A PROMISE

An unconsummated long-distance passion that resists the

erosion of time and memory is the subject of the Austrian writer
Stefan Zweigs posthumously published novella, Journey Into
the Past. When addressed in the movies, this kind of longing is
usually diluted into soap opera and its darker psychological
implications suffocated by a gauzy romanticism. The French
director Patrice Lecontes film, A Promise, adapted from the
novella, is no exception.
This tasteful daydream, which features one of Gabriel Yareds
lushest film scores, is the first English-language movie by Mr.
Leconte, whose critical reputation has declined since its peak in
the mid-1990s when his Ridicule won Cesar awards (the
French Oscars) for best film and director. Playing the principal
characters in A Promise, the British actors Alan
Rickman,Rebecca Hall and Richard Madden lend a high-toned
Masterpiece Theater gloss to a story that begins in pre-World
War I Germany and ends there after the war when Nazism is on
the rise.
An incalculable asset is the presence of Mr. Rickman, whose
character, Karl Hoffmeister is a wealthy, ailing German steel
manufacturer. Through minute changes of expression and tone
of voice, Mr. Rickman is a master of insinuation and ambiguity.
As he stealthily observes his beautiful, much younger wife,
Lotte (Ms. Hall) resisting her attraction to his bright, handsome
new young assistant, Friedrich (Mr. Madden), youre never quite
sure if he wants to kill Friedrich or adopt him.
A keen-eyed eager beaver, whom Mr. Madden (Game of
Thrones) imbues with a sensitivity at times reminiscent of the
young Montgomery Clift, Friedrich is a steelworks employee
who earned an engineering degree despite having grown up a
ward of the state. In contemporary parlance, he is a young man
on the make.
Abandoning his garret and his working-glass girlfriend, he
moves into his bosss house and becomes tutor to Karls son,
Otto (Toby Murray). The instant attraction between Friedrich
and Lotte blossoms into a mutual obsession that Lotte refuses to
1|Page

acknowledge until the night before Friedrich leaves for Mexico

to work for two years. They vow to wait until he returns. But
World War I breaks out, and nearly a decade passes before they
reunite.
Ms. Halls Lotte is the weak link in the triangle. Despite all her
characters flowery words of longing, she cant convey the heat
bottled under Lottes demure demeanor. Ms. Hall makes the
right gestures, but you never sense her heart beating faster or see
her blush.
The films other insurmountable problem is the compression of
its story. The anguish of the lovers decade-long separation cant
be evoked in a matter of minutes, and when Friedrich returns
looking pretty much unchanged except for a limp, its as though
he took a weeks working vacation and came home more
exhausted than when he left.
A Promise
Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig
In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, published the year after
his suicide in 1942 at age 60, Stefan Zweig wistfully recalls the
sense of security that made life seem worthwhile and that
defined his parents and grandparents generation. Pre-WWI
Europe, it seemed, was on an inexorably upward journey away
from barbarism, whereas what came after proved to Zweig that
his fellow Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, was right all along:
civilization is merely a thin layer liable at any moment to be
pierced by the destructive forces of the underworld.
But, as Zweig says so bluntly in one of his acclaimed novellas,
The Post Office Girl, happy people are poor psychologists.
And in the stories of this prolific writera humanist, pacifist,
and aesthete of the highest order who by nineteen had published
a volume of poetry and went on to write fiction, plays, and
biographies and essays on Balzac, Stendhal, Dante, Tolstoy,
Dickens, and many othersthe human heart, especially as
thwarted and buffeted by the mindless machinations of society,
is scrutinized with an acuity informed by, and often bettering,
his friend Freud.

2|Page

The latest novella available to English-speaking readers, Journey

Into the Pastfound among Zweigs papers after his death and
now published by New York Review Books Classics in a
masterly translation by Anthea Bell and with an introduction by
Andr Acimanis no exception. This dissection of an
unconsummated love affair is bleakly affecting, its nuanced
sadness leavened by a belief in an eternal, idealized romantic
love that contemporary readers might justifiably envy, just as
Zweig envied his fathers faith in the inevitability of world
peace.
The opening pages of Journey Into the Past, in which a couple
reunite at a train station, are suffused with a deceptive optimism.
Thrilled to see each other, theyre annoyed by the presence of
others in their train carriage, so desperate are they for an
intimate conversation. We discover why as the thoughts of the
man, Louis Ludwig, slide nine years into the past, to when he
last saw his beloved. As a 23-year-old scientist, he had
reluctantly moved into the grand house of his employer, a
German industrialist, to serve as his private secretary.
Reluctantly, because Louiss humble past as a tutor to rich
children, when he had loathed his status as a nameless hybrid
somewhere between a servant and a companion, made him
recoil from anything resembling such a life. But, persuaded by
his ailing employer that his round-the-clock proximity was
indispensible, Louis discovers that his new residence comes with
a significant benefit: the lady of the house, his bosss wife, with
whom he instantly falls in love.
The object of our heros affections is given neither a name nor
an age, but the impression is of a woman in her forties. Her
appeal is explicitly Oedipal: she makes sure the neurotic and
vulnerable Louiss wishes were granted almost as soon as he
had expressed them, and granted so discreetly, as if by
household elves. Nurtured and grateful, at first he idolizes her
as beyond sex, pure and inviolable, but faced with a sudden
separationLouis is given the position of overseeing a new
mining venture in Mexico for two yearsthe pair allow their
mutual desire to surge to the surface. Zweigs descriptions here
3|Page

verge on the purplethere are burning trances, feverish

longings, ecstatic frenziesbut the would-be lovers will remain
chaste, until, she promises, he returns from Mexico.
Alas, it is not to be: while he is there WWI breaks out, and he is
stranded abroad. Desperate to get back to her, he immediately
weighed up all the possibilities of smuggling himself across to
Europe by some bold and cunning means, thus checkmating
Fate but is dissuaded from such recklessness. Years pass and he
eventually marries someone else, but when a professional
obligation brings him back to Germany, he cannot resist seeing
his lover of the past, whose husband, she has explained in a
letter, is now dead.
So can the past be resurrected? This is the agonizing question
Zweig poses, and it becomes increasingly clear as the story
progresses and the train speeds to the lovers destinationthe
picturesque city of Heidelberg where they plan to spend their
first and last night togetherthat there can be no straight
answer, even though Louis at first is hopeful. Time is helpless,
he thinks, helpless in the face of our feelings. The reader is
tantalized: who doesnt want to believe that love can conquer
all? We hope along with Louis that he can rescue his one chance
for fulfillment, even while the storys foreboding atmosphere
and spellbinding temporal meshing seek to disabuse us of that
nave hope. Because Zweig, ultimately, is less in the business of
providing solace than of reminding us that even humans most
powerful emotions and determined volitions are no match for, in
his words, the dungeon walls of their destiny.
Andr Aciman and Joan Acocella will be discussing Journey
Into the Past and Zweig's other works at a New York Review
Books Classics event next Monday, November the 29th, at 7pm.
More details here.

4|Page

MOVIE REVIEW
FILM REVIEW; When Love Is Madness And Life a Straitjacket
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 25, 2004
Young love -- the old-fashioned kind that flourished before the
age of the hook-up -- has always been one of the most
challenging emotions to portray on the screen with any
specificity. Beyond the smooches, sighs, and adoring glances,
how do you convey the reality of a shared, private paradise?
In the strongest scenes of ''The Notebook,'' the screen adaptation
of Nicholas Sparks's treacly best seller, Ryan Gosling and
Rachel McAdams break through the barrier to evoke highstrung, slightly crazed teenagers plunging headlong into first
love. It is passion that begins in playfulness. Their performances
are so spontaneous and combustible that you quickly identify
with the reckless sweethearts, who embody an innocence that
has all but vanished from American teenage life. And against
your better judgment, you root for the pair to beat the odds
against them.
The romantic drama, directed by Nick Cassavetes from a
screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the
novel, opens today nationwide. It is told in flashback as Duke
(James Garner), a garrulous, ailing old codger in a comfortable
nursing home, reads aloud excerpts of a love story to Allie
Calhoun (Gena Rowlands), a patient suffering from Alzheimer's.
She is so smitten with the 1940's tale of Noah (Mr. Gosling), a
poor Southern boy who works in a lumberyard, and his wealthy
girlfriend, also named Allie (Ms. McAdams), that for brief
intervals his readings jog her blurred memory into focus.
As the movie seesaws between Seabrook, N.C., in the summer
of 1940, when Noah and Allie meet at a fairground, and the
present, it is deliberately (and annoyingly) coy as to who these

5|Page

oldsters might be. Gosh, could they be the same young lovers six
decades later?
Mr. Garner and Ms. Rowlands are wonderful actors, but Mr.
Garner, in particular, plays ''old'' with a hammy avuncularity that
sugarcoats his character with a glaze of nostalgia. His
performance reinforces the impression that in Hollywood, old
age is even more difficult to depict with real honesty than young
love. Ms. Rowlands's Allie is quieter and sadder, but she looks
too well-preserved for a woman in her condition, and as the
story leaps back and forth, the movie veers between unbleached
sugar and artificial sweetener.
When Noah meets Allie, he is so desperate to impress her that he
hangs on the rungs of a Ferris wheel and threatens to jump if she
won't go out with him. Even at the beginning, Mr. Gosling's
performance emphasizes Noah's slightly creepy streak of
fanaticism. After the lovers have separated, he withdraws into
himself, grows a beard, and with a small inheritance from his
poetry-loving father (Sam Shepard), a Walt Whitman fan, he
converts the rotting old mansion he once dreamed of sharing
with Allie into the showplace he promised to build for her. He
also serves in World War II, where he sees his best friend die in
the Battle of the Bulge.
Ms. McAdams, who played the alpha queen in ''Mean Girls,''
matches Mr. Gosling's Noah in idiosyncratic verve. Impulsive,
giggly and combative, she exudes the air of a careless rich girl
bursting out of a bubble, until the moment her stern, watchful
mother, Anne (Joan Allen), puts her foot down and ends the
relationship.
The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority
have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the
young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40
years ago to their roles in ''Splendor in the Grass.'' The power of
Ms. Allen's performance comes out of understatement.
6|Page

Impeccably coiffed and outfitted, barely moving her tight lips,

she projects the full emotional depth of composure under siege.
Like most movies that span many decades, chapters of ''The
Notebook'' seem scrunched together. The war, in particular,
passes in a flash. It is as a nurse's aide that Allie meets Lon
(James Marsden), a dashing, seriously injured soldier from a
wealthy Southern family. Once recovered, he courts Allie
aggressively and, just when the beautiful couple are on the verge
of marrying and becoming the toast of Charleston society, she
reads a newspaper article about Noah's architectural restoration
and promptly faints. A reunion is in order.
For a movie that might have plunged full-scale into bathos, ''The
Notebook'' tries to remain restrained. The camera caresses the
lush Southern landscape of blood-red sunsets and flocks of
ducks, and Aaron Zigman's romantic score drizzles only a light
coating of syrup over the ice cream.
''The Notebook'' is a high-toned cinematic greeting card. It
insists on true, mystical, eternal love, till death do us part, and
won't have it any other way.
''The Notebook'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It
has sexual situations.

7|Page