About love

Sally Rooney and Chantal Akerman

Toute une nuit (1982)

“I have loved in her the image of the beauty of the world,” wrote James Joyce of his beloved Nora, “the mystery and beauty of life itself.” Joyce was a fierce advocate of desire. There have been few in the literary canon of the English language as genuinely enthusiastic about sex, or even about love. Ulysses famously ends with a graphic and unpunctuated soliloquy by Molly Bloom, where she details first meeting her husband, whom she has since cheated on, and teasing him until he asked her to marry him:

“the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath [.]”

Much earlier on in the book, her husband also remembers this day and this intimate exchange of chewed up food in rapturous and explicit terms:

“Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle.”

“Love, soppy as it may seem, is the novel’s great subject,” wrote Merve Emre in The New Yorker. Everything is bound up in love, God, history, disillusionment, the foundational wandering myth from which the novel derives its name and basic structure. Love grounds you, connects you to the world. It is the first and most fundamental kind of bond, that between parent and child. Its harnessing into the pious structural stability of the family does not really occlude its messiness or fluidity. It continues to morph, feverish and monstrous, suffused with desire, a sticky, unquenchable thing that could make the world’s greatest modernist write breathless and formally inventive odes to kissing.

There’s a part in the Chantal Akerman film Toute une nuit (1982) where a woman dancing with one man muses aloud about the other one she really loves. The man dancing with her is totally focused on her. He holds her tightly, he does not react to anything she is saying. Why does she love this other man, the woman wonders. Is it his mouth? No, it’s not his mouth. Maybe its the way he looks at her. At the end of the film, she answers the phone and sits rapt and still listening, answering “yes” over and over again. She is dressed in a fawny pink, suffused in light in the foreground, framed against the drawn white curtains. Behind her, the man slumps on the bed. His shirt matches the bedspread. He almost blends in with it, an accessory to this more remarkable love story.

Toute une nuit is a series of tableaux about love, set over the course of a single hot and stormy night in Belgium. The lovers are nondescript and anonymous. They act out familiar and relatable scenes of passion and jealousy and abandonment and heartbreak. They spend a lot of time waiting, pacing back and forth, sitting by the phone, lying sleepless listening to the sounds from the street below. Akerman had a consummate eye for interiors. The film is full of dreamy blue light and deep shadows like a Vermeer painting. Streetlights reflect off of beautifully framed glass doors and windows. Crumpled white sheets suggest sensuality or the torment of insomnia. One couple runs around very early in the morning closing the windows as a thunderstorm starts. Their curtains billow in the wind, reflecting the sudden melodrama of their fraught interactions. We don’t love each other anymore, the woman tells him earlier on in the night. Later, he sits almost washed out by darkness near the window, while she pretends to sleep, the light angled across her thick teased hair. In the morning, she collapses on top of him in a wordless embrace.

Writing for e-flux, Dominiek Hoens describes how the personal and impersonal are constantly staged against each other in Toute une nuit. Each intimate sequence is recognizable above all as a cliché, a scene with its own referential lexicon in romantic media. Thus the private is subsumed to “generic repetition, with something that always threatens to disappear in a love story but thanks to Akerman’s genius can appear as an encounter in its almost speechless, incomprehensible ‘stupidity.’” Hoens turns to the Lacanian axiom that to love is to give what we do not have, that desire is based on irreparable, structural lack. Everyone is groping in the dark, to put it crudely, trying to be desired and thus to be made static, a moving thing in the world, freed from the staid tableau of the love story.

Lacan reappears in a later film of Akerman’s, Un divan à New York (1996), which is something like an arthouse version of The Holiday. William Hurt is a hotshot but depressed analyst living in a toney apartment off Central Park, trying to dodge his demanding patients, who never seem to get better, and his overbearing ex-fiancée. He puts an ad in a Paris newspaper to do an apartment swap and ends up trading places with Juliette Binoche. She is apparently a dancer in the film, but she never dances. Instead, she schemes and lies around making messes and unwittingly seduces everyone around her with her natural charm and emotional intelligence. She starts seeing Hurt’s clients and cures them all, along with his depressive dog. A friend explains to her what transference is over breakfast. In Paris, Hurt has to toil up the stairs, clean up after her, and fend off her jilted lovers. After a plumbing incident, he gives up on Paris and goes back to his creature comforts. But when he realizes that Binoche is posing as an analyst, he decides to pose as a patient and she heals him too. Of course. He chases her to the airport, they miss each other in a comedy of errors, and finally find each other in Paris, where they kiss among her untended plants. I have a lot of issues, Binoche tells Hurt (I’m paraphrasing) — Do you think you could fix me?

Transference comes full circle in Un divan à New York. Hurt falls in love with Binoche as his analyst and then as a woman before stepping back into his own role of analyst. Both characters narcissistically pursue their own personal growth more than anything else. Lacan gives an example he lifted from a linguist in his seminar on love of an arranged tryst between two lovers which is signified by a drawn curtain at five o’clock — indicating that the girl is alone. The linguist fixates on the curtain and how it acquires new heavy significance from this new meaning assigned to it, but Lacan is more interested in the idea of being alone. The girl is alone here as a pretext to be with her lover, in other words, not alone. She imagines herself as the object of his desire and a person who desires and is therefore subject to someone else’s tyranny. She is not alone in the subject sense because is not autonomous. Her aloneness simply exists to be filled up by her lover.

All the brooding, waiting lovers in Toute une nuit seem to exist in this kind of contingent solitude. They are never really alone. They are acting out a script that is shaped by desire and that holds them captive to it. It’s like the whole movie was Akerman working towards a theory of love, my boyfriend said as we left the theater.

Un divan à New York (1996)

I wondered, watching Toute une nuit, if I had gotten soppy. There is no shame in that. To some extent, the whole point of art is to be received sentimentally. It speaks to our emotions and our memories, deep, primal feelings. If sentimentality, to be moved by something, feels like a banal interpretation of creative work, it is also an incredibly powerful one. I wondered the same thing though while I was reading Intermezzo, the new Sally Rooney novel. Although I have admired Sally Rooney and liked Sally Rooney at times, I have never really been deeply moved by her books until this point. Normal People, which had so much success, mostly inspired polite enjoyment for me.

But I was moved by Intermezzo. Rapturously moved. I was not the only one. Andrea Long Chu wrote a gorgeous review of it for New York Magazine, which ends by mentioning on an offhand note that she is engaged and therefore has also become soppy. Jo Hamya called the novel “sublime” in The Independent. “On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had.” Rooney is also working towards a theory of love. The prickly, emotionally stunted brothers of the novel are brought closer to the world by love. They learn how to care about something. Their love is all mixed up with grief. Their father has just died. They loved him in the same kind of conflicted, impersonal masculine way in which they love each other, mainly demonstrated through actions. They are softer with the women. They can assert dominance over their bodies and so surrender to them psychologically. Through this surrender, they lay themselves bare.

If this all sounds kind of archetypical, the basic shape of a love story, that is also Intermezzo’s argument. The characters act out their plots and in doing so, reveal themselves. Their specificity, their individualism, their walled off interiors, become accessible through the very genericness of the love plot. Both brothers constantly worry they are participating in the worst kind of clichés. Peter, older and more successful, is dating Naomi, a 22 year old squatter whose beauty and lack of inhibition hypnotizes him. He is also entangled with Sylvia, his most serious ex-girlfriend, a brilliant academic, who has been left disabled as the result of an unspecified accident. He feels ashamed, in front of the older woman, of his affair with the younger one, who he partially supports and babies and dominates in bed. He knows it looks like an early onset midlife crisis.

Ivan, the younger brother, is a competitive chess player who is barely staying afloat. He might be neurodivergent and has grown up on a toxic mixture of anime porn and antisocial tendencies. But at 22, he meets Margaret, a 36 year old woman, who is separated from her alcoholic and controlling husband, and whose life, for all intents and purposes, is over. She is surveilled by her small town, who side with her husband, and criticized by her friends and relatives. She keeps her relationship with Ivan secret at first, deeply ashamed of herself for sleeping with a younger and inappropriate man. In one passage from the novel, she starts to see how easily your life can spin out of control.

“You are lying to almost everyone you know. You have come to care too passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person. You can no longer visualise your own future: not only five years from now, but five months, even five weeks. Everything is in disarray. All this for one person, for the relation that exists between you. Your fidelity to the idea of that relation. In the light of that, you have come to hold too loosely many other important things: the respect of your family, the admiration of your colleagues and acquaintances, even the understanding of your closest friends. Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting.”

Peter also fantasizes about dissolving all of his attachments, about being able to effortlessly disappear from someone’s life so seamlessly that it would be as if he had never been there in the first place. This idea of a clean break serves, among other things, to absolve his guilt about his indecisiveness, his sense that he has led Naomi on although she is unsuitable for him. That he is still clinging to Sylvia although they broke up years ago. His Oedipal feelings resurge with the death of his father. He vies with his brother, puts him down. He feels simultaneously responsible for and put upon by the needs and desires of everyone around him. He feels hurt and humiliated and small. He drinks to the point of blacking out and wakes up contrite.

Some critics have been put off by the earnestness of the book and by how its characters always seem to be striving for grace. Love is effortless in its mechanics in Intermezzo. Sex is transcendent, desire warm and redemptive. The staged out dramas are mainly a result of fear and hurt and defensive reflexes, a blind groping for the correct path. Ann Manov called it sneeringly a “young adult” novel in her TLS review and criticized Rooney for the moral purity of her supposedly “problematic” men. James Marriott echoed this idea in The Times, remarking that Rooney’s characters (and especially her men) would be more interesting altogether if they were worse people. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page.”

What is this preoccupation with unlikable men? It is a strange refrain, one that seems blissfully unaware of the whole ponderous history of the novel and its parade of grotesque protagonists. Naomi Kanakia devoted a whole substack essay to it, arguing that men in literature can be acceptably nice and wholesome or exceptionally aberrant and evil, but nowhere in between. She asserts that any realistic portrayal of masculinity would generally fall in the middle, in the space of a kind of pathetic, low level aberrance. The desire to use and exploit women for sexual gratification, narcissism, stupidity, dominance, the thin veneer of socialization that prevents men from raping and pillaging and murdering and convinces them to instead wistfully fantasize about it.

But this is such a bleak view of masculinity and ultimately such a dehumanizing one. Do men not have principles and ideals and romantic fantasies? Do they not unexpectedly fall in love and devote themselves to that love? If they are taught to be cruel and domineering and careless of the humanity of others, is that really the deep psychological state of half the world’s population? I am puzzled by this thirst for nihilism, which feels like perverse wish fulfillment. It is a cynical view of literature, one where sophistication is constituted of misery, of bad behavior, of joyless sex and debased lives, of narcissistic men masturbating furiously and hatefully to women they despise. A sad vision of our humanity.

Does being a romantic therefore make Rooney less of a literary writer? Intermezzo is one of the more serious and formally innovative novels to have come out in the English language in recent years. And yet, even its defenders have compared it to a “Harlequin romance,” as if writing about tenderness and idealism and ending on a note of hope should doom you to the mass market aisle.

Intermezzo is perhaps more reminiscent in its theory of love of Akerman’s 1991 Nuit et Jour. In this film, rich with color and set against the backdrop of a dreamy nocturnal Paris, a couple attempts to hermetically seal themselves off from the world. They have no friends, they won’t get a phone, they try to avoid their neighbors, they barely eat or sleep. At night, he drives a cab and she wanders around the city, reading and enjoying her solitude. During the day, they stay in bed and have endless sex. Eventually, she meets another cab driver, physically similar to her boyfriend, who works during the day instead, so she strikes up an affair with him at night. In the end, she leaves both of them, electing to be alone rather than getting in any deeper.

“Nuit et Jour,” writes Marion Schmid in her study of Akerman, “is, arguably, Akerman’s most poetic film, a painterly homage to youth, the innocence of a love uncorrupted by jealousy and possessiveness, and the pleasures of a Parisian summer that, like in a modern-day fairy tale, will never end.”

Intermezzo is also a sealed-off world in some ways. The realities of life intrude harshly upon it. Naomi is evicted from her squat, Ivan gets behind on rent, Margaret’s mother ostracizes her for daring to be happy. But it is still a world suffused by warmth and by grace. It asks sincerely, and with deep spiritual conviction, how we are meant to love each other and to live well. The questions a novel should ask, really.

Nuit et Jour (1991)

1  Chantal Akerman, Schmid, M., 2010, Manchester University Press