Pauline Noel | The Pianist / 2024

the story of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jessica Limbardo (screenplay), Pauline Noel (director) The Pianist / 2024 [8 minutes]

 

Jackson, a composer/pianist has evidently been commissioned to write a new piece, but is obviously in the midst of a creative block. He has been drinking for days apparently (bottles of wine and scotch litter his otherwise immaculate apartment) without having been able produce anything of value.

     His lover Teddy rises and attempts to lure him back to the piano to compose, reminding him that Jackson once told him that songs are just like stories. “So tell the story,” he insists. “Tell me the story for love.”

     As he begins to play, the film shifts to the now stereotypical street scene (this in New York) with in love boys running every which way and bumping into each other in the middle of the street, only to rush off again hand-in-hand.

     But once more, as Jackson describes it, he gets “stuck in the middle.” Is this a reflection of their own relationship we have to ask? “I don’t want it to end” moans the pianist.

     Once more Teddy reassures him that he can do it. “I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”

     The street scene returns, but Jackson blocks it out. He can’t go on.

    This was about half way through this little cliched film, and I too was about to storm off given the amateur theatrics and inane plot of Pauline Noel’s short film. Surely, as a writer, I can no longer talk about such simple-minded works!

      But finally the friction between the two actors produced a tiny bit of heat, Teddy facing off with his lover: “I know what this is. It’s just you and me here babe, where you gonna hide?”

      But then, the back story made it even worse. Apparently, Jackson’s still miffed because Teddy failed to appear for one of his concerts. There he was waiting to go on, and no sight of Teddy. But, Teddy tells him, life is cruel. Get over it, you’re a pianist, that’s what you do!

      I almost quit this little movie once again to switch on the 1940 film Knut Rocke to hear Pat O’Brien shout out, “The last thing George said to me, 'Rock,' he said, 'sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper”—which given my disinterest in football and football movies should give you a clue of my state of mind.

      Back at our little movie, of course, Jackson finds a way through music to bring him back to love. What we discover, as well, is that the reason Teddy didn’t show up for the concert is that he evidently stepped off a New York street corner and was hit and killed by a passing car, and the concert, we discover, is a memorial for William Theodore Davis, the pianist’s beloved “Teddy.”

     Images of An Affair to Remember blur out the dance of Jackson and his dead Ted, tears presumed to have welled up in your eyes. The end.

     I recognize that this well-meaning film might have even been based on a real-life event, so I truly don’t wish to make fun of an amateur indie. And I’m a sentimental being. But….well, there’s a limit. This is most definitely what the males of Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle would describe as a “chick flick.”

    

Los Angeles, January 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).