The Last Film

The last film I saw with my mother-in-law

Was 8 Women by François Ozon.

7 women in a remote manor house

Waiting for the arrival of the eighth.

Each to the others is suspected of killing a man,

The mâitre des lieux, who was by term the brother,

The husband, the lover, brother-in-law, patron.

The cast of actresses

(3 very famous faces)

Each gets to do a sketch at her bespoke window.

A café-theatre of sorts. It was pleasant enough,

          Elegiac, not méchant;

          A box of sugar almonds

                  Done up with black ribbon.

We were late for the film.

                Our family always is

As late as possible.

We sat right under the screen,

My husband, the 2 sons, my mother-in-law, myself

All in a row.

My neck ached. The head locked in place.

The whole time in the dark I was thinking

Thinking & praying

Up-close, perpendicular

Please François Ozon

Let me not be right.

But of course

The mâitre des lieux

Has had all 8 women

One after another

                  Buried in the potager garden.

                                    What we are shown being a collective dream

Of the dead

                8 victims (of

The said head of the family)

Now playing a ghost story of their reunion;

Reminiscing good old times

After the pot-au-feu

A little armagnac.

Some family occasion.

Xmas, as it happened.

All I remember of the rest of the evening

Was our dinner in a restaurant

Called Mona Lisa

Right next to the cinema.

It was “Mona Lisa” in Dublin

Because some say they couldn’t decide whether it was

Italian or French.

We were served pasta

           Fried courgettes flowers

& a salad niçoise

Not bad I guess for Mona Lisa.

Now why

Should I have remembered any

Of this? But my mother-in-law

Got quite upset that evening after Mona Lisa.

She started giving out, with some vehemence

           On the pavement,   Yeh

She’s fed up, fed up with you lot,

Her lot, can’t you see—

& just as soon, apropos of all

Or nothing

Got hold of herself,

Mittens in the pocket,

         Following us to the car.

A peekaboo of the  famous eight earlier,

                                 A woman “having a turn.”

                                 Was all.

No one reacted.

Not the sons

Nor the father

          No one remarked

Neither on the car journey home

Nor the morning after.

                                   Not a word

                                   Thereof—

                                   If anything at all

                                   Was something one forgets

Like the film has refused to quit; a glitch.

It can happen.

She was 8 women in one on the pavement

           In 8 stages

Emmanuelle Béart

Catherine Deneuve

Isabelle Huppert

Fanny Ardant (of the postbox red, postbox mouth)

       I couldn’t put a name on all eight here.

The credits rolling over a natural life-span

Haloed with winter misting.

    Spoken or

Unspoken the dubbed words

       Bounced off the “original version”

Text-to-speech,

Crystalline by the streetlight

White noise

            Rather than silence,

Liminal—on a certain spectrum

   None of us could quite catch.

Or retract.

Did she say what she said?

O my drling Clementine

  Lady Captain,

It feels late—

  Your herringbone golf-cap

Where is it hiding?

My broken dandelion, in tears you were

Beside yourself, surely

Out of breath,

             Not yet out of steam

You were making a scene,

My Irish Protestant mother-in-law.

She was 83.

She would have a sip of brandy

From a vial in her handbag.

We got going.

It was Xmas 2002; for all of one

Dismal moment

 Woefully alive—like

 A struck match,

 She flared

 Spluttering.

 The little match-girl.

 Anything could change her mind.

In another year she’d be dead.

What did she see that night?