Totally, Tenderly, Tragically

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Stardust Memories
Review:

This book caught my eye with its luminous cover picture and title, invited my scorn ( and derisive laughter ) with chapter headings like "A Taste For Naruse" and "The World According to Makavejev." Not that I consider those directors necessarily rarefied or beneath consideration, mind you, but it's hard to ignore the exclusionary tactics at work here. Even Lopate admits, in the Naruse essay, that the Japanese director's films have only been screened for a few festival vampires... in New York circa 1984. How many people are there, outside of Lopate's wine-tasting compadres, who could possibly relate to this?

Needless to say, I broke down and bought Totally, Tenderly, Tragically anyway. Any author who has the good taste to put Anna Karina on the cover of his book, so the reasoning went, deserves my money. As it turns out, that's not Anna Karina on the cover -- it's an Italian mamacita from an untraceable Antonioni film -- but that was to be the rudest shock I suffered. Otherwise, these essays were always enlightening, often surprising, and occasionally even revelatory.

The two best pieces in the book are "Anticipation of 'La Notte'" and "Fassbinder's 'Despair'." I turned the pages expecting parched, scholarly analysis, and instead was treated to very entertaining, often embarrassingly personal anecdotes. If you've ever craved dirt on Phillip Lopate, this book is manna from heaven.

In the first, a memoir of sorts in which "La Notte" serves basically the same function as the Groucho Marx movies in "Hannah and Her Sisters" -- a celluloid reminder that life is worth living -- Lopate spills the beans about not only his youthful virginity, but his resultant suicide attempt. Lest this sound too depressing, I hasten to add that Lopate is much older now, feels no pity for himself or his younger incarnations, and keeps things entirely unoppressive. But it's startling to see how time doesn't change human nature, and that virginity, pallor, and monkish solitude are the necessary components of film buffery, in 1999 no less than in 1961.

"Fassbinder's 'Despair'" has even less to do with the film in its title, instead choosing to recount a date Lopate had in the late 70's with a haughty German girl ( is there any other kind? ) Lopate's hopeless attempts to seduce the ice princess, who just wants to nurse her toothache, are thrown into sharp relief by the hovering figure of Fassbinder himself, a "greasy wild boar" who lived life to the fullest. He represents cinema; Lopate, mundane reality.

Movies are where we go to see high drama unfold in a safe, contained setting. But they're also an everpresent backdrop against which our own tiny lives play out, dwarfed by the looming figures on the screen. I can pay Lopate no higher compliment than to say he is equally skilled at evoking the transcendence of great cinema, and the quiet desperation of day-to-day life.

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Summary: The shocking genius of this book is in the linguistic perfec
Review: Lopate's new book is a showcase for his brilliance, his ability to graze not only far but wide. But I can't help thinking that here, more than in any other of his books (all of which I have read) the brilliance is not as much in the insight but in the perfect choice of every word, the absolutely right adjective and adverb, which create a passionate sensual delight.While Lopate has a remarkable linguistic intelligence his work becomes even more impressive when he writes about movies than when he writes about anything else.I could have done without the Lewis commentary which wasn't necessary and seemed half-hearted, and I could have done without the suicide attempt because it seemed it could have led him to another book, one which I would very much want to read, but the recounting of his days in college were fabulous.