The Last Film
By Wong May
The last film I saw with my mother-in-law
Was 8 Women by François Ozon.
7 women in a remote manor house
Waiting for the arrival of the eighth.
Each to the others is suspected of killing a man,
The mâitre des lieux, who was by term the brother,
The husband, the lover, brother-in-law, patron.
The cast of actresses
(3 very famous faces)
Each gets to do a sketch at her bespoke window.
A café-theatre of sorts. It was pleasant enough,
Elegiac, not méchant;
A box of sugar almonds
Done up with black ribbon.
We were late for the film.
Our family always is
As late as possible.
We sat right under the screen,
My husband, the 2 sons, my mother-in-law, myself
All in a row.
My neck ached. The head locked in place.
The whole time in the dark I was thinking
Thinking & praying
Up-close, perpendicular
Please François Ozon
Let me not be right.
But of course
The mâitre des lieux
Has had all 8 women
One after another
Buried in the potager garden.
What we are shown being a collective dream
Of the dead
8 victims (of
The said head of the family)
Now playing a ghost story of their reunion;
Reminiscing good old times
After the pot-au-feu
A little armagnac.
Some family occasion.
Xmas, as it happened.
All I remember of the rest of the evening
Was our dinner in a restaurant
Called Mona Lisa
Right next to the cinema.
It was “Mona Lisa” in Dublin
Because some say they couldn’t decide whether it was
Italian or French.
We were served pasta
Fried courgettes flowers
& a salad niçoise
Not bad I guess for Mona Lisa.
Now why
Should I have remembered any
Of this? But my mother-in-law
Got quite upset that evening after Mona Lisa.
She started giving out, with some vehemence
On the pavement, Yeh
She’s fed up, fed up with you lot,
Her lot, can’t you see—
& just as soon, apropos of all
Or nothing
Got hold of herself,
Mittens in the pocket,
Following us to the car.
A peekaboo of the famous eight earlier,
A woman “having a turn.”
Was all.
No one reacted.
Not the sons
Nor the father
No one remarked
Neither on the car journey home
Nor the morning after.
Not a word
Thereof—
If anything at all
Was something one forgets
Like the film has refused to quit; a glitch.
It can happen.
She was 8 women in one on the pavement
In 8 stages
Emmanuelle Béart
Catherine Deneuve
Isabelle Huppert
Fanny Ardant (of the postbox red, postbox mouth)
I couldn’t put a name on all eight here.
The credits rolling over a natural life-span
Haloed with winter misting.
Spoken or
Unspoken the dubbed words
Bounced off the “original version”
Text-to-speech,
Crystalline by the streetlight
White noise
Rather than silence,
Liminal—on a certain spectrum
None of us could quite catch.
Or retract.
Did she say what she said?
O my drling Clementine
Lady Captain,
It feels late—
Your herringbone golf-cap
Where is it hiding?
My broken dandelion, in tears you were
Beside yourself, surely
Out of breath,
Not yet out of steam
You were making a scene,
My Irish Protestant mother-in-law.
She was 83.
She would have a sip of brandy
From a vial in her handbag.
We got going.
It was Xmas 2002; for all of one
Dismal moment
Woefully alive—like
A struck match,
She flared
Spluttering.
The little match-girl.
Anything could change her mind.
In another year she’d be dead.
What did she see that night?
