The River, 3rd Draft (send to Tom)

EXT., RIVER, DAY

DYLAN, a young man of bookish appearance, and JO, a young woman with a charming smile, are walking along by the edge of a river together.

DYLAN

Let's have a swim!

He takes off his top and jumps into the river.

JO

What, here? I'm not really -

DYLAN

It doesn't matter, the water's amazing ...

JO stands on the edge and looks at him. Then she loses her uncertainty and plunges in. We see them splash around for a while. DYLAN holds his breath and dives under the water. JO looks for him, and he appears further down the river. They improvise little games until they get bored and climb out again. They lie down in the bright sunlight to dry off.

JO

I can't wait for the start of the season to begin. Arsenal are going to peel off the frontrunners by boxing day, though, I reckon ...

As DYLAN looks at her, the sound of the river begins to drown out her voice and he is simply gazing at her body and face while we see her talking.

INT. COTTAGE, DAY

DYLAN is kneeling in front of a severe-looking icon.

DYLAN

Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven ...

We see flashes of JO, laughing in the sun.

DYLAN

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses ...

We see shots of DYLAN making notes beside a Bible, covering the edges of a sheet with "JO".

DYLAN

As we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation ...

We see a shot of JO's bare arms.

DYLAN

But deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.

He rises quickly and leaves the room. He begins throwing out all of the food in the little kitchen. He heaves a great mass of it outside and pours it into the compost bin, covering his mouth to protect it from flies. When he returns he finds a rabbit in the kitchen, eating pieces of strewn-about lettuce.

DYLAN

Neither of us are getting into heaven, my friend ...

INT., COTTAGE, NIGHT

We see shots of him in front of the icon, sweating and looking ill, occasionally holding his stomach.

INT., SHOP, DAY

DYLAN stands at the counter of a village shop, still looking pale. A set of Victorian scales lies behind him. A voice from the back of the shop calls him.

SHOP-KEEPER (O.S.)

Dylan, can you take a bag of potatoes over to the Three Lions this afternoon?

DYLAN looks apprehensive.

DYLAN

Sure.

INT., PUB, DAY

DYLAN enters an ancient-looking pub. JO is behind the bar.

JO

Hey Dylan, you can just leave those here, thanks.

DYLAN

Right.

JO

Something the matter?

DYLAN

I've just never been in here before.

JO

It's lovely, isn't it.

DYLAN

No, it's ... horrible. I don't know how as a Christian you can ...

JO

You work at the village shop, that sells alcohol to fifteen year olds. Get real, mate. You see what you want to see, that's all. What are you laughing for?

DYLAN

You called me "mate".

JO

We are mates, aren't we?

DYLAN's face clouds a little.

DYLAN

I thought we were more than that. But I guess you're right, I see what I want, don't I.

DYLAN walks off.

JO

Dylan ...

EXT., RIVER, DAY/ INT., SURGERY

DYLAN sits on the rapids in the river, his head and feet above water. He observes the dragon flies at play in the rapids.

DYLAN

My body is without sin!

He looks at his hands, filtering between the sunlight, then looks around in a white room. He is lying on a surgical bed in the centre.

A surgical knife cuts under his left pectoral, and water rushes out. We see his sleeping face. The flap of skin is lifted up, and a river of images flows beneath, of icons and JO and animals. We see his body change to a woman's one.

EXT., BEACH, DAY

A man is standing at a beach. His back is turned. A woman rushes towards him.

DYLAN

Joe! Joe!

The man looks behind him.

DYLAN

I did this for you, Joe ... so we could be together.

JOE holds her at arm's length and looks at her body up and down. Then he embraces her. We see the mouth of a river, running out into the sea.

FADE.

TREATMENTS

1: There is no continuity in the film. Clothing changes constantly, furniture changes from shot to shot, and in the pub scene clients disappear, and JO's arm against the bar in the foreground of a shot of the pub is a man's arm. During the scene where DYLAN runs towards JO(E) - who is clad in a man's version of the shirt he wore in the pub - objects change in the tracking shot itself, rather than between cuts, but when JOE turns around things achieve a perfect stillness.

2. The opening shot of the film is of a narrow river. This shot is in a ratio narrower than 4:3. By the end of the film, the shot of a river flowing into the sea, the ratio is panoramic. The ratio slowly expands throughout the film, although the film itself will be shot in panoramic.

3. For the shot during surgery where DYLAN is opened up, there is going to be an insert shot of a double exposure, that of flowing water and that of a body of images loosely associated with each other.

All 3 treatments will hope to show that not only is the body a river, but so is the film.

The forest was filled with dust. From the assorted animals there hung spider webs, and the colour of the sun was faded. The forest had been constructed for me to play in, and then it became a romantic place for me to take my sweethearts, before the grime became pervasive. It was night in the attic, and the two-dimensional trees cast broad shadows in the torch light. I set my lantern down by an eternally startled deer.

When I think of my wife, I think of lemons. Their brightness, and the images of the sun that collected around them. How they could sit on the shelf of a grocery and still bring a bit of the continent with them. Just like lemons, my wife went with a cocktail perfectly. Her dresses lit up parties, and her sharpness suited conversation well - in small amounts, of course. Her body had the small hardness of a lemon: but most of all what reminded me was how they tasted when sugared, and when bitter.

german count murders wife, hides her in the secret bits of the attic he played in as a child, then becomes obsessed with hiding the evidence that he didn't love her, which forces him deeper into his childish world, until in the highest part of the castle he finds a keep sake of hers he placed when they first met, and this convinces him to give himself up.

The Vegetable Girl (418)

It was one of those expensive places near Oxford Street that cater for a particular type of person: the sort of person who would pay large amounts of money to spend part of their day eating a salad, while spewing afternoon nothings from their mouths in carefully bred Islington lilts.

I reached the centre of the room without anyone really noticing me, and found myself alone with a great glass display case. Inside, tempting concoctions of rare fruits and vegetables lay on large white plates. Prising the glass open at the bottom, I slipped my hand in hungrily.

Someone grabbed my arm: I turned up my eyes to meet the glare of the girl behind the display. She pulled me around the counter. I wasn’t resisting, only trying to think of an excuse. Finally she guided me through a little curtain, and we were alone in the darkness of the kitchens behind the shop.

There we faced each other, and I looked her fully in the face for the first time. Her features were long and ethereal in the flat square of light we stood in. She whispered in my ear ‘let me show you something’. I saw that she was trembling slightly.

She walked past me and opened a small cabinet nailed against the wall. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to make out what it was that was moving around. In the box there writhed the head, arms and torso of a girl, who appeared to consist entirely of fruit and vegetables.

Her hair was made up of lettuce leaves, her fingers were flailing strips of cucumber and celery and other green vegetables, and her lips were formed by passion-fruit. The girl reached in to the box and cut a carrot areola from the dark skin, and the vegetable girl began to cry. But the tears blossomed as flowers from her red tomato eyes and we were captivated: the flowers of things that do not blossom are lovely as dreams in stone.

We stood there and watched while she twisted in silent anguish, because they had taken her tongue for a gherkin, and by the stump one could tell that it was just beginning to grow back. We stood there and watched: because even empathy can be overwhelmed by something when its suffering is beautiful.

The Human Abstract (340)

The prince's walls are near, and before the gates six thousand slaves revolve around millstones that may or may not move something in the nether depths: but as I watch them I would stake my life on those grinding wheels turning the slaves themselves, like puppets in chains.

Brightness hovers near me, and opening my mouth I let them count my teeth. My mind swims deliriously in the narrow path of the seeping light, the light that seems to flow through my being: that seems to have at its core the depth of my mouth, and the light gently brimming.

Then I am bereft, and the ochre colours rush like breath back into my body, encasing me. I take up the next piece of iron and pierce my thigh through with it. The pain is intense - the spear seems to nestle within the broken shards of iron welted into the rasping wounds, each sealed with the heat like rosebuds blooming inwards within me.

I look up to where Jesus sways on high Golgotha, directing thousands of us with the spear he has torn from his skeletal side. It is only my abject mind that fuses me to him and the fires that burn under his gaunt brow. Sometimes I think that he is weeping, and it is the lights they have shone upon him that make the tears dance like flame. Such is the narrow angle of my heart. I look up again and he is gone.

This is the human abstract: we below haunt ourselves to chase ghosts from the blesséd, and it is on us that they must test their weapons, so useless against unflawed skin. Within my roots, there is an ecstasy of weakness, and in that weakness there is the Word. My body bangs within its hollow trunk, for my thoughts are trapped beneath its shades. But oh, heed my fruits, fear my fruits. They are soft enough to break your mouth open and split your entire being down to its last unblemished sliver.

THE GREEK VASE (296)

A takeaway boy smokes a cigarette under the beating of the sun, beams filtering through his smoky breath. His motorbike: his glasses: his white trousers. The mountains in the distance flicker like flame beneath the shifting clouds. His eyes on the mountains, he looks unapproachable, a living portrait.

My bare legs: my towel: my wine-glass. I see an old woman with her hand against the window, looking down on us, flattened against the darkness of the room behind her. Fingers pressed against a window pane seem grotesque, more naked than mere surfaces. I let the towel slip from my body, and feel two pairs of eyes locked on me: suddenly I am the piece of art, with the artist trapped inside.

We look at each other from the back-stages of our lives, the stacked scenery hiding us from the spotlight. The old lady still stands at the window. I let him do the work. Suddenly a Greek vase - James' present for me - falls with a crash, but I don't want to clear it up: some things just happen, that's all. Afterwards, he walks away down the garden path. Slowly he becomes a silhouette, and his movements acquire a shadow's grace to them, stretching out in simple shapes against a backdrop of roses.

Ten minutes after he's gone, I get up with a strong feeling of loathing. Love-making seen backwards is disgusting. I kick the pieces of vase into the pool, returned to dirt once more. It had survived wars and plagues, James' little hint that personal history transcends conflict. His desk: his instruments: his frowns. Yet the two things he valued most were broken by a boy in badly-fitting shoes. I smile, and think to myself that all things should be destroyed this way.

PABLO AND OLGA (123)

Your face is lovely in the pouring rain, with its features made unreal by the faint lines of flowing water. On the canvas behind me, you look like what you were, a bored dancer in an artist's room. Out here you come alive, turning and laughing in front of the pink rhododendrons that seem to set your marble flesh alight.

I look at you one last time, before I must attend to the drying pastels. My love for you is so powerful that it cannot be fully conceived in my mind, but rather sipped at like a strong and endless liquor. Beautiful Olga, like a Russian river running darkly and soulfully beneath the ice. When I am with you, I am absolved.

DREAMS OF BLACK CARS (93)

Nathan first had the dreams when he was a boy. Classic cars, with wide chassis and bodies like ocean steamliners, careering down country lanes. Everything would be in slow motion, and he would be too far away to prevent what was going to happen. He would start running, and he would see the black cars breaking their bodies against a man, whose face was always blurred. Their bonnets would rupture, though no driver flew through the splintering glass: he assumed, with the logic of dreams, that each car reformed around its own spectre.

2nd hour

I'll be your writer for this evening.

You walk into the hotel, that shines drearily in the seaside fog. You reach into that purse you always seem to carry everywhere, the one that makes you look like a footballer's wife or worse. You don't have a husband, just some barely-there lover who sits at your side and if he snores after sex it doesn't matter, he is good to you.

You wear long gloves, like an actress in the thirties, but we both know what they hide. You once left notches on your arm - he loves me, he loves me not. You affect simplicity, but it just reveals the process beneath, like a child showing off a bad magic trick. You never left your village, really: you just brought it with you.

Where will we take you, then? Up to the third floor, a room that must be familiar to you. You put the room key on the bedside cabinet and wait. Then you get nervous, so you rise from the bed and go into the bathroom to prepare. At this point you're thinking, this is going to be some degraded story where he writes about me having sex, and you feel pity.

What if I did? The one part I have of you that you can never take back is the memory of your body. I couldn't photograph your mind, couldn't encase it in a moment, but I remember the curve of your neck when I stood behind you, the touch of your hand on my knee. I wouldn't debase such memories by writing about your body: it's your mind I'm after.

I wrote our relationship from the start, and I'm not going to stop just because you left me. I rehearsed scenes in flying train carriages, jotted witty comments on sick bags in aeroplanes, and scripted whole romances from my work desk on grey ugly mornings. If we eventually saw through each other, then all I can say is such things happen, and we may return to this story.

You turn on the light in the bathroom, but it's still too dark to really see yourself in the mirror. Your whole body is a battleground between youth and age, and the scars caused by one meet the scars caused by the other. Beauty is an impostor come to mock at you: yes, a forgery, the ultimate trompe d'oeil, inserted by nature to entrance us.

Yet as you struggle with your make-up bag, you are more convinced of your body's beauty than its reality. Even if beauty were a dream, it would still be worth dying for. You rotate your head in phases, trying to find your most pleasing aspect in the darkened glass, and yet you are worried that there is a twin vision that shows you in all your ugliness. Which angle would reveal more of your soul?

OK: so he knocks, and you go over to let him in. He isn't a lover, but a teacher come to guide you through the basics. This is what I know of you, and how I choose to show you the little truths you have been trying to hide for so many dinner parties: that you are ignorant, my dear, and desperate to conceal it. He starts you on the fucking alphabet. No, I exaggerate.

His manner is awkward, and he struggles to find the authority necessary in a tutor, because he is embarrassed by the situation. But Christ, look at you, and all the artists you dated, the writers like me, the references you laughed at and the books you said you enjoyed. If there's one thing I hate worse than anything else, it's a hypocrite, a liar, a dilettante, like you.

You worked in art-charities, for christ's sake, taking money away from other causes to give to all that is irrelevant, particularly to someone who barely looked at a painting. And of course it paid for expensive lunches, and the hotel room you sit in now. Your sin stinks, like a dog in a kennel that was never born but crept from its mother's rotting womb. This is a song of hatred, a song for you, my dear.

(30 minutes)

I've got no fucking talent. Rubbish bullshit non-story just like all the others. Well, carry on.

I think it's fabulous that you're a good man, in a place like this. Really, it's so ... authentic. There gathered in his mind a sense of oblivion. Moments later, birds covered almost every part of him. She wanted him to die in a gentle, beautiful way. Some sun had sprinkled into the sunken garden, and the red brick lit up in a glow so strong it made the wall and furniture seem as one.

Her fingers worked at the button until it had fallen off. He twisted the garment until it was thin and unrecognisable. He pressed his child's hand against the keyboard and it made this word: dfh

Someone has to come sooner or later. He rocked further and further until he fell out of the tree, still laughing. It's a dire mess of a party, and no-one's brought their own drink. What she really wanted was such stillness and closeness that she could be entirely enveloped in cloth without being smothered. The baron approaches.

Listen to us, now. You tried it your way and you failed. It's a different world.

The lightning-charred tree stands wonderfully erect, yet an ominous example set by the Gods.
Her beauty was ignited by the presence of her child, and made whole with its happy laughter.
Her gaze was like solidifying ice, her liquid eyes freezing over in anger.
Nothing for me, I'm sick with music and love.
I fragmented out as she embraced me, fracturing into still quiet pieces.
The soulfulness that stirs me was absent in him, almost to the point of blasphemy.
She came softly on the sultry breeze.
A corner of his mind was clouded with the obscure conviction that men hated him out of jealousy.
The occult was a map of the soul for him, a cornerstone of mental illnesses for her.
Well into his sixties he was still bothered by the phrase, "cut his teeth", to the point of nervous irritation.
Some mistakes, he made on his own, others with acquaintances, and still others were made before he was born: and it was these that dogged his life.
Nice of you to visit, she said, flicking a crumb absently along the expanse of settee between them.
He remained strong for the length of time he was sure others were watching, and then cried like a child for the remainder of the day.

1114 words.