When Laurel glanced at the cover of the DVD movie, “The Housekeeper,” that I brought home recently she said, “I can see why you want to watch this.” I was offended. True, the cover shows a beautiful curvaceous young woman, wearing every man’s fantasy of a “cleaning uniform,” posed provocatively on her side, smiling sensually. But the reason I chose this French sub-titled movie went far beyond the cover image.
All the way to the back cover, which summarized the plot. The aforementioned housekeeper, Laura, is hired by a balding man in his 50s, Jacques, who has separated from his wife and is having a lot of trouble keeping his apartment clean. The twenty-something Laura naturally falls in love with the middle-aged Jacques, a plot development that made perfect sense to me and slotted neatly into my own housekeeper fantasies.
And fantasies they will remain, so long as our own housecleaner is Jim, a hefty Mr. Clean look-alike who used to practice Tae Kwon Do and currently is an avid bow-hunter and dirt-bike racer. Jim is a terrific, highly dependable housecleaner, and if you have a problem with a macho guy doing that sort of work, I would recommend that you keep your opinion to yourself, around Jim at least (though normally gentle, he also has a wild side).
Laurel and I have used Jim for many years, ever since Laurel fired me from my “job” as a Hines household cleaner. My cleaning technique centered around Spiffits, disposable cloths optimized for every cleaning need in the house. There was a bathroom Spiffit, a kitchen Spiffit, a dusting Spiffit, and perhaps other Spiffits I have forgotten. Armed with my boxes of Spiffits, I was able to spiffily clean our house in fifteen minutes. However, after Laurel and I got married we discovered that her definition of “spiffily” was far removed from mine. So I was fired and Jim was hired.
Since Jim is at the opposite end of the yin-yang housecleaning spectrum from Laura, it was a pleasure to pop in the DVD, sit back, let the subtitles and images flow into my mind, and imagine myself single, mid-50ish (that part was easy), and the employer of a sexy young housekeeper who wears short skirts and low-cut tops while she cleans (Jim often wears shorts and tanktops, but believe me, the effect is quite different).
My reveries frequently were interrupted, though, with Laurel’s all-too-sensible comments. “Why would she clean wearing those sorts of clothes?” “A girl that attractive wouldn’t have any trouble finding a boyfriend her own age.” “She doesn’t really love Jacques; she’s just using him.” Without giving away the movie’s ending, I will simply admit, reluctantly, that Laurel made some good points. Not enough to totally obliterate my male housecleaner fantasies (note: “male” modifies “my,” not “housecleaner.”), but enough to partially erase them.
The Roger Ebert review at the above link echoed some of Laurel’s practical observations. Laurel likes to ask me, “What would you do with a sexy 23 year-old woman anyway?” I start to stammer out a reply, then Laurel mercifully interrupts: “No, I don’t mean that. You can’t do that all the time [at 55, that’s for sure]. What would you do with her otherwise?” This same question lies at the heart of “The Housekeeper.”
Ebert notes, “Young girls want to stay out very late and dance endlessly to barbaric music. Mature men are amused to spend a little time on the dance floor [in my case, let’s make that a very little time]—but not hours and hours and hours, surrounded by inexhaustible youth, the music so loud they can make no use of their treasured conversational abilities.”
Ah, how reality slices and dices our fantasies. Yet, really, I’d rather live a real life. I’m so much happier being married to Laurel than I would be to someone half my age. What we share, I couldn’t have with anyone else. This applies to the big as well as the small things. For example, what would it be like to say, “That reminds me so much of when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show,” and have your spouse look at you with a blank expression and ask, “Who is Ed Sullivan?”
To some degree or another we all have fantasies of being someone we are not, and of being with someone other than who we are with now. We think that a happier reality lies somewhere just over the horizon. But once we get there, the horizon shifts, requiring more traveling. The futility of such happiness-seeking is evident in movies such as “The Housekeeper.” The wonder is why it is so difficult to discern in the private cinematic productions that are our own lives.
Who are the Beatles?
Posted by: newspimp | March 11, 2004 at 03:53 PM