Miriam: A Serialized Interview with Brian Pera -- Part Five of Five

Yesterday's winners of the "Miriam" sample and DVD are a.k.a. Warum and Zerami! Get in touch with me at the email address to the left and I'll send them.

(To all commenters: the Grand Prize winner will be announced tomorrow, Monday Sept. 19^th, at 9:00a.m. US Eastern Daylight Time.)

“For me, serialization means a story keeps on deepening and expanding over time.” -- Brian Pera, Writer and Director 

“Woman’s Picture,” the film, is a beginning. Filmmaker Brian Pera plans to continue exploring these characters in an open-ended series of short, web-based films over the next ten years or so. 

The segments, while at first view may seem unrelated as stories, do relate on “subterranean levels of mood and theme,” according to Pera. This is a process he likens to perfumes from a long established house like Chanel. Compare two of them, and the differences are obvious. But, when looking at the line through time, the differences become more muted, while the parallels become more apparent, and more complex.

Visit the other participating blogs for different angles. They’re listed at the end of this (and subsequent) posts. And stop by Evelyn Avenue  for all sorts of interesting stuff. “Miriam,” which is to be released in early October, will be sold there, and through Lucky Scent. 

For a look at Brian Pera’s short film “Melissa,” which was featured here yesterday, go here.

Question 5:

Have you ever known anyone like Miriam?

Pera: “I'm a lot like Miriam myself.  Because creating a character is a form of impersonation for me, a lot of who I am goes into it.  I try to understand what I would do in the situations that (the) character is in.  I've been frustrated and placed in positions of paranoia like Miriam, and I empathize.  She handles it about how I imagine I would.  She's in a situation where she doesn't know whom to trust and can't evaluate other people's motivations properly, or her own judgment, and she's faced with what for me is the ultimate test of endurance, the gradual loss of a loved one.

Miriam is also me trying to understand, drawing from my own experience, how the women I've admired (particularly my grandmothers) coped with adversity or their ambitions and the people who generated resistance to them.  Miriam is a hard working, driven person who wants to see the good in things rather than focus on the bad.  I appreciate that in people.  

A lot of my experience found its way into all of the Woman's Picture stories we've filmed so far, but nowhere more than MIRIAM, because of all the characters, she was closest to my memories of my grandmothers and the frustrations I felt they faced in life.  Miriam is ambitious and a creative soul, and she doesn't always know what to do with that.

Like her, I try to make something productive out of my frustrations, and sometimes that means living partially in a fantasy world.  You create the world you wish you lived in (for me, that's film; for her, it's a TV show and a TV persona) and you can find pretty quickly that you prefer the fantasy to reality, because in the fantasy you can work things out to your advantage and resolve things which can't be resolved in any other way.  You can imagine that your perceptions of people and their motives are exact rather than ambiguous and opaque.  Most of the people I know are like Miriam in that respect. We all have imaginations and visualize things before we do them.  We want the best for ourselves and to think the best of others.  And fantasy permits that.

I've known many women who, like Miriam, give a lot to a relationship, trying to keep it going, and suffer for it.  They're trying to be the best they can be, even when it goes against self interests.  They lose themselves somewhere in the process.  I watched some of the women in my family do that, sometimes repeatedly.  

I think it's easy to blame women for things.  I wanted to put a character you want to blame in a situation where you gradually see how ridiculous your judgment of her is.  I always disliked the way the men in my family judged women.  I had nowhere to put those feelings, and MIRIAM offered me the opportunity to address them and deal with them constructively, and to bring my grandmothers back in some way.  I felt like they were on the set with me.”

This post concludes the five-day interview serialization. Thanks for reading, everybody!

Visit the other participating blogs for more exploration of “Woman’s Picture,” reviews and short films in which women talk about their memories of perfumes. Links appear at the end of this post.

Andy Tauer has provided a very generous allotment of sample prize packages for the drawing, too. Details appear below.

 The drawing: Each day, I’ll pick two winners at random from that day’s comments, who will each win a package from Tauer Perfumes. This includes a sample of the fragrance “Miriam” and a DVD version of the “Miriam” short film, which opens in October. I’ll announce the names of the previous day’s winners with each day’s post.

Previous winners of the “Miriam” package won’t be eligible to win again until the drawing for the Grand Prize, a purse-sized sprayer of “Miriam,” which all commenters are eligible to win. That random drawing will be held at the end of the five-day series, and announced at 9:00 a.m. US Eastern Daylight Time, Monday, Sept. 19^th. 

All winners must contact me with postal details at the email listed to the left, by midnight US Eastern Daylight Time, Friday, Sept. 30^th. Otherwise, I’ll do a random drawing to select alternates.

Other participating blogs are:

Perfume Shrine   

 Persolaise

Perfume Smellin Things

Perfume Posse

The photo is a still from the film, of Ann Magnuson as “Miriam.”

Moon Drops

 I just got back from Florida, where I spent a couple of days with Carol, who writes WAFT. There were brush fires burning all around us, from months of drought. It was too smoky to walk outside, or go to the beach, or much of anything. So we hung out indoors, sniffing perfume, for two days. 

I spotted a green box in her collection that looked familiar. Pulled it out and turned it over. It was vintage Moon Drops.

I’ve recently returned from Memphis, where I was an extra in the forthcoming film "Woman's Picture", which concerns mothers, daughters and perfume. Moon Drops was my mother’s signature scent during a difficult time, the 80’s, when we lived on opposite sides of the U.S., and didn’t get along for long on my visits home. I thought of myself as hot stuff then, rising fast in a wicked and glamorous career, and I think that she, a lifelong wife and mother, might have been a little jealous. She made a point of being unimpressed. 

I didn’t know whether I should try the Moon Drops. I’d always turned my nose up at it. Drugstore stuff. Cheap. Revlon, for God’s sake! I’d been disappointed in her for putting away her Arpege and Moment Supreme and adopting as her signature...this? I was hesitant to smell it, afraid that it might bring back bad memories. But I decided to be brave, and sprayed some on my wrist.

Here was the slightly bitter alcohol and aldehyde blast I remembered. She would apply it generously, just before she’d leave the house, and that smell would linger in her wake. Then, I smelled some sort of white flower, followed by -- surprise! -- the trajectory of a Chypre. Orris. Green. Not sweet. Lily of the valley. Carnation -- probably eugenol, quite a bit of it. And finally, moss. Lots of moss.

The “notes” lists things I don’t smell much of -- ylang-ylang, fruits, honey, cedar. It’s the bitters I smell now. Perhaps the top and midnotes degraded with age, leaving only the structure, the dry bones. Sweetness tends to do that over time.

“The whole fucking world,” says Miriam, of “Woman’s Picture,” to her clueless boss, “is mothers and daughters, Grant.”  I’ve been turning that statement in my mind ever since I heard it. Is it true? 

My father wore Mennen’s Skin Bracer, the after-shave. I wouldn’t have been afraid to sniff that. The bottle of Moon Drops, though, seemed to hold a malevolent spirit, and I held the box for a moment while I considered it.

I appreciate my mother much more now that she’s gone. Hers was a tough life, always moving, raising her kids in the Sixties, that era of generational war, fought across the kitchen table every night; expectations, disappointments. I’m wondering now about her giving up the first-rate French perfume for this drugstore stuff. What was that about?

Practicality. An attempt to conform to small-town life. A bone-deep fear of being thought pretentious. That’s a generational thing, too, far from my era of single-malt Scotch and McMansions with five bathrooms, a time now coming to its own ignominious end. 

Carol loved the Moon Drops. As surprised as I was at its classic quality, she told me that she, too, had turned up her nose. She’d had the box for a while and hadn’t even opened it. Once she smelled it, she couldn’t stop spraying, evaluating, exclaiming.

I didn’t, though. It’s not that I don’t like the fragrance. I do. But when I had a signature scent, it was the lush floral oriental Bal a Versailles -- an attempt, I now know, to carve my own identity into that opposite coast, as far away from home as I could get. 

I came back with a decant of the Moon Drops, and another of Charlie, something else she wore back then. I’ll put them in my “Mom Kit,” I joked to Carol, “along with the Arpege and the Woodhue and the Moment Supreme.”  

Here’s the thing though: I’ll do just that. In a way, it’s the least I can do.

“Notes” for Moon Drops include aldehydes, gardenia, peach, bergamot, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris, honey, sandalwood, musk, cedar, moss, styrax, amber and benzoin.

Eclipse photo used under license from Dreamstime.com; © Emiliau | Dreamstime.com

I'm Ready for My Closeup -- Woman's Picture

You make such interesting friends doing this. I “met” (I wonder how much longer we’ll be putting that word in quotes in this wired time?) Brian Pera, who is cowrites the blog “I Smell Therefore I Am,” when he mentioned my blog in a year-end wrap-up. I was a neophyte then and utterly thrilled to be noticed. We began a correspondence, I found out he was a filmmaker and writer working on a project he called “Woman’s Picture,” an ambitious work in progress whose ongoing exploration of fragrance’s essential meaning encompasses, among other things, the primal relationships between mothers and daughters. 

It’s a short flight from Atlanta to Memphis, so when Brian asked me if I wanted to come up for a few days and participate in the shooting of a pivotal sequence between Miriam (Ann Magnuson), the home-shopping cable host who can’t help but get involved with the lives of her callers, and her elderly mother, Rose. In the scene shot yesterday, Miriam is with Rose in a luxury store, asking for assistance from sales associates as she tries to identify an old bottle of perfume that was Rose’s signature scent. The sight of the bottle and smell of the old perfume elicit an angry outburst from Rose, and we -- and Miriam -- realize that Rose is in the early stages of dementia. 

I’m an extra, a customer in the store.

I spent several years working in film production, but it was always behind the camera, as one kind of underling or another. This was the first time I’d ever been in front of one.  The actual scene involved pantomiming a conversation between a sales associate and a customer (me) as background to the emotional scene between Miriam and her mother. As I worked I began to think about the great early films -- the silents -  and how the actors made every gesture count. Remember Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”? “We had faces then!” Well, yeah. 

Brian also filmed a short sequence with me, talking about my favorite classic perfume Bal a Versailles. I was nervous, but knew the material, so I did ok -- well, I’m told. 

Life does hand one a surprise every now and then, doesn’t it?

I’m honored to be a part of this project. This kind of thing is what perfume is really about. Memory. Fascination. Sadness. Love. Life.

“Woman’s Picture” is about three women who don’t know each other, but are linked through fragrance, with its special power.

Andy Tauer is involved, too. He’s developing three special perfumes, his interpretation of the three characters who will comprise the central triptych -- Miriam, Loretta and Ingrid -- and the fragrances will be so named. These are planned for release over an 18-month period.  

To read more about the project and see a trailer for the upcoming first release, go to Evelyn Avenue, named after a beautiful old street in Memphis.

I’m sitting in my hotel room in early morning, writing this. Soon I’ll have to pack and check out and check in and fly home, to all my responsibilities, and the get-it-done rhythm of daily life. I guess I’d have to call this movie magic, the act of suspending the routine for a little while. Good fragrance is like that, too. It allows us to check out of get-it-done for a few moments, and enter a mysterious realm. I think that “Women’s Picture” will be the first film to look -- really look -- at perfume. 

The photo is Ann Magnuson, as Miriam.