CAROL

"Just when you think things can't get worse, you run out of cigarettes"--Carol

Tuesday I borrowed Robert Graves' I, Claudius from the Palmerston library.  I'd forgotten how good it was!  In the preface he mentioned a criticism by an airman called T.E. Shaw, who I realized was actually Lawrence of Arabia! (He joined the RAF under a new name.)

Wednesday night we were rehearsing Die Fledermaus again.  This time I remembered to remove the chaise, but the other guy forgot, so I pushed it off by myself. (A bit of noise, but the show must go on!)

Thursday night at the Bloor I saw the Janis Joplin documentary Janis:  Little Girl Blue.  If I could bring one singer back from the dead, it would be her or maybe Cass Elliot.

Friday I rented the DVD of Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli.  That's the one where Rossellini got his married star Ingrid Bergman pregnant, leading to one of the great Hollywood scandals:  studio head Howard Hughes leaked her secret to get his movie some cheap publicity, the rat!  The movie's about IB marrying an Italian soldier to get out of her refugee camp and coming to live in a fishing village on a volcanic island and hating it.  It isn't as good as the later Rossellini-Bergman movies Europa 51 and Voyage to Italy:  it's one of those movies that stops instead of ending. (Luchino Visconti did better with a similar setting in La Terra Trema.) But there's clearly some talent at work, and there's always the Ingrid Bergman face that the camera adored.  I liked the scene where her husband dragged her to church after she was seen "flirting" with another man and everyone turned and looked at her.  It reminded me of when a kid arrived late at my class and school and the teacher made us all look at her!

Tonight I saw Todd Haynes' Carol at the Revue.  It's a sparely powerful, spellbinding lesbian romance, from a Patricia Highsmith novel.  Haynes used a similar 1950s setting for Far From Heaven, but I didn't care as much for that one:  for all its handsomeness, it was a movie about '50s movies.  This time his style is calm and moving, proof that less is often more.

Real brass-monkey weather today.  After finishing the movie I walked to the Dundas West station instead of waiting for the streetcar because I can't stand still in such cold weather!  I normally walk to the station from the Revue anyway.