Opening Shots

           While I was loitering in St. Peter’s Square trying to make up my mind where to go for coffee, a small blue tent slid slowly into view. Propelled by the wind, it progressed gracefully across the paving. I got a hand to it before it drifted onto the tram rails. It was empty but I guessed it belonged to a homeless person, so I put it under the arcade, whence it most likely came. There are fewer tents on the streets since the pandemic forced the authorities to do the decent thing and take more care of the homeless, but they haven’t all disappeared. I thought, at the time, that the scene would make a good opener for a film, since there was a sort of mystery about it. What had become of the owner/occupier? Perhaps they had found permanent accommodation – or moved into a friend’s tent for companionship.

          I was mulling over several possible plotlines, when a large pigeon startled me by landing in a flurry on a low wall nearby. I noticed that it had only one leg yet, by somehow twisting it into a central position beneath its breast, it was able to stand erect without the aid of a crutch. Perhaps it had been born that way. I could see no sign of injury or mutilation, no residual stump. The pigeon had adapted well to its handicap and I felt some admiration for it, unlike its two-legged fellow, an avian  brute, who arrived soon after and chased it away as though it were a nuisance. Mmm, I thought, an allegory on lack of empathy. Another good opening shot, perhaps.

          I suppose film was on my mind because the previous evening I had watched Witness for the Prosecution, a 1957 production by Billy Wilder starring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. The plot is intriguing – as you would expect of its author, Agatha Christie – and the production, allowing for its era, is top-notch. From my contemporary liberal point of view, however, the experience was marred by the reduction of the supporting cast to gross caricatures. This may have been done for comic effect but, nevertheless, it left a bad taste, based as it was on the kind of class-biased assumptions of superiority that have long since been discredited. The saving grace of the film (production quality excepted) is that the story itself – a tragedy of unrequited love – is all too human, credible and moving.

          I have not been to a cinema since lockdown: too risky to be enjoyable. Instead, I have spent more time at home, streaming, reading and browsing the internet, the last of which is not without its own dangers. Not that I have been infected by a computer virus, but I have unwittingly attracted the attention of a blogger known as Peking Duck, whose mission is to spread propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, of which I am not a fan. In the interest of open mindedness however, I have read some of Peking Duck’s content and have to agree that the CCP has achieved a remarkable feat in dragging China out of poverty and propelling it to the forefront of technological innovation. I also agree that ‘western democracy’ is not the perfect system of governance that some claim it to be, especially now that I see it crumbling under pressure from demagogues and corrupting lobbyists. But my real objection to the CCP is its anointment of Emperor Xi Jinping and the consequent snuffing out of all political dissent. I am, after all, a liberal and I said so in a comment to Peking Duck one evening after a few glasses of Bordeaux, which may not have been prudent, since I imagine now that I will soon be kidnapped, taken to China, charged, convicted and imprisoned under the new National Security laws. Now, that has the makings of a good film plot.