Pt. 1 - "normal life"
I was getting very stressed out - I was trying to buy an apartment building, a rambling, flat yellow "garden" apartment complex - but there were all sorts of hold ups with the title, and transferring the title to me. The property was unkempt, the alley behind it was filled with dandelions and catgrass and duckweed, while the other alley lots were really beautiful horticultural plots with streams and landscaping rocks. I had plans for that back alley. I never actually got in to see the apartment building that I was going to buy, but I had some plans for that alley.
I went back to the realtor's office - it was not very nearby, in fact, it felt and looked like it was all the way in Olympia - and talked to him about the troubles, and it came out that we were both fans of Peter Greenaway, who had just released a new movie. I went about some other daily-life sort of things; I had scratched my glasses and needed to get them polished, I went to Marshall's and bought some socks, then I went home.
I looked in the paper (yes, a real newspaper, I said at the beginning to remember this is a dream) and found out that Peter Greenaway's new film, The New Sandwich, had just opened at the Columbia City Cinema. I called Tiffany to find out if she wanted to see it with me. She wasn't there.
The paper said the movie was breaking all sorts of ground for Greenaway, both linguistically and stylistically. Its advertisement was an old high-heeled pointy boot, with a sign hung at the top seeming to name the shoe "The New Sandwich." I went to see the movie.
Pt 2 - "The New Sandwich"
As the film opens, there are two plots developing simultaneously. The first focusing on a tortured Frenchman, who is desperately trying to develop a new sandwich before the opening of his shop. The neighborhood containing this pointy-shoe-building is unmistakably Danish. He is speaking French with no subtitles. The second plot begins with a doctor in bloody scrubs doing something unspeakable to a patient who's been bondage-style-roped down. The camera focuses on a patient cowering in the corner, eyes shifty in that "i'm mental" kind of way.
Several of the patients in this hospital have a priviledge which allows them to work together on the docks - either loading chum onto the boats there or gutting the fish as they come off. They have heard of this man who wants to invent a new sandwich - how could that be done? they wonder. Sandwiches are sandwiches, there is no "new sandwich."
The Frenchman is at the market - he has decided that no two sandwiches on the menu can have any of the same ingredients - no two mustards will be alike, no two breads. There will be one chicken sandwich, one pastrami, one roast beef, one salami. They will have entirely different vegetables, every flavor combination will be unique.
Nighttime at the Asylum - the shifty-eyed dock foreman is hatching a plan. They will steal a boat, and they will find out for themselves what in the world a New Sandwich could be.
They steal a Very Tall Boat, and Ron Perlman (who has apparently jumped ship from the river in City of Lost Children) is knocked unconscious as the boat goes under a bridge.
They find the sandwich shop with very little drama, and the proprietor thinks to himself, of course! This is just the kind of outsider thinking that will get me a new sandwich! Ron Perlman is still unconscious on the boat.
And here, it becomes formulaic. The inmates kill the Frenchman and serve him (nearly-raw, thin-sliced with capers and mayonaisse) as the New Sandwich. It is a great success. They don't return to the asylum. Ron Perlman is never seen again. The doctor we saw at the beginning comes in to the sandwich shop, and is, of course, killed and served.
Greenaway's so predictable with the cannibalism.
1 comment:
i totally want to see that movie now. and to have another human flesh sandwich.
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