CHAPTER 114 - Smile

“Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.”

— William Shakespeare

Macbeth

Brandon “BB” Bradshaw was thirty-two, ambitious, and the film critic for the New York Post. He had cultivated his ethos for a decade now, dedicating himself to the review of not just Oscar-bait and indie-classics, but avant-garde, experimental, and foreign films galore.

He had been to Park City six years running as the Post’s eyes and ears, meaning he had the privilege of a shared condo in Prospector Square, and a rental car with the dash demi-glazed in Big Mac secret sauce. If he cared to count, he would say that he had seen about fourteen hundred films since he scored the post, and had reviewed about nine hundred of them.

One of the things he had learned in his long tenure was to isolate himself from the people watching the film around him. Actors, by their very nature, were prone to cultivating cults of personality. This meant that audiences tended to laugh just because their favourite actor was being funny and cry just because their darling actress was being sad. Film was different to books. Novels were a private medium where the author had long died by the time the reviewer read through the twists. Films, especially feature films, were foremost enjoyed in the cinema, in the company of others. It was easy, therefore, to be carried away by the mood.

Tonight he sat among the audience in the middle of the theatre, with his Moleskine on his knee, and watched them clap and sing and laugh. The film contained one Euphemia Fontaine, America’s sweetheart, a young woman with an impressive catalogue unrelated to the cinema-sphere.

Her works had been eclectic, to say the least.

Ballads, rock, pop, retro, choral, a shanty—her catalogue was no more predictable than her artistic output.

She was also not an actress, insofar as these things worked in the business.

She had one acting credit, a head turn.

Now she was in an indie feature film, one that, according to the finance filing, she had funded with music money.

Was the film meant to be a feature-length music video then? She only had two, but both had attained critical acclaim, far outclassing their contemporaries, much like her songs.

But the danger lay in the Wally shanty.

Until the song left the consciousness of the public, the audience’s opinions would surely be skewed. As with all things popular, there would be those giving her five stars, and there would be those giving her 0.5 out of spite, because in the age of bespoke tastes, populism was a sin.

Brandon adjusted himself, nodding at his neighbours.

Black.

Then the logo for Sony Classics.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

A non-diegetic SFX filled the cinema before the visuals presented themselves, bassy and moving to a slowed metronome. Brandon noticed that it was the wooden tick of an old clock, the kind that sat in a hall and measured a house.

Tick.

Tock.

The film opened.

A single glass, clean, sat on a folded towel on a table of worn blonde wood, in a kitchenette, where the lighting implied a working-class abode.

Tick. A hand, rough, a little hairy and calloused, turned the cup a quarter to the light.

Tock. The cup turned over.

Tick. A bottle of milk came out of the fridge.

Tock. The glass filled. Four gulps.

Tick. A drawer opened.

Tock. Spoon, fork, plate.

Tick. Gun. A Beretta. Enormous, in a state of general disassembly.

Tock. Bullets were pressed into the magazine.

Tick. The gun, assembled methodically.

Tock. The gun slid into the holster.

Tick. The door closed. The Pro went to work.

The montage of stylistic macro shots repeated itself, a little different each time, pushing the narrative forward. What remained identical in each instance was the cadence of the actions, the quarter turn of the glass, the volume of the milk, the expertise by which the gun was cleaned, assembled, and the fluidity of the “Pro”.

It was a superb sequence.

Stylistic, unique, and indicative of the protagonist’s neurological divergence in a way that spoke to the viewer without ridicule or insult. Here was a savant who was a master of his deadly craft, and here was his routine—unforgiving as his lack of mercy.

Then came the film’s first action set piece.

It opened to a warehouse, and an actor famous for playing mafioso on LA’s television cop shows. As if to make it easier for the audience, Ferroni had stuck to all the classics. The overweight body, the unshaven five o’clock face, the mock-mobster accent from watching too many Scarletta films. On screen, the mobster professed to have no desire to keep paying the local Don, a man called Vincent Lorenzo. The acting was a bit over the top, too much braggadocio for Brandon’s taste, but he understood why Ferroni had taken the thematic shortcut.

He walked through the warehouse, inspecting the loot, bragging to his men, only for his men to disappear one by one, via a silenced pistol shot, a garrote, a visceral strike with a knife, until he was alone with The Pro, who delivered a quick and impactful message from Vinnie Lorenzo.

“Pay your dues.”

“I will, I swear, by my mama’s soul…”

The mobster looked back—The Pro was gone.

The action itself was stylish but unimpressive. There was nothing technically incredible, since it was a setup piece. The rest of the film had to be better, else…

The title card came on.

THE PRO

Nothing clever, just bold ivory font over a scene fading to black.

And then the audience met the face of Rémy Aubert.

The choice was deliberate, because Aubert was not traditionally handsome. In the garb of a tired New Yorker, the same as a million other faces, he was utterly unmemorable. He was buying milk from a bodega, the most common thing anyone could do. The tonal whiplash was more impressive than the action sequence, which Brandon appreciated.

An over-the-shoulder camera followed The Pro home.

The NovelPhoenix site carries the author's published chapter, but this version was copied without permission. Reading there supports them.

An old apartment presented itself, aesthetically pleasant with a stairwell blessed by pale, neutral light. Buried foreshadowing popped in one by one. The old landlady downstairs, the voice of drama happening in the apartment next door, on level three, one room down and left of The Pro’s abode.

“You little thief!” a young woman’s voice cried out, followed by a slap and a muffled grunt.

His door opened.

His door closed.

Tick.

Tock.

Brandon annotated his impression via his Moleskine.

Thus far, two out of four.

Valorie Sanders, eighteen, enrolled at Guilliams and on the verge of her first genuine career breakout, had no idea what to expect from her dearest friend.

She had seen Eppie act in plays, and so knew Eppie was the real thing.

She had also heard and seen Eppie sing, but that was a different thing as well.

On screen, she had only seen Eppie in her music videos and in that one scene in Ferroni’s former TV show, which she had loved.

It was a strange feeling, seeing her friend’s face, forty feet wide, on a cinema screen, watched by over a thousand people.

Presently she was watching Eppie being abused, a parallel that made her sick to her stomach. She watched what was effectively a simulacrum of life—that of Eppie, blonde and fourteen, skinny and underfed, being neglected by her father, excluded by her stepmother, and physically subdued by her stepsister.

It was only the little brother that gave Josie solace, but he was too young and too clueless to change the sad reality of Josie’s home life.

The characters, almost all played by TV actors, were very convincing, at least to her uneducated self. What frightened Valorie the most was that Eppie was even more convincing, so much so that Valorie wondered if she was acting, or just channelling the past.

“SHUT UP! BOTH OF YOU!” The father’s voice rang out, booming across the cinema. He was weighing something in the kitchen, and he hated being distracted.

Josie came through the apartment door too fast to see where she was going, and she ran, face-first, into an unsuspecting neighbour leaving for work.

The neighbour, The Pro, did not move an inch. It was as though Josie had run into a stone post. He stared at her without emotion, and her hand went to her cheekbone, where she had run into something with a familiar shape.

She looked up.

The cross-edited cut to the close-up was incredible.

Euphemia, with all the prowess of cinematic make-up, looked thrice as pitiful as her usual self. She looked younger, much younger than she looked in her Conti dress. Her fringe was roughly cut, likely by herself, her hair stowed under a headband and a scrunchie in teal. The camera didn’t slow when she looked up. The duration was about a second, maybe less, but the impression it left was far longer. Josie’s mouth had somebody else’s lipstick in the wrong shade, put on hurriedly out of spite. High on her cheekbones sat a bruise, and her flesh was red where she had just run into the gun.

A band-tee, three sizes too big, with the neck gone slack, hung off one of her bony white shoulders. She wore a man’s varsity jacket, probably her sister’s, like a coat on a scarecrow.

It was just a second, but it told the audience everything they needed to know. Josie’s baby blues were enormous and hurt, and looked ripped from Disney’s golden age.

The combination as a whole told people what they should feel, and that feeling was pity.

Valorie did not know much about filmmaking, but she understood mastery when she saw it.

The girl looked up at the man she had just run into, and her face shifted in such a way that made the audience lean toward the screen.

She smiled.

“Oh, hi… sorry…”

She smiled with every ounce of her being.

And The Pro smiled back, a face with a mask and an expression he did not value.

Then they passed each other, and the smiles went from their faces, each for different reasons.

Valorie suddenly understood.

Marcel and Josie.

Curon… and Eppie?

Was the film a dedication?

She had no idea if the film would turn a profit, but she had full confidence that The Pro and Josie’s cosy close-ups would dominate YouTube for a generation, and perhaps, beyond.

Olivier Brassac had come prepared to forgive the American girl.

As the premier agent buying films for Gaumont, headquartered in Neuilly-sur-Seine, he was the staunch defender of Rémy Aubert unto his dying days.

A decade ago, when Vasseur had approached them for the film, Gaumont had been on the cusp of opening its chequebooks. There had been doubt, of course, and raised eyebrows, but the French, different to Hollywood, were far more open to artistic idiosyncrasies. Forcing a director to alter their vision merely because of audience discomfort was far more uncomfortable to Gaumont, the lynchpin of French cinema.

But the fact remained: had the film been made in its original vision, with a twelve-year-old under the focus of the male gaze, the question on the audience’s lips would be “Why?”

Ergo, when he received word that Aubert had gone to New York and made the same troubled film with an Italian-American television man and an American girl with a plantation’s surname, he had demanded to be present at its first showing.

When his tickets were booked, the girl had yet to sing about fish.

Presently, as in a garish circus, the audience around him began to sing a shameful shanty, and Brassac felt that all was already lost.

Then the film began. The clock, the glass, the gun. It was stylistic, it was cool, and it was impatient, very much the language of American cinema. When Aubert was finally introduced, Brassac became of two minds. Aubert was too old to be an action star. His character moved slowly, meticulously, never with reflex, but perhaps that was the point. Aubert’s acting was flawless, even if the man with the camera and the director pointing merely did their best.

The Pro, whose name he knew to be Marcel, went shopping.

He bought milk, which Brassac understood to imply the infancy of Marcel’s pure mind, and also a little symbolism pointing to the “milk of human kindness”. He had heard that there was quite a bit of Shakespeare in the film, applied over Vasseur’s vision like a glaze, covering the kitsch that would have passed for daring a decade ago.

Then the girl happened, and she smiled, and Brassac found his heart hanging in suspense.

How was this amateur acting?

It was… too real.

Every micro-movement of her face had been captured.

The focus and the lighting were so profoundly perfect that the audience felt as though they were living in the moment.

The feeling was so uncanny that he had to uncross his legs and swap knees.

The next day, after his next job, Marcel returned with a carton of milk. The building was quiet. The radio was playing a song Brassac swore he had heard somewhere before. At head height, Aubert turned his gaze ever so slightly, so that the over-the-shoulder shot captured a pair of worn, filthy, hand-me-down shoes.

Josie’s shoes.

His gaze followed the upward pan, not noting the vaguely feminine shape, but the bruise, the cut, the scrape here and there, a living tapestry of inferred abuse, seen through the torn seams of a straight-cut pair of jeans rolled at the ankle.

The 50mm moved past the slack jacket, the loose tee, the naked shoulder, and ended somewhere around her lips, seamlessly cut to a 100mm. There was blood there, half clotted from a nostril that was still dripping.

“What happened?” Aubert’s voice had no emotion at all.

“I fell.”

The exchange came out of the speakers low and subtle.

Brassac could not speak for others, but his gut reaction was fury. He wanted, somewhere in his chest with a violence that could not find a voice, to burst into Josie’s apartment and show her father Parisian justice. Brassac was fifty-four, and he had two daughters, one who was sixteen, both of whom he would die for, if it came to that.

It would be so satisfying if Marcel could walk into that accursed apartment and…

Unexpectedly, the unfeeling Marcel withdrew a handkerchief. It was white, folded in quarters, and ironed. He held it out. The girl took it. She pressed it against her face, and the fabric turned bright red with fake blood, for real blood could never be so vivid.

Marcel gave her a nod, the same he gave to the bodega’s shopkeeper, and went home. The cut to the girl was near-invisible, unnoticed by the viewer. It transitioned into her point of view, looking at the door, at Marcel’s back, and then, pointing down into her hands, she folded the soiled handkerchief slowly, meticulously, with the red hidden… then she went inside to be abused again.

At some point, Brassac realised he’d been gripping his pen.

After the tension, came the lull. Marcel performed his routine; the shouting next door continued.

Brassac’s doubts wavered—he had acquired faith.

Faith in Aubert.

And faith in those enormous blue eyes.

Brandon Bradshaw heard the audible gasp in the room when the camera panned far enough to show the girl’s bruised face and bleeding nose, and knew that Ferroni had them.

He could feel it from his row that the neutrality of the room had shifted. The room was sensitive now, invested, because it was foul to see something so beautiful and so damaged, and they wanted, like he did, to see her happy, or at least, smiling—actually smiling.

He loved the fact that they omitted Josie crying.

Crying was the novice’s choice. It was the tool of the simpleton director.

The curled lips, and the bleeding nose, and the smile that did not reach her eyes—that was what made the scene gut-wrenching.

The audience was not turned away.

The audience was not turned off.

Subtlety was a fine line, and Ferroni had walked it without crossing it.

He scribbled on the page.

Three out of four, maybe…