Unexpected, even uncanny, connections typically come up on this job. An interviewee may, for instance, elevate an concept that chimes with one thing I’ve lengthy been occupied with. Or I’ll discover whereas doing analysis that somebody’s work illuminates an issue I’d been coping with. Two such surprises occurred with this week’s topic, the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both formed my feeling concerning the ensuing dialog, although in very alternative ways.
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The first: In a e book of sketches and musings by the British author John Berger referred to as “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one drawing has all the time mesmerized me. It’s of an androgynous face with almond-shaped, nearly alien eyes, and it exudes a deeply human compassion. That sketch is labeled, merely, “Tilda,” and I hadn’t a lot considered upon whom it was based mostly. Until, that’s, when in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co-directed about Berger. In it, she mentions “Bento’s Sketchbook” — and a lightbulb went on. I’d lengthy admired that sketch and Swinton’s daring, shape-shifting performing — in her avant-garde movies together with her mentor and good friend Derek Jarman, her indie collaborations with administrators like Bong Joon Ho and Wes Anderson and her Hollywood triumphs like “Michael Clayton” and the “Chronicles of Narnia” trilogy — however I’d by no means put collectively that I’d been entranced by the identical particular person, the identical presence, the entire time. I couldn’t assist taking that as omen for the interview.
The second connection was tougher to interpret. Readers of this column could do not forget that my final Q&A was with a physician about medical support in dying — a topic with which I’ve had latest private expertise. Swinton’s upcoming movie, “The Room Next Door,” directed by the nice Pedro Almodóvar and opening in choose theaters on Dec. 20, is about — and I swear I didn’t know this forward of time — a distressingly related matter. In the film, Swinton performs a lady named Martha, who asks her good friend Ingrid, performed by Julianne Moore, to help her determination to die by suicide after turning into terminally ailing. I’d have felt disingenuous to not be open about this coincidence with Swinton, however I additionally wasn’t precisely wanting to discover it. She, because it seems, felt in any other case.
“The Room Next Door” is predicated on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, “What Are You Going Through,” which takes its title from a quote by the French thinker Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness merely means having the ability to say to him, what are you going by means of?” So what are you going by means of? I’m having fun with proper now the eye to that query, and the truth that our movie places that query into the air. The concept of bearing witness, and the query of what’s friendship, however much more than friendship, what’s it to coexist? What is it to not look away? I consider it truly as a political movie.
I’ve questions on that, however I need to preface them by sharing what I hope is a morbidly humorous anecdote. Sounds good!
