SCENE 11. A picnic on the Seine. 1854.
Virginia de Castiglione argues with Napoleon to keep his promise about Italian unification as they sail away from his wife at royal picnic. The Empress's friends and ladies in waiting disparage the Countess's beauty calling her slovenly, and making fun of her wild hair and wild ways.
SCENE 12. In the court photographer's salon. 1855.
Virginia's reputed affair with the Emperor makes her the center of attention- some gossips are admiring and some are cruel. One says she heard Castiglione came to a ball at the Tuileries as the Queen of Etruria, who had been promised unity and independance for her homeland under the first Napoleon. As though she thought herself somehow behind our Napoleon's new passion for the Italian cause.
But another woman, one of the Empress's friends, says that the Italian girl has no such head on her shoulders, that she herself saw Castiglione arrive wearing almost nothing at all, and leave wearing less. "The girl is nothing but base desire, no finer understanding, another symptom of these troubled times."
SCENE 13. Inside the photographer's studio. 1855.
Virginia is photographed with her baby son and her lady-in-waiting Louisa. Louisa deadpans a joke while holding her conventional pose. Virginia laughs and begins to improvise.
Roseanna's voice-over: "Pierson couldn't have suggested that a woman of her class hold her hand like that, let alone take off her stockings or lie on the floor. They say she couldn't have been the photographer's lover, but some of the pictures are really sexy and comfortable; and there's evidence she took other working class men into her life, plus she ignored so many other social conventions. She made a friend take her to the middle class theater, to meet the actresses she admired, though they were all basically considered prostitutes.
(Scene changes- we see she is speaking from the back seat of a car.)
Maybe gender-bending a bit in dress-up with her son wouldn't have seemed like a big deal to her. They say she wasn't an artist, that she just had narcissistic whims and wasn't aware of what she was doing; but she had to be the one guiding the experimentation because none of Pierson's other photos look anything like this. People think she was obsessed because she took so many pictures but I don't think that's so crazy. Everybody gets to make their interpretation and you just wonder what she would say about it herself if you could ask her. So. Anyway. That's what I'm working on."
SCENE 14. In a car. 2005.
It's quiet in the car as Roseanna's uncle and father do not respond to what she's said. With a book of the Countess's photographs open in front of her, sitting in the back seat behind them, Roseanna watches different women's faces flash by in other cars and she zooms in with her digital camera to take their picture.
The car moves under looming over-passes and she sees the dark, tunnel-like studio with huge ceiling windows covered by curtains hinted in the distance between the highway's cement pillars. The framing moves into position, showing a different perspective on one of the Countess's early photographs, then shutters quickly dark and opens on a next portrait- full of the sound of cars rushing and slowing to traffic lights.
The car sounds are swallowed up by the quiet and breathing of this room.
Virginia laughs as the court photographer shakes his head, astonished; and she smiles and gestures him toward her.
SCENE 15. In the Studio. 1855.
Later on, she sits beside him, flushed and hair still undone, with black and white prints of the photographs on the table in front of them. She puts dashes of colour across the prints, telling him how they are to be painted and cropped.
"This one, where she is fleeing the opera house fire the hair and eyes and jewels and leaves should all be bright with the burning light, paint it with a high sheen. And this one. Queen of Etruria. I want several prints of this. Some people need to be reminded. This will be the one Cavour and Francesco will keep, even if he won't forgive me."
SCENE 16. Grama's apartment. 2005.
While Roseanna visits, Mette watches a Bergman film shot in Denmark over and over for the moment in the film where her father walks across the screen. Stops, rewinds, watches it again.
"There he goes. He's still right there, I can't believe it. Ben reminded me of him, you know. Sometimes I think he's still around, it would be just like him. Maybe people stay tied to the world by their tools and books and electricity- like how I found my father in this movie. Watch, there he goes, do you see him? Crossing the square in a black felt hat. (pause. rewind. play) There he goes again, that's his long face shot in Copenhagen before the war."
Rose says: "Maybe there are just 2 key things we do that last- making the things to make links between people, and making the links."
Mette says: "look, there he goes again." and she lights another cigarette.
In the dim, smoky light she begins to talk about the war. How they found out one night that the Germans were going to round up all the Jews in the coming days, and she and her brother spent all night rowing back and forth across the water to Sweden. How her job was to hold the babies, and to keep them from crying with drops of chloroform. How she didn't know in the end if any of them made it to Sweden alive or dead.
She lights another cigarette. "Do you smoke Rosie?" she asks.
"No."
"Promise me you'll never start."
"Why do you do it if you hate it?"
"I didn't say I hated it, save hate for the Nazi's, but I wish I hadn't let it control me. Don't let things get in control of you."
"Look at those pictures there, that's your Grampa in Africa, looking like the colonial gentleman. Really he was in Malawi to teach teachers, and to help set up a school board. I was the one acting like a colonial- they said I should keep servants because there were so few jobs. That's me with the ladies, living like a woman of leisure."
She laughs a bit bitterly. "I have more then enough time on my hands now."
Roseanna looks at the African sculptures and paintings, and walks down the wall of family photographs. In the background Grama lights another cigarette and says "Look at those pictures of your cousins, aren't they beautiful, tall like their father. And there we all are at Ben's funeral, we had almost all the cousins together. We made a great family."
SCENE 17. In the car. 2005.
On the way back Roseanna's dad and uncle ask how her visit was. She looks out the window. She tells them Grama told her she lived in Africa like a woman of leisure. They laugh and tell her, "not quite- she wasn't religious at the time but she helped the people build a church with her own hands, and she ripped up her wedding gown to make them an altar cloth." Roseanna smiles and takes a picture of her uncle in the rear view mirror, and then of herself reflected against the road going by.
They take her to the train station. They tell her it will be a few more weeks until the doctors run the last tests to see if the cancer is really gone. Her dad tells her Mette calls him sometimes talking about wanting it to all be over. Her uncle, with some bravado, tells her that as long as Grama has himself and his wife as her spiritual friends and counselors he believes she will continue to find her way out of those dark places. They begin a tense conversation about religion and their mother's beliefs, and the fact that she's still drinking pretty hard, but the train comes in loud before Roseanna has to find something to say.
SCENE 18. In R's house in Montreal. 2005.
Roseanna sits in her home with books of the Countess spread around her. There is a shelf of cameras. Four different old Polaroids, two 35mm's, the digital, and a number of disposables. The rest of the walls are covered in their record collection, and there are polaroid pictures stuck to most available spaces. The pictures from her trip play as a slideshow on a computer monitor. They are almost all of the world from cars and trains, of strange women, and of herself reflected in mirrors and windows. Her boyfriend is wrapping the antenna of their TV in aluminum foil.
Her boyfriend stops for a second to watch the photos go by. He asks her if she took any pictures of her grandmother. Roseanna says, no, she couldn't even think to bring the camera out when she was with her. Maybe her Grama would have wanted it. Castiglione wanted pictures of herself sick and old.
"But," Roseanna says, "I felt like, I didn't really want to see this, that this wasn't how I wanted to remember her. Maybe that's selfish."
It is quiet and the pictures of pictures from the mantelpiece go by- of her grandmother on a green lawn, younger and well.
He gets chatty about his kooky project to distract her: "I read about this on the Internet. We won't have to lie on top of each other with our feet in the air to get channel 46, although I think we still should sometimes."
Rose, frustrated and not listening, says "This paper on the Countess is going everywhere and nowhere- all the histories have different sets of facts! They say Virginia staged an assassination attempt against Napoleon outside her home, and then they say he was her cousin, and a member of the Carbonari- a secret club of resistance fighters and Italian nationalists like her. This one says she egged on her bureaucrat friends in their assassination of the citizens of the commune; and then this one suggests that she was broken hearted by what they did- how they cut her out once her pretty social function, introducing them all to each other, was fulfilled."
He says, "How's that? Hello! Pay attention to your loving and ingenious boyfriend please, not the crazy old lady."
She goes off on him: "She's not crazy! What is it with men and that word! Who says your world is the real world? So she liked to model, and played dress-up with her son, maybe they had fun! You and I can't know what it's like to feel like you could have been anything and then to have no rights and everything you do that makes you happy, and that would have been quirky or even brilliant in a man, is too scandalous to ever show or else is just made fun of!"
"Why are you so pissed off?" he asks "Because of what your professor said?"
"Yes! No. I'm pissed off because you're irritatingly calm.. and I'm mad at all men because of what Pierson says about her here. Once she's gone he basically says she was pathetic. He made this thing she loved happen, she borrowed crazy sums of money to keep taking the photographs- as though it was important to her, like she thought she'd found someone that saw more in her because with him she could be brave, heroic, powerful: anything other than another washed up courtesan. And he was just faking it. Argh!! I wish I hadn't read that."
"That sucks babe. But maybe he only thinks he thought that."
"What the hell does that mean!"
"I mean like things make sense when I'm with you that I can't put back together without you. Maybe they had what they had together, and then he had to remember it differently once she was gone."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise he would have to remember that that crazy goodness really happened and was really gone and that would make you crazy."
"Yer sweet. I'm sorry I pulled the 'all men are like that' card. I don't actually think that."
"I did good? You think that's good, check out this reception."
The phone rings.
The narrator tells us that she "found out then that her grandmother had more cancer then they caught when they cut off her breasts. It was in her lungs and blood and bones, and they were moving her to the hospital, but the prognosis was not at all good."
"I could remember clearly my Grama calling to tell me she was going to buy a scooter, not a motorcycle- because "I'm not a man, I don't need my engine between my legs" and now they were calling for her, and they said I needed to get out there now. And for some reason I thought angrily that all the machines in the world were useless."
Roseanna gets off the phone and her boyfriend is already standing next to her and she gets up, covers her face and cries.