Lionel. The lion. He refers to himself as “the lion”. Powerful, arrogant, awe-inspiring.

Lionel is an artist, a painter, often seen smudged and dirty with paint, careless and seemingly free from the social concerns that rule the rest of the world. Child-like, original. Feral. 

And successful. Famous and admired. 

But Lionel is also a needy egotist, a bully, a man in the grip of jealousy and fear. His self-confidence is an act, a fabrication in which he himself wants to believe. Like Narcissus, Lionel evades the truth and would probably die if he faced it: in a rare moment of self-awareness, he is appalled by his own words and covers his mouth with his hand in fear and disgust. 

His art is disturbing, nightmarish. We watch him at work on an image of a bridge, crossing the length of the canvas on which many figures, forms, presences also appear. During painting sessions, he plays loud music. Insert the tape, press play, pump up the volume: actions performed in frenzied motions denoting desperation, compulsion, dependency. Drug-like, the booming sound keeps reality at bay and helps him work through the night. Dizzying rock and roll highs, with Puccini’s dose of morphine to balance them out.

The bridge on the canvas — leading where? New York is “the only city”, he says.

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Lionel and his demons seem to be the central subject of Life Lessons, Martin Scorsese’s forty-minute film that is the first segment of New York Stories, a 1989 production comprising three contributions by three different directors.

Lionel is embodied by actor Nick Nolte in a creation of remarkable fullness and depth. In fact, to me, how such a performance can be achieved is almost unfathomable. As a painter, I find the depiction, in fiction films, of the act of painting or drawing nearly always phony. But Nolte is completely believable. The hands in close-ups are possibly not even the actor’s, but many wider shots show a perfect representation of the physical aspects of painting, of the handling of the brush, of the making of a specific kind of mark, of the way the energy of the artist fluctuates during a session. That is how a painter works; that is how a painter looks at the picture in progress, taking it in, waiting; that is how they look at it when they are unsettled, in the middle of fashioning some image, scanning the whole of what is there to have a glimpse of what it requires; and that is how they don’t even need to look at the whole, sometimes, and concentrate on a little square inch.

And the performance is truthful in every other respect, too. Nolte is realistically grotesque, in the alternation between self-confidence and self-denigration, in the way he occupies space, in the ways he says “I love you”. (It is a hallmark of his insecurity that Lionel says “I love you” too many times.) 

From a certain perspective, this time period was Nolte’s golden era. A look at a few films in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties and one would have good reason to think he was the greatest actor who ever lived. Just before Life Lessons, he had been a slim and wiry man-god in Farewell to the King, soon after he would be a dangerous, obscene bear in Q & A, always with a disquieting intensity, a nerve-wracking mix of stillness and brusque movement, of attentiveness and confusion. As if permanently unsure of his place, permanently wondering “Where am I?”, “What has happened?”, “Why don’t they understand me?”. A man who can, on a given moment, either break things or create delicate, intricate shapes with masterful, precise brushstrokes. 

But if Lionel is so captivatingly portrayed as to appear to be the focal point of Life Lessons, it is the trajectory of another character, Paulette, that confers unexpected significance to the story.

It is a crucial part of Lionel’s existence that he lives and works in New York, and the city that gives this movie project its title is, in Scorsese’s segment, more than a background — it is an ecosystem that allows someone like Lionel to exist, and is in turn defined by his presence and that of others like him. Despite the short duration of the narrative, and the lingering impression upon watching that most of it is spent with Lionel in his studio painting feverishly, there are scenes taking place on rainy streets, in diners, at a party, at a live performance, at the glamorous gallery opening. New York is conjured on screen: a place full of vitality and affording opportunities, but also hard, violent and inhumane.

The successful, tormented artist who has wedded his identity to the city is a dazzling subject. But the filmmakers extend the same attention, the same loving curiosity, to the girl who just wants to get away.

Paulette wants to leave New York and maybe go back home.

And that different experience of the city, one of dislike and rejection, holds the deeper meaning of the film.

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The nature of Lionel and Paulette’s relationship was originally inspired by events in the life of Dostoevsky. The screenplay of Life Lessons was created by Richard Price, carrying on from an old desire of Scorsese’s to adapt the diaries of Polina Suslova, a woman who had had an affair with the Russian writer and was fictionalized as the Polina of his novel The Gambler. In the book Scorsese on Scorsese edited by Ian Christie and David Thompson, the director states: “The diaries reveal the real woman behind the character in the book, and I wanted to make a film about this relationship.” Interestingly, this concern with “the real” person behind the female participant of stories that are ostensibly set in motion by men is something that can be found in other Scorsese films: in Cape Fear and Casino, especially, there seems to be a tension between the necessity to tell the developments of the plot and the desire to explore the particular drama of the woman placed in the middle of them.

In Life Lessons, Lionel and Paulette appear, at the outset, as two of a kind, as she can be as manipulative as he is, and is also prone to her own delusions. But they end up as opposites. When she first manifests her wish to leave New York, Paulette is unable to articulate her motives, but throughout the film it is made obvious that she feels a visceral, if not intellectual, revulsion to Lionel’s general attitude and perspective of life. His arguments and reasoning, from claiming that being an artist has nothing to do with talent, “you do it because you have to”, to his advice on how Paulette should deal with a recent ex-boyfriend, may constitute his idea of “life lessons”, and may even contain some truths, but Paulette senses something wrong. She lashes out physically more than once, her body transmitting better than words that she feels closed-in and constricted. It is not merely that Lionel is suffocating her. She apprehends that he himself is utterly trapped, and that the same fate might easily befall her.

Initially, Paulette is partly incapable of breaking free, partly unsure of what she really wants, toying with the idea of staying, but continually expressing discomfort. When, after a series of situations that work to consolidate her determination, she finally decides to leave, there is a climactic exchange that brings the real point of contention between the two characters to the surface, which is simply the manner in which people should treat each other: Paulette exclaims “maybe if I was as good [a painter] as you I wouldn’t care about anybody else either”, while Lionel equates his work with a bad habit, a compulsive practice he must abandon to be able to act rightly: “I should just stop… stop painting and just be a nice person for you”. He is not fully in earnest, and is using that formulation in order to further bully Paulette, but his words still give away a perception that something in his life is obstructing what should be natural sympathetic behaviour. Indeed, Lionel’s pathos is that he lives on the brink of such awareness; the stylistic device, used at points in the film, of the opening up or closing down of the frame through the use of a diaphragm placed over the lens carries dramatic resonance because it alludes to that conflict between revelation and concealment, clear view and unhealthy fixation, freedom and imprisonment. In any case, Lionel’s predicament is the stranglehold his ego exerts on his humanity; Paulette’s constant unease is an innate aversion to egotism.

It is no wonder Scorsese would later be interested in a story about Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. His investigation of characters like these provides a frame of reference for concepts such as karma and samsara. Lionel, in his many obsessions, dependencies, and in his role of successful artist, is a man caught in a vicious circle, unable to step away, reinforcing his attachments instead. 

If, in the final scene, Lionel seems to be calm and composed as never before, he is patently only deepening his self-delusion. Paulette, who had at moments looked up to him, sought his advice and guidance, is the one who moved closer to any sort of enlightenment. To cut free from Lionel, and especially to leave New York, constitutes nothing less than a kind of self-denial, since she is abandoning that which was established as appealing and desirable and was, in fact, something she craved — but ultimately perceived as an impediment to becoming a better human being.

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