By: Andre
Suprapto
“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the
presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the human sufferer.”
-James Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist as A
Young Man
Vito
Corleone, of Mario Puzzo’s haunting mafia novel, The Godfather; said that each man is allowed one foolishness in his life time. To my shame, I almost conducted such ultimate foolishness of a life
time by seeing the much-anticipated musical, Les Miserables, in pirated DVD.
Luckily,
good reasoning got the better of me as I was watching (in a DVD with terrible
English subtitle thank you very much) Hugh Jackman’s “A-Game” when he delivered
the heart-wrenching “Valjean’s Soliloquy” almost in one take and with
pathetic red shot eyes. I decided to stop and understood that I owe it to Victor
Hugo and to the French in general to see this movie on the big screen.
It proved to be one of the
best decisions I made in my life so far. Since the experience of seeing the
movie with the full embracing aura of the theatre was magical, surreal, and “not-of-this-world”.
As
the title of this essay suggests, out of the great performances pulled off by
the actors and actresses in the movie, except for Russell Crowe whom I think
played Javert in a rather soul-less piece of acting; I was completely mesmerized
from head to toe (and toe to head again) by Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of the
pitiful and tragic Fantine. Seeing her wearing Fantine’s pathos to her very
skin as if it were her own life story, made it impossible to believe that she
once was Mia Thermopolis, the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Genovia in The Princess
Diaries (not that I have seen the movie).
Surely,
in overall, Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the musical that has been seen by more
than 60 million people world-wide which in turn is based on Hugo’s timeless novel
on the universal theme of suffering and the possibility of hope or redemption;
is worthy of a standing ovation as long as your emotion allows you to give.
However, amidst the almost flawless performance of the actors, the precisely harmonious
execution of the choruses, and the perfect rhythm of the scenes; it is Anne’s
Fantine that stood gigantically and was able to tie up the movie altogether,
and became the soul and the spirit of the movie.
For
the part, Anne, just like the character Fantine who sacrificed everything for
her daughter; gave her all and more. The long, thick and brown hair of hers,
that I fancy must be having a healing power like the relics of saints of ages
past, was cut pixie-short for real. She dropped about 25 pounds to give Fantine’s
emaciated look of an underfed early nineteenth century French grissette.
When
one reads how Hugo narrated the tragedy of Fantine in his novel, one will
absolutely concede that the way Anne sang I
Dreamed a Dream must be the exact portrayal of the emotional state that Fantine
had after she decided to be “the woman of the town” in order to send money to
the Thenardiers who took care of her daughter Cossette in a corrupt and abusive
manner.
In
the novel, Hugo narrated Fantine’s ordeal in more detail. After being sacked
from Jean Valjean’s factory, she worked for seventeen hours a day sewing shirts
for soldiers for only nine sous. When the Thenardiers told her Cossette was freezing
for lack of coat in the winter, she sold her hair; when they told her (lyingly)
that she was sick from miliary fever, she sold her two front teeth (one can
imagine how hideous even for a beautiful girl to lose her front teeth). Then,
to a creature already down, the Thenardiers sent a letter saying that they
would kick Cossette out of their house and she “would perish if she must”, if Fantine
did not send them one hundred francs immediately.
Hence, came the ultimate
sacrifice of Fantine as a mother, her ability to give her own life for her
child. Perhaps as an act of remorse and guilt to the child of having delivered her
into this miserable world.
That was when she said to
herself, “I will sell what is left”.
For sale, was her pride, her
very dignity, her integrity, her worth as a woman being: her body.
On Suffering and On Women
There is no exaggeration for
one to say that the world is nothing more than a crucible of sufferings. If one
is to chronicle all the sufferings in the world even of those that happen only
in a single day, one may be at risk of being insane.
France in the early
nineteenth century, when the story of Les
Mis began with the release of Jean Valjean from 19 years of imprisonment
because of stealing a loaf of bread, was nothing short but a house of pain for most
of its citizens. The glorious French Revolution of 1789 only opened the gate
for abuses by ambitious men such as Maximilien de Robespierre and Napoleon
Bonaparte to usurp power in the name of the people. Egalite, as the shrewd urchin Gavroche aptly put it, only came into
realization once you are dead. That’s why for the whole nineteenth century, France
was rocked by revolutions almost once in every decade.
Against such setting, we
have this petite and lovely Fantine, who in Hugo’s words: “...was a joy to
behold.”, and who “was beautiful, without being too conscious of it”. She was “a
dreamy, musing and pensive girl” who fell in love with a wrong person by the
name of Tholomyes, a young bourgeois law student who had the motto that “Woman
is man’s right.” When she was pregnant with his child, he abandoned her, and
the society condemned her severely with a hypocritical morality that sexual
freedom should only be enjoyed by men, not women.
Fantine’s life, even as a
mere twenty-two years old when she was sacked from the factory and had to rack
her brain to find means to feed her daughter, was clothed in misery and
drenched in pain. But being a woman, she was not a quitter.
I do not mean to digress
from the issue at hand, but my research and study on Fantine inevitably led me
to the one fact that our mostly patriarchal world seems to intentionally deny:
that women are the most daring of all creatures and a thousand times stronger
than men. Consequently, women contribute to the betterment of the society more.
It is of genuine truth when
the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, coined the
phrase that “the empowerment of women is the most effective development tool”.
It has been almost eight
years since the first time the above phrase was introduced by Annan in the opening
of the 2005 UN Commission on the Status of Women, and women have lived up to the
expectation, despite all the difficulties they face. As reported by The Daily Beast.Com, “research from the
World Bank to the public and private sectors has shown how investments in women
yield a ‘double dividend’: women are more likely than men to invest their incomes
in their families and communities, driving GDP up and illiteracy and mortality
down.”
In this year’s World
Economic Forum in Davos, Christine Lagarde of the IMF gave justice to her sex when
she said that: “the evidence is clear as is the message: when women do better,economies do better.”
This perhaps has to do with
women’s unselfish nature. It is their stubborn habit to, in the words of the
nineteenth century American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “give entirely to
their affections, sell their whole fortune on the die, lose themselves eagerly
in the glory of their husbands and children.” Because of such selfless characteristic that
women possess, Emerson further added: “Women are...the civilizers of mankind.
What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women”.
Under the similar
understanding, Karl Marx put the emancipation of women as a condition of his
utopia. Utopia –the ideal country– is where women cease to
be mere property of their fathers or their husbands or the society.
In my humble opinion, it
seems that women, as the ones who give birth to LIFE, appreciate life more than
us men.
As the one who defies death
in order to give a life for the newborn, it is natural for a woman to handle
troubles and sufferings with grace, elegance and motherly wisdom. A real woman
accepts with dignity the fact that she was born in a world that is unjust to
her sex and that she has to stand against men whose main occupation is to
subjugate her to their power all her life. A woman is the triumph of the soul
over the body. In this sense, a woman is strong in her vulnerability, perfect
in her imperfections.
Thus, it goes without saying
that he who understands women, understands life; and he who adores women, adores
life.
(And to our shame, we live
in a country where to ban a woman from straddling motorcycles is even
thinkable.)
To go back to Fantine, her
desperate actions, her self-sacrifice were only conducted out of her
irrevocable and unconditional love for her daughter Cossette. “This woman had,”
as Hugo described, “in all the world, nothing but her child, and the child had,
in all the world, no one but this woman.”
What did she care about
morality that is mostly imposed in the severest sense on women by pretentious
and sanctimonious men with deceitful motive? All she knew was that her Cossette
was sick and even dying (as the Thenardiers falsely informed Fantine); and
under no circumstances can she sleep before she had sent the money needed, the
one hundred francs, for Cossette’s medication. There is neither reservation nor
any condition for her undying love to Cossette, she’d do anything. Even to go
to the worse form of slavery: prostitution.
In the simple chapter after
the unfortunate girl threw herself into the dark abyss of prostitution, which
was entitled Christus Nos Liberavit (Christ
Has Liberated Us), Hugo summarized
Fantine’s miserable condition as follows:
“She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold.
She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and dishonored
figure. Life and the social order have said their last word for her. All has
happened to her that will happen to her. She has felt everything, borne
everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything,
mourned everything. She is resigned, with the resignation which resembles
indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all
the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to
her? She is a sponge that is soaked.”
In the movie, Anne duly
absorbed every detail of Fantine’s emotions and engraved the bleak, depressing and
agonizing tragedy of Fantine’s life into her memorable performance when she
sang the ballad I Dreamed a Dream. That
four and a half minute of seminal performance of the ballad I think worth two
Oscars for one category. And we as the watching bystanders are under the risk
of having a blasphemous thought that suffering, especially of other people’s,
may be entertaining.
In the following, I will try
to describe the highlights of the impressions that have left a scratch in the
soul as I saw Anne’s performance in the I
Dreamed a Dream ballad:
There was a time
when men were kind
In this opening, we see the
dreamer Fantine fantasizing about the days when men were represented by the seemingly
kind and lovely Tholomyes and she was just “Fantine, the Blonde, who was still
in her first illusions.” When she was still an innocent teenager who was so ignorant
on the bestiality that men are capable of. Such innocence, credulity and
ignorance that had her fell in a “first love, sole love and faithful love” with
just the wrong person.
This view was later confronted
by the crude, real facts of life. When, before she was helped by Jean Valjean
from police inspector Javert’s iron hand of the law; she learned that there was
such a man as heartless as Valjean, so she thought, that sacked a help-less
single mother with a little starving child.
Later on in the ballad Fantine’s Arrest, she dared to stand up
against Valjean, spat on him in the face and threw her hands in a boxer-like
double cover only to drop it immediately; knowing that her defense was useless
against a world governed by callous and unfeeling men.
There was a
time...
Then it all went
wrong
Here, the cold hand of harsh
reality started to give a deathly touch to her skin. The picture of Cossette
lying sickly in the house of strangers (the Thenardiers) perhaps crossed her
mind.
I dreamed that
God would be forgiving
In mentioning the name of
God, Anne’s eyes began to be glassy and her voice started to falter. She
dropped her head as in a terrible anguish and despair. In nineteenth century
Catholic France, most of the time, there was no other refuge or place of
comfort for a powerless and bitter soul like her except in the Holy Name of
God. Yet, her prayers and supplications seemed only went to an empty and deaf
heaven. No answers whatsoever, the cross only got heavier and heavier as she
prayed. In this context, one might wonder, how incredibly insane and mad one
must become in order to believe that God is love.
As they tear
your hope apart
As they turn
your dream to shame
She began to break down. She
pushed her voice up in order to channel the painful emotions within. Seeing
this, there is just this human solidarity and universal pity that burst into
the heart that makes you want to get to her and give her an embrace in order to
ease her pain.
And still I
dream he’ll come to me!
That we will
live the years together...
Again, the dreamy Fantine
still armed herself with the unrealistic hope of having Tholomyes as a husband
and live happily ever after. Anne’s eyes perfectly resembled the eyes of a fantasizing
mind. She seemed to gaze into an imaginary world, a castle in the air, where her
life was not the way it was.
In the novel, after she had
sold her lovely hair for ten francs to buy Cossette a petticoat for the winter,
Fantine said “My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my hair.”
Further, she also daydreamed by saying laughingly “When I get rich, I will have
my Cossette with me.”
But there are
dreams that cannot be
And there are
storms we cannot weather...
A flow of tears from the eyes
that were almost ran out of liquid streamed down her skinny and dirty cheek.
She gasped, exhausted with life.
I had a dream my
life would be
So different
from this hell I’m living-
So different now
from what it seemed!
She belted her voice. The
emotions, the song, the rhythm, the tone and the words in the lines have
enmeshed together perfectly to create a vale of woe.
Now life has
killed the dream I dreamed
There was a reserved anger
in this last line. This was when she seemed to accept that rage is no longer of
any use in her situation.
She closed the ballad by
looking back to the dark room in a pathetic sigh, as if she slightly grieved
over the loss of innocence and the darkness that took over.
***
Anne’s breathtaking
performance continued when she was dying in Valjean’s hands, dreaming of
Cossette in the ballad Come to Me
(Fantine’s Death). Her feverish delirium was very real and vivid; it’s so
difficult to find any trace of acting in it. There was no longer the incredibly
attractive Anne Hathaway that broke millions of men’s hearts when she got
married in 2012, we only saw a dying Fantine; whose death seemed to give a sort
of relieve in view of her limitless and immense suffering in this life.
A fate like Fantine’s is
repeated a million times in our country and a billion times more in our world.
The proper emotion to have in seeing Anne’s portrayal of Fantine is not to feel
entertained, but to be enraged on the disgusting nonsense that have made such
suffering as Fantine’s possible in this supposedly beautiful and glorious
world.
In playing Fantine to
perfection, Anne Hathaway has given nobility to the acting profession. An
actress like Anne is no longer a mere impersonator or puppet whose job is only
to get in and out of characters for tons of money. But she is genuinely an Artist,
with an important message to convey and emotions to infect.
***
In the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as told by St. Luke the physician, there is a story in which Christ
accepted a certain “woman in the city, which was a sinner”, by saying these eternal
words:
“Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.”
This passage is so
artistically true and the nature of justice that it introduces is so poetic
that even Oscar Wilde, the prophet of aestheticism, himself wrote that: “it
would have been worth while dying to have said it.”
If (it’s a very big if)
there is a unified global consensus to burn all printed Bible in the world
tomorrow, I will defend it with my life that that passage must be spared. Under
the vein of this passage, the sins (if any) of Fantine or any other woman in
real life that share the same fate as hers, must be forgiven, for she has loved
much.
On Kindness
The story of Fantine would be so
unbearable to behold if there was no savior that interceded. And there is where
Jean Valjean came into the scene, played honestly from the heart by Hugh
Jackman “The Magnificent”. His face was all the “V” shaped veins on his
forehead as he ripped the death-sentence yellow passport which alone utterly
earned him the imprimatur of an Oscar.
Hugh,
whom GQ Magazine described as “too good to be true, nicer than nice...ridiculously and sickeningly nice.”, played
Jean Valjean unpretentiously and naturally perhaps because he actually is a real-life Jean Valjean.
This extraordinarily
multi-talented man has been active in supporting charitable works all over the
globe. He took the Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus’ idea on micro-credit just
too seriously so that he is implementing it through his philanthropic Seeds of Hope project. ‘Wolverine’ is
also involved in the Global Poverty
Project, with “the ambition to see an end to global poverty in his life
time”, and also active in raising fund for Equity
Fights AIDS.
In
this huge orphanage called the world, a generous soul like Hugh is very hard to
come by. Someone who is not only willing, but sees it as a privilege to be a
guardian, protector, foster father to the underdogs of the society, the down
trodden.
Hugh
as Jean Valjean displayed that kindness can be a tyranny; only it is a tyranny
whose abuse we long for with all our hearts. Fantine’s utterly embittered soul,
whose heart has been frozen by suffering, finally can only be melted by the
warmth of Jean Valjean’s irrational love.
The tale of Jean Valjean and
Fantine, two souls bound together by suffering and love, illustrated that in
the end; only kindness, love, compassion that will make the whole human
experience worth living. Without them, we are indeed Les Miserables – The Miserable Ones, who are condemned to certain
death with no hope.
Most of us, me for sure,
live our playful urban existence without realizing and being aware that we
share the same sky as our roof protecting us from the vast, dark and dangerous
universe as those unfortunates living in the numerous slums of Jakarta.
In the preparation of this
essay, a good female friend of mine, who is now under a pact with me in a
“best-buddies project”, warned me of avoiding being patronizing.
Therefore,
with no intention to patronize or giving a lecture whatsoever, let me hereby
invite you dear readers who have patiently read this piece thus far to see the
truth that, as Jean Valjean has shown; there is actually something super cool
in being kind to other people. As cool as Hugh Jackman’s abs which is an object
of endless envy for a guy with monstrous fat belly like me.
As conclusion, perhaps, every morning the sun
light hits our faces, we should start to interpret it as the universe, or
something more transcendent or God if you may, giving us another chance to be a
Jean Valjean to the world’s Fantines. No matter how fall
short we may be. To once again, one day at a time, show the world that there is
such a thing as kindness in this brief life. That appeals to the only organ in
our body that makes us human: the heart.
“The quality of
mercy is not strain’d,-
It droppeth as
the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath:
It is twice
blest,- It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes:
‘Tis the
mightiest in the mightiest:
It becomes the
throned monarch better than his crown.”
-William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV.
Scene I
TO: MOTHER
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An excerpt of this article is published in the Jakarta Globe on February 15th, 2013 under the title "I Dreamed of Anne Hathaway Winning Two Oscars"
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