We Cannot Read the Darkness
Narah T. Coelt’s To Have a Lover: beauty, the body and memory.
It’s Friday night and I’m sending a stranger on the internet pictures of myself; what I’m wearing, my face, my tattoos. I take picture after picture and hit send. The next day I look at my camera roll and scroll through dozens of photos, carefully angled so that my best features are brought out - my sharp jawline, my bright brown eyes. I stare at my own image, I look good.
On Monday morning I press shuffle on an old playlist and get back to work. The Stone Roses song I Wanna be Adored plays. Feels timely. Being desired can become an addiction and I’ve been flirting with the edges of that slippery slope. What if I just went and devoted myself to the accumulation of beauty? What would I even do with all of it? What is beauty for? Is being beautiful even a thing of merit in itself?
Narah T. Coelt’s short film To Have a Lover, is a surreal, vampiric, breakup ballad that asks similar questions. The impulse to preserve beauty is an instinct alive in all of us. And when it comes to a breakup, I’ll be the first to admit that stepping back into a version of the past where everything was tender is an alluring pastime; for that too, is a way of preserving beauty.
Mireille, the film’s protagonist, played by an arresting Sophie Walter, begs-asks-commands her ex-lover for “one more time” as she stands in the doorway to a barren room. A couple of moments before, we’ve witnessed her tramping through a disorientating landscape - a lush forest, an abandoned warehouse, various crumbling structures - until she arrives at a house, to which she heads determinedly, deciding to enter through the back door. Henry, played heartbreakingly by Eloka Ivo, becomes alert in the empty room. It’s almost like he can smell her approaching. “Everything is ready,” Mireille muses, as she stands in the doorway of the room. “I knew you’d come,” he replies. There’s a loaded silence between them and sex lingers over the encounter thick like fog. The sparse furniture of the room is covered in a protective transparent film. Last time, Mireille says. Mireille ties up her hair and Henry undresses.
Coelt’s film, like Nelson, avoids telling too many specific memories, it is concerned with its own kind of “fucking”.
In another seminal breakup ballad, Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes “I suppose I am avoiding writing down too many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is ‘the fucking’”. Talking to Coelt over the phone I asked her how she navigated her own vulnerability at the time of writing the screenplay, how it felt to poke around in a wound. She tells me about her interest in using art as a mechanism to process trauma, about her interest in surrealism and painful ambiguity. She references Boy Meets Girl by Leos Carax and Possession by Andrzej Żuławski. In these films nothing is obvious, yet as Anna thrashes in a Berlin tunnel, squirting milk from a bag all over the walls or as Carax’s Mireille tap-dances after contemplating suicide, emotion is at the forefront of every scene, priming the inner sensations over an overt explanation of rational thought. Coelt’s film, like Nelson, avoids telling too many specific memories, it is concerned with its own kind of “fucking”: the last moment of intimacy with a lover, the inner landscape of a breakup.
I suppose that my own breakup landscape has focused on the “fucking” too (I too am navigating the swampy landscape of post-love). Once my once-partner had come to my house to pick up his belongings and we’d performed the final act of intimacy, a fear of change crept into my mind with dagger-like claws. Everything was about to change and I was very scared. But what moments could I hold onto? What moments wouldn’t break my heart all over again? To Have a Lover teases at these ideas of memory repeatedly. But before getting into that, let's return to the body once more.
As a muse, the Life Model in To Have a Lover, is not just the object of art but also the illuminated giver of the gift of art. You’re in control now, she seems to be saying.
Mireille enters one of the abandoned warehouses (perhaps before her encounter with Henry, perhaps after, perhaps imagined) and happens upon a live drawing class. The Life Model, played by a stunning Miss Betsy Rose, emerges from a corner and poses for the class. She breaks the fourth wall as she peels off her see-through gloves and points directly into the camera. Mireille, who is watching enraptured, starts to sob at her feet. I’m reluctant to impose my own narrative over the highly suggestive events of the film, but to me, this moment brought me fiercely back to my own “fucking”. A highly feminised subject, fully in her power, elevates Mireille-the watcher-me to reclaim themselves through a direct appellation. She seems to be demanding Mireille take back ownership of her body and by extension, her own narrative. As a muse, the Life Model in To Have a Lover, is not just the object of art but also the illuminated giver of the gift of art. You’re in control now, she seems to be saying.
My “fucking”, needless to say, has been heavily involved with my own body. The prospect of intimacy with a new object of desire can be daunting after having shared yourself exclusively with one person over a period of time (in monogamous relationships). I felt like I’d forgotten how to position myself in the world that way. What were the possibilities offered by opening yourself up like that? Mireille walks through a deserted road that connects few and far between houses. Two older women, dressed in clothes of a time gone by, cross her path arm in arm, speaking French. “She has changed the relationship to her own body” says one of them. “Has she made new tethers?” the other asks. “Evidently,” the first replies. The allusion here isn’t necessarily to new lovers (although it could be), but suggests a newfound relationship with desire and her own body, which is now displaced and objectless, as Mireille navigates a post-Henry world. As we return to the plastified room where Henry is getting undressed, Mireille kneels on the ground over a cardboard box and a plastic bucket.
Breakups have that schizophrenic quality about them; wrenched from one personhood to the next in the blink of an eye.
Possession by Andrzej Żuławski is the quintessential cult breakup movie. In fact, when Coelt reached out to me, a still from the movie was my display picture - timely coincidences once again. After Żuławski’s Henry returns home from a mysterious espionage mission, he finds Anna in a state of disarray; she wants a divorce. What follows is a surreal, horror-filled journey through the woes of separation; there’s blood, sexual Frankenstein-like creations, abductions, and a crazed look in Anna’s eyes that follows her constantly. Anna goes from lover to lover, eating them, killing them, furiously possessing them. She’s trying to make a new lover that will be greater than the sum of the individual parts - a bizarre, alien like creature that’s reminiscent of the baby in David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I saw this film a couple of weeks after my breakup. I didn’t entirely know what I was getting myself into as I pressed play, but the things meant for you have a habit of swinging by at the right time. It was a difficult watch; Anna’s rage, her desperation, her isolation. Breakups have that schizophrenic quality about them; wrenched from one personhood to the next in the blink of an eye. I, too, needed to exorcise someone from inside of me.
Mireille starts to cover Henry’s body in white plaster. There’s silence between them but the act is full of intimacy. She petrifies Henry as he is in that moment in time, and in the following shot we see his plastered limbs hanging from the ceiling of her house. She is making her own lover-monster, like Anna does in Possession. She wants to conserve his body, his beauty - what once was their beauty. Preserving beauty is an instinct alive in all of us.
Mireille, like all of us, must learn to coexist with the ruins of the past.
In Bluets, Nelson writes, “Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. [...] I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.” To Have a Lover is perhaps Coelt’s letter, her exorcism, but Mireille is very clearly making a talisman. Quite literally hollow, the encased body parts of her once lover pepper her room. They swing unchanged, simultaneously a constant reminder of the past, as it is an object of a concluded, terminated affair. She’s using art as a vehicle to let go without forgetting.
Beneath Henry’s limbs grow an array of plants: shoots barely visible over the soil, frondy leaves spilling over their pots. Henry’s limbs are a hanging garden, Mireille’s plants reach upwards from their flowerpot. Past and future reach out towards each other. Mireille, like all of us, must learn to coexist with the ruins of the past as new moments and opportunities blossom in front of her.
“What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.” Nelson writes. I must say that I, like Mireille, only wish to make a talisman from my wounds. Words don’t always come easy.
Preserving beauty is an instinct alive in all of us.
The day after my partner and I parted ways, I wrote the following in my journal, “It’s funny how similar the experience of death is to a breakup. My brain immediately started to fire all those moments leading up to the words that changed everything in a quick succession of flashes.” I remember him sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee minutes before he spoke the words. I remember I went up to him and kissed him. Mireille lies in a bathtub and tells Henry about a friend who told her that, “Fish [are] like thoughts in the bath, brushing past her leg, swimming by her feet.” While watching I think, is that what the past is? Fish-thoughts, skimming past your body, bright yet blurry, unclear? I remember him sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee minutes before he spoke the words. I remember I went up to him and kissed him. The rest, however, brushes past my legs and disappears into deeper waters.
Breakups take you to dark places, an entire part of you is ripped out of your body and psyche by force, but that doesn’t mean that the talismans we make of them cannot be beautiful. What often comes out of that search is a contradictory balance of pain and light. As Nelson writes, “We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.”
To Have a Lover is currently being released to Film Festivals. It is available to view via private link. Email: naraht.coelt@gmail.com for viewing enquiries.
Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.
