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swirls the ordinary traffic and weary populace of
the city of now, each of them unfolding or jigsawing the private narratives
with which this ancient history has only apparently very little to do. Thus
Marco, thus the private invisible stream making its pressure felt to the
viewer, indirectly, in the length of the shot, the minutes uncut. So Lamb,
weaving and waving his way down the high street, halting occasionally to tug
his bag’s wheels loose from some snag in the paving stones or a curb’s edge,
edging, it’s clear, with steady trepidation toward his ultimate goal.
    What
he, Lamb, has to go on. Very little. A client’s
scantly documented claim. The folded letters. M.
    He turns his gaze from his
reflection or the array of watches or the policeman’s reflection (blue back to
him now, putting the ticket book away in his hip pocket and looking at the sky
reflected in his sunglasses), tips his roller bag from a vertical to a diagonal
position and begins once again to move. We follow him into more crowded
streets, now thronged with traffic, stoplights and gridded lines mazing the
intersections and crowds of shoppers and tourists and idlers, men and women,
really more people than you’d expect in what had seemed such a small and sleepy
town (is it the same town or is it a geographical atrocity committed by the
filmmakers, splicing together two or more places with superficially similar
architecture and light, a sign of their commitment to a global audience
implicitly ignorant of the difference, a rejection of local knowledge in favor
of the spectacle intrinsic to film and film editing’s capacity to get along
without visible parentheses), and there’s no mistaking now the sticky overlay
of modernity coinciding uneasily with that stone miscellany, the flagstones and
paving-stones, because there are people with cellphones pressed to their ears
in the crowd, and a line of Japanese motorbikes the color of hard candies in
front of a café, at which a young woman is briefly visible at an outside table
tapping on the keyboard of her laptop—flash of her eyes as she looks at the man
and his hat passing over the tops of her designer shades, but he takes no
notice and walks on bent and leaning as though into a wind, free hand loose at
his side like some sort of slow sea creature eddying past a slower one,
whistling in the dark, prey and predator. She slides off the edge of the
visible world as the camera tracks the man in the hat in profile, riding on
parallel rails, the man’s face shadowed in the hat’s brim and his monochrome
clothing and most of all the hat itself sustains a sense of his sliding somehow
on the edge of time, outside our era, so that he belongs to the early Sixties
at the very latest or the early Thirties at the very earliest, though his
suitcase is the very mark of the modern cosmopolitan, dense and compact and
massy, allocated to the last centimeter for an airliner’s overhead bins. Then
he passes in front of another shop window, sheer reflection this time, just a
glint of red—velvet? meat?—and again the whole street beheld behind his mirror
image and no camera or tracks or crew in sight, miraculous perspective, that
puts us into the scene and removes every trace of spectatorship. Just looking, not seeing. Just telling, never showing.
    We
accept trompe l’oeil as the truth of looking: we accept the deceit of
appearances in the name of a higher truth. If the camera follows a man we discover
what he discovers a beat after he sees it, registering how to see it in the
assumption of his stance: dully ambling, ambitiously striding, cautiously
skulking, or bridled to a short, shocked stop in the face of what must remain
literally obscene, the world of the off-screen. If the camera precedes him we
never see what he sees except what’s reflected in his face: Lamb reacts to a
reality we infer, the necessary fiction that when he looks at us, into the
camera, he sees something that is precisely not us, and yet we