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In The Washington Post, many people of culture were asked the meaning of luxury today. While their responses differed, a throughline was made evident: being offline, or, in other words, unreachable, was the ultimate luxury. There has never been a more sibylline time to go off the grid.
Thus, this newsletter reaches you from one of the oldest campgrounds in America, a smattering of dollhouse cottages in northeastern Pennsylvania, built before railroads connected the East to the West. (Don’t fact check that.)
Following are recommendations the algorithm won’t serve you, but Serviette will. Make yourself unreachable, and watch these films. They may be unreachable too, found on few streaming services, but it’s important to reintroduce friction into our lives.
A hidden gem from New Wave-era Japan, The Shape of Night (Noboru Nakamura, 1964) plays in the shadows of romance, danger, and existential dread. Handsome and brooding Yakuza member Eiji Kitami (Mikijiro Hira) rides in on his motorcycle to sweep wide-eyed factory worker Yoshie Namoto (Miyuki Kuwano) off her feet, and into a swirling cyclone of diamond-crusted depravity and degradation. Just as Byronic Hero’s lush, jammy rose is pierced by the metallic sting of diesel exhaust, young Yoshie trades college days for red-light district nights, the vivid neon lights casting a bitter pall onto her torpid romance.
Over the course of a few nocturnal encounters, full of tenderness yet fleeting like the snow, Marcello Mastroianni’s humble clerk courts a woman (Maria Schell) awaiting her lover’s return. Night after night, this pair roam an unspecified Italian city’s streets, a transitory romance never meant to last. An adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel White Nights, Le Notti Bianche (Luchino Visconti, 1957) cloaks a city with a temporary frost of intimacy, evaporating like snow before it hits the ground. Its atmosphere makes a natural companion to Frisson D’Hiver.
There is something scandalous, still, when a note of kush invades the nose. Even the faintest trace can trigger a visceral response—be it thrill or nausea, or both. There is both organic and dramatic flair in the pairing of kush with florals or fruits—a threshold-crossing of sorts might be about to take place. Jean Cocteau, enfant terrible of avant-garde era Paris, likened his heavy usage of opium to getting off a train moving him towards death. His “Orphic Trilogy”—The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960)—is an opiate of mythological proportions. The same friction animates Sour Diesel.
With acrobatic visual flourishes, director George Miller concocts a sweeping romance for the ages. Shy British scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) lands in Istanbul to research her chosen subject of narratology, and soon gets swept up in a romantic tryst she could never have hypothesized: with an ancient Djinn (Idris Elba). A fantastical love story filled, like Ruche, with Turkish delight, yet pricked by the nagging problem of interspecies romance, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) searches for the answers while still stopping to smell the roses on its ride to eternity.