Peter Brunette

My first meet­ing with the crit­ic, schol­ar, and teach­er was not what you’d call a con­ven­tion­ally aus­pi­cious one. It was some time over half a dec­ade ago, at the Toronto Film Festival, on what the Canadians call a line-up, and a rather crowded one at that. My recol­lec­tion of it is rather hazy, which is prob­ably all to the good. For what it’s worth, let’s just say the exchanges we shared com­bined the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall with any num­ber of “what the fuck are you look­ing at?” encoun­ters of New York legend.

Eventually the dust settled, and apo­lo­gies and prop­er intro­duc­tions were proffered. In a weird way, we were both kind of glad that things had got­ten off on the “wrong” foot for us, as it enabled us to dis­cov­er straight away that we shared a kin­ship that exten­ded into pos­sibly less gentle realms; that is, each of us learned imme­di­ately that the oth­er was an indi­vidu­al of strong opin­ions, large appet­ites, and poten­tially tem­pes­tu­ous temperament. 

We nev­er became intim­ates, but we were stead­fast film fest­iv­al pals; when our paths crossed again in vari­ous loc­ales we’d invari­able sched­ule a big meal and there’d always be great food, fant­ast­ic com­pany, a lot of laughs, a good deal of loud opinion-expressing, and rol­lick­ing good fel­low­ship. Peter was also a man of excep­tion­al gra­cious­ness, both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al; he exer­ted effort above and bey­ond the call of any duty to get me a pos­i­tion in a pres­ti­gi­ous film crit­ic’s soci­ety, which only ended up not hap­pen­ing because of my own lack of fol­lowup. I had not seen him for a while, since I’ve been trav­el­ing the fest­iv­al cir­cuit a good deal less in the past couple of years. I’m shocked and deeply saddened to learn of his death of a heart attack at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy. 

Sometimes I really don’t under­stand the ven­er­ated phrase “the long good­bye.” A lot of Peter’s friends had no chance to say any kind of good­bye, dir­ectly to him, at all. I am, of course, not going to get a chance to sit down to a din­ner with him and wish him well on his jour­ney after express­ing my irrit­a­tion that I won’t be able to take pleas­ure in his always enga­ging, eru­dite, and warm con­ver­sa­tion ever again. This is the kind of sud­den, unfair passing that can make even an athe­ist angry with God, and at the same time drive him or her to pray­er; the pray­er being, of course, that Peter’s spir­it, so vital and so essen­tial when he was among us, be at peace now. So long, brother.