, I really like John-Paul!”

Here’s one memorial notice. It has another philosopher’s recollections of Nick.

And here’s a notice with more recollections in the comments, and a photo.

Our annual holiday

The semifinals of the Champions League were unremarkable. The winners, PSG and Bayern Munich, played on Sunday, and Bayern deservedly came away with the title.

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Karin took some days off from work, as she does every summer, but this year we didn’t travel much. We went as far as New Buffalo, Michigan – forty-five minutes away. With our friends, Dan, Lizzie, and their children, we strolled through a county park distinguished by its marshy scenery and two boardwalks: one high in the air, the other at marsh level. We saw marsh plants and kayakers and little fishes.

Then we tried out the beach at New Buffalo. It was crowded with revelers from Illinois, so we left. Frankly, I’d rather have gone to a beach in wintry Old Buffalo. We went to Niles for lunch. On our way, in tiny Three Oaks, we were detained by a long parade of flag-waving tractor drivers.

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Karin & I have been counting kcals again. I’ve lost several lbs. Watching my diet has forced me to acknowledge that butternut squash is more filling and nutritious than jasmine rice. Mowing has become a more welcome chore, since it burns kcals and allows me to increase my food quota. I briefly considered buying a reel mower to work out even harder. Then I watched some videos of people using reel mowers and decided it wasn’t for me.

R.I.P. Rick

Karin’s stepdad, Rick, died today. He was fifty-five. His body housed many illnesses: among them, pneumonia; we’re not sure which one killed him. When we saw him a few weeks ago, he looked frail, shriveled up. He needs to go to the doctor, we said. But with typical stubbornness he refused to go to the doctor. Karin’s mom told us he seemed tired of living: he would barely eat, and he’d talk about dying. Last weekend, he collapsed and lost consciousness. The medics almost took him to the hospital, but he awoke in time to dismiss them.

The following Monday, he went back to his job. Then he stopped working.

He was employed as a chef. Some weeks, he’d work ninety hours. His body was always sore.

A gruff, irreligious man, he was reconciled with God some two weeks ago, Karin’s mom said. It was the first time she’d seen him at peace.

Karin & I are very sad. We would’ve especially liked for Samuel to know him longer. He was very kind to his grandchildren. He put up with a great deal of nonsense from the rest of his family. He had a piquant, rather absurdist sense of humor. He was an ardent Vikings fan; the Vikings, of course, never won any Super Bowls, and I don’t think Rick ever won anything, either. That’s all right: a wise man once noted that ours is a religion for losers.

Rick left it late, but I think that at the end, he was prepared – he had the requisite humility. He was small enough, as another wise man once put it, to crawl through the eye of a needle.

Here he is with his dog, George, whom he lovingly called the “Swine.”

August’s poems

… are by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Kidnapped I’m reading for the first time. When I was little I was very interested in that book, but I didn’t read it because the characters’ dialect was too strange to understand. The story is creepy as death.

Anyway, the poems. One is for Samuel, whose bedtime it is; and one is for me.

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Bed in Summer
(From A Child’s Garden of Verses)

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

Sing Me a Song

of a Lad that Is Gone

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Mull was astern, Rum on the port,
Eigg on the starboard bow;
Glory of youth glowed in his soul;
Where is that glory now?

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone!
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that’s gone!

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?
Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

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More quarterfinals

Attack, attack, attack was the theme of the first three quarterfinals, beginning with Atalanta’s.

In the second quarterfinal, RB Leipzig, which came into existence just eleven years ago, outplayed and defeated Atlético de Madrid (who’d so impressively ousted title-holders Liverpool). Leipzig sliced through Atlético’s middle for the first goal. The winning goal was fired in after a clever low cross.

Leipzig’s young center-back, Dayot Upamecano, bossed Atlético’s strikers.

The next game was one of the most breakneck-paced contests I’ve seen at this level. Both Baryern and Barça threw caution to the wind. Bayern’s high defensive line was especially shocking.

Indeed, the Catalans had early chances. They didn’t take enough of them. The Bavarians romped to a 4–1 victory in each half, improving upon their 7–2 group stage victory over the Potato Tots.

The experts are predicting that Barça will be renovated through and through.

There was less attacking in Lyon’s surprising victory over Manchester City. The Citizens possessed the ball but lacked ideas. The “signature” moment occurred when Raheem Sterling missed the tying goal just feet from the empty net.

Outcomewise there are various possibilities, but Bayern has the best team this year.

Near-upset

A cracking good, heartbreaking first quarterfinal. Atalanta outplayed and led the headless chickens of PSG until minute 89 or so. Then the Parisians scored two goals, overturning the deficit. Their difference-maker was Kylian Mbappé.

Neymar, who reportedly earns about as much as the whole Atalanta squad, played a stinker of a game.

I have no horse in this race. There is no European team I cheer for. But the Parisians are the least deserving semifinalists I’ve seen in a long time.

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Samuel had a checkup today. The nurse practitioner said he was too thin. She urged us to feed him mashed potatoes.

Weather for Hoosiers

We are like the frog in the cauldron. Mishawaka was cool for two weeks; gradually, it warmed; yesterday, suddenly, the temperature reached ninety (Fahrenheit).

Karin napped inside the air-conditioned house. Samuel and I remained on the sauna-porch. The little boy zonked out.

From time to time, he would raise an eyelid at the sound of a distant lawnmower or chainsaw.

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Today was more of the same. The air was stagnant and sultry. Samuel scooted around the porch and covered himself in dirt which he transmitted to my sweaty face. I took some dead leaves out of his mouth. He resented that.

Tonight, on the other hand, we had severe t-storms and wind gusts of 50–70 m.p.h. There were even a few little tornadoes. I carried supplies down to the basement, but the worst winds were over quickly, and it never became necessary to hunker down.

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The quarterfinal, semifinal, and final rounds of the UEFA Champions League will be played as single-game contests in Lisbon, at the home grounds of Benfica and Sporting (non-participants upon these lofty stages). Every match can be streamed gratis with a CBS All Access trial subscription.

The most odious clubs have all been eliminated, except PSG.

More sleep trouble (a cautionary tale)

You might think that the trouble is with Air Supply, my CPAP machine. Indeed, for a couple of weeks, the mask was too tight, and I was getting terrible headaches. But I fixed that problem.

No, the trouble is that our mattress is wrecked. It has been for years.

When we bought it, Karin & I thought we were being clever, trying out mattresses in the store and then using the Internet to order a model that was similar to what we liked. Well, the joke was on us. Now the springs are damaged and we sleep in enormous craters.

I awoke with a backache that would persist all day. It was the final backbreaking straw. A few hours later, we ordered a new, more expensive mattress. This one is renowned for its firmness and has a lifetime warranty. It also will require us to make a lifetime of payments (or at least a year’s worth).

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David Attenborough’s Our Planet – a Netflix production – is free to stream on YouTube. Samuel and I watched Episode 8, “Forests.” Samuel was quite taken with the animals. He squawked at the TV several times.

Fathers and sons

Samuel is still a shrimp, but not such a shrimp as he was. This week he graduated from his three-to-six-month onesies to his six-to-nine-month onesies (he is nine months old). And today, Karin brought him some large pacifiers. We’d worried that he would swallow one of his older pacifiers; he’d begun slipping them entire into his mouth. Samuel also did his first crawls today. He’d been standing on hands and knees without moving, but this week he took a few crawls forward. I hope he walks soon so I can let him wander around the back yard.

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I’ve finished reading Book 2 of C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series. Nine more books to go. This particular novel used to be called Strangers and Brothers, but for the omnibus edition it was rechristened George Passant. This month, I’m reading Book 3, The Conscience of the Rich.

I also am reading John Stott’s IVP Romans commentary which I used to notice my dad assigning to his seminary students. (They’d usually read it in Spanish.) I’ve put off studying Romans long enough. And now that I’m beginning, I’ve resolved to limit how much I study it. Some people get sucked in and read dozens of commentaries on that epistle. That isn’t for me. If I find a tidy 400-page Reader’s Digest Condensed version that makes sense of Romans, that will suffice.

Today, coincidentally, Samuel and I were having a video call with my parents when my dad, who was writing study notes on Romans, gave me an impromptu presentation of his worked-out theory of the Atonement. Indeed, he presented it several times in response to my clarificatory questions. He is the same father who used to sit with me in the middle of the night when I was too afraid to sleep, answering questions such as What is faith, questions upon which salvation hinges.