TO NICK AND SAMUEL, WHO RAISED ME TO RESPECT IMAGE AND SOUND
...NEW AUTO TRAINS WITH SLEEPER CARS...
Happiness for example.
Whenever he desired something...
so did I.
Or fame...
For him.
When he didn't desire anything...
neither did I.
In this way I didn't live without desires.
For him.
When he was silent...
he must have been like me.
I only had the desires he manifested.
Excuse me.
Where should I put the whiskey?
Shall I change the towels? - Yes, please.
What's Atlantic Cité’s population?
63,000. Maybe over 62,500.
There was a big police crackdown on drivers last weekend.
In Paris too.
Weren't the Communists beaten here last year
in the local elections?
Yes. They wanted to requisition bathrooms if they won.
As pretty as ever, Miss Nelson?
- What are you doing here? - Let me in.
- What do you want? - I have things to tell you.
Like what?
Not in the hallway.
Okay.
You wanted to talk? Talk.
The Moroccan War made you a bit mean.
You know...
the war ended long ago for me.
Yes, all that's long gone.
Wars are never over.
Trafalgar, Sedan, Chemin des Dames, Mers el-Kebir,
Leningrad, Okinawa, Berlin, Hanoi.
The name changes, but it's always the same, as you can see.
What can I see?
What are you doing here yourself?
You're a jerk.
A filthy jerk.
So...
what do you have to tell me?
What did Richard die of?
Was it really heart failure?
How should I know? I read about it in Ouest-France,
so I came down pronto.
Right, Mr. Pronto.
So you weren't here at the time.
- Why me? - Listen, Mr. Typhus.
If you want to talk, fine. But talk straight.
I just arrived this morning. I didn't even unpack.
My train got in at 8:13.
I walked here from the station.
I crossed the street and saw you enter the hotel.
I asked for your room number and took the one next door,
and I came to talk to you.
Why can't we work together?
We have before.
Not with me.
With Dick, maybe.
What kind of work anyway?
What kind of work?
We're after the same thing.
Really? No kidding!
And what's that?
You know very well, Paula,
but you're trying to find out if I know more than you.
More about what?
You're a pain. I don't know a thing.
He sent me a telegram three days ago.
I couldn't come till yesterday.
We hardly saw each other anymore.
I don't even know if I still love him.
But this love indebted me to him.
His neighbors told me
he'd been taken to the hospital in the fifth region.
I understood from the article that he's already been buried.
I don't know.
I went down there... nothing.
Now tell me things I don't know.
You know it's a secret.
- What secret? - Come on. Don't start that again.
Never mind.
I'll manage on my own.
You know, in Paris, some people
must be shaking at the Information and Interior ministries.
Maybe even in the Cabinet.
Really? You think it's serious?
Yes, it's serious.
Very serious, even.
If we work together, do we share everything?
Sure. Fine. All right. Okay.
Which shoes go best with my dress?
The blue or the white? - Blue.
Now fiction overtakes reality.
Now there's blood and mystery.
Now I feel like I'm caught up in a Walt Disney movie,
but with Humphrey Bogart, so it's a political movie.
DR. SAMUEL KORVO AESTHETIC AUTOPSIES
What'd you do to Uncle Edgar?
- You his nephew? - Yes, ma'am.
Don't mind me.
Is he dead?
I'm the person he wanted to talk to.
Will you call the police? - Absolutely not.
- What's your name? - David Goodis.
Who's she?
The girl I love.
Doris Mizoguchi.
We were vacationing in Paris at Uncle Edgar's invitation.
How long were you in Paris?
- Exactly? - Yes, exactly.
How long were you in Paris?
- Exactly? - Yes, exactly.
Exactly...
127 years.
Really? Just as I thought.
You must not have seen your girlfriend often.
Rarely. She lived too far away.
I only saw her daily.
Mornings for breakfast, midday for lunch,
afternoons for tea,
sometimes between tea and dinner, then for a movie or a play after dinner.
She couldn't come often. She lived too far away.
She lived in the suburbs.
Since the suburbs aren't Paris, and Paris isn't France,
she had to get a visa every time she came to see me.
But couldn't you go see her?
Sure, but only outside breakfast, lunch,
tea and dinner.
You're a real moron.
If I was a moron, I wouldn't speak French.
So what are you doing in Atlantic-Cite?
"In this mirror I am enclosed alive
and real as one imagines the angels,
not like reflections."
What are you writing?
A novel that'll never end and that I'll call The Unfinished Novel.
"Who is that actress
with iris eyes so heavy and dark like a bouquet?
The Japanese girl
suddenly looked something like a Manet.
Surely, like me,
she wearied of their silly wordplays.
She uses only familiar words:
'You'll miss me, honey,
some of these days.'
Why then this feeling of a long agony?
And my life
and the world?
Who could ever still believe in them?
She only loved the here and now
And I was the color of time
She spoke of elsewhere
Forever elsewhere,
I listened, in dreams sublime
A woman is a door to the unknown halls
A woman is like the triumph of naked soles
Do you remember the song, the tone of that foolish carol..."
I couldn't rhyme that one.
"One day, alas!
You'll go off, Alice, with Lewis Carroll."
Thanks. Can I count on your help?
Sure, if you help me too.
But not a word to the police.
- He still works at? - No, they sacked him.
Okay.
When he comes to, tell him I vanished.
Is it really you I'll find dead?
O Richard.
O my king.
In what second-rate tragedy have you once again cast me in the final role?
Luckily I was now a brunette, and Dr. Korvo
didn't recognize the blond student from Agadir.
Madam Nelson, I have to talk to you!
You look unhappy. No luck?
Wasn't that funny?
- Hello, Thomas. - Hello, sir.
Don't call me sir.
Call me Bartender or Paul. It's easier.
I'm not much older than you.
Excuse me. Another shot of scotch.
Coming right up, Miss Nelson.
Don't call me sir.
Call me Bartender or Paul. It's easier.
I'm not much older than you.
You are. How old are you?
I'm 22. - You'll be twice that in 22 years.
In 22 years I'll be 26.
Not so, sir - sorry - Bartender or Paul.
In 22 years she'll be 44.
You're good at mental math, but she beats you in French.
I'll catch up. I'm only two years older.
I didn't know you were 19.
22 and 35 don't make 19.
They do, except during the war.
'70 and '14 added up to '40.
Mind doing some arithmetic for me?
All right, fella.
Could you inventory the objects in my bar?
- What's a bar? - Bartender!
Coming! A bar...
is a place... I mean, a room.
I mean, it's several persons who meet under a bartender's eye.
And it's also a room where liquids are served.
I mean, it's both people
meeting under a bartender's eye, and it's also a room -
A bar can't be two things at once.
Can the young lady be both a woman and a crocodile?
You ask tough questions. I have to think about it.
List the objects in the bar.
I see a glass, bottles,
a rose, windows on my right,
a door that's both in front of me and behind you.
You see, a thing can be in two places at once.
Keep going.
- A bartender. - Where's the bartender?
In front of me. It's you.
That's right. I didn't see myself.
Keep going.
An ashtray,
cups, saucers,
a coffee machine, three taps,
a cigarette, a striped dress.
And four walls that surround the bar,
a floor under my feet,
a worker and me, Paula,
who's stuck in a desperate situation.
You just throw words around. Do something with them!
Like what, Bartender or Paul?
What does one do with words?
- Is this necessary? - I sincerely think so.
I'll try to make sentences, but I don't like to.
Why don't you like to?
Because sentences are useless or empty words.
The dictionary says so.
But the dictionary also says
that sentences join words together...
to give them fuller meaning.
- I reject your definition. - Why?
Why do you reject it?
Sentences can't be meaningless and have fuller meaning.
Don't complicate things. If you don't talk in sentences,
I can't understand you and thus serve you a drink.
Then, Bartender or Paul, I'll give it a try.
The glass is not in my wine.
The bartender is in the pocket of the pencil's jacket.
The bar gives the young lady a few kicks.
The floor is stubbed out on the cigarette.
The tables are on the glasses.
The ceiling hangs from the lamp.
The window looks into the young lady's eyes.
I open them, and the door sits on the stool.
The telephone has three bars.
The coffee fills with vodka.
The Cinzano has four walls around it...
but the dictionary has only three windows:
One sash window and two French windows.
The doors jump out the window.
The bartender fills a cigarette with his whiskey.
He lights his tap.
I am what you are.
He is not what we are.
They are what you are.
I have what you have.
He has what they have.
They have what we don't have.
- What'll you have? - If anyone asks, you don't know.
Say something at least.
"What's the maximum speed of love?
Answer: 68 miles per hour.
A mile faster and you're in a cock-up."
Very well.
ARMED TROOPS ARE PROTECTING
CANDIDATES IN SUNDAY'S ELECTIONS...
Say something at least.
I'm fed up.
Here's the address you wanted.
Whatever I do...
I can't shirk my responsibilities toward others.
My silence has the same effect on him as my words.
My leaving disturbs him as much as my presence.
My indifference can be his undoing as much as my involvement.
My sometimes rash concern...
can be fatal to him.
Either this life is nothing
or it must be everything.
By imagining that it could be lost,
rather than subjected to the absurd,
I place at the very center of my relative existence
an absolute benchmark -
that of ethics.
The absolute in this sense is not elsewhere.
No past justifies it.
No future can promise it.
I choose to exist to become increasingly present
for myself,
for Dick...
and for others.
Miss Daisy Kenyon, please report to Solarium 4.
Miss Ruby Gentry, please report to the oxygenation room.
This way.
Calling Dr. Ludwig.
Calling Dr. Edward Ludwig.
Is it you?
Yes, miss. Miss...?
Paula Nelson.
I don't do special consultations.
No, I just want some information.
- Are you a reporter? - Who said I was?
You're from Paris?
I just want to know if Dick really -
If Richard P... died of heart failure.
Are you his sister?
We were to marry two years ago. THE BOOK OF THE IT
During the events in Marseille?
Why don't you answer my question?
I am. Look.
I have his file here. There's no mystery.
Of course. Even in Treblinka and Auschwitz,
people ended up dying of heart failure.
What did he do before coming to Atlantic-Cite?
Did you work together?
Excuse me.
Go right ahead.
Tell Mr. Widmark the person in question did call.
Why did they call you to confirm his death?
Because I saw him often.
We'd play tennis three times a week.
I'm the club president.
He was alone. I introduced him to people.
He was lonely, you know.
Loneliness isn't a cause of death.
How can you not see
the link between loneliness and physical illness?
Why tell me stories?
I just want the truth.
You don't like telling stories. I think you're wrong.
Dickens, Melville, and Hammett are better
than all these new audiovisual truth-detecting methods.
Weren't you the mayor's deputy until '67?
The mayor was a Communist.
He was killed too.
An explosion in a gas depot.
The Communist utopia is no longer the revolutionary utopia of 40 years ago.
You're sure he had no family?
They should be informed.
He had only me.
I'll avenge him.
I don't understand you.
In that case,
let's stop DICK-ing around with this ri-DICK-ulous nonsense.
I understood very quickly.
This affair had to remain murky for everyone,
and my life was on the line.
But maybe, too, I'd come across something
that I could then sell to the opposition press.
To recover Richard's things,
I went back late that afternoon to the address I'd been given.
It was once again the kind of day for taking out a camera
and making a color movie.
An anonymous voice had given me the address of a garage.
I thought I'd recognized the northern accent
of a typist he'd run off with.
Where am I?
I'm crossing countries drenched in blood.
War is war...
whether you call it that or not.
War.
And life -
has it ever been anything but war?
To kill less than in a war -
is that the law in life?
Where am I?
Why was I told he was in the military hospital?
Who gave you the address of this garage?
Someone from around here.
And I remembered his fondness for cars.
And I saw his Alfa.
That idiot Donald! I told him to torch it.
- Was it after the elections? - Maybe.
You killed him.
What makes you think that?
The corpse at that doctor's office, Dr. -
Korvo? I don't know anything about it.
You can fool the movie audience, but not me.
Why do you want to avenge P?
This may surprise you, but out of idealism.
Ah, right.
I remember an editorial...
where he wrote that fascism was the dollar of ethics.
What did they do to him?
It's the other way around:
It was Dr. Korvo who informed Ludwig that you'd come by.
How'd you get to Atlantic-Cite so fast?
- Who slugged me? - I do the questioning here.
Then do the answering too.
He'd kept evidence about the mayor's death.
It had to vanish.
Something new,
criminally speaking.
It was worse here than Marseille or Chicago.
You know, I'm in charge of planning
for all of Region 5.
If you kill me, you won't learn a thing.
Your theory doesn't hold water.
The main thing is to find out if you know where it is.
I tell her I know exactly what she's looking for.
She'd heard that P... was dead
and thought that once here, it would all be easy.
And I tell him it's all Chinese to me.
Cold.
Colder.
Freezing.
The South Pole.
Still the South Pole.
Warming up.
Warmer.
Crossing the Equator.
The Sahara.
Starting to burn.
Burning.
Let's listen to it.
Paragraph 3.
Permanent revolution only has meaning
if the diversity and seriousness of the politico-economic team
allows us to surmount the hazards of the situation.
Paragraph 7.
What Robespierre and St. Just had glimpsed empirically
as part of a program -
What Robespierre and St. Just had glimpsed empirically
as part of a program that remained to be defined,
but whose surprising topicality still amazes... others have drafted.
I am one of them, and you shouldn't blame us, comrades.
Paragraph 12.
As colonial independence in the interim
checks the fascist evolution of the regime,
domestic conquest and the struggle for the presidency
should open a new field of club activity.
I've changed my mind.
Why did I go to Dr. Korvo's?
And why did I go to the military solarium?
And without any risk.
You know, I could kill you right now.
Here I am in my dark suit
and bright tie.
I tell her I still have a lot of friends in Paris
who will be back in power someday.
To be classified.
We asked a nation to base its opinion
not on adversarial analysis within public opinion,
or on the study of hard evidence,
but on what certain officials
have chosen to leak from secret archives.
Such methods, comrades -
Let me start again.
We asked a nation to base its opinion
not on adversarial analysis within public opinion,
or on the study of hard evidence,
but on what certain officials
have chosen to leak from secret archives.
Such methods, comrades,
epitomize a police state.