Cabaret: The Crooked Frame in “The Attack on Modern Art in Germany 1937”

Alan Cumming in the 1998 production of Cabaret.

Indulge me in serving up what might appear as an improbable conceit: that the current New York production of Sam Mendes’s Cabaret, that (as I write) is in previews on Broadway, could have been included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition of avant-garde paintings and sculptures on display uptown at the Neue Galerie. The Mendes production is a revival of his own 1998 reinterpretation of the 1966 Harold Prince Broadway blockbuster and the 1972 celebrated Bob Fosse film, all of which are loosely based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and his experiences in Berlin during the early 1930s when he befriended a cabaret singer who became the inspiration for Sally Bowles. If Prince and, to a greater extent, Fosse’s glossy sheen and honky-tonk gaiety were inspired by the garishly-coloured and provocative subject matter depicted in the paintings of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, Mendes offers a grungier, economically desperate and grimmer look. Both the characters and the set – the Kit Kat Klub alternates with a dowdy rooming house without any evidence of conspicuous wealth – communicate a sense of impending danger, false hope, resignation and the threat of radical change that will forever alter their lives and designate the cabaret as degenerate just like the modernist artworks that provided some of the cinematographic cornucopia in the Fosse film.

Doubles: The Face of Love & Enemy

Ed Harris and Annette Bening in  The Face of Love

As a woman who can’t get over the death of her husband in The Face of Love, Annette Bening does her best acting in years. Bening still has the old-Hollywood glamour that made her such a luscious camera subject in Bugsy and The Grifters nearly two and a half decades ago, but the pussycat brittleness has been replaced by elegance: as Nikki, who “stages” empty L.A. houses for resale, she has the aura of a southern California countess. Nikki’s husband Garrett died in a drowning accident during their thirtieth-anniversary vacation in Mexico, and even now, five years later, she hasn’t moved past her grief. The only friend she seems to have retained is her neighbor Roger (Robin Williams), who has also lost his spouse, and her response to the on-again, off-again relationship her daughter Summer (Jess Weixler), who lives up in Seattle, has with her boy friend is to urge her to cut it off rather than set herself up for more pain. Then one day Nikki sees a man who’s a dead ringer for Garrett, and she’s hypnotized. His name is Tom, and he’s a painter. (Ed Harris plays both Tom and, in flashbacks, Garrett.) When she finds out that he teaches studio art classes at a local college she tries to enroll in one, but it’s already halfway through the semester, so she persuades him to give her private lessons at home. Though it quickly becomes clear that she’s not really interested in learning how to paint, by that time he’s begun to fall for her and they become lovers.

Dry Wells: Believe and Crisis

Johnny Sequoyah and Delroy Lindo in Believe, on NBC

The new NBC TV series Believe is about a magic little girl, Bo (Johnny Sequoyah), who has psychic and telekinetic powers. She is sought after by powerful men—chiefly, Kyle MacLachlan—who would use her for sinister purposes, and there ends any resemblance this show has to Brian De Palma’s The Fury. Delroy Lindo has the Carrie Snodgress role of the villain’s former associate who helped raise Bo and tutored her in harnessing her powers but now works to keep her safe, so that she can be used only as a power for good. He breaks a sullen convict named Tate (Jake McLaughlin) out of a cell on Death Row so that he can become Bo’s new protector and traveling companion, the previous holder of that position having been run off the road and murdered by a female assassin (Sienna Guillory) in Kyle MacLachlan’s employ. Tate is a natural choice for the job, because he’s actually Bo’s biological father, though he doesn’t know it, and for some reason, Lindo doesn’t see any possible advantage in telling him. Instead, he’s just along for the ride, spending most of his screen time acting grumpy about having this kid joined to him at the hip. On other occasions, he stands on the sidelines open-mouthed at Bo’s displays of her superpowers, such as when she summons a cheesy-looking CGI swarm of doves to overpower Sienna Guillory.

Refinement: Norma Winstone's Dance Without Answers

Vocalist Norma Winstone (Photo by Petra Kemper)

There are some artists that defy explanation and description. Vocalist Norma Winstone is one of them. Considered by many as the “singer’s singer” the British chanteuse will probably never enter the mainstream and, considering her history, most likely prefers to seek out her own artistic path. But with the release of her new album, Dance Without Answers (ECM), she may well enter the mainstream on her terms, rather than make the compromises many singers; many female singers have to make to be successful. Namely repertoire. Winstone has often avoided the pitfalls of category by writing her own words and music and by being highly selective regarding standards in the jazz idiom.

L’Air de Panache: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson tries his hand at something new: he jumps into comedy with both feet, and I think it suits him much better than the drab navel-gazing he’s known for. In his Critics at Large review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Shlomo Schwartzberg pointed out (quite rightly) how the rigidly-constructed artificiality of Wes Anderson’s films works against them – nothing feels true or honest or real, and in the case of Kingdom it doesn’t even really succeed at being original.  The result of his tonal shift in The Grand Budapest Hotel is a madcap, zany, hilarious film that plays on Anderson’s limited strengths. The plot is a madcap crime caper that bounces along at a brisk pace. The central story, about the titular hotel’s refined, roguish, sweet-scented concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) being framed for the murder of an elderly patron, is nestled Russian doll-style in a series of layered flashbacks that tell a broader and more touching story than the trailers might suggest, without ever becoming convoluted or confusing. Anderson draws generously from his now-impressive stable of regular collaborators; actors such as Willem Dafoe (as a comically lugubrious hitman) or F. Murray Abraham (as one of the story's multiple narrators) and they chew through their almost cameo-sized roles with abandon.

Showboating: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

Ron Menzel and Sofia Jean Gomez in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (Photo by Jenny Graham)

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, receiving a rare revival at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, was the last play written by Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun); she died, at thirty-five, during its Broadway run in 1964. Set among Greenwich Village bohemians, it’s a bald, generalized and often preposterous attack on corruption and compromise. Sidney, the hero (played by Ron Menzel), a hard-drinking dilettante in search of a venue for his undefined artistic and communal aspirations, buys a local newspaper (his last property, a jazz and folk club, went belly-up) and opts to put its clout behind a politician, Wally O’Hara (Danforth Comins). But by the time O’Hara wins the election, the political machine he opposed has bought him. Sidney’s wife Iris (Sofia Jean Gomez), a would-be actress, lands a gig in a TV commercial for a hair product that doesn’t work. When their playwright neighbor, David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), opens his first show to enthusiastic notices, Sidney, panicked because Iris has left him, begs David to write a role for her in his next play; he even tries to bribe him with the promise of a rave review in his paper. Their friend Alton Scales (Armando McClain) wants to marry Iris’s sister Gloria (Vivia Font), until he discovers that she’s a high-class hooker.

Veronica Mars: You Can Go Home Again

Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars, now in theatres (Photo: Robert Voet/Warner Bros. Entertainment)

Last Friday, the much-anticipated Veronica Mars film appeared in movie theatres, Video on Demand, and for direct download on iTunes and Amazon. Last March, when series creator Rob Thomas' famous Kickstarter campaign was in full swing, I expressed some mixed feelings about the project: both because the strength of the TV series was always so dependent on the television format, and because its third (and final) season had demonstrated some real signs of decline. Still, whatever reservations I may have had, I eagerly marked March 14, 2014 on my calendar, and, with my expectations not-so-firmly in check, couldn't help counting the days until the film's release. The verdict? As neo-noir filmmaking goes, this isn't The Usual Suspects; despite the ten-year high school reunion plot element, it isn't even Grosse Pointe Blank. What it is is Veronica Mars, simpliciter. And for this long-time fan, that turned out to be more than enough.  

Beauty and Barbarism: Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises

With The Wind Rises, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki has achieved a feat befitting a master: he has crafted his final film into an elegiac farewell that at once communicates what it means to be an artist, while also being an artistic triumph itself. When I urge friends to see it, they deride the notion that a “cartoon” could be good. Pity. This animated movie is a feast for the eyes, ears, and heart, with narrative magic married to tonal complexities to form a sublime milieu. It's not a perfect movie, though, and its romantic idealism tries to find redeeming grace among irredeemable evils. It simultaneously breaks your heart and renews your belief in the transcendence of the human spirit.

Monumentally Dull: George Clooney's The Monuments Men

George Clooney and Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

It’s an unusual criticism to make of a movie that it doesn’t aim low enough. But that’s the problem with The Monuments Men, George Clooney’s new movie about a team sent by FDR to Europe in the final years of the Second World War to root out the art the Nazis stole from the countries they conquered and protect any more of the cornerstones of western civilization from being damaged. Using as source material the non-fiction book by Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Clooney and his co-writer/co-producer Grant Heslov – his collaborator on Good Night and Good Luck and The Ides of March – have set about to make a wartime adventure in the square style of big-studio entertainments of the fifties and early sixties, but they’ve done it without an ounce of cheeky wit or romance. Clooney has made the movie with a sort of middle-brow integrity, but what it really needs is showmanship – an instinct for melodrama, which he lacks entirely. He and Heslov start with a sensational story and a tantalizing cast – the seven “monuments men” are played by Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin and Clooney himself as Frank Stokes, the head of the mission – and then strip the movie of just about everything that might have made it fun to watch.

To Get to The Other Side: The Bridge

Kim Bodnia and Saga Noren star in the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge

The TV series The Bridge, a Swedish-Danish co-production that first aired in 2011, begins with the discovery of what appears to be the dead body of a Swedish politician. He has been cut in two; the corpse is lying at the exact spot on the Oresund Bridge that marks the point where the borders of Copenhagen and Malmo meet. Sofia (Saga Noren), a Swedish homicide detective, and Martin (Kim Bodnia), a Danish detective, both arrive at the scene, and it’s only after Sofia has brashly claimed the case for herself, with Martin’s happy consent, that it’s found that the “body” is actually two halves of two different dead women. Sofia and Martin end up working together on the case, which expands as it becomes clear that a serial killer with a larger agenda is at work.

Masterclass Concert: Robben Ford at Mohawk College, March 7

Guitarist Robben Ford

Robben Ford has played guitar with some of the greats. Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, and Miles Davis! Those names are legendary, but Robben Ford? Not so much. He is an extremely tasty guitarist with a long career behind him, and judging by his brand new CD he should have a long career ahead of him. But last Friday he came into Hamilton to offer a guitar masterclass to the students of Mohawk College, and he stuck around to play a concert at Mohawk’s McIntyre Theatre.

The show started at 8pm but the doors opened an hour earlier while ushers walked up and down selling raffle tickets as a fun-raiser for the music programme. The prizes? Autographed posters from last year’s guest guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and a signed Robben Ford Epiphone guitar. This is an annual event which has also featured Larry Carlton. The lights soon dimmed and after a few notices the opening act came on stage. Bump City is a student band, under the direction of Darcy Hepner, which plays the music of Tower of Power. Don’t Google them, you’ll find another Bump City entirely, also a tribute to Tower of Power band but made up of much older musicians. This group appeared to have an average age of 20, and each member was filled with the energy and enthusiasm you might expect. Their half hour set showcased three different vocalists, and a horn section that was together, and had all the moves down just so. Special props to their guitarist (Braden Varcoe) who made a guest appearance during Mr. Ford’s set. But more about that later. I’ve never been much of a Tower of Power fan, but Bump City acquitted themselves beautifully and kept their promise (from their Twitter site) to “make you shake your squib cakes all night long.”

All This Useless Knowledge: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is one of popular fiction’s favourite aesthetics-du-jour. We’re still apparently enamoured with zombies, dystopias, and teenagers murdering one another, and whenever we need a cut-and-paste horror setting, Lovecraft is the first well we draw from. His lurid and eloquent prose certainly invites (and deserves) imitation, but few works have managed to bottle his particular brand of dreadful, elegant, creeping horror. With Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer comes closer than anyone I’ve ever read.

A mysterious place known only as Area X has been isolated from humanity for decades. The government sends out expeditions to explore it and record their discoveries. Some expeditions came back dazed, unsure of what they’d seen. Some came back and contracted terminal cancer. Some came back and committed mass suicide. Some never came back at all. Annihilation follows the twelfth group, which is composed of four women – a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a biologist (our narrator). The characters are named by specialization and never physically described, their expertise and attitudes being the only salient information the author provides. The setting is likewise left ambiguous: Area X, and whatever lives there, might be a product of nuclear warfare, or government experimentation, or alien invasion, or any other recognizable science fiction trope. 

Musical Vaudeville: Encores! Production of Little Me

Rachel York and Christian Borle in Little Me (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Encores! at New York’s City Center opened its three-musical season at the beginning of last month with a spirited, uproarious revival of the 1962 Little Me, directed by John Rando, whose work for the series has included some of my personal favorites (On the Town, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Irving Berlin’s Face the Music). The source material for Little Me is a book by Patrick Dennis (author of Auntie Mame) that takes the form of a fictional memoir by a scandalous dame named Belle Poitrine – poitrine is French for chest – who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s pretty much an overlong one-joke comedy, the joke being the obvious discrepancy between the innocent version of events Belle is offering and the truth that glares at you between the lines. I got tired of the novel and of Belle after about a hundred pages and put it down. But the book of the musical, by Neil Simon, though it’s overstuffed – act one is ninety minutes long – is consistently funny. Simon divided the character of Belle between an aging millionairess (impersonated in Rando’s production by the feisty Judy Kaye) and her indomitable younger self (Rachel York, belting happily and effortlessly carrying off an ingénue role she ought to be about a decade and a half too old for). Belle goes to jail for murder, resurfaces as a stage personality on the basis of her notoriety – note that Little Me predated Chicago by thirteen years – entertains the troops in the Great War and stars in silent movies, among other adventures.

Feathers In their Caps: Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in Swan Lake

Evan McKie & Svetlana Lunkina (with the National Ballet of Canada) in Swan Lake. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

The highly anticipated debuts of principal guest artists Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in James Kudelka's version of Swan Lake readily explains why Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts was packed to the rafters last Saturday night (March 8). McKie who self identifies as a dancer-actor is the Toronto-born principal dancer with Germany's Stuttgart Ballet who is internationally celebrated for his ability to dramatize a role, and make it matter. Last month, the 30-year-old McKie headlined the Paris Opera Ballet, a first for a Canadian ballet dancer. In April, he will be a featured performer with the New York City Ballet where doubtless his long lyrical lines, his buoyant jumps and aristocratic mien will get audiences there as excited as they have been this past week for his homecoming in Toronto. Russian trained, McKie has also performed with the Bolshoi, making him a choice partner for Lunkina, a star ballerina of the Bolshoi who made headlines last year when she announced she was quitting Russia for Canada following a series of malevolent threats made against her and her family at a time when the Bolshoi was rocked with violence, an acid attack on its artistic director, Lunkina's former partner Sergei Filin, being one. McKie's undisputed talent as a gifted dramatic dancer notwithstanding, she was the one everyone had come to watch. The house was filled with ex ballet dancers and au courant balletomanes, all eager to see the controversial Russian ballerina show her stuff. She did not disappoint.

East Meets West: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

South Korean cinema seems to be caught up in the rapture of a cultural renaissance. Their films crackle with the energy and inventiveness of a newly successful moviemaking machine, like Pixar at its prime, from Oldboy (2003) to Pieta (2013). I’ve never seen a better example of this than Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird, which owes its existence to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti tour de force The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, but diverges from this legendary source material in creative (and often hilarious) ways. It’s not really fair to compare the two – one is a literal masterpiece and the other is a fun period action feature – but The Weird models itself too closely after The Ugly to ignore the similarities.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird takes Leone’s southwestern epic across the Pacific and seventy years into the future, landing us in 1930s Manchuria, where a hitman (Lee Byung-hun, “The Bad”) is hired to rob a train of a Japanese treasure map. An enterprising thief (Song Kang-ho, “The Weird”) interrupts this scheme and escapes with the map. Meanwhile, a bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung, “The Good”) arrives to claim the bounty on The Bad. The film plays out from there in a series of escalating (and increasingly ridiculous) chases and escapes, until The Bad, The Good, a gang of Manchurian bandits, and the Japanese Army are all chasing The Weird towards the treasure’s hidden location. Only the three title characters make it there, where they engage in a classic Leone-style Mexican standoff. So the plot is almost exactly that of The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, albeit with a shot of Eastern flavour (the film is actually referred to as an “Oriental Western” in the end credits). It can’t exactly be called a remake, because the basic plot structure and rough character outlines are pretty much the only things that are the same. The Weird simply takes The Ugly and injects it with adrenaline – it’s almost the antithesis of The Ugly in terms of pacing, speed, energy, and humour, all of which it provides in spades. Where Leone’s film was laconic, Kim’s is hyperactive.

Neglected Gem #51: Something Wild (1961)

Ralph Meeker and Carroll Baker in Something Wild (1961)

No one in Hollywood in the late fifties and early sixties attempted anything remotely like Jack Garfein’s movie Something Wild (1961). (The movie has no connection to Jonathan Demme’s great romantic comedy of the same name, made twenty-five years later.) I first saw it on Saturday Night at the Movies when I was in high school in the late sixties, and though I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, for years afterwards my mind retained images from the dream sequence, where the protagonist, Mary Ann (played by Carroll Baker), in a gang of schoolgirls, stares at a painting with a moving eye in a museum and then endures the mocking laughter of her classmates as the features of their faces vanish. Garfein and his co-screenwriter Alex Karmel, adapting Karmel’s novel Mary Ann, had clearly absorbed the lessons of the Surrealist painters – De Chirico especially seems to haunt Mary Ann’s nightmare – as well as the Expressionist playwrights of the 1920s, and applied them to the conventions of film noir in a more florid and inventive way than anyone had previously. Visually the film noirs of the forties and fifties had always leaned toward that style; of all genres, noir was the one that gave directors and cinematographers the greatest license to import the ideas of the German Expressionist pictures of the silent and early talkie eras, and naturally that was the genre toward which filmmakers who ran away from Hitler and landed in Hollywood tended to gravitate. But Something Wild takes a more experimental approach to the narrative elements of noir, particularly the portrayal of the city as a weird and dangerous place.

Politically Radical Content That You Dance To: Sini Anderson's The Punk Singer‏

The Punk Singer, Sini Anderson’s profile-style documentary about the rock star, “riot grrrl” movement figure, and provocateur Kathleen Hanna, is a scrappy (but rousing) snapshot montage of someone who can be seen as embodying the best of the D.I.Y. spirit of the American punk culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s. At times, Hannah—the front woman for the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre—comes across almost as the scene’s Zelig: she was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s, and she was the one who came up with the phrase “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (She actually scrawled it on the wall of his house one night, explaining that “We were so wasted. Soooo wasted. So fucking wasted!”) The movie makes a pretty fair case that Cobain was strongly enough influenced by “girl art punk” that, without Hanna and her acolytes, there would have been no Nirvana as we know it. The thought of what the 90s would have been like without Nevermind could send a chill down the spine of many folks of a certain age, not that the thought of what the 90s would have been like without Bikini Kill, or Le Tigre, should make them feel any warmer.

Play it Again: Adrian Raso & Fanfare Ciocarlia's Devil's Tale

Adrian Raso isn't exactly a household name when it comes to the Canadian music scene. Raso was born in Guelph, Ontario. At a young age, he started playing guitar beginning with rock music, but with a keen ear for Mediterranean musical forms. By 2005, he formed his own instrumental trio that drew crowds at home and abroad. Raso and his band were very successful in Italy gaining recognition for their musical skills and spirited music. His latest CD, Devil's Tale (Asphalt Tango), features the guitarist with a band called Fanfare Ciocarlia from Romania. The 12-piece brass band features trumpets, tubas and percussion in a lively, spirited mix that is fresh and optimistic. It's an album of original compositions by Raso that is immediately accessible and eclectic right from the first note.

Hard Burn: The Expanse Trilogy

I was surprised to learn that James S.A. Corey, author of the tremendous SF series The Expanse, is actually a pen name shared by fantasy author Daniel Abraham and his collaborator, Ty Franck. The three novels which encompass the series so far are so seamless and well-crafted that they hardly feel like separate books, let alone three huge books written by two different people. They combine everything I love about SF into a slick and accessible package, with the electric action of modern fantasy and the moral and philosophical nuance of classic sci-fi. These novels illustrate a fictional universe which is incredibly compelling, and it behooves any SF fan – or anybody interested in being one – to bump them up to “must-read” status. Franck built the universe of The Expanse as a singular project, initially intended to function as the setting for an online multiplayer video game. Then Abraham signed on to flesh out characters and fill Franck’s setting with a compelling narrative. 

Unlike other SF works which vault humanity into the far reaches of the universe, depict faster-than-light interstellar travel, and show people coexisting with extraterrestrial organisms, The Expanse has a more grounded speculative setting. Our species has spread out into our own solar system, but no further. Mars has been colonized, and there are agricultural and industrial outposts as far out as Neptune. An invention called an “Epstein drive” decreases travel time between celestial bodies, but forces ships to fly with extreme thrust, which causes fatal g-forces. To compensate, crew members must sit in gel-filled couches which inject them with stimulants and muscle-control chemicals, keeping them from blacking out during a “hard burn.” This is a far cry from the fantastical hyperdrives of Star Wars, blasting characters across galaxies in maximum comfort. But these depictions of advanced technology, realistic as they may be, still take a backseat to the human element – this is a very human society, driven by interplanetary politics and economies. Mars, for example, has a distinct culture, separate from that of Earth, which is removed even further still from Belter society (the nickname for those who occupy the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter). The total human population has become a vast melting pool of races, most characters sharing in an incredibly diverse genetic lineage. Martians of the Mariner Valley affect a quasi-Southern accent, and Belters have elongated skeletal frames from generations spent in lower gravity. A character might appear Chinese, but have a Portuguese name. This creates enough racial tension to make for some solid space drama (one character notes that “a certain death rate [has] to be expected” when you keep so many highly-evolved primates in the same box for months and months on end), but even that isn’t the focus of the story – simply an example of the excellent worldbuilding that defines the series.

Chekhov and Baryshnikov: Man in a Case

Man in a Case, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov (center)

At the end of Chekhov’s short story “About Love,” the narrator Alehin reveals that only in the last moments he spent with the married woman with whom he had fallen in love – when he kissed her for the first time before she traveled away from him forever – did he understand that “when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.” Man in a Case by the Big Dance Theater, which has been traveling around the east coast and played a handful of Boston performances in the Arts Emerson series, dramatizes “About Love” and “The Man in a Case,” two of the Chekhov tales from 1898 that begin as conversations between the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster Burkin, who are hunting companions. And I think it’s that comment of Alehin’s that links them. The title story focuses on Belikov, a schoolteacher whose cautious disapproval of anything with the mere whiff of impropriety has the effect of making everyone around him feel constrained. Improbably, he becomes enamored of a young woman, but he can’t rise above either his prejudices or his pride. Belikov’s story, which is comic and tragic by turns – the Chekhovian balance – ends when, after he’s scandalized to observe his beloved on a bicycle and gets into an argument with her brother over her, he’s thrown down the stairs and dies as a result of his injuries, or perhaps of some combination of shame and heartbreak. He’s “the man in the case” who has sealed himself off from humanity; he seems to break out of it when he falls in love but he can’t allow that love to alter his nature. It’s quite a strange story (and, like “About Love,” a beautiful one).