Neil Jordan | Not I / 2000

mouth on fire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett (text), Neil Jordan (director) Not I (part of the project Beckett on Film, presenting 19 Beckett texts on film, conceived my Michael Colgan) / 2000

 

Neil Jordan begins his short film Not I, based on the 1972 dramatic text by Samuel Beckett, with a view of a young woman (Julienne Moore) entering to sit upon a chair. Perhaps he just couldn’t resist showing off his actor, but this clearly works against Beckett’s instructions, wherein he writes:

 

                     Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet

                     above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face

                     in shadow. Invisible microphone.

      The auditor, covered head to foot in a loose black djellaba, is missing from Jordan's film.

     From here on, however, Jordan follows the author’s suggestions, turning the rest of the work into a film of the mouth.

      The mouth—or the voice—is, in fact, the subject of this work, which concerns an older woman (seventy years of age, we later discover) whose parents, having died or disappeared shortly after her birth, was brought up without love and basic human communication. Throughout much of her life she has seldom spoke, grocery-shopping, for example, by bringing a black bag and a shopping list to the store, and quietly waiting until the clerk puts the articles into the bag.

     But suddenly, one April morning, upon hearing the larks she falls face-first into the grass and, accompanied by an interminable buzz she hears all about her, she begins to talk without stop. The speech she releases into the world seems to be often incomprehensible to her friends, but, despite the constant interruptions between words, the tumble of language she uses to describe herself in the third person, we do gradually come to comprehend her “story.” It is as if all the silence she has previously lived has been let loose as a roar of suffering, a suffering she has not previously felt. In fact, she has felt little, apparently, throughout her life, unable even by the end of her scree to identify herself as single entity. Like a character in a fiction, she describes herself as a figure “out there,” a “not I” with no inward being.

     One might read Beckett’s short work as a kind of statement of the writer’s art, the writer being a silent entity until he is forced, “once or twice a year,” to express himself, often without being properly comprehended. And when those words pour out or the mouth opens to speak, it cannot stop, swallowing up everything, including the self, in the buzz of a created reality.

      Moore credibly plays the interruptive mouth, but it is somewhat difficult to watch this mouth in action—despite the three different views the director presents—in such extreme proximity of the camera. In some ways, the busy lips almost become abstract, so focused is the camera upon them. In the theater, where an unspeaking Auditor also stands in the shadows, there is more to distract the audience, even if it is hidden in the shadows. While I was watching this DVD, the movie was appropriately accompanied by a buzzing, a saw in my neighbor’s apartment from their attempts at renovation.

     Although I like the theatricality of the moving lips, with the gasps, pursings, and poutings of them against the actor’s white teeth, I often felt the need to turn away briefly to relieve myself of the apparent pain they express.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2011