I've long held affection for Adair's sexy, cinema-saturated short novel, though revisiting it now now I found it functions more than anything as an aide-mémoire to a younger version of myself. In the 15+ years since my first read I've encountered a lot of literature that Adair is drawing from both overtly & impicitly, which made the depiction of transgressive sexuality feel not just a bit hollow, but sometimes downright silly. It rather reminded me of softcore film adaptations that use Sade or The Story of O as a justification to show copulation & lots of flesh but dispense with the deeper implications of sex, desire, & power those texts grapple with. Even Cocteau, though nowhere near as explicit, ultimately gets to something more kinky & feral, even depraved.

What does hold up, however, is the celebration of cinema, & the intensity of the pious cinephile life. The opening pages, nestled within the storied Cinémathèque Française of the 1960's, is tour-de-force, & gets at the religious fervor & ecstasy film can inspire in a way I still have never really encountered elsewhere. And the trio of American innocent abroad Matthew + the worldly twins Théo & Isabelle are tremendously appealing. Meanwhile, Adair's prose vacillates between feeling both overwritten & underwritten, sometimes within the span of a single page.

But even if I won't hold it up in such high regard now, it's still a fun, quick read that I quite enjoyed & will likely return to again at some point. It's been even longer since I've Bertolucci's adaptation, & now I'm curious how it will hold up.

If they chose to sit so close to the screen, it was because they couldn't tolerate not receiving a film's images first, before they had to clear the hurdles of each succeeding row, from spectator to spectator, from eye to eye, until, defiled, second-hand, reduced to the dimensions of a postage-stamp and ignored by the double-backed love-makers in the last row of all, they returned with relief to their source, the projectionist's cabin.