Everything that is done out of love is always done beyond good and evil. “Whatever is done out of love is always done beyond good and evil,” Nietzsche said. The movie "Rafael the Debaucher" is just about such love.
I. “She looked up and I looked at her.”
I love Raphael the Debaucher because it gives rare moments of luxurious tension of emotions and spirit, without spoiling them with a beautiful picture and impossible beautiful faces.
XIX century. The rise and decline of romanticism, with its manic but seductively beautiful obsession with suffering and young death. The aristocrats in love, Raphael de Lorris and Aurora, walk into the abyss as if on a tight tightrope, balancing between the desire to go and the desire to fall; they live in a state of tightly strained bow: neither the string can be loosened nor fired. Expression, affect, tear in such a “tension” so much that you shoot – you will certainly fall into the heart of another. And you will, of course. And they do. And they don't want to kill.
On the contrary, they want to save. It is good for you, it is good for you, it is good for you. He is from evil that does not go to her: debauchery, restlessness, falling into a ditch. Both are from the life that brings fatal changes to the beloved - the rebirth of the personality.
They love so much that they experience a moment that can really happen to a person only “beyond the edge of good and evil” – a moment of deep transformation into another. He's in it. She's in it.
Platonic miracle. Dante’s dream materialized: “She looked up and I looked at her.”
Reflect this phrase in the film “Rafael the Debaucher” and get: “he looked down, and I in him”, that is, the stunning (sinlessly accurate) mirror, which became both the plot and conceptual core of the film.
In Aurora’s bedroom, one candle illuminated by light hangs a mirror and a crucifix. Looking at the crucifix, the heroine looks in the mirror. Her ideal is Jesus, whom she imitates, helping the poor, visiting hospitals, doing charity.
Look in the mirror, she wants to see the crucifixion instead of her perfect beauty (heavenly, clean, though cool - never loved, even despised, men).
Raphael, who has probably had a thousand women, looks at Aurora at the beginning of the film as impeccable. The Queen! A supreme being. However, completely, in the full height of his present, he shows him her distorted mirror. In one of the final scenes (orgy scenes), Raphael peers at his beloved and sees in her his sad, sick, ugly reflection. He doesn't like it. To tears. Torture. Before suicide (I ordered a shot in my own heart).
Did the monster kill beauty?
Was the monster saved by beauty?
Did the monster make beauty a monster?
II. "Beauty!" I cannot bear the fact that another man, even with a higher heart and a higher mind, begins with the ideal of the Madonna, and ends with the ideal of Sodom. Even more terrible is he who, with the ideal of Sodom in his soul, does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it, and truly burns, as in the youthless years. No, the man is wide, too wide, I would narrow. Damn it, that's what it is! What is shameful to the mind is beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in the sodom? But what hurts, he speaks of it. – F. Dostoevsky
I do not know what the death of vice must be of the ideal. Beautiful? Sad, ugly?
And the death of the ideal by vice? Even sadder? What's worse?
But the battle of these opposites does not always look like a struggle against them.
The film (as in this quote from The Brothers Karamazov) reads ZA. Vice protects the ideal. And the ideal, loving vice, turns into it.
Aurora is very religious. But one day, before the crucifixion, the pious beauty will utter a non-canonical prayer: “I thirst for his face.” I crave his body. I want to feel it on myself.
The libertine Raphael's prayer in the finale is the "mirror" opposite: "Wake up, Aurora." Wash that dirt and dress decently. Go back to your garden with your friends.
From the brilliant theater in a luxurious white dress embroidered with precious stones, perfect, beautiful, Aurora runs to the slums, to hell, just to see him.
And he, taking the ugliest whore, falling into the most rotten tavern, crawls on the spitting floor in a drunken frenzy. And falls, falls...
And she, white, pure, stands above him and all glows, glows.
But she is ready to stain herself with the “ideal of Sodom.”
He does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it, and indeed it burns.
It really is a big man. Who would? He and she have a sea of love in their hearts. But... “It is terrible to die in the sea of thirst.” – Nietzsche
Forbiding himself to love Aurora, Raphael, like a monk, forbids not so much himself - she - to sin. This does not fit in with his nickname “debaucher” and his impressive Don Juan list (note, everyone on this list is ruined, not a single happy one).
But that's not even the point. And is it fair to create an ideal out of a woman, and then be afraid to even touch, tarnish, spoil? Become hostage to your own ideal? And make her a hostage? Is it fair to think you can’t get out of sodom? Is it fair to look down when you're upstairs? And being on top, not to believe in height?
III. “For he who forgets himself finds himself again” (from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi).
And yet... Looking into each other, Aurora and Raphael ceased to be hostages, overstepped their narrowness. Each recognized in the other that part of himself which had been preserved in the depths of his personal vanities. De Lorris was disgusted by the mud he used to boast about ("I'm disgusting.") And I like that! Aurora is an aversion to contrived and cold purity, narcissistic and detached beauty, which is not warmed by the warmth of mistakes, nor by the sparks of impulses, nor by the current of spontaneity, nor by the simple human desire to love. Aurora is clean. The worst libertines are afraid to stain you.
IV. “Whom the spirit of love touches, everything will be forgiven him, because he is not his own, in spirit, delighted...”
Heroes can be blamed in many ways. They died in vain: he – having ordered his death on a tightrope, she – married a hated old man (I think her suicide is “bloodier”), but there were things in their lives worth learning.
Mmm. Sort of like...
There were two ways, two choices, for both Aurora and Raphael: an easy boring life and a difficult one, but bright and intense. People say, “Life is easy, but there is no need for it, as it is without salt, but it is not tasty.”
Salt is bad. It's a fact. And maybe she kills. What if it has all the taste and all the salt of life?