Blogical Conclusion

THE SAD SOUNDS OF SILENCE

JUNE 14, 2008 - AFTER ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL PERFORMANCE at the Royal Opera of Stockholm – in Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, the first Danish winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film – Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont), the famous baritone from Paris, breaks away from the applause and repairs to his dressing room filled with powdered wigs and congratulatory flowers. An enthusiastic admirer leaves Papin in no doubt about how delightful he just was, and he smiles and says what he’s said a thousand times earlier, to a thousand earlier enthusiastic admirers. “Thank you so much madame. You are so kind. Thank you madame.” Sensing that his gratitude is perfunctory, that the smile on his lips does not reach his eyes, sensing in these words the attitude of a dismissal, the admirer takes her leave.

And Papin turns to make small talk with the other occupant of his dressing room, now his audience of one, a lady-in-waiting at the Swedish court (long-time Bergman regular Bibi Andersson, wearing a diamond tiara, lace gloves, a brooch between her breasts, and the undisguised glee of freedom from the stark wardrobes of her Swedish films with the master). “Stockholm is a delightful town,” observes Papin, either because he genuinely feels so, or he wants to ensure future commissions from the royal court. She agrees, and points out that it isn’t just the capital. “Scandinavia has a wealth of beautiful cities.”

She seats herself directly across Papin, who, outside of stage, cuts a comical figure – a golden waistcoat over (to borrow a Seinfeldism) a white “puffy shirt” with flouncy lace cuffs, and on top, an alarming burst of pink, a face ruddied with rouge. “I travel a lot,” he states the obvious, and then he states the even-more-obvious. Aspirants to celebrity want nothing more than applause and admirers; once that celebrity is achieved, however, once this applause and these admirers become a way of life, they say what Papin says. “But what I yearn for most is to be alone.” His voice falls to a hush, as if anticipating his subsequent declaration. “I love silence. Silence and the sound of waves.”

“Then you should visit the coast of Jutland,” the lady-in-waiting suggests. “It is magnificent and totally unspoilt. There you could get your fill of fresh air.” Along with a whiff of love, she may have added, if she only knew that this remote corner of Denmark is where Papin would meet the woman of his dreams, one of a pair of sisters born to the founder of a religious sect, which held that earthly love and marriage were of little worth, merely an empty illusion. (When a handsome young man approaches the father and asks for the hand of one of his daughters, the pastor asks in return, “In this calling of mine, my two daughters are my right hand and my left. Would you rob me of them?”)

But all that’s in the future. “I know a place. You could stay with the grocer,” says the lady-in-waiting. The next scene, Papin is on a bluff overlooking the sea, in possession of exactly the things he craved for: silence, and the sound of waves. He’s seated on a patch of green atop the slope, which slides down to meet the water, as sunlight pours through a tear in the blue bolt of sky. It’s the very picture of serenity – except that serene is the last thing Papin is. He fell into a kind of melancholy, we’re told, seeing himself as an old man at the end of his career. And suddenly that solitary patch of grass he’s sitting on doesn’t look as green as the other side, filled with the compliments of admirers and the comfort of applause.

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