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be a great general to be a film director, as well as a great visionary. Today, Napoleon would be a film director, and Custer, and Robert E. Lee. And yet all this effort, all this cajoling, caterwauling, casting, and casting about for completion bonds and last-minute infusions of cash can easily come to naught if the essential theme is too paltry, too unworthy of all this effort. Great films need great subjects and there are few enough minds that can conceive of great subjects in these small times. Björn is one. And Björn always goes back to the classics. Mozart and Shakespeare—these are his muses. He knows that in a spiritually bankrupt time, an artist should at least know enough to go back to the classics.
    Another day’s screenings over, the jury yawns, stretches, thinks of food. We trudge back to our rooms at the Excelsior, dodging photographers, trying to remember what we have seen. Dozens of phone messages are jammed under our doors, along with schedules of the next day’s cocktail receptions for directors. Björn Persson and Lilli have still not appeared. The international press speculates on the meaning of this. One of Björn’s films is due to be screened the next day and the director’s whereabouts are unknown.
    This is pretty much how the beginning of the festival felt. The badness of the films, combined with my nine-hour jet lag, created in me the sensation of being trapped in a nightmare—and not even an exciting nightmare, but an extremely boring and repetitious one. We got up at eight-thirty, attended films all day and all night, then returned to our suites exhausted. Except I’ve neglected to mention that as the days passed, and Grigory Krylov escorted me to the screenings and back home to the hotel again, it started to appear in the press that we were lovers. At least, pictures of us together kept cropping up in the papers and little innuendoes in the gossip columns created the illusion that we shared a bed as well as a flashbulb.
    This didn’t bother me particularly since, as an actress, my whole life is illusion, and I knew I was not Grigory’s lover. Besides, when I was younger and a sex symbol, I’d had the experience of perfect (or imperfect) strangers coming up to me on the streets of New York or even London or Paris and saying in the appropriate language: “You are disgusting—whore!” and spitting at me. I never knew then whether my roles were at fault (for a while I played prostitutes in my American films) or whether the very fact of a woman being a public personage, an artist, an earner of money, created this reaction in certain frustrated souls. Needless to say, it had unnerved me when I was younger, but now that I was older (and presumably wiser) I had a healthy disregard for the causal connection between my actual behavior and what was publicly reported of me. So I gave little thought to my increasing involvement with Grigory in the public prints. At this rate, we should be married by festival’s end—a horrifying prospect.
    On the fifth night of the festival, Björn’s film of Don Giovanni (in which Mozart and his father both appear as characters in a sort of framing tale for the opera) was due to be presented, and still Björn and Lilli had not arrived. I began to worry. The press was reaching a fever pitch of speculation regarding Björn’s mental health, I was being pelted with telephone messages (which anyway I had no time to answer because I was always in screenings), and Grigory was becoming a gigantic pain in the ass about our newsprint love affair.
    â€œJessichka,” he’d say as he escorted me back to the hotel from the last screening, “since anyway we are lovers in the eyes of the world, do you not think it is our fate to consummate this passion? It could be kismet, La Forza del Destino— no?”
    â€œNo.” I’d laugh. “A newsprint love affair can never break my heart,