Synopsis

It is 2012 and a very old Louis van Gasteren is reviewing an earlier phase in his life in a video editing suite. In the movie he is watching, a 42 year old Louis stands watching garbage cans loaded into a truck in 1964. The older Louis reflects upon his own image as a young man, "At the age of 90, it's strange to look back at myself then. I see myself, knowing what has happened to me since, Yes, it's me but then again it isn't." We leave the old man and pick up the story as it unfolds beginning in 1964 in Amsterdam, when as a young man Louis began to film his feelings and experiences in a full length feature film. We see him and his family at a carnival, shot in gaudy color, a different time, before the 60s really happened, feeling almost like the 19th century. We hear a player piano. Louis is with his two young children from his first marriage, Louis and Dominique, and his second wife Jacqueline and their newly born daughter Mardou. They are watching a fat mother and daughter on a carnival stage, who together, we learn from a sign, weigh 900 pounds. The carnival barker explains that the fat women are very rare and gives their exact dimensions as they sit pleasantly in seats for the audience. The family then rides the carousel as Louis in voice over introduces each of them and himself to the viewer. In voice over Louis explains that he is living the "illusion" of a lasting family life. The film then regresses into Louis' past, as he explains through photos and archival footage that a few years earlier his parents had died, his mother three months after his father by taking her own life. His father had been a famous stage actor, Louis van Gasteren Sr., his mother a singer and communist who had quit the concert stage to travel through rural Spain, learning Spanish ballads from the peasants. Haunted by his mother's death, Louis plays for a colleague a recording he has of his mother singing in Spanish. He picks up a post card from her in Spain and explains she would describe not the temperature and food of a foreign country like most people, but the feel of a place like a hot Spanish harbor. Driving through the landscape of his childhood with his wife, he points out to her the sites he would visit as a boy when his family lived in the Hague, such as riding on the back of his father's bicycle and the things his father would observe. We see a shadow of a boy and a man on a bicycle seemingly following alongside Louis' and his wife's car as they drive down the country road. He says he thinks about his parents all the time. The film ceases to look backward in time, and it comes to present day 1964 in a series of scenes in which Louis plays himself, along with actors, enacting a life of bourgeois meaninglessness. He plays himself as a man with no true interests besides indulging in pleasures. He catches the eye of an attractive woman in an airport in Zurich, and by editing alludes that he begins an affair with her. Cutting to his wife at home feeding their one year old child, we see that he has no spiritual direction or real scruples. Louis is then called to a meeting in a house in England, where a very respectable man who has brought along his elderly and apparently wealthy mother, informs him that he is the husband of the woman and that he has discovered the affair. Louis remains polite but quiet, obviously uncomfortable, as the man and his mother explain that they have called him to make him an offer of 5000 guineas to admit to having been with the man's wife, as the wife is "quite mad" and this will allow him to get a divorce. The husband explains to Louis that he will be 'helping them out' to admit to the affair, but Louis tensely folds his hands and forfeits the bribe, saying with mock dignity he cannot help them and is "terribly sorry." Louis is now walking in Belgrade with a man much like himself. He explains that at a film festival in Yugoslavia he ran into an Italian journalist, Luigi de Santis, and the two began to hang out together, laughing off the language barrier since neither speak the native Serbian. On a whim they decide to book a plane to Zagreb, and go into a street side travel agency. The pretty blonde at the desk informs them in Serbian, "Nama Aviona Za Zabreg." The two laugh out loud, not having any idea what it means. The woman explains in English that it means, "There is no plane for Zagreb, tomorrow." The two leave without the tickets and go brawling in the bars, finding the incident inexplicably funny. Romping about drunk late into the night they keep repeating to locals, "Nema Aviona Za Zagreb," the only phrase they know in Serbian. But after parting from his friend Luigi, the phrase mysteriously lingers in Louis' mind and causes in him a kind of turning point in his otherwise aimless life and thoughts. He finds he cannot get the phrase "Nema Aviona Za Zagreb" out of his mind, as it falls off the tongue and has a quality to him, as if saying more than it appears to. He shortens the phrase to "Nema" (which in Serbian literally means "there is no.") "It became a catch-phrase that I summarized as the word Nema. Nema presupposes shared feelings and like-minded expectations. What Nema expresses is good will and a great incapacity. Nema and life as such cannot be tied down. You are in them, yet always off the mark." This begins an internal shift in his thinking, and from simply this phrase "Nema Aviona Za Zagreb" he develops an idea. He decides that he wants to film "everything." Excitedly explaining his film idea to his wife at home as she is cooking, and he is pacing their living room area, he says: "I want to show everything, because every observation I make fits in with that. Look Jacq, every step I take also inwards everything I am involved in." From this point forward, he begins to question everything that he has ever heard, and to observe for himself and seek his own answers. He abandons his playboy existence. His interest has turned internal. Staring at himself in a distorting mirror right after the scene with his wife, he says in narration: "I am of the opinion that life is one big illusion. I lost faith in the idea that parents and teachers are always right." Deciding that "life is not what it seems," he begins a series of experiments to see if things he was taught or assumed all his life are true, and there is a series of scenes showing his search, initially using trivial and humorous examples the name of an insect he once saw which he is told "does not exist," trying to fire a BB gun at a church bell he had always bragged he could get a C or a B-flat from, and tries and learns he cannot. He travels to Vancouver to visit an old middle school friend from the 30's and together they call one of their old school teachers to point out he was wrong about the pronunciation of the word "Vancouver" as "Vancouver," and it all winds up a joke as Louis has set up a recording to say, "It is Vancuvver, and will always be Vancuvver. You fail!" He then begins to question what he really sees. Taking his son Louis on a ride through the countryside in the snow, he shares with his son how to observe life directly, and see what others do not. As he and his son run through the snow, in voice over he narrates that about this time he decided to experiment with LSD. (At this time LSD was still legal and could be used therapeutically.) In how many dimensions can someone see, think, and feel? In order to answer this question I started experimenting with LSD. I used LSD to investigate what the drug did to me and my surroundings. But I mainly wanted an answer to the question: is the human species, being the only one capable of reflecting on itself and familiar with only a few dimensions, adequately equipped for life? Then the film takes a darker turn. Louis is flying to West Germany as we see a newspaper clip and hear a radio announcer explaining that a teenage boy in Berkeley has jumped out a window on LSD thinking he could fly. Louis goes to the home of the parents in West Germany where they have recently learned of their son's death. They speak with him gratefully, though tense and deeply grieving. Louis' voice is as gentle and kind as possible. Telling Louis their son was interested in writing, they give Louis a recording of a poem written and recorded by him just weeks before his death. We hear the poem recited by the boy over scenes of young teenage hippies in the Haight-Ashbury. Poem one: The spinning top. They keep telling me to go to school so I can graduate, get a job and become a respectable citizen. Yeah, society wants to wind you up like a top and spin you in a single hole and tell you to spun your grave. I saw my death surmount the windfall rock and, spinning, dove into the mother-sculptured stone. Then down the dawn I saw the centre grooves sinking and lock, anchor, two ninths gravity, heavy as the sun. Not even moons lightened the load, there was no zodiac. And in the centrifugal force fed cell, the serpent tail whipped out a life and no one wept the birth - why weep the dead? Louis crosses the globe again, to Millbrook, New York, to ask Timothy Leary about LSD. Leary speaks directly to Louis' camera outside his Millbrook estate: This is the centre of the LSD religion in the United States. We have come here, as men have done for millions of years, to get away from the insanity of the American society. We find God, here in our body; we find it in flowers, we find it in our senses, and we find it in love for our fellow man, and for all forms of life. This is a meditation house. For the last four years, people come here day and night to take LSD and to find God. These people that you see, here today, are right now in the middle of an LSD session. They are participating and celebrating their religious experience. This large house is the centre, during the winter, for our life and for our worship. Louis intercuts the interview with Leary with more scenes of his interview of the grieving boy's parents. Louis asks Leary to address the boy's death. Leary gives a kind of unsentimental reply that leaves Louis feeling disturbed and unsettled. Timothy Leary: "I share their grief and I would try to help them understand why and how this could have happened, in such a way that they might feel as proud of their son as he'd been an astronaut who had crashed, or someone who had fallen in a line of high spiritual duty." We now see clouds from an airplane window as Indian music fades in. We see shots of India, as Louis travels to the far side of the world to speak with the guru Meher Baba about what experience of Godhood is and whether a drug can give a person such an experience as Leary has claimed. Meher Baba tells Louis that real experience of Godhood is continuous, without any break in it, and does not require a drug. He says these experiences by the use of drugs are mere hallucinations, make people feel temporarily uplifted, but eventually lead to madness. The film cuts back to Millbrook, showing it in a more negative light than before, showing that Louis has seen through this illusion too now. People are passing around a bottle of cheap wine and look simply stoned, drunk and unwell, dancing carelessly. The voice over of Timothy Leary explains that he knows what Baba really says, but in expressing it, directly contradicts what we have just heard through Louis' going to meet Baba directly and asking him in person. From this point on Louis stops taking LSD, but adds that if it had not been for LSD he is sure he would have taken his life . . . like his mother and his grandfather. From here on out, the movie becomes very different. The pace is stepped up as the 60's are now in full swing. Avoiding the drug scene, Louis now intermingles with artists and intellectuals of the time, and puts on numerous exhibits of his own art. The film becomes at times surreal, as theme after theme is covered. Louis travels with his family to a lovely fishing village in Spain, where his daughter, now older, is serenaded by a Spanish singer in a restaurant. The sense of Spanish singing brings to mind Louis' mother who sang rural Spanish ballads. Much now becomes symbolically resolved. Louis sees a large turtle caught in the harbor on the beach in Spain surrounded by a large crowd. The turtle is picked up and carried, looking more like a crucifixion than a fishing scene. The turle is carried on its back on a plank heaved onto a man's shoulder, and through the camera we see the crowd following, upside-down, as if through the turtle's eyes. Louis follows the turtle to market, and bids on it and wins it. With his two older children Louis and Dominique, Louis hires a row boat to go back out into the harbor with the turtle and set it free. His son, wearing swimming goggles, dives in as the turtle is dropped overboard, and resurfaces to tell his father excitedly that he saw it swim away. Louis pulls his son into the boat and embraces him on both cheeks, both of them very happy, seemingly Louis having released himself from the haunt of the loss of his mother by suicide. It should be noted that this is exactly the kind of "hot Spanish harbor" mentioned near the beginning that as a boy his mother would send him postcards from in her travels. Louis is at a lavish and well-attended gala for an opening of his works of art. He has numerous exhibits. Marshall Mcluhan introduces an exhibition on New Style Painting in Toronto including sculpture and photography by Louis, explaining that life is taken to a new level of meaning through a new phase of art. Standing in an elevator for television cameras, Mcluhan says: "Painting now moves from representation to a direct encounter with the environment. And this involves a certain amount of violence. And the artist thereby helps us to a new discovery of identity by this means. When the new environment goes around the electric environment, goes around the old mechanical one, the old mechanical environment, the road, the car, the auto, these forms become art forms. Just as when satellites go around the planet, the planet itself becomes an art form, in fact ceases to be nature in the old sense at all. I now declare this exhibition open and I am going to move on to another level." Then the elevator door humorously closes on Mcluhan's face, implying he is 'going up' and leaving the crowd. Louis is driving on a deserted dirt road, and comes to a strange sight. A mountain has collapsed into the road, creating an impasse, implying the end of the road for Louis in some symbolic sense. Louis gets out of the car and stares at the wall with his sunglasses on, silently, as we hear the crickets. Next he is in an airplane in a parachute, still in the 60's, about to jump. The narration explains that about this time in 1969 his wife Jacqueline left him, taking their daughter Mardou, now five. The heartbreak, Louis explains in voice over, was so bad that he had no choice but to stop making the film. Only now, over four decades later, does he find that he has the courage to complete it. He jumps out in the parachute and lands upon the ground, the parachute blowing in the wind echoing his leap of courage and the refrain of the film, "There is No Plane for Zabreg." We see Louis at 90 again as we did at the beginning, still sitting in his editing room. He speaks directly to the camera: "You have looked at five years of my life . . . I shall spare you the other 85." He gives a wry old-man smile. As "Really and Sincerely" by the Bee Gees begins to play, we see Louis again as a young man, sitting in a train staring out the window at the blurring tracks. In closing, the film's script reads simply: Credits on train tracks. Last shot: From Gasteren looking out the window of a train. The rails lead their own lives with coupling and uncoupling. They go on alone or seek support from another track.