Muddle, Part Two

He was a dragon after the singeing of his own hair and skin. The charred village back to carbon from smokey diamond. Under the flames they felt a slow rain, rich with disintegrated flesh. Closer to a grey snow, rich and putrid. The dragon snapped at space made emptier without oxygen. He would smile through all the smoke at an aging outline of a friend, pricking his flushed ears at dry echoes of approbation. All the ruin for love, for nods, for clasp of sharp stern claws. Chasing his scales he had flung through the billowing veil at the other, he could not halt the fiery dance. If there were another village, it followed the first, and another and a friendship, not scorched, but welded.                              


The dragon spit a wide stream from his belly onto the other beast, who was not a dragon but breathed air and brightened up in his own peculiar way, distinguished by aplomb, rather than magnitude of pillage. Strange flames flickered in four eyes, surveying the ash and bone. The flames had waited out the night. Two beasts, not content to moderation. One prone to all the demolition. The other, the charting of his friend's percussion. Their bodies could not be broken that night. Lumps of coal in their mouths sweetened each hour. Villages gone to make way for savage communion.


The other presented two mirrors for his friend. He suggested they mock performance art and attempt transcendence, starting with they know and love best: their own flesh. Both flicked cigarettes over the glass and cozied up to their reflections. They angled the two flush mirrors first at 120 degrees, delighting in the multiplying of themselves, over and over as the angle was drawn back and forth. Enflamed and body engorged, the two bodies lowered and rubbed against the image.


The Dragon kissed his own reflection:
--You know I bring chaos. You ask for chaos.


 He taunted the admonishing approach of the morning, defying a frayed social contract. After more cigarettes and riches taken for granted, the Dragon smashed a mirror over his leg. Drugged, the dragon cut into his leg, foretasting the spoils of unconfined consumption. A claw swiped over his blood and transported the boiling wine to his own mouth. Blood dropped onto the mirrors on the ground the other had unearthed from the rubble of a house. Nothing was spared, but, again, the bodies of the two beasts could not be broken.

Untitled Project on Sibling Actors, Post 13: Afternoon Wine with the Director: Part 2

Broussard redirects her probe:

--What I do ask of my crew is for their trust. I believe the final product comes out bolder and truer when I have that. It's not the mechanics I want as much as the essence. I'm always looking for an essence. When I think I've found the right person, I give them my trust. I only expect that, in return, they do the same for me.

Sister knows she must comply:

--I understand perfectly. I'm ready to be molded or…pushed. With the script I realize II'll have to suspend hesitancies and jump--just jump right into it all. And that's all there is to it.

Brother smothers a piece of baguette with the pate. Brother amuses himself with the thought of smudging Sister's forehead with the fatty concoction. How far can Sister be pushed? Brother offers the platter of foie gras to Broussard, who is obliging and humored after finishing her cigarette. His counterpart refuses the same offer and resents the crunching noises following from his mouth. 

Broussard:

--You've come to realize this, I'm sure, as you've grown more accustomed to France, but we come from backgrounds of intense discipline. I'd say it's an obsession, how we regulate ourselves. We measure out exactly our personal interactions on parchment, just so, and seal them off with polite kisses. Many who visit interpret our culture as one mediating through deliberate coldness, but I say we interact in a way that is tres simple et claire. (She speak more slowly) This is not my approach in film. I do not want to pull the ceiling down over my team to where it just barely misses the hair on their heads, or to mold my leads down to models I've already pre-conceived. I can work with a tight aesthetic and let it drape around the work naturally. I think it's nice to breathe. 

Laurent:

You're going to have a rough time reigning in this one, though. 

Broussard raises her eyebrows briefly to Laurent, like a quick spasm from a muscle unknowingly tensed, and stoops closer toward Charlotte:

--What motivates you as an actress?

Charlotte, making sure not to look at Laurent, puts out her cigarette:

--Does an actress need to know what motivates her?

Brother tsk tsks to himself. Throughout the meeting he had been waiting for Charlotte to repeat some of the half-heartedly felt witticisms and broad aesthetic statements on acting he fed her before the guest of paramount influence and opportunity arrived. Sister buckles silently in her seat and clears her throat. Broussard lets out a quick exhalation of short breath.

Charlotte continues:

--I'm joking of course.

Broussard:

--I'm not one of those directors that thinks her actors and actresses to be dispensable. I am searching for an essence and a source of constant freshness.

Charlotte:

--Absolutely. I'm…not entirely sure (she laughs). When I think about it, I realize I've always been acting. Laurent and I have always acted. Isn't it fantastic to be able to take what is common and spin it upwards through an inspired lens, up to the ceiling of a performance hall (she wipes the sweat off of her forehead with her backhand, as if rubbing away the smear of pate with which Laurent fantasized her)? I like to make things grand even in their mundanity. It's like writing, I suppose (she turns to Laurent). We owe ourselves to some…reality, but we also leave gaps, or, they're already there for us to fill up. What am I saying? 

Laurent, who knows Charlotte has reluctantly turned to him for assistance:

--We owe ourselves to ourselves. Well, we owe ourselves to the art and to the daily toil.

Charlotte brightens and hastens:

--It's everything to me. I believe pretense heightens the raw materials from our lives and reveals to us subtle interactions of these sources in ways that we don't always immediately recognize. At the same time I also thoroughly enjoy a performance that does not lean back on the artifice, but makes a window of itself to what is common in an uncanny, even troubling way…(she laughs) perhaps an intensely boring way. Like I said, I promise we really are quite boring here. 

There she goes again claiming to be boring and insisting herself reduced to the level of "common." Sister repeatedly refers to the setting of the Yardley house as boring--as a dull pulse that consumes time, and it does. All the time in the world is not enough for the Yardley siblings to consume, as well, to pick up dust from the angles of their playhouse (wait, that is Martha's job) and sweep in here and there and to order more gin and tonics and to lounge on the backstage. There is something rather lush about the known security of wealth, isn't there? No kidding. Laurent and Charlotte adore the sluggish sun cloud that seeps into the house each morning after their nightly toking sessions. Boring is sexy. Performative boredom is riveting. A this time, Laurent performs boredom while trailing backwards to ground where the remains of the dragonfly have been eaten away to mere bits of wing, glass from a precious lamp shade that have lost their original sharp ability of light refraction. Laurent reanimates what has been struck down and scorned:

Long-winded and not prone to compartmentalize each gleam of the twisting joyride, the dragonfly, the drunk, demands they change their tone--to shape up or be snatched up. Shift and bend out of shape, bottom layer to this lawn forrest of the molted outer substance. The dragonfly is drunk in the air with wet mandible emerald nape, to feed in between emotional planes--never on, but inside. Tyrant of the lawn sky, he is compelled. He chews out a mean battle drum, waits for the hover to emerge from of them all below. Below, they scatter, step, prick at, are cautious, but regard the brilliant current. Do they decide, then, that some sky is worth a severed head?

His perception follows the heat of the ground to the clouds and imagines a giant dragonfly homing in above its destination at the Yardley house. He sits and feels his sternum rattle from the underlining woof of the beast's weighty humming, magnified and made into a grinding plague. The predatory sky makes him nauseous. Lower in the gastrointestinal track he feels the base of the song attack, loosening silted bowels. There is no time to recuperate from the last pound of the bass before the next blare. Heavy heaving drone. He imagines another man, older and even more confounded, outside of himself, choking on the thick air, each particle buzzing and pushing inward into the trenches of sound, snaking inward. Crunching over, as if to cough wildly into his fist, the old man shakes and the framework of his upper body responds to the heavy bass of the dragonfly. The bones acquire a hard plasticity that is difficult to make work with his lungs.  His clenching ribs clunk against the softer tissue and are pushed back further than is natural with the driving beat of the music. Green armor plates drown out the sky as the dragonfly nears. 

For a couple minutes Brother drops out of color. Next to him the two women continue their conversation. After a dazed look elsewhere into the sky above the backstage, Charlotte lets her head fall back gracefully, like a drifting leaf meeting the water of the swimming pool. She lights another cigarette. Charlotte then drifts further down this smooth imaginary garland toward Laurent, who has been in a whole other "elsewhere" of his own. Gently, she rubs his right shoulder with her hand, coaxing him to attentiveness, and then looks back to Broussard, keeping all of her body still in its new marking, except for her neck which twists back to the director. Charlotte takes a drag of the next cigarette, hand positioned over Laurent and eyes locked on Broussard, as she speaks:

--For instance…

As if pre-rehearsed a countless number of times earlier in the day Charlotte exhales the smoke through her lips into Laurent's mouth, who slowly sucks in the smoke while closing his eyes. While tilting his head backyard, Laurent then blows the smoke out and upward through his nostrils. The two of them have carefully monitored their presentation, only, both have taken different (not opposite) approaches. In the end this is not entirely a collaboration for the siblings, at least not a conscious one. Practice in their theater leads to moments of autonomy, but, while these ornamentations of performance lend themselves to an overall musical reception, intended or not, grasped or not by the performers, they are not everything for either Yardley. Quickly, the moment is dismissed by Laurent, pretender guardian of the below, of everything Charlotte overlooks, and he excuses himself from the table to leave the director and Sister to their business. 

Charlotte, determined not to be the mere second to last feature following the performative coalescence, says to Laurent:

--Could you bring me a cup of tea? Mint tea, if you would.