I must have seen the video clip for Tout Oublier (Forget Everything) by Angèle at least 30 times. That’s because when I’m on the cross-trainer at my local fitness centre, it’s on NRJ Hits every ten minutes. I can’t hear the actual song because I have my earphones on, with Tom Petty or Springsteen driving me to burn those calories. But the clip is cool. Angèle is on a beach with lots of sunbathers, but where other singers would prance around in a sexy bikini, she plods along in a ski suit. If you get a chance to see it, make sure not to miss the beginning – she does the best one-shouldered shrug I’ve ever seen.
Naturally then, when I saw Angèle on the cover of Télérama, I had to find out why. I learned very little, except that she’s Belgian, has had a zillion downloads and has ‘dynamited’ la chanson française (which is surely a point in her favour). But as luck (or fate, or serendipity) would have it, in the same issue, I came across a review of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by the filmmaker Bi Gan, which takes place in Kaili.
Naturally then, I had to see the film, because Cheng Wei comes from Kaili, and Cheng Wei is the villain in Mystery Manor. He is, to quote a review, ‘an obscenely wealthy, somewhat autistic, wannabe artistic gourmet with a rich man’s taste for excess.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Again, I didn’t learn much. Kaili is hot and humid, and like Hongwu, the hero of the film, it’s easy to get lost there. Unless he’s just lost in a dream. Or in his own memories. I certainly got lost in the film, but it isn’t one of those films it makes sense to try and make sense of. Not that it matters – the atmosphere was perfect for a character like Cheng, whose memories are horrific and yet, so he claims, of no consequence.
As luck (etc.) would have it, not long after, I came across a passage in Dostoyesky’s The Devils, in which Stavrogin, after callously causing the suicide of a young girl, puts a photograph of her lookalike on the mantelpiece but never once looks at it. He goes on to say, I mention this only to show to what an extent I could get the better of my memories and how indifferent I had become to them. I repudiated them all en masse and the whole pile of them obediently disappeared every time I wanted it to disappear. I always found my memories of the past boring and I could never discuss the past as almost everyone else does.
That, too, is Cheng Wei, when he says, The past has a weight to it, a solidity. For some, it’s a ball and chain they drag with them all their lives; for others, little more than a balloon tied to their wrist. And the way we walk through the present depends on the effort we put into carrying our past. And after telling his atrocious story, he concludes, You see how fortunate I am to carry nothing more than a helium balloon floating behind me.
I’m not convinced that Cheng is to be believed any more than Stavrogin. I think he may simply have been trying all his life to do what Angèle says: Tout, il faudrait tout oublier, pour y croire, il faudrait tout oublier.
Unfortunately, the way he sets about it is as terrifying as the memories themselves.
Mystery Manor is available here at the special launch price of $0.99 for a limited time only.
