The Immortal Story

Orson Welles directed this adaptation of a novella by Isak Dineson, "The Immortal Story," in 1968.  The film was made for French TV with a tiny budget.  It is Welles' first picture shot in color and stars Jeanne Moreau and the aging film maker -- in The Immortal Story, Welles plays a wealthy American, ill with gout and mostly immobile:  he has the rheumy eyes and distraught, anxious expression of the old Major Amberson in the director's film, The Magnificent Ambersons.  Perverse in the extreme, The Immortal Story is a curious testament, an elegy about the power of narrative and the relationship between storytelling and death.  In his mansion in Macao, the sick Mr. Clay sits on his verandah with a Polish Jew, his accountant.  Normally, the Jew reads to the merchant from his account books but on this night, the bookkeeper opens a phylactery and recites a prophecy from the book of Isaiah.  Mr. Clay is offended and says that he despises prophecy, primarily, it seems, because his time has run out and all auguries are against him at this stage in his life.  The old man says that he will tell a story and begins a tale about a wealthy gentleman who went to the harbor, selected "a fine sailor," and, apparently, paid him 5 guineas to have sex with the elderly wealthy man's young wife.  But before the story can be narrated -- and the tale always breaks off at the point where the "fine young sailor" receives his stipend -- the Jew says that he has heard the story as well; "everyone knows that story," he says.  The fact that the story is twice-told or, even, as common as the rain troubles Mr. Clay.  It seems to him that a story that has broad currency can not possibly be true and he proclaims that the only tales that he admires are true ones.  Then, the old man conceives of a way to make the story uniquely his, to withdraw the narrative, as it were, from common currency as it were and make it unique to himself.  He tells the Jewish accountant to hire a courtesan to enact the part of the girl, to locate a fine young sailor and to pay him five guineas to have sexual intercourse with the young woman.  In this way, it seems that the rapacious old man will add the story to his own store of wealth -- he will appropriate it to himself by making the events actually happen.  The Jew hires a local courtesan, played by Jeanne Moreau, to play the girl.  Moreau says that she is too old, that her youth is behind her, and, furthermore, she is a bitter enemy of old Mr. Clay -- he betrayed her father, Clay's former business partner, resulting in his suicide.  Moreau's face is a mask of tragic beauty, a leonine theatrical visage that looms over us in immense, marmoreal close-ups throughout the short film -- the movie has the sort of abstract and simplified terribilita of the late Michelangelo; somehow, it is huge, monumental, statuesque.  A suitably beautiful young sailor -- he has a wonderful head of blonde hair and startling blue eyes -- is selected.  He also knows the story and understands the assignment before it is even pitched to him.  The young man has just been rescued from a desert island where he lived in awful isolation for nine months and he has almost lost the power of speech.  (He is also a virgin and, for a few moments, seems possibly gay -- it's just performance anxiety and soon enough he's copulating with Moreau's courtesan, but the actor is so remarkably beautiful that there is a homosexual resonance to the way that he is filmed:  he is shot as an object of desire and his Greek-athlete torso and peroxide hair make him look like one of the boys in an erotic film by Kenneth Anger.)  The couple are united in the room where the woman's father committed suicide in the big, dark house.  Mr. Clay lurks outside the door.  At one point he says:  "You think you are jumping jacks.  Your limbs are so full of blood and lust.  You think that you are acting on your desire.  But actually you are acting entirely according to my will."  At dawn, the birds sing and the lovers part and Mr. Clay dies.  The sailor leaves a beautiful shell for the woman and, when the Jew tilts it to his ear, he thinks he can hear a song that he has heard before...but, he can't quite recognize the melody.  The final shot with a wicker chair holding the corpse of Mr. Clay, the dead body invisible to us, the Jew with the seashell cupped to his ears, and Jeanne Moreau in the distance, peering into the dawn after her departing lover, is as gorgeous and tapestry-like as a late painting by Bonnard.  The film is slow, comprised mostly of close-ups, and there is little of the camera pyrotechnics and explosive editing that made Welles famous as a young man.  This is a late work, suitably dignified, ecstatic, and enigmatic -- it seems to have a deep and fundamental meaning, but I don't know exactly how to define that meaning.