Window to the soul

I saw Mr Turner, by Mike Leigh last week. I had been thinking for a while that this film felt connected to my tango life, and yet I could not see how. Then I read in TangoTherapist’s blog how Sybille realises when she dances with someone that she touches their soul. I think it is that. In this film you see fine souls, driven souls, good souls and broken souls. It’s the same when you dance tango. You can’t hide when you dance. If a person is creative, you feel it, if they are irreverent, ambitious, vain, or patient, strutting, pedagogic, kind, controlling, loud, listening, light-hearted, nervous, overbearing, or if they have a sense of humour, you feel all of these things. Except it is never just that straightforward. People are incongruous mixtures.

In this film, Turner is a coarse brute. But it is the moments in contrast to this that you remember: the luminosity of his art, the light seeming to come from within, how it stands against that of his contemporaries, how he does entirely his own thing. Then there’s the sloppy, grunting Turner who at home cares for his father, loves him and is loved by him.

One of the pivotal moments is when Turner and his partner-to-be in later life, recognise the attractions of the other’s soul. She is an ordinary woman, kind, bustling, optimistic, making the best of things. He sees beauty in her. She, apparently unaware that he is a celebrated artist, suggests he is made of finer feelings than he lets on; she means his soul. The film peaks for me when a successful industrialist comes to see Turner. His paintings are displayed, propped up really, in a leaky room, in need of rescue. The industrialist offers Turner £100,000 for all his paintings. Humbled, Turner considers the offer, yet you know even as he considers it, that he will turn it down, and somehow, perhaps because of that finer feeling, you know why. He thanks the industrialist but says he must refuse the offer, because he wants the British people to have his work, collected, all in one place where it can be seen together, gratis.

The most wretched scene is the final one. I don’t know how much is true and it doesn’t really matter. Turner’s housekeeper in his Harley Street house, loved him but Turner was human and flawed. He used her, treated her casually though he must have been aware of her feelings for him, and did not tell her when he picked up with his new partner. Never attractive, she becomes badly disfigured through disease.  When he was dying in his other lodging with the "other woman", she tried to see him, without success. After his death, as his last partner cleans her windows and lives with her happy memories, the housekeeper, the crone, shuffles round the dark Harley Street house, mumbling pitiably. Seldom was the futility, loss, loneliness and tragedy in the most ordinary of lives so briefly or so memorably described. Leigh ended this way deliberately. These are the broken souls. These people we rarely see in public.

Photo credit http://www.william-turner.org/Rain,-Steam-and-Speed-The-Great-Western-Railway--1844.html, Creative Commonce license 3.0.