Ready for his close-up
Book celebrates great film director's life and career
The film director Billy Wilder always maintained that, as a Jew living in Berlin in the early 1930s, pessimism saved his life. “The optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills,” he said in 1945, in reference to his decision to flee to Paris and Hollywood.
It would be natural, however, for a pessimist to assume that a life that goes on too long can be just as unlucky a fate as one that is cut short, and this may explain why his masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (1950) is so haunting in its portrayal of the forgotten film star Norma Desmond.
Perhaps Wilder was pessimistic enough to see Desmond as a sort of anticipatory self-portrait; in the last 30 years of his long life, no U.S. studios would back his films.
It was a series of flops in the 1970s that erased Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and so on from the credit side of Wilder's ledger and killed his career. His last major film, Fedora (1978), was financed by a German company. Wilder said, “With this picture I really cannot lose. If it's a huge success, it's my revenge on Hollywood. If it's a flop, it's my revenge for Auschwitz.” It turned out to be the latter.
Jonathan Coe's 13th novel, centres on the filming of Fedora. Coe has for many years been a rather lonely champion of Wilder's late movies, but I suspect he has chosen to write about Fedora not because he thinks it has been underrated but because it was an act of defiance: an autumnal piece, reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard.
Coe's Wilder — a ruthless perfectionist and caustic wit, but essentially far more decent and lovable than a great director has any right to be — is seen through the eyes of the fictional narrator, Calista Frangopoulou, a young Greek woman who helps out with translation duties when the Fedora crew begin filming on the Greek islands.
In the present day, Calista, now in her late 50s, is a film composer and mother of rapidly growing daughters who feels underappreciated in both capacities, but in the act of reminiscing about Mr. Wilder's capacity to go on, she reaches an epiphany on how she might escape obsolescence.
I think Coe wants us to attribute to both his work and Wilder's a description in this book taken from Calista's reflection on her favourite composers, Ravel and Debussy: “joie de vivre invariably coexisted with a lingering, implacable melancholy.”
This is truer of some parts of the book than others — a long, bravura passage in which Wilder's early life is dramatized in the form of a screenplay is involving and moving while Coe seems to be slightly on autopilot when writing about Calista's tribulations.
At its best, Coe's close-up on Wilder doesn't just celebrate him, but embodies his glorious ability to say sad things in a funny way, and vice versa.