Bite me, but not too gently

[sovay]

Armed with a carton of goat's milk, some discs of Taza chocolate left over from the Halloween party, and the fact that Dave's Fresh Pasta sells Fat Toad Farm goat's milk caramel, I have made myself goat's milk salt caramel hot chocolate.

Dinner was an experiment from Amsterdam Falafelshop on Elm Street. I'd bought salad items from them, but never actually their falafel. It's delicious. Crunchy on the outside without being tooth-breaking, fragrant chickpea goodness inside. I got three in a bowl (I wasn't sure how a pita pocket would travel) and piled baba ghanoush, hummus, pickled turnips, and garlic-fried eggplant around them; the cost came to less than most sandwiches and it was an entire dinner as far as I'm concerned. Their garlic cream sauce is indispensable. I forgot to try the tahini. Next time. There'll be a next time. Possibly very soon.

I am going to drink my hot chocolate and rewatch Stephen Frears' The Hit (1984), which has John Hurt being morally ambiguous. Of such things are evenings made.

Comments

[sovay]

I love The Hit.

I recommended it the other night as one of my favorite films with John Hurt, so I thought tonight was a good time to dig it out of its box. (My DVDs are not yet on shelves. We don't have enough shelves. We're still working on furniture here.) I remember being struck by the chemistry between Hurt and Laura del Sol the first time I watched the movie, but it really leaped out at me this time. In a conventional noir, Braddock would find himself reluctant to kill Maggie because she's an innocent; she would represent something cleaner than his professional killer's life, a moment of grace. He could find redemption in her. Or she could be his mysterious signifier, like the pianist for Jef in Le Samouraï (1967), making her that strange little gift of being his death—gentle, graceful, cool. Maggie interests Braddock because she's duplicitous (concealing her English), ferocious (she doesn't miss a chance to attack him and she fights dirty), and as successfully guarded as a hit man with four different names that we know about ("You're no fifteen-year-old. What are you?"). The most apparently powerless of the characters, without Myron's jacketful of bicycle chains or Willie's needling philosophy, she's the one who fights the hardest. Braddock bloodies her mouth and blackens her eye, twice stands over her with his gun leveled execution-style; she claws his face, twist his balls, bites his hand so hard there's pieces of him in her snarl. She hates him. It's as intense a charge as a sexual attraction, which it may be on his part—I maintain that the biting scene, which goes on for much longer than the viewer thinks it should, is extraordinarily hot. But it doesn't draw the expected tenderness out of the antihero, either. His way of not killing her is to stagger away from their final no-holds-barred, two-body melée with Maggie only unconscious, not shot. She doesn't repay the favor. It isn't her doing that the police open fire instead of arresting him, but she pointed him out in the first place; she gives him no mercy—she never did—and he winks at her as he dies. And it is never explained, because Braddock explains nothing about himself or anyone else; he's a man so laconic, he's nearly a silent role, a studied blank, capable of dispatching former associates and strangers at gas stations without breaking sweat or stride. (Maggie can get him to lose his cool. Crotch-punches do that. With her teeth set in his hand, though, he's silent, only breathing hard, wide-eyed for the first time we've seen him.) I don't think it has anything to do with redemption; it's not as simplistic as a hard man going soft or a bad one doing good. I don't think she would have survived if she'd been the crying, pliant girl Myron liked to feel sorry for (and wouldn't have saved—he's just squeamish enough to be glad he's not the one supposed to do her). But something opens up in him because of her, because of the things Willie says about death that Braddock might have believed all along, and of all the characters in the film who talk about dying without fear, he's the only one who can practice it in the end. It might make him the protagonist. But she's the survivor. We never do learn her age.

[gwynnega]

I've seen it a couple of times, but it's been several years. I do remember that biting scene very well, and the look of amazement on Hurt's face.