Last Tango in Toulouse Read Online Free Page A

wanting to move on to other things.

5
    My film-making husband David is a passionate man who can be exasperating to live with because of his entrenched attitudes towards all aspects of life. He’s not a flexible or easygoing person in any sense, and we have clashed frequently over all sorts of trivial, day-to-day incidents and concerns. He is inclined to get upset about things that most people regard as unimportant, and he is a man with a strong sense of routine and order, baulking at spontaneity or unexpected change. He likes things the way they are because it makes him feel secure.
    That said, he is also a highly charged creative individual, very loving and loyal to his family and friends and seldom boring to be around. He is a Scot by ancestry, and many of the character traits attributed to that race apply to him. He’s careful and considered, pedantic and exacting, and in many ways quite conservative, despite his appearance and the fact that over the years he has been responsible for producing or working on films that could be considered radical. He is therefore a contradictionin many respects. On the one hand, when working with scriptwriters and film directors and actors he can be inspirational with his intense enthusiasm and deep commitment to the project. At the same time he can be dour and negative, tending to anticipate the worst in any situation. When he is in this frame of mind or when he plummets, as he sometimes does, into a deep depression, I wonder what on earth I am doing with him.
    My ancestry is more on the Irish side, and I have the opposite disposition to my husband. I never worry myself about trivial matters, am irresponsible with money, laugh at situations that others would find grim, and generally regard most days as an opportunity for a celebration or a party. Yet somehow, despite our opposing personalities, we have weathered more than three decades of mostly happy cohabitation.
    One of the main reasons our relationship has survived is because, over the years, we have spent quite a lot of time apart. David’s career took him to Sydney every week, where he stayed three or four nights, sleeping in the back room of his office, being available for phone calls and meetings with his working colleagues twenty-four hours a day. He also spent long periods away from home filming or doing research for various film projects – in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey, France and Asia. His career has given him great satisfaction and provided financial security for our family, but I always felt it was at the expense of his involvement and participation as a husband and father. He enjoyed considerable success with many of his films, producing more than forty features that have been screened in cinemas and on television all over the world. In the late 1980s he made a controversial anti-apartheid film,
Mapantsula
, which was widely screened, receivedawards at several major film festivals and eventually earned him the 1988 Human Rights Australia Film Award.
    I was so proud of his achievements and his commitment to a risky cause, but my pride was tinged with bitterness. That particular film took David away from us for nine months, and when he returned he found living in Australia and being with his family an anticlimax after the intensity and danger of the film-making experience. He and his fellow film-makers had smuggled the film out of the country under the nose of South African Security so that it could be completed in London in time for the Cannes Film Festival (where it was an official selection). David felt such a buzz of excitement at their success that I suppose it was natural he would find home life boring by comparison. For me, this rankled.
    I also experienced a certain level of tension when David was at home, and I realise now, many years later, that it was because of our situation, having my mother Muriel under the same roof. While having Mum around was fantastic