My Husband Suspects

A short romantic comedy without much dialogue

A woman in love, frustrated by every circumstance, stops at nothing to achieve her desire. 

A restaurant.  The patrons are in evening clothes, the waiters formal.  There is no music, only the soft sound of voices in conversation.  Michaela, elegant in a black dress, participates in one such conversation.

We can't hear what's being said but the atmosphere is happy, polite.  Her husband presides with an easy charm.  Over her shoulder we see the couple they are dining with, Philip and his wife.  Philip's eyes are toward the other two, perhaps carefully so.  

Michaela is absorbed in the general conversation, self-forgetful, but she too is restraining her gaze.  When it does rest on him it is with a gaiety that seems a touch contrived.

She gets up and walks away, pausing to greet friends at another table.  As her husband and the younger woman continue chatting Philip permits himself a discreet but lingering glance at Michaela.  She is several yards away in profile, smiling, nodding.

Suddenly, absurdly, she is naked.  She stands there talking with someone, in heels and necklace, tiny purse in hand, oblivious to her nudity, as are those around her.  This is Philip's fantasy.  

But now, even more absurdly, she does notice!  She looks down at herself, shocked. The others don't see.

She does not convulse and cover herself but stands her ground, purse lifted in her hand, and glances at Philip—too briefly to be eloquent, but sharply: he looks away mortified.

Instantly she is dressed again and, taking leave of her friends, she proceeds to the bathroom....

Michaela has reached a certain age, and worries about her beauty—but Philip, her husband’s business associate, is mad about her. And she about him: lightening has struck. 

They do everything they can to meet but are constantly frustrated—each episode an assault on her dignity.

He's not a bad husband; she loves him. And his passion for her is keen, so keen that he can tell something, or someone, is on her mind, and watches even as the lovers try to elude his eye.

So does Philip's wife. He's starting to disappear at odd times. In fact she's sure there was a stranger in their bedroom while she was asleep. Did someone reach the balcony from the street outside and—?

As Michaela climbs a steep street past Philip's apartment, where the balconies hover near the steps, her friend hails her from up high—from where she spies down at the other couple. That night she steals down and steps over onto the balcony—

And the co-star is Athens, the only place this story could happen.

Every opportunity, every chance meeting, every frustration is a piece of Athenian realty.

Always elegant, always in a little black dress and heels, she hangs from balconies, climbs cliffs, crosses deserts, clings between moving taxis—but her dignity prevails, and the sound of her steps as she threads the Athens labyrinth is the music of the film.

Pretentious Pictures presents a short romantic comedy without much dialogue.

Gimps

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html.  A new one every so often.)

    A man is in love with a woman.
    She is beautiful beyond his reach and he doesn't tell her anything about it.
    Then he does.  He stutters, and when he stutters his dentures pop against his palate.  The more nervous he is the more laborious his stutter.  He is conscious of a strawberry mark that stains his face, and cannot meet her eyes.
    She listens, but she has been told the same thing many times--in many ways perhaps daily--and is not particularly moved.
    He nods understandingly and manages to convey that he won't give up.  He'll talk to her again.
    A doctor tells him his eye has to come out.  He doesn't know what that will do to his chances but there's nothing to be done.  He has the operation.  He wears a patch for a while and then acquires a glass eye which he studies in the mirror.  It glints artificially and he can't control its direction.  People look at him funny.  He improvises compensations, develops a squint, a leer, a way of looking at them with his head sideways like a pigeon.
    The woman, distant and in monocular vision, goes about her life of semiconscious grace.  He thinks of nothing but her.  It is not that he wants to achieve her, it is that he needs to give himself to his love for her.
    She notices nothing.  He does not present himself.
    There are complications in his condition and his leg is amputated.  He learns to walk on a sophisticated prosthesis until he hardly limps.  Chemotherapy makes his hair fall out and he has to wear a toupée but the treatment keeps him going.
    He stands naked before the mirror on the flesh-colored prosthesis, a long way from his dream.  He practices walking noiselessly.  He doesn't give up.
    She doesn't marry.  She hangs around with men who are bad for her and, by turn, loves them.  He knows her pain.  He sees it hiding.
    The doctor tells him his colon has to come out, but he will survive.  He can lick this but he has to have the operation.  There will be a colostomy bag for voiding mounted on his side, a considerable cramp to the style.
    He has the operation, and is some time getting his strength back.  His sense of possibility has been shattered.  He reassembles it.  Rebuilds himself.  Learns.
    She is on the beach playing three-to-a-side volleyball with the wrong men.  She is splendid, modest, deceived.  A little vulgar perhaps, but in the way suppressed nobility is vulgar.  Unthinking rather than insensitive.  Unambitious rather than complacent.  Horse-like.
    He walks toward her in a bathing suit, sand grinding in the joints of the false foot.  His skin is pale but red-splotched, his silhouette compromised by the undisguised bag and the leg strap.  He pats the toupée.
    The ball bounces past him--he cannot pivot to catch it, though he tries--and she gallops after it with unrestrained heaviness, almost passes him and then stops, recognizing him.
    He is still finding his balance from his attempt to catch the ball.  He smiles shyly, turns his head sideways, squints.  The more acute his urgency the more agonizing his stutter, so he says nothing.
    She passes from recognition through confusion--she looks around--to comprehension.  He has been striding toward no one but her.  There is an ecstatic certainty about him.  Can she see him as anything but a stripped-down and naked hero?

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, A Comedy with a Dark Center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre.  Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff.  He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.


Proposed cast: Jacqueline Bisset (Diana)

DIANA, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.


Proposed cast: Joel Edgerton (Jim)

JIM is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes.  Together they’re fast company.  They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked.  She tells him he has to go.  She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him.  He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.


Proposed cast: Kathy Bates (Betsy) 

BETSY, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her.


Proposed cast: John Goodman (Griff) 

Diana's lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in love with her for years.  Now’s his chance.  When Jackie tells Diana the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries to make a go of it with Griff.


Proposed cast: Francis Albery (Jackie) 

JACKIE, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her.  Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy.  She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.


Proposed cast: Jack Roth (Dylan) 

Betsy's son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably.  He disgusts her.


Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria) 

MARIA, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego.  She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him!  Just kidding.  In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills— 

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide. 

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek  at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Pretentious Pictures presents a comedy with a dark center.