Fiesta & A Butterfly's Wings

The film director Hereward Potenza aspires to be a cinematic heir to Ernest Hemingway. He shares a fascination with similar themes to the author, especially the concept of masculinity and man’s relationship with nature, and his elliptical style is often compared to the writer’s theory of omission. Beast, his update of Truffaut’s L’enfant Sauvage, announced his lean, raw style, focussing on the nasty brutish requirements of survival and the equally amoral methods of scientific investigation. It ditched modern cinema’s overpolished production values and instead created a visceral, blunt poetry of stark imagery and spare sound. His follow up, Cloud Range, was an equally vivid and confrontational meditation on the lives of kangeroo hunters in the Australian bush.

He’s been working on two films in tandem, and they both deal directly with the writer who is perhaps his literary mentor. These releases can perhaps be seen as investigations of the autobiographical elements in Hemingway’s work, rather than stylistic borrowings and thematic influences. Both the films take material from early in Hemingway’s career, and Potenza has cast the same actor, Bennett Kolar, to play Hemingway in both films.

Fiesta is a playful reworking of The Sun Also Rises, taking the events from Hemingway’s life that inspired the novel rather than the actual story itself, and then transporting them from 1925 to the present day. The group of American and British expatriates that accompanied Hemingway on a trip from Paris to the bull running festival in Pamplona are instead modern tourists. They are bored of the routine and limitations of an organised tour of Europe. Everything in their day is planned out by their itinerary. A tour guide tells them what to look at, and drives them from one landmark to another.

Potenza has updated Hemingway’s Lost Generation for a modern audience. Instead of the emotional and physical aftermath of World War I, the tourists seem to be devastated by a sense of meaninglessness that mars their efforts to enjoy themselves. They are herded around a series of commodified experiences, shuffling around museums or trying to enjoy the ambience of a café overrun with similarly uncomfortable tourists, obediently producing the expected reactions as if on cue, perhaps against their wishes. On the tour bus, a group discussion of Hemingway’s novel transports them from the sightseeing industry to ideas of authentic travel. In Paris, they decide to break with the tour, book their own tickets to Spain and visit the fiesta in Pamplona.

Events in Spain follow closely those in the novel, to the extent that Potenza seems to be suggesting that even their attempt at genuine adventure and freedom is really a tired trope of life apparently imitating art. They drink and argue, and torment each other with accusations of affairs. The anti-Semitic jibes of the novel continue. The British debutante falls for a young matador and seduces him. The characters end up fighting in the street, inebriated and argumentative. The scenes are no different to those played out in thousands of tourists venues where people stifled by the limitations of their day-to-day lives back home go to experience adventure and freedom.

It is the running of the bulls and the spectacle of the corrida, as in Hemingway’s novel, that provides the core experience of the short film. Potenza adores the danger and immediacy of the bulls chasing through the streets of the town, and lingers on the gory ceremony inside the bull ring. There is the same relish of the agony and bravery as in Hemingway’s descriptions. The vivid events are even more anachronistic in the modern world than they were in the 1920s. Even though a bull fight is not a real fight, but a choroeographed stageshow, it seems Potenza is trying to prove that they are perhaps a more authentic experience when compared to the artificiality of the modern world. The emotions of participants and spectators are raw. Suddenly, under the blistering afternoon sun in Pamplona, every seems real for the tourists, suddenly their actions have consequences and are not guided by the gestures of a tour guide.

Bennet Kolar’s performance as the modern Hemingway is more an interpretation of the author’s attitudes and preoccupations updated for the modern world. He seems constantly irritated by the inconsequence of modern life, by its throwaway attitude and lack of grounding. He is an actor and observer, fascinated by the primal immediacy of the bull fighting, but disappointed by the inadequecy and apathy of his travelling companions. His performance in Potenza’s other film is a more subtle and mannered autoniographical interpretation.

A Butterfly’s Wings follows the meeting of Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, as documented in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It is a rich evocation of the 1920s in Paris, the time when Hemingway was working on The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald had finished The Great Gatsby, two masterpieces that distilled the age. Even though it is a lavish evocation, Potenza still ensures he uses a sharp lens to explore the friendship of admiration and hostility, to unpick the discomfort and antagonism between the two characters.

As Fitzgerald, Theobald Porter is required to sail close to outright slapstick as he conveys the writer’s hypochondria and alcoholism. Immediately on their meeting in the Dingo bar, Hemingway is concerned about the strange effects drink has on Fitzgerald. A few days later, Fitzgerald promises to show Hemingway the novel he has just finished. It is evident that Hemingway, already confident in his own abilities and importance, thinks little of Fitzgerald’s work. His interest appears to be more to learn the commercial angle of the trade rather than any artistic appreciation.

The plot develops. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda have left their car in Lyon, and Fitzgerald suggests he and Hemingway get a train down to repair it and drive it back to Paris. Hemingway acquiesces to the suggestion, perhaps through a sense of adventure rather than any altruistic motive. He seems to be making a character study of Fitzgerald, whose behaviour seems chaotic and life unstructured.

Indeed, the morning they are meant to leave on the train to Lyon, Fitzgerald misses the train and Hemingway is forced to continue alone. These are tranquil moments in the film, where we enter into the confidence with which Hemingway explored the world and drew it into his imagination to then be able to write with such exacting observations. He contains his frustration at Fitzgerald, and instead explores Lyon, having a drink and dinner with a fire eater in an Algerian restaurant.

There are elements of farce as Fitzgerald appears the next day, frustrated perhaps that Hemingway has been able to just continue on without him. The car needs to be repaired. It has no roof, and they are caught in the rain countless times. Again they are drinking, and it is having a bad effect on Fitzgerald. They argue, Fitzgerald from the standpoint of a hypochondriac, Hemingway with the confidence and knowledge he has acquired from his father, a doctor.

In a hotel in a town on the way back from Lyon, Fitzgerald is convinced he is dying of pneumonia, and becomes increasingly delusional. He gets increasingly drunk. But then the comic elements are shed as we head into the central tension in the film, and the revelations of the state of the marriage between Fitzgerald and Zelda. Potenza fleshes out Hemingway’s account from A Moveable Feast with scenes from the south of France, where Zelda has an affair with Edouard Jozan while Fitzgerald is working on The Great Gatsby. Potenza focuses on the cruelty and drama of the declining relationship, of Fitzgerald’s disillusionment and Zelda’s troubled mental health.

Fitzgerald calls Zelda while he and Hemingway are eating a meal at their hotel. He passes out drunk during the meal. Hemingway helps him to bed. They continue back to Paris as if nothing has happened, Hemingway trying to stop Fitzgerald from drinking.

By putting these two great writers on the screen together, Potenza is allowing us to witness the development of their friendship, and its complications, especially in the concerns Hemingway has for Fitzgerald’s self-destructive trajectory, and the disastrous influence and jealousy of Zelda. But he’s taking us deeper into that period of history through the genesis of two great novels that the writers would produce. Hemingway finally gets to read The Great Gatsby once they are back in Paris, and realises its power and importance. Hemingway is spurred into moving on from journalism and short stories to a novel, which would become The Sun Also Rises. We can see that Fitzgerald is nearly destroyed by the excesses of the Jazz Age, a lavish lifestlye and dramatic life, the immoderation and collapse of the American Dream that he documented in his fiction. Meanwhile, Hemingway stands in opposition, valuing hard work and an authentic existence, questioning the values of the Lost Generation, lamenting its effect on both his friend and his contemporaries. Potenza’s film tries to get beneath the glamour of the recent revivals of 1920’s decadence to reveal the damaged people and disillusionment underneath.