from Sunny Girls

Sandra Moussempès

FRAME—NIGHT—RED ABODE


The heat of studios, we can extract this heat.
“Your body holds up a night-light, you are languorous.”
—title of the first dialogue—


The hero says he’s captivated.


When you are in this Santa Monica hotel you have a view of the ocean, you are in the interior of a décor purchased by more than 900 TV channels.


You like the blue that makes positive thinking easy, the whiteness of the walls looks like Greece but in LA it’s never too hot or too cold “I like the quality of life, our kids go to a private school” or any other dialogue in sale will be fine.


She walks on the beach, that ocean is not actually a place for swimming, we find sharks there and the opinion Californians have on them.


—We have to drive, I see, you don’t like driving you’ll have to get used to it, that and the gym.


The red light intensifies, the faces frown, 1979 or maybe 1982, no mass movements, the Cocteau Twins are big with young Californians at the time, in L.A. there were some fake punks who lived in luxurious villas, they organized parties on the patios of their plastic surgeon parents.


[I met a brunette there who looked like Mia]


But also some arty directors and rising actors; sometimes the servers became stars, shortly after, but no one really knew how to lose themselves like here.


Dialogues numbered 1 through 13
—I want to re-read some books, books stimulate me and make me stronger, at the cinema (the image makes everything) there’s this condensation on the camera that prevents seeing in, depth, it is very tempting to be guided by an atmosphere.


—It’s possible to be lured by silence and to wish for the sound to guide us.


In LA two women kissed each other, I remember this moment; was it just a spot for a vintage porno in faded colors (a popular aesthetic in the field of design)?


—I watched these two blonde women, naked, who had maintained long pearl necklaces, in a wicker chair, the light was blue, their blondeness was blue, and this blue became tangled in many layers, with their legs and their ankles becoming mauve on the photo once enlarged.


Red desk-blotter, first window
Rectangle, transparency, dark edges—
The heroine became a second role in the background categorized emerging pin-up, in this independent film, she slaved away (the quality of the image makes everything).


—We’ll call her Mia, blond, father German, mother Irish, physique Hitchcockian but without the ambivalence, voluptuous curves, Mia wears a brown wig that brings out her blue eyes and the paleness of her complexion.
(In this boarding school, no one knows who is who, no one knows who is I)
—But, yet it’s the same woman, I’m sure I recognize her.
—Yes actually, but the image doesn’t make everything.


So, various hypotheses
—I did not go to the cinema for years but I included myself in my list of unfindable films


Questioning, question marks
Repetition of the final sentence
Motives, suppressed adjectives


—The final scene didn't make me feel anything

                                                       but deep inside, she is devastated
                                                       in a sculpted house


3 o’clock, in front of the housing development barely out of the ground, the residents come to get the keys, they open the door of their apartment


A form of submission
They fool around with each other


I had repetitive dreams: I am almost superstitious when I keep quiet
No sentence seemed really positive despite the blue
“Coldly received”


Fade to black
Thesis of survivors who are fed up with
Aliases & memento to forget them
Something welcome: the replacement of the rumor with a strident note


“You enter a new cycle you’ll see nothing will be the same, or maybe you’ll see nothing because everything will have changed”


Nothing needs to be explicable if the explanation is the only thing that stays


Something shorter
—This bitch ripped you off


Features other than direct access to the sea: the waste collection is becoming decent
We could say boiler if everything hadn’t been taken away


With me as an extension of you
I bet you are
Smiling I feel that you wish me well

translated from the French by Hadley Sorsby-Jones and Sandra Moussempès


Sunny girls © Editions Flammarion, 2015