Paper Smiles

I always love the scenes in movies that are set at train stations. Like those old wartime movies where the boys are hurrahed off at the train station and then welcomed back at the same station, changed and broken. Or movies that play on the routine of train stations, the way you may see the same people at the same time every single day for years and years and never know anything about them. I like the way train stations look, the orderly chaotic flow of people, the constant hustle and bustle, the different platforms the crowd of faces periodically separated by whooshing trains. The architecture of big train stations is always quite pleasing too.

So I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about a story. The story is about a man who spends his days watching people at a train station, he sits there all day drawing the people and making them smile in his pictures. I imagine he picks a character and draws them as they are, usually blank faced and rushed and then thinks about what could make that person happy, then makes them happy by drawing the same character but with a smile.

I’m thinking a few of those surreal European arthouse style moments where a blank faced business man suddenly makes eye contact with the crazy old picture man, tips his hat, clicks his heels and grins like the Cheshire cat, the action purely a figment of the old man’s imagination. But more than often the smiles are real smiles that have nothing to do with the man but he feels like he created them.

The artist would be an older man, in his sixties, I would probably call him Felix, or Oscar, dressed in clean but ill fitting clothes and with a bit of a homeless look about him, a bit crazy eyed. Think scruffy Geoffrey rush in op shop clothes. He’s been sitting in this one spot for years drawing the faces of the commuters and trying to work out what would make them smile.

The shy young girl who keeps checking herself in the mirror and making sure she looks ok would smile when she realised the boy she is waiting for is just as nervous as she is. The businessman with his briefcase in one hand and newspaper under his arm just getting off the train would smile when the nine letter word he had spent trying to work out the whole train ride just pops into his head when he gets on the escalator. There would be all kinds of smiles, shy smiles, sheepish smiles, guilty grins, naughty smiles, contented eyes only smile, the man doesn’t care what kind of smile he gets from them he just needs to make them smile.

At first it all seems quite lovely, this crazy old man trying to make the world happy by imagining he is making them smile with his thoughts and his pencil. Then as we get into the character of the man more, realised exactly how obsessed with this he is, that he is there every day, that his little unit is covered with these pictures, that occasionally he can’t make someone smile and he gets obsessed with them, trying to work out what would make them happy, the inability to draw them smiling makes him depressed and delusional.

Perhaps at some point he meets a young art student or film student or journalist who wants to know more about his story, maybe have an exhibition of his pictures. Through this second character we learn the old man’s story, that he has been drawing smiles since he was in his twenties, when his life fell apart. Something horribly tragic happened and he believed it was his fault because he couldn’t make someone happy. Perhaps post natal depression causes his wife to lose the plot and drowns herself and their young baby, Felix (the old man) then becomes obsessed with working out what makes people happy and starts drawing them, feeling he must make a difference to make up for his perceived horrible failings in the past.

ps. The current background to my blog title is a glimpse of the roof of the Musee D'Orsay, my favourite experience of Paris. The building was once a train station and is absolutely beautiful, the full photo can be viewed here, from where I stole it.