With such a face (sometimes) it is also ours

There is this photograph, which, however, is not a real photograph in the sense that it was not born as a photograph; this is actually a frame taken from broken flowersa 2005 film by Jim Jarmusch. To complete the picture, let’s add that the director of photography is Fred Elmes, who has worked with, among others, John Cassavetes, Ang Lee and David Lynch (so to name a couple), so it is at least an obligation to give him half paternity frame.

Let’s watch in bed together, Sharon Stone and Bill Murray. She sleeps with a satisfied smile on her lips and her left hand is pressed against the face of Murray, whose right hand is pressed to his head and the other (which we cannot see) is buried under it. The closed eyes of one act as a boundary for the closed eyes of the other.

Now: those who love Bill Murray know that one of his characteristics is precisely the wide eye on the edge of the boiled fish and the impenetrable face. He is an actor with minimal facial expressions, and it is this characteristic that allows him to avoid the slight cliché of a man forced to act as a pillow for his sleeping partner, while the hand that surrounds her loses sensitivity, turning into a lifeless appendage. .

Not that cliché, when done right, isn’t funny.

there is an episode from Friends (the third of the third season), for example, in which Chandler asks Ross how to get out of the nightly embrace of Janice, his girlfriend. Ross then teaches him a trick, which Chandler pulls so clumsily that Janice rolls off the bed and breaks her arm (not to mention Rachel later discovers Ross is using the same trick on her, which infuriates her as hyena).

Well, it’s already like that, it’s fun: you take a common place, cleanse it of all misogynistic malice and mount a funny parody on it; so even malice, as long as it is functional for the story, is allowed. Eduardo does it in These ghostswhen he inserts the porter (the great Hugo D’Alessio) into Raffaele’s mouth with a chauvinistic tirade to condemn her: in a moment of heat.”

In short, some raids should be able to afford them, with all due respect to sensitive readerswhich in this case would be sensitive observers, always with the little finger up, looking for the politically incorrect. ‘Cause here it’s like a cliché we’d have a woman on the spot, kitten and needs protection on the one hand; and on the other, the male who should never beg and suffers when his living space is invaded, unable to move and therefore unable to perform the classic nocturnal masculine activities such as shooting at Comanches, building bridges, fighting bears with bare hands. brunettes and seduce lingerie models.

Now all this is not on the face of Bill Murray. But the beauty is that there is not even the opposite. It would be easy for him to turn everyday life upside down and assume a blissful expression on his face; but nothing, not even that. We are dealing with an actor who is very little inferior to acting. Look at him: when he stands, he often keeps his hands at his sides and moves like a sloth. Confront ghosts and zombiesGhostbusters

AND The dead don’t die) with a composure reminiscent of the stillness of Buster Keaton. When he acts like a real zombie (in Zombieland), here the zombie Murray becomes more expressive than the human Murray.

That’s why this photograph, which is not a real photograph, is so strange, so destabilizing, making you laugh without knowing what exactly you are laughing at: because both the cliché and its reverse are missing. There is no intent or intention to convey a message. He doesn’t like Stone clinging to him? We don’t know, he doesn’t let it seep through (although we know perfectly well what facial expression we’d have if Sharon Stone also hugged us via Zoom). We don’t know if he’s happy, if his left arm is tingling, or if he’s thinking about the World Series (he’s crazy about baseball and is a Chicago Cubs fan).

We might erroneously say that this is a face obtained by subtraction: but to subtract is to remove perhaps everything and reach zero, and there is no zero here. Instead, there is something else, an actor’s evasion, which serves to take us, starting from the situation that we have come to know by experiencing it several times, to another place. His face is like Picasso’s, it moves while remaining motionless: it is a face that displaces us, which we do not understand at the moment, but which contains all the expressions of the world, at least all those that we can imagine. If a cliche seems to us, we can easily add it ourselves, based on our memories, which are more like memories. Friends than Murray. Because then it is not necessary to study Picasso in order to love him. That untranslatable look remains, without a wink (and this is not easy: even the Mona Lisa winks), which, however, offers us a number of interpretations.

“It seems that there is everything, but instead there is nothing,” said Tognazzi in My friendstalking about the basement where he brought his wife and daughter to live.

“It seems that there is nothing, but instead there is everything,” one could say about the face of Bill Murray. And we, mere mortals, suffering from prolonged hugs, whether from heat or from respectable personalities, are left with Nora Ephron’s method, which puts Harry and Sally to bed to complain to each other, watching and commenting Casablancabut each to his own house; because perhaps, as the French cartoonist Jules Feiffer said: “The secret of true love: no direct contact.”