25 January 2004

Woman in a Fur Coat

My friend was interesting in seeing the re-release of a classic film. Washington has been bereft of a legitimate Art House for cinema since the Biograph in Georgetown went out of business a few years ago. The Biograph had been a little one-screen neighborhood theater that couldn't make it in the multiplex world of mega-thearters that were as big as Home Depots and felt like Target stores. There were plenty of places to see the first-run films of the moment, Cold Harbor and Lord of the Rings. But there had been no place to see films like The Battle of Algiers.

In the search to find a place it was playing, we discovered that there was a stunning development in Washington. There was a new art theater mega-complex downtown, at the corner of E Street and 11th. It was near the Orange Line stop at Metro Center. No muss, no fuss, no parking problems. We decided to go and recall the travail of another empire attempting to impose its will on a nation with a rising Muslim sentiment. It was just eight metro stops from the office garage, and we left the car there and rolled downtown underground, Virginia Square, Clarendon, Courthouse, Rossylyn, Foggy Bottom, Farragutt West, MacPherson Square and Metro Center. We got off there and walked the last couple blocks.

It was an amazing complex. The lobby was up and the theaters were down, accessed via escalator into a cavernous basement that could have been configured as a garage. There were ads for the films you read about in the New York Times. Quirky stuff, very foreign. Different context and cultural sensitivities. Movies you should go see because they are good for you.

I don't known if the Battle of Algiers is good for you or not, or if the message of a dying empire that wanted desperately to hold onto a colony is the same message that is relevant to a virtual empire seeking desperately to get out of a place it does not want as a colony. The film was scratchy and black and white with blotchy subtitles.

We settled into the stadium seats in the darkness. It was good to hear French spoken again, fast and fluid. The message was stark and powerful. The French paratroops were by turns brutal and compassionate, and Front Liberation National was by turns brutal and admirable. We left a little sobered. Five more Americans had died in Iraq that day. Was the message in this old film relevant? What had the Pentagon leadership thought of the tough and tres lucide Colonel Mathieu and his vicious campaign of retribution against the rebel leadership.

I watched in amazement. I had forgotten how the French went after the leadership of the FLN. They diagrammed the cell structure of the revolution on a blackboard, all the little triangles, and then the methodical operations to capture and torture the cell members until they filled all the blanks in and rounded them up. They crushed the rebels, and they crushed them so effectively that they made every Algerian a rebel. The methodology was exactly like the computerized software called Analyst Notebook that is credited with making the associations that enable the capture of Saddam in his little hole.

The Algerian were hiding in just such a place of concealment when Colonel Mathieu had them blown up. He asked first, quite politely

It was a sobering film. A little long, but powerful. We decided to stop at a posh nite-spot across from the Metro station and look at the people. I like to show my friend some of the quirky places in town, and this was one of them. The Oceanaire Grill specializes in upscale seafood and visibility. It has valet parking and dark wood and ice-heaped display tables with seafood and chilled wine. The martinis are somewhere around fifteen bucks. It is not a place I would hangout normally, but it is a marvelous place to watch the lobbyists and lawyers knock them back on their way to the deeper part of a Friday night. The crowd was thinning at the back end of happy hour. We found a place on the far wall and settled in to sip Gray Goose vodka and eat the three jumbo olives.

While we were there, we saw a woman come it. She was wearing sling-back CFM pumps and a long mink coat . She was dressed to die for. Around five hundred little mink already had to make the coat. He wrap had a full collar with scallops. It was down at the moment, but the damage to her carefully-coifed helmet of hair suggested it might recently have been rolled up against the frigid breeze. Her face was carefully made up, doll like, and the incongruous state of her hair strongly argued for a trip to the lady's room to repair the damage.

But she didn't, and her coat stayed on. She stood at the bar and a glass of red wine was delivered to her. Soon the cell phone came out and she began an animated discussion with someone who had let her down. I always wondered how women did it, a coat good to fifty below zero and legs clad only in micron-thick hose, traveling the streets perched on preposterous spiked heels. As practical as the European quarter of a colonial city. Undoubtedly she was wearing something slinky underneath, though she did not display it to us. She was probably still chilled. I didn't want go any further with the metaphors for Algiers and we did not.

But I was a little disappointed that we did not get to see the Washington power-frock. I glanced at my companion's shoes. She was wearing boots with sensible heels, fit to navigate the Metro or an Algerian revolution, whatever the contingency. I thought about sensible choices. We didn't stay for another $15 dollar martini. Before we found out who let her down, or stood her up, we left for Metro Center and the train back to Arlington.

The bed remained exactly where we had piled it. Eight hundred and sixty-five pounds and three hundred pieces of sensible industrial-age technology. For the price of another few Oceanaire martinis, we could have had a work party of Algerians from the Casbah come in and put it together.