Auster’s Muses

                 The writer Paul Auster is obsessed with the fount of creativity: some books investigate the magic, or how the trick is done. Often, as in Oracle Night, the protagonist is a writer writing. In his new movie, his second now opening the New Directors New Films series at Lincoln Center and MOMA—the muse herself is given form. She is Irene Jacob (famed muse of Polish director Kieslowski) playing the ethereal Claire Martin who shows up in bed alongside the fiction writer/Auster alter ego, played with great charm by David Thewlis. As the film is called The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the story is as surreal as inner lives go—the personal projected, literally. From the opening pan of framed family photos atop the mantelpiece, portraits of Auster, his wife the writer Siri Hustvedt, and their daughter Sophie signal the subject of Auster’s inquiry. You cannot get closer to home.

                You have to love a film that shows writers as important. The idea is as antiquated as Frost’s portable typewriter in a world of laptops, and oddly out of place when characters call on cell phones. Disbelief suspended, you follow the lovers’ discourse on aesthetics, on what is or isn’t real, on Hume and Kant. Up to the plot point where Martin burns the 37 pages of his newly written story to keep Claire alive, a Tinkerbell a la Hawthorne concept, the film’s surprises sustain interest. Something fizzles when the lovers separate and speak from different sides of a door, when Martin blindfolded, is permitted to see Claire only in mirrors. A mysterious “they” seems to be the problem. Doubling the writer/muse motif is the handyman who happens to write and his niece (the Soprano’s Michael Imperioli and Sophie Auster).  The story becomes as jumbled and inexplicable as inner lives go. The final frame follows the car winding down a country road, Martin happily driving with the vision of Claire in his rear view. One hears Sophie Auster’s lovely voice singing “Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day.” One thinks of the 1993 movie of Auster’s book, The Music of Chance, directed by Philip Haas, when the writer appears in a cameo driving off down a country road.

                In an informal poll I have learned that among favorite novelists, Paul Auster is #2 (after Kurt Vonnegut).  At Thursday’s screening of “Martin Frost,” many fans clutched first editions for Auster to sign. Surrounded by his muses, Irene, Sophie, and Siri, the author obliged.

                                                                                                               Regina Weinreich

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