Love in a Cold Climate

Later in life, Hans Christian Andersen confessed: ' No fairlytales occur to me anymore. It is as if I had filled out the entire circle with fairytale radii close to one another.' The world seemed a plenitude, every element of nature reminding him only of stories it had already told him. In Michael Curran's latest film, Love in a Cold Climate, such a plenitude would be a source of hope rather than resignation; but, in a less eloquent world, a world in which the continuity of experience itself seems to have been put at risk, the fairytale has to survive occultly - glimpsed in flashes amidst the garland of fragments of which the film is composed.

Love in a Cold Climate, Curran's first feature, has its origins in his memories of seeing the Russian film version of Andersen's The Snow Queen when he was five years old. The image of the snow queen reemerged some thirty years later - long enough for Curran to wonder whether he had ever seen it at all, or only imagined it. Having finally tracked down a copy of the film, he was nervous about watching it and initially disappointed with much of what he saw: a clumsy, sentimental film for children. But the appearance of the snow queen herself was startling: this cryogenically-preserved image of childhood, 'brought me back to that first point of identification, which was so strong, with the image of this cold, remote, alien being'.

Curran's own film is, in effect, a response to this moment of shocking recognition (of the Snow Queen and his five-year-old self), and an attempt to understand it. But rather than being an overtly personal or confessional response, Love in a Cold Climate is an act of cultural archaeology: an attempt by the filmmaker to trace in the world around him the substance of his experience, beyond mere idiosyncrasy or nostalgia - an attempt to recognise the reality of his desire. Nothing, however, is predetermined, and nothing guarantees that his search will be successful, that the experience will prove communicable: the film knows this and risks it.

Curran began with questions, both specific and speculative. He was curious to find out about the circumstances in which The Snow Queen was made and, above all, what had become of its lead actress, Natalya Klimova; but he also wanted to analyse the elements of the film which seemed so key to its appeal - above all, the associations of snow and ice. While researching Klimova and trying to track her down, he began to cast his net more widely too. He asked people he knew around the world to send him something about coldness, whiteness, love; he received music, texts, a photo of a Japanese 'love hotel' on fire. 'I gave myself permission to go in any direction that felt appropriate, without questioning it too much: I went to film a rock band called Dirty Snow singing Lightning's Girl by Nancy Sinatra, I went to the London Weather Centre and interviewed a weather expert about the history of documenting and recording snowfall...'

In Anderson's fairy tale, the devil constructs a distorting mirror and sends it with his demons to shine in the face of God; they, cackling with glee at the prospect, drop it and it shatters on the earth. Curran took the motif of the shards of mirror and structured the film in the form of interlinked fragments: 'each moment would have its own autonomy in a sense - there was also the possibility for linkage or association, but this could only happen perhaps accumulatively. It connects very much to how I tend to find my way of dealing with experience, I don't often have a sense of continuity or narrative flow - one gets very possessed by the moment.' Taking its cue from Robert Bresson's axiom 'build film on white, on silence, on stillness', Love in a Cold Climate connects its scenes - sometimes of only a few seconds - with moments of silent whiteness; some scenes are broken up and recur, some are persistent threads throughout the film (a blind woman reading out loud from a braille text of The Snow Queen; the sound of a ringing telephone).

Story-telling itself becomes subject matter; many of the people who appear, momentarily, are in the middle of telling stories, which are almost invariably edited almost to the point of non-existence. Love in a Cold Climate pursues the thesis that narrative itself is inextricable from its opposite: the crisis of meaning, total collapse. Only a certain kind of being lost, a radical disorientation, opens up the possibility of a meaningful passage - meaningful by virtue of never being vouchsafed. Stories of journeys become archetypal: the relation of linear experience so that it becomes re-lived, full of hesitancies and false paths. Anything else is an itinerary. In a snatched, seemingly chance conversation a man speculates on endings and tries to remember the word for the opposite of a cliffhanger - only to be cut short by a closing train door. The film is full of such false endings, formal endings, endings-before-the-end. And it acknowledges the risk that one form of closure which always remains is a mere fading out into incompletion - a spectre it confronts, more or less obliquely, on several occasions.

The climax of Curran's search for Klimova is incredibly tender, and tied intimately to, as he himself puts it, the film's own moment of 'unmaking'. Nothing is resolved, there is no crescendo, but there is a kind of musical closure, a rhythmic coming to rest and a sense of the film folding back on itself. In a sense, the whole film is contained in every one of its moments. Seeing it a second time, there is an extraordinary clarity to its opening sequence: the camera following the switching on of lights in a flat and then, one by one, their ritualistic extinction, each filament remaining for a fraction of a second as an after image.

Whereas for Anderson the world finally became a series of reiterations, Love in a Cold Climate insists to the contrary that repetition is never immaculate and meaning is always contingent, local to the telling. Weather itself is an index of such dislocation, a nexus of overlapping but incommensurable forms of experience: forecast and fairytale, meteorology and myth. The film's fierce commitment to this multiplicity saves it from metaphor, and ultimately allows it to raise the question of love obliquely but unashamedly - love, which could so easily be subordinated to a metaphorics of climate, and mircoclimates...

© Mike Sperlinger 2003