Pin de fartie

Both fact and fiction – For a cinematic cinema

«Try again. Fail again. Fail better.» This infamous expression of Samuel Beckett (from Worstward Ho!, 1983) is the key to entering Pin de fartie, Alejo Moguillansky’s cinematic elaboration on Beckett’s work Fin de partie (1957) – as the Argentinian filmmaker himself confesses in the film (through an astonishing accidental detour that passes by one of Stanley Wawrinka’s tattoos!). An elaboration that resembles a labyrinth of mirrors, and a key that perhaps will allow us not to get lost in it. I won’t get lost. I better fail, or try to fail better. How can “fail better” give a film critic some orientation in Moguillansky’s composition of repetitions and variations of Fin de partie? The easy answer is Beckettian: we cannot but fail in interpreting Beckett’s works, insofar as they play with us, hinting at a plurality of meanings, titillating our hunger for metaphors but intending to leave us empty-handed. Taking Beckett seriously means falling into this trap. Concurrently, we should not resist the temptation to fall into said trap, because this is part of Beckett’s game. We must fail. And we should fail better. So far, so good for the Beckettian, easy answer.

Now, in my view, Pin de fartie explores a more precise sense of “failing better”. Taking Moguillansky seriously is something more than playing the Beckettian game of searching-and-not-finding (coherent) meanings or metaphors, it is diving into the cinematic labour of translation. If translation works within the horizons of a necessary failure, its interest is exactly in its effort to fail better. Taking “fail better” as the key of Pin de fartie thus means to look at the film as a work on cinematic translation. Cinema is definitely more than representation, is definitely less than performance, and it can coincide with the refined art of translation. It is in the folds of translation that fiction blossoms. Moguillansky’s obsession with Beckett or, more precisely, with the text of his Fin de partie – whose on screen materiality of text is Moguillansky’s first cinematic translation – has something to do with the slippery, unseizable character of the work, which makes a translation a compelling – and equally obsessive – task. Cinema-as-translation surges when it has to deal with elusive, ambiguous works, for they are the closest things to the fictional complexity of reality.

Moreover, for Fin de partie, translation is probably at the source of its creation. Is the French original already a version of a mental, or parallelly written, English Endgame? Pin de fartie recites and stages its Spanish translation, does it in Argentina and in French-speaking Switzerland. As an Italian-Swiss critic which language could I choose but an un-original English? In English I will fail better, in English my fiction of Moguillansky’s fiction of Beckett’s fiction will blossom further. In English, I will recall the fact that Ludwig van Beethoven’s well-known “Moonlight” sonata, one of the two obsessive musical motifs of Pin de fartie, was originally just Sonata number 14; at least until 1832, when Ludwig Rellstab – the first great music critic according to Max Graf – proposed to call it Mondscheinsonate. Through the fiction of this Moonlight, Moguillansky builds the most factual and documentary of his four re-presentations of Fin de partie, the one in which he himself acts with his fictional mother, the 99 years old pianist Margarita Fernández. In the Q&A at the Geneva screening (at the festival Filmar en América latina), he said (it’s a fact) that the moon of the obsessive Moonlight can be both the factual disk in the sky and a fictional Meliès-like whitened orange.

Both fact and fiction: I feel that here is where I find my thread, an Ariadnean thread out the labyrinth of mirrors. That it is a good thread will be clearly confirmed by another re-presentation of Fin de partie: its version in the form of the making-of the theatre piece, where two actors prepare the recitation of its text in the isolation of a rented room in Buenos Aires. From the mother-son relationship, we pass here to the colleagues-lovers ambiguity of two actors going back-and-forth between their being actors and being Hamm and Clov, the Beckettian protagonists. Do actors translate the factuality of the text into the fictionality of acting? Do films that show their making-of want to present the factuality behind fiction? In the actors-version of Fin de partie, factuality is central, but only as far as it is surpassed by the explicit back-and-forth between fact and fiction.

I will follow this thread further through the Swiss translation of Fin de partie, with Otto and Cleo, Moguillansky’s daughter, at the place of Hamm and Clov. Why in Switzerland? The fact is that the Argentinian filmmaker stayed at the residence La Becque, at La Tour-de-Peilz, so that the greater part of the Swiss shooting is done on the Montreaux lakeside, in a landscape that I happen to know in almost every detail – Buvette de Jaman included, where Otto and Cleo flirt with a Swiss “death in Venice”… As for other Swiss viewers, I cannot avoid the factual layer of this geographical translation, but fiction is the projection of the Swiss lakeside as Hamm and Clov’s “empty room”, and one that becomes a “grey graveyard” in the film commentary. Switzerland seems to so anticipate Hamm and Clov’s death, from the neutral point of view that looks at the long shadows on the other side of the lake, in France, an evident metaphor for the twilight of modernity and its Enlightenment. Where should the endgame of democracy be observed if not from the safe and neutral Switzerland? Fictionally, Switzerland embodies the metaphysical place beyond the Beckettian end, a place so “beyond” that Moguillansky takes the freedom to add a fictional and quite touching coda to Beckett’s end of the play, where Cleo-Clov shows a final piety towards Otto-Hamm and accompanies him, without his knowledge, during his last journey.

Is there a way out of the destiny of death in Pin de fartie? In the Geneva Q&A, Moguillansky speaks of the film as an exploration of separation, farewell, love and death, death of love, or dying as lovers. However, the fourth level on which Beckett’s Fin de partie is presented is a sort of Greek choir, the narrator’s point of view, made of the voices of Luciana Acuña – Moguillansky’s partner – and of the musician Maxi Prietto, singing and playing at the guitar. Are they really voices-over, over and beyond the text of Beckett’s play? Prieto says that his singing equals his own existing: is music the existential way out of Beckett’s endgame, a sort of resistance to Beckett’s Fin de partie? I believed in this hopeful way out – a kind of know-it-all, ultimate translation – until the end of the film, where Luciana is also saying good-by, like Clov… «No, Luciana! No te vayas!» Who is speaking? My private or childish desire to resist this separation? Am I fictionalising the meaning of this ultimate good-by? Is it impossible to step out of the labyrinth of mirrors of Beckett’s Fin de partie? Should we remain trapped in the celebration of the endgame without any “beyond”?

Should this piece of film criticism of mine make sense as another layer of translation, obsessively faithful to Beckett and Moguillansky being taken seriously, then the thread of the inseparability of fact and fiction will transcend the separation of this death foretold. What is such inseparability of fact from fiction but cinema itself? It is not important whether Luciana would either factually or fictionally say good-by, because it’s cinema, it’s both fact and fiction: fact as failed fiction and fiction as failed fact, wonderfully ambiguous, back-and-forth. She went away, yes, but also no. Pin de fartie is a wonderful homage to cinema or, even better, to cinematic cinema – cinema that resists its being reduced to fact or fiction, failing both, failing them better and better. Beckett’s Fin de partie is confirmed and contradicted, repeated and betrayed, obsessively loved and faithfully-unfaithfully translated. Saying this, dear Alejo, I can only hope that my critical translation failed too and, if Godot wishes, failed better.