Page 613 - A Little Life: A Novel

there was unanimity about at least one thing: the two leads, Willem
Ragnarsson and Fausta San Filippo, were fantastic, and would go on to
have great careers.

Over the years, Life After Death had been reconsidered, and rethought,
and reevaluated, and restudied, and by the time Willem was in his mid-
forties, the movie had become officially beloved, a favorite among its
directors’ oeuvres, a symbol of the kind of collaborative, irreverent,
fearless, and yet playful filmmaking that far too few people seemed
interested in doing any longer. Willem had been in such a diverse collection
of films and plays that he had always been interested in hearing what people

named as their favorite, and then reporting his findings back to Willem: the
younger male partners and associates at Rosen Pritchard liked the spy
movies, for example. The women liked Duets. The temps—many of them
actors themselves—liked The Poisoned Apple. JB liked The Unvanquished.
Richard liked The Stars Over St. James. Harold and Julia liked The Lacuna
Detectives and Uncle Vanya. And film students—who had been the least

shy about approaching Willem in restaurants or on the street—invariably
liked Life After Death. “It’s some of Donizetti’s best work,” they’d say,
confidently, or “It must’ve been amazing to be directed by Bergesson.”
Willem had always been polite. “I agree,” he’d say, and the film student
would beam. “It was. It was amazing.”
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Life After Death, and one
day in February he steps outside to find that Willem’s thirty-three-year-old

face has been plastered across the sides of buildings, on the backs of bus-
stop shelters, in Warholian multiples along long stretches of scaffolding. It
is a Saturday, and although he has been intending to take a walk, he instead
turns around and retreats upstairs, where he lies down in bed again and
closes his eyes until he falls asleep once more. On Monday, he sits in the
back of the car as Mr. Ahmed drives him up Sixth Avenue, and after he sees

the first poster, wheat-pasted onto the window of an empty storefront, he
shuts his eyes and keeps them shut until he feels the car stop and hears Mr.
Ahmed announce that they are at the office.
Later that week he receives an invitation from MoMA; it seems that Life
After Death will be the first to be screened in a weeklong festival in June
celebrating Simon Bergesson’s films, and that there will be a panel
following the movie at which both of the directors as well as Fausta will be

present, and they are hopeful he will attend and—although they know they