The Training of Camille - Session 1

JJ's European adventure continues

I was ready to go to the next step, the final step in this drama, when I realized that Camille wasn't done moving. She still raised herself slightly, an expression of pain across her face, a pain I thought it was real, I was beginning to admire her resistance. In one afternoon she was putting herself through a lot more of what Margot had gone through in our rehearsals in our South Street Seaport duplex a couple of years before. Back then our relationship was in full force, we were living in Manhattan after almost a year of touring Europe. When I returned to Hungary in 1988 I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't written to Margot or contacted her in any form for two years. The last I knew from her was a postcard from Peruggia, where she went to study, a few months after our meeting. After that, nothing. I didn't answer her, I just didn't want to start anything, I was married, and ... well... busy with my film. Very busy.

Again Camille seemed to be lost in the world beyond the space we were occupying. Her hands were not twiching, her facial expression fixed on a grimace of pain, her body still. The sight sent chills up my spine. I had to give it to her, she had talent, she was very convincing and that's what I needed for the role in the production I was about to make. It was going to be my first fiction film, my previous work was on a very intense documentary with a narrative that was more like fiction, but where I used reality, the reality of Haiti and its people to tell the story. And even though I used a few fictionalized moments, including a couple of young people crucified naked in the middle of a sugar cane field, still, it was not fiction. I was nervous about what I was going to do.

Camille raised her head once more, just to lower it again and this time exhaling as if she was giving up the ghost... a favorite frase from my times in school, when the nuns described the last moment of a martyr's suffering with those words, giving up the ghost. This time Camille was still, with the stillness of death, what I was going to be asking her to do in the movie. A story that was going to bring some of my obsessions to a large, very large audience. The haitian film reached millions in Europe and the US, got great critical aclaim and I was proud of it, but I was going to move further now. Just before my trip to Cannes, when I was done with the film, I was asked by some of my supportes to give a screening in upstate New York. These supporters were part of the catholic church. They were priests and nuns and they were inviting people from the town. I was worried.

I left Camille hanging for some time, just to make sure that she had reached the end of her struggle to survive. Although this was just a rehearsal, it was a very violent scene, implicitly. Not like in the haitian film where the violence was explicit. Heads chopped off, hands cut off, people hanged by their ribs with meat hooks, women whipped and hanged naked, they young couple crucified naked, ton-ton macoutes dumping cadavers in common graves... real corpses, of course... short, powerful scenes in the middle of a movie that for the most part showed an idyllic, sunny, green, haitian paradise ... that was the film that a group of priests, nuns and town's people were going to see. I was truly nervous.