Fortunes

Over the course of a weekend, I started reading Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature, had a bad case of flu and writer's block, and then watched this movie. Three states of being, three characters, a few fortune cookies... FORTUNES, the movie, ostensibly offered a great escape: a light/dark comedy, full of boys, beer, a dwarf. Just what I needed to shake French postwar criticism, a stalled novel and other pressing issues into oblivion. Instead, my preoccupations immediately took shape around the characters in the movie… biological and existential angst (Phil), the practical and spiritual perils of being an artist (Lewis) and the empty drive for money and acceptance (James). It was only after the movie was over that James' role as the real artist in the picture—filmmaker himself—became clear to me. The clarity came from re-reading Blanchot's concept, "Noli me leg ere: do not read me." Blanchot says, "No one who has written the work (made the film) can linger close to it. For the work is the very decision which dismisses him, cuts him off, makes of him a survivor without work. He becomes the inert idler upon whom art does not depend." This is James at the end of the film… the only guy of the three who didn't get to sit down in the same space with inspiration (the fortune teller), who, in the end, beats the pavement, effectively homeless (gel-less), glimpsing/misrecognizing inspiration in diner windows… wandering outside the editing booth after the film has been shot, after the work has been written, cut off, a survivor. Bravo FORTUNES!