Entry 9:

Dear Geoffrey,

Up all night with a sick child (she came home from school with a bad cough), head still bleary, I see in the morning paper that Bush is rolling back the tougher arsenic-in-water standards Clinton had instituted, and Gov. Pataki is preparing us for diesel-generated fuel this summer. Tough times for the environment--although Maine has set aside a million acres for undeveloped forest. As you know, I'm writing a book about the New York waterfront, and yesterday I heard that global warming would raise the oceans along the coast by a foot in 15 years, then more after that. I need to finish my book before Manhattan goes underwater.

But on to the Oscars: This morning's Times says only Julia Roberts is a shoo-in for Best Actress; all the other races are up for grabs. I preferred Laura Linney in You Can Count On Me, a nice little movie with some beautifully written scenes (I especially liked the one where the heroine tries to get the priest to stop being so therapistlike and condemn her to hell) and some dynamite acting by Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick. Broderick is one of those actors who cheers me up; I start smiling as soon as he comes on screen. In a way, Julia Roberts deserves the award because it's such an old-fashioned Joan Crawford star turn. (Although Joan would have given us some darker hues.) And I thought Linney was even better in House of Mirth than in You Can Count on Me. Molly Haskell had a nice piece in the "Arts and Leisure" section about how there used to be a much clearer, stricter sense of what a supporting actor or actress did: like Thelma Ritter, Jack Carson, Eve Arden. Now, very often a lead actor gets a supporting nomination: Marcia Gay Harden in Pollock, Benicio del Toro in Traffic.

I want to put in a good word for The Taste of Others in the foreign film category. This is a French comedy by Agnes Jaoui, a wry, wise ensemble piece in which, as Jean Renoir said, "everyone has his reasons." Jaoui makes splendid comedy out of the cruelty and cross-purposes of people's self-absorption (the same premise as Seinfeld), and yet you end up liking all her characters. Nothing flashy in the camerawork, just the judicious restraint and craft of a well-made boulevard play brought to the screen. She also did the script for Resnais' The Same Old Song and seems to have caught the Zeitgeist of depressed Parisians bouncing up against driven, ambitious ones and exchanging energies.

Last night I saw a preview of a little gem soon to open, The Day I Became a Woman, by an Iranian woman director named Marzieh Meshkini, who is the wife of one of Iran's most important directors, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. A few years ago, Makhmalbaf started a film school for his family, and so far his daughter (who made The Apple) and his wife have done brilliantly. It's an interesting artistic dynasty, like the Bach family. Anyway, The Day I Became a Woman is composed of three stories about women at various stages of life: childhood, young marriage, old age. It was made that way because you don't need to get the censor's permission in advance for a short film in Iran. It has a crystalline, heartbreaking purity, that "ontological beauty," to use a pretentious phase, of each object resonating in its beingness, like early Italian neorealism, only in color.

I'm struck by the fact--coincidence?--that three of my favorite recent films were all directed by women: The Taste of Others, The Day I Became a Woman, and Chantal Akerman's magnificent La Captive, which I mentioned in my first message to you. Don't know what it means exactly or whether it makes any sense to speak of a woman's cinema, but the good thing is that it's no longer seen as such a novelty when a woman makes a strong film.

I'm glad you said you liked Sidney Lumet's The Prince of the City. Yes, it's far better and more complex than Traffic; it makes you go through the dilemma and nobody comes off clean--a noble piece of filmmaking. I think Lumet is one of the most underrated directors we have. When you add up his body of work, it's amazing. Plus he has a terrific feel for and knowledge of New York and puts the whole city on the screen: You never come away thinking it's an overedited, narrow band of privilege, like Woody Allen's Manhattan.

My daughter's coughing in the next room, and I have to get back to her. I saw your guest-edited fiction issue of Bookforum. Good job.

As ever,
Phillip