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In 1990 Federico Fellini directed La voce della luna, his final film. In the years before his death in 1993, unsuccessful in raising funds for new projects, Fellini created a TV commercial for a bank and dedicated it to a Signora Vandemberg. The actress in the commercial bore a strong resemblance to Fellini’s last lover, a Dutch actress named Rosita Steenbeek who had come to Rome years earlier, accompanied by another actor, both dreaming of being cast by Fellini. The other actor was Arthur Japin.

In an afterword to Director’s Cut, his third novel to be translated into English, Japin writes, “I especially blamed the famous director for taking the magnificent, strong, independent woman who taught me, as a young man, to live without caring in the least what other people thought, and slowly but entirely making her dependent on him, to the point that she was finally reduced to living in a tiny cell above a church in which he had installed her, doing nothing more than sitting by the phone, waiting for his call.

“I wondered how it was possible for love, which normally makes people stronger, to make someone weaker, her world smaller.” The TV actress spoke her lines in Italian-inflected Dutch and wore a leopard skin coat – the signatures of Rosita.

But Director’s Cut doesn’t reflect an authorial mind merely wondering into prose, nor is it primarily interested in the facile mechanics of victimhood. It is a rich, resonant, and deeply humane performance. The novel is narrated by Fellini – called “Snaporaz” here, a nickname he had given to Marcello Mastroianni — as if dictating the plot for a screenplay, then moving to reminisce about his childhood, the war years, and his marriage to Giulietta Masina — called “Gelsomina” here, the character she played in “La Strada” (1954). Japin’s feel for the clashing forces in a singular personality allows him to perform at a level far above the usual narratives of adopted voices. One never hears the clanking of invention.

The central story follows two Dutch actors, Gala Vandemberg and Maxim, beginning with Gala’s girlhood and her tempestuous, even violent relationship with a critical but caring father. Next, she and Maxim meet in acting class, cast in lead roles. He is handsome, cerebral and drawn to Gala’s seemingly uninhibited behavior, a challenge flung at the world in the manner of daring to cross her father. Together they journey to Rome and conspire to attract the attention of Snaporaz. But how does Snaporaz know all of this? Had Gala given him these details during their liaison, or is he coloring in the empty spaces?

Although the story ends with the production of a commercial and not a film, the director’s cut represents what Snaporaz/Fellini’s most psychologically developed story might have sounded like in his own words, embracing all of his major themes and creative theories. “Everything is possible as long as you’re still making up the story,” he says. “This is the phase of waking dream.” This is why Director’s Cut amounts to so much more than an answer to why Gala/Rosita is willing to live under his spell. The Japin/Snaporaz world is one where creativity arises from the closing off of possibilities – and the created object or film lives because it expresses the eternal presence of myth. Although Japin doesn’t mention Fellini’s interest in Jungian depth psychology, his story is peopled with archetypal characters. Gala and Maxim are edenic characters fallen into the profane complexities of Snaporaz’s cinematic Rome.

Before Gala leaves for Italy, her mother takes Maxim aside and says, “Do you understand, Maxim, why we can never completely enjoy the things we love most? … Always afraid it will be taken from you.” Focused compulsively on and confined within a personal mythology, each person uses the world, and is used by it, to produce a livelihood and to generate art. This idea is the dynamic core of Director’s Cut, told through subterfuge that sounds like truth, and hard-core facts that dissolve into ambiguity. It is a novel with the whirling feel of lived life, a full consideration of basic motives and desires.

“Nobody who has seen my chaotic films will be able to believe it, but I strive for tranquility of a Japanese print,” says Snaporaz. “I show life as it shows itself to me; what really matters is hidden behind an enormous thigh that just happened to wander past. Maybe I could gather all my strength and use both hands to push away that floral dress and reveal the truth, but the truth is so much less attractive. If I don’t see something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. If I don’t show something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there for all to see.” Japin lets Snaporaz tell his story in this manner. But there is no chaos in the telling, only in the deftly drawn psyches of the characters.

Gala is an epileptic. One of her legs is shorter than the other. Her head is too large. She radiates sexual energy but is oblivious to its effect. The lurking tension of the plot of Director’s Cut radiates from her character. While in Amsterdam, Gala had been photographed in the nude depicting fairy tale characters. She has this epiphany:

“With a stab, Gala experienced the menace of the male in its full intensity for the first time; she was astonished, as if the danger came from a completely unexpected source. She shuddered to think of the depths behind his mask. She did not fear the sorrow, the insecurity, or the pain a man inflicted by loving you – child’s play, compared to this unnamable something. She shudder at the realization of the true perversion, the loneliness of the role men have to play, the part that everyone, themselves included, expects them to play with such abandon that if they have to they will destroy you to make you believe it. In a flash, Gala became aware that this natural, insurmountable inequality renders impossible any hope of fully abandoning oneself to the other. This must be why every woman discovers sooner or later that, together with love, this menace has forced its way in to her unnoticed.”

Director’s Cut treads a fascinating path between action and lyric analysis, setting the perceptual limits within which Japin/Snaporaz permit us the illusion of glimpsing, testing and measuring that which escapes our full comprehension. It’s quite a feat. In one set of memories, Snaporaz recalls how his village’s prostitute and her daughters managed to receive communion from a resisting priest after the townspeople refused to attend services until the ladies were treated respectfully:

“When he ascended the pulpit on that day, the priest spoke to us for the first time from his heart instead of out of the commentaries. ‘Such is the mercy of God,’ he said, ‘that he has told me that I was wrong: only one thing is worse than being used …’ At that, his congregation called out as one man, ‘Not being used!’”

Drawn into this magnetic narrative, the reader of Director’s Cut is used as well to validate the psychological forces that led to Snaporaz’s portrayal of Gala/Rosita in his commercial – to use up life for creative ends. Japin may have been outmanned by Fellini in losing Rosita, but he treats him with utmost compassion here. The kind-hearted Maxim, the shadow of Japin’s younger self, learns a lesson: his desire to protect Gala consisted of something more than his stated intentions. When he finally experiences his own shamelessness, it liberates him for a moment: “This is why shamelessness is so addictive, so triumphant: it undermines the dictatorship of small-mindedness.”

Japin gives us several memorable minor characters who underscore the various strains of thought – an aging opera singer, the bawdy maid at the house where Gala and Maxim rent a room, a neurologist who hires out a new woman for sex every Friday, a famous set designer who longs for Maxim, and Snaporaz’s dying wife Gelsomina. Of their marriage he says:

“It’s strange how a love that keeps growing starts to hurt like sorrow. Perhaps because at the same time it grows you see the outline dissolving. You need to make haste to show the other how great your love really is. You can tell her every day how much you love her, but it gets to be like a nagging pain whose exact location you can never pinpoint when the doctor asks. Finally, you feel you need to scream your love out loud, because it’s too big to capture in words, or even show in pictures.”

I must say that my love for this novel, an admiration which grew from page to page, hurts like sorrow.

As a finishing touch, click here to watch a video of Rosita Steenbeek.

 

[Published by A.A. Knopf on February 12, 2010. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. 340 pages, $27.95 hardcover. First published in The Netherlands as De droom van de leeuw,]