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Expressing the In-Between
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‘Cinema is that which is between things’
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1. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Tome
1:1950-1984 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma), quoted in Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester University
Press: Manchester, 2005) p. 153 (‘[Godard’s] definition of cinema as “ce qu’il
y a entre les choses” [“that which is between things’’]’).
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I |
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Manny Farber says of the The Big Sleep (Howard
Hawks, 1946, US): ‘[It] ignores all the conventions of the gangster film to
feast on meaningless business and witty asides’. (2) One of the ‘fine moments’
in the film, he writes, is ‘no longer than a blink’: Philip Marlowe, played by
Humphrey Bogart, looks up at a sign as he crosses the street from one store to
another. In fact, Farber is probably mistaken. Marlowe does not appear to look
up at a sign. Rather, he seems to be surveying the sky in response to loud
claps of thunder. A few moments later, after more claps, the heavy rain nearly
makes it possible for him to spend the afternoon sheltering in the Acme
Bookstore with the sassy proprietor played by Dorothy Malone. Instead,
disappointingly, work calls, and he must follow bad guy Geiger through the
stormy night. Bogart’s gesture is therefore not strictly, in Farber’s terms, a
piece of ‘meaningless business’ because it relates to the impending storm which
is a feature of the narrative. Yet, the spirit of Farber’s point remains: the
claps of thunder and Bogart’s gesture are incidental at this point. The thunder
and rain could credibly begin while he is in the bookshop.
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2. Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (De Capo Press: NewYork, 1998), p. 6.
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Farber’s
mistake (written before the privilege of repeated scrutiny permitted by video
recordings) does not undermine his deeper understanding of what the gesture
adds. He talks about the film having ‘a life of its own that goes on beneath
the story action ... All the unbelievable events ... are tied together by miserable
time jumps, but, within each skit, there is a logic of space, a great idea of
personality, gesture, where each person is’. (3) Moreover,
there is another ‘unnecessary’ gesture, which Farber does not mention. It takes
place on the other side of the street – and in the background of the shot –
where Bogart slaps the top of a water hydrant. Crucially, he does not stop. He
may be quickly taking stock, touching-base (for safety, superstitiously
perhaps), while remaining on the move. In general, it suggests Marlowe’s
fluency and ease in the city, and Bogart’s on the set. As he crosses the road, I sense the construction of the setting, all its
elements intimately packed into the frame – the crossing cars, the comings and
goings of people – creating oblivious busyness. Yet, the meticulousness of the
staging does not determine the action; paradoxically it creates a living world,
precisely brought to life (an ideal environment for all that ‘meaningless
business’). This is partly because responsive performers like Bogart inhabit
the world built for them; they live in it. (4) In Farber’s terms, both
the gestures give us ‘a logic of space, a great idea of personality, where this
person is’ – this street, here, now, between these two bookstores, looking up, just before it rains, crossing it, now,
touching this hydrant, as he passes.
(5)
The
whole scene that follows, between Bogart and Malone, is like a ‘witty aside’
but given density by all ‘those tiny, mysterious interactions between the actor
and the scene’. Bogart speedily delivers, ‘Would you have a Ben Hur eighteen
sixty third edition with a duplicated line on page one sixteen?’; announces
that he would rather get ‘wet inside’ with the ‘pretty good’ bottle of rye that
he ‘just happens to have’ in his pocket; hovers his right hand over his waist,
lightly drumming his digits; and later points two fingers towards his eyes to
prompt Malone to remove her spectacles. Malone, meanwhile, unhurriedly folds
her arms; nimbly manipulates the pencil, evidently sexual but in scholarly
hands; precisely delivers her list of each aspect of Geiger’s appearance while
she ambiguously moves her eyes up and down each aspect of Bogart’s; takes out
those little white cups in the upper drawer of the desk; and removes the pin,
carefully spreading her lower hair just enough for it to open up and sit more
comfortably upon her shoulders (tightly bunched hair prudently unfurled rather
than spectacularly released). All that is ‘mysterious’ lies in the performers’
interactions, made readily available to us, and not in a secretive dissolve
that insinuates but ultimately hides very little. Malone remains just a ‘pal’ –
her sexual disappointment represented in his comradely squeeze of her upper arm
– and she never appears again in the film.
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3. Ibid., p. 6.
4. I explore the idea of the
performer’s expressive rapport with his or her surroundings at length in Andrew
Klevan, Film Performance: From
Achievement to Appreciation (Wallflower: London, 2005).
5. The Bogart gestures appropriately illustrate Farber’s sense of Negative Space – the term that became the title of his collected
essays. Richard Thompson summarises negative space as ‘all the area in an image
which is not the subject: the background, corners, air, in fact anything that
does not claim our immediate attention upon looking at the image’ (Richard
Thompson, ‘Books’, Cinema 6, 3: 54-56
quoted in Noel King, ‘Manny Farber’, Framework,
volume 40, April 1999). Farber
(according to King) encourages us ‘to direct our attention away from the centre
to the margin, suggesting that the most important meaning is likely to reside
in unexpected places’ (p. 13). Foster Hirsch notes how Farber ‘will often
single out details which lurk in the unostentatious corners of a film - the bit
player with the special tic who suggests a whole way of life in a few seconds
of screen time’ (Foster Hirsch, ‘Books’, Film
Society Review 6, 9, 1971, p. 49-50 quoted in King, ibid.). He promotes
peripheral detail over the declamatory. Farber loved, in his own words, ‘those
tiny, mysterious interactions between the actor and the scene that make up the
memorable moments in any good film’ (Farber, p. 145).
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6. For a meta-critical analysis of this concern see my essay ‘Description’ in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Routledge: Oxford, 2011), pp. 70-86 . This volume contains a range of essays pertaining to the possibilities for film criticism as a form of expression. Another recent discussion of mine relevant to the method undertaken in this essay is Andrew Klevan, ‘Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism’ in Havi Carel and Greg Tuck eds., New Takes in Film-Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2011). |
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II
Bringing
Up Baby is giddy with diversion and distraction. Professor David Huxley (played by Cary
Grant) and Susan Vance (played by Katherine Hepburn) are in the middle of the
forest, an enchanted in-between place, where they are searching for two leopards,
a dog and a bone (in fact, a dinosaur’s intercostal clavicle). All this keeps
them together long enough for them to find each other, and themselves. (7) One
particularly inspired interruption finds Susan slipping down a muddy
embankment, and crashing into David from behind. She causes them both to roll,
and in the process crushes the Professor’s glasses. (Never mind – according to
Susan – David looks ‘much handsomer
without them’.) As they rise from the ground, the film cuts to a shot that
shows the whole of Hepburn’s body as she starts to limp. She barely takes a
breath between her announcement that he looks ‘much handsomer’ and her ecstatic screeching of ‘Oh look David, I’ve
lost my heel, I’ve lost my heel’. Similarly, after realising the heel’s absence
she instantaneously takes advantage of the occasion to stage a playful act.
‘Look at me walk’ she says, while singing a military tune to accompany her
lopsided march. Despite the imbalance, she performs the thoroughbred,
manoeuvring in dressage: the purposeful and deliberate picking up of the feet
and then the curving turn in a confined space, head lowered in preparation.
Amongst all the clumsiness and calamity, Susan’s speech and actions are
self-possessed and sure-footed, and flow deftly into each other. (8)
The continuity of her behaviour
contrasts with the discontinuity of the narrative and its constant disturbances
(many of which she happily instigates). Indeed, she is, for as long as
necessary, impervious to interruption: a bemused David, himself infuriated at
the disjointed story, eventually raises his voice to halt her – ‘Susan, Susan’ – and announces, ‘We’re
not really getting anywhere’. She stands in front of him, looking up, continues
to bob up and down, and repeats her
mantra: ‘I was born on the side of a hill; I was born on the side of a hill’.
He shouts ‘Stop’, and tries to restrain her by putting a hand on her shoulder,
but as he releases it, she just pops up again. Each time the bobbing motion
brings her face to face with him, and encapsulates her (so far undeclared)
desire to kiss him (and the need, for the time being, to back down). Finally,
she does stop, but not before she naughtily sneaks in a jerky, yet subdued,
bob, irregular in rhythm, like the final shuffle of a child’s mechanical toy
insisting to be wound up again. The fairy tale forest rewards her playfulness
with a silvery light that reveals delicate developments in her expression: a
pretend sulk delightfully grows into a grin with fluttering eyelashes to flirt
with the Professor (bobbing up or down, she never relinquishes eye contact). In
all, she goes back and forth, circles around, and bounces up and down on the
spot, resolutely and advantageously failing to get anywhere. Susan is the
embodiment of the film’s celebration and promotion of going round in circles,
and its rejection of the straight (and narrow). She creatively plays in the
time and space between things, and therefore, unlike those who always want to
get on and put things in their place, mines its secrets. She juggles the
elements of a moment and turns out new arrangements (a brave undertaking given
that, as we well know, everything may drop and spill). (9)
For those women who wear them, the breaking of a heel will be familiar – so often on the way to somewhere – yet it is uncommon in film. Susan uses the break in her shoe, normally a frustration, to take advantage of a break in normality. The film is full of items of clothing and accoutrements that provide an endless succession of inspiringly irregular images. While frustrating the straight storyline, they often tempt us to enjoy the uncertainty of sexual characteristics against our ‘better judgement’ (and the instance of David, later, in the fluffy negligee is conspicuous and fabulous). (10) We may recall Miss Swallow, Professor Huxley’s fiancée and co-worker at the Museum, who is devoid of sexuality; her ironic name is surely one of cinema’s most wicked provocations. Professor Huxley is conventional and rigid, and Susan educates him to be the person whose name she forever repeats – ‘David’. Given that she is returning him to himself, it is little wonder that she has a usefully backwards idea of progression. Susan’s fluidity and flexibility of movement shows a capacity for indefinite behaviour, an elegant erasing of boundaries (erected by stiffer bodies and stuffy institutions). The mythical forest is ideal, but she turns everywhere into an in-between place, where a lack of conventional determinations and destinations arouse indeterminacy. Maybe this is because, as she repeatedly tells us, she was born, not on the top, nor at the foot, but on the ‘side of a hill’. |
7. Cavell discusses the
redemptive and therapeutic nature of forests and gardens, and their
relationship to locations in Shakespearean comedy, in Bringing Up Baby and its sister ‘Remarriage Comedies’ of the 1930s
and ‘40s. See Cavell, Pursuits of
Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard University Press: Massachusetts
and London, 1981).
8. Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby was one of the few female performers to embrace slapstick successfully while maintaining elegance and femininity. Indeed, she makes them happily compatible. For a vivid account of Hepburn’s unique suspension of Susan between dignity and indignity, through her handling of weight and balance, see Alex Clayton, The Body in Hollywood Slapstick (McFarland Press: Jefferson, NC, 2007).
9. Andrew Britton, in his stirring account of Grant and Hepburn, writes, ‘The principle is to identify “play” in the sense of recovered infantile polymorphousness ... with “sophistication”, the apogee of cultivated adulthood. The sophisticated couple is the couple whose sexuality is no longer organised by the phallus. The characteristic co-presence ... of two apparently distinct comic modes of farce and wit is the expression of this thematic principle. The partners engage in rough-house and in epigram and repartee; the anarchic consorts with the urbane; the infantile drives which precede maturity and civilisation are suddenly definitive of them.’ Britton, ‘Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire’ in Cineaction, December, 1986, p. 41. The majority of Britton’s impassioned essays, including the one mentioned here, now appear in an essential collection for anyone interested in film criticism (it isn’t quite ‘complete’ despite the title): Barry Keith Grant ed., Britton on Film: The Complete Criticism of Andrew Britton (Wayne State University Press, 2009); the quoted passage is on p. 10. 10. Britton writes
about, ‘the feminised hero, and of a couple whose validity and vitality is
continuous with his feminisation ... What we have in ... Bringing Up Baby is something like an image of a positive
bisexuality – something with which we are familiar in the personae of many of
the great female stars ... Grant formulate[s] a type of masculinity which is
valuable and attractive by virtue of the sharing of gender characteristics with
women. The particular beauty of Grant’s collaboration with Hepburn consists
(questions of acting apart) in the complimentary bisexuality of the Hepburn
persona.’ Britton on Film, p. 15.
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III
Pierre Lachenay, played by Jean
Desailly, (11) a critic and scholar of literature, and the editor of a literary
review, is to deliver a lecture on ‘Balzac and Money’ in Lisbon. La Peau douce does not show him
delivering the lecture, but it does show the moments before: preparing in a darkened back room where he had previously
been eating his dinner with his hosts. He is partly in silhouette, smartening
the knot of his tie, and moving towards the stage. The lecture hall is out
there somewhere lit-up beyond the window and there are noises – the announcer,
his malfunctioning microphone, and then the applauding crowd – off-screen.
Lachenay marches off for his lecture. The camera does not follow, but his exit,
by letting in light, illuminates the room only now that it is deserted. The
film then cuts to the inside of a car, where Lachenay is being escorted back to
his hotel – after the lecture.
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11. From now on, I will call him
Lachenay, rather than Pierre, because he is often treated formally in and by
the film. The film seems to be on first name terms with Nicole so I share this
address. These choices will result in the odd, but oddly appropriate, reference
to their coupling: Lachenay and Nicole.
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Before and after, and on the move. Lachenay spends most of the film on the move, between places. (12) Transitional locations are mostly moved through in haste, but they feel present. The first sequence, after the credits, immediately exemplifies the film’s style, while appearing simply to be getting things going. Lachenay comes out of the métro and hurries up some steps. (We soon find out that he is late for his flight to Lisbon and throughout, for one reason or another, he is never settled. Given that he is a man who must, for his occupation, sit still and read, it is notable that the film does not show this.) He reaches the crossing; he looks anxiously up; an electronic crossing sign is counting down; he crosses; he immediately turns into the doorway of his apartment building; he presses the button and pushes open the door as it buzzes; the elevator rises. The continuity is clipped, a touch too tight, and pinches the habitual locations. The sense of location is also (gently) heightened by the surrounding noise, blunt and familiar but encroaching: the shunting train; the buzzing outer door; the whirring and clanking elevator; and the screeching inner doorbell. The prevalent sound – frequently present in the film – is that of Lachenay’s hurried footsteps clipping and scuffing against the paving. | 12. The film seems to be a
philosophical meditation on a line by Pascal which is quoted by Lachenay at his
public address in Reims: ‘The misfortunes of man stem from one thing: his
inability to stay quietly in a room’.
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Dramatic elements combine fluently
in passing. (13) Once the car escorting him from the lecture comes to a halt,
Lachenay sights the Air Stewardess, Nicole, played by François Dorléac, the one
who had first attracted his attention on his aeroplane journey from France. He
sees her from a mode of transport, and the window frames her, but she is not
still. She too is on the move, entering the hotel with the plane’s captain, and
although she is some distance away from the darkened car, she turns around
(fortuitously?) to notice him at just the right moment. He follows urgently,
collecting his key from the reception, moving around the hotel kiosk, and gets
to the elevator just in time for the captain to hold open the door for him.
This area of the hotel foyer, next to the kiosk, was where they had earlier
looked round at each other, fleetingly, while he was on his way to the lecture. Showing it again, on his return,
emphasises the significance of crossing paths in transitional places where
potential lovers, by destiny or contrivance, may find, and re-find, each other.
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13. Maximilian Le Cain writes: ‘[The film’s] intricately designed pattern of incessant movement unfolds with a remarkable smoothness’. His piece, suitably entitled ‘Love in Flight’, announces La Peau douce as François Truffaut’s ‘supreme achievement’, and gives a sharp overview of the film. I quote many of his fine observations here, as they usefully dovetail with my account of the film. Maximilian Le Cain, ‘Love in Flight: François Truffaut’s La Peau douce’, Senses of Cinema, June 2004.
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The period in the elevator is
distinctive because it is stiff and deliberate, and the antithesis of fluency.
The characters are moving in transport, but they must stand still. The journey
extends beyond real time, giving each character plenty of opportunity to stare
at the other, the result of which, as the elevator takes forever to go up, is
to lift the situation into a protracted comedy of gazing. Later, the elevator
descends in real time, and further points up the earlier distension. Lachenay
seems consciously, and rather awkwardly, to reposition himself perhaps under
the pressure of the stares, or perhaps to find a better position to stare at
Nicole (and when the co-pilot gets out, Lachenay stares uninhibitedly). The
elevator is the most conspicuous of the film’s in-between spaces, and therefore
somewhat emblematic of its concerns. (14) It is their first time alone with
each other, and their relationship, from its inception, is on the move and constrained (and together but
apart). The secrecy of affairs, away from home, entails constricted movement
through anonymous spaces.
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14. Truffaut says of the film: ‘La Peau douce is truly modern love; it
takes place in planes, in elevators; it has all the harassments of modern
life’, New Yorker, 31st October, 1964, quoted in James Monaco, The
New Wave (Oxford University Press: New York, 1976) p. 56.
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The elevator, an impersonal space
characterised by awkwardness and silence, matches the personality of the
characters: withdrawn, self-contained and set in its ways. She is holding two
wrapped up gifts, hugging them close to hide and shield, a fortification behind
which she may avert her gaze and safely peer over. Her wide oval eyes query and
invite, and are enlarged by long, blackened eyelashes and a smallish face
(which is itself dwarfed by the closeness of her surrounding hair, especially
her low fringe). His eyes look small and unimpressive in comparison, unwavering
in their attention, but sad, as if what was attracting him was already
depressing him. (15) When they return the next night after their drink, they
once again take the elevator together. The transitional period, between The
Drink and The Sex, is appropriately located in the elevator (taking them from
one level to another) and their behaviour in it prefigures their relationship.
Nicole surveys Lachenay, perhaps taking a private opportunity to reflect on
him, or perhaps eager for a sign. With the uncertainty about how their
relationship will continue, he is facing away, absorbed and agitated. He is
looking ahead, anxiously anticipating making love to her – out there somewhere
– incapable of looking at her now (in here). The couple never rest in the
present and enjoy the affair; they are always looking forward to it.
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15. Le Cain describes Dasailly’s
Lachenay: ‘an unprepossessing, almost mole-like head with a contrastingly
handsome, intelligent face that seems on the point of being absorbed by the
mediocrity of the rest of his appearance.’ Ibid.
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After the elevator, the hotel
corridor (I return now to the night before they meet for a drink). Nicole gets
out at floor eight, and once again glances back, swiftly, as she moves away, so
her look catches us. Yet, we cannot
catch its meaning – seductive, curious, uncertain, or self-conscious? This is
beguilingly ambivalent (rather than lazily enigmatic) – a sense that we are
losing our grasp on meaning as it moves away from us – and is reward for the
film’s secure handling of mobility. After descending further, Lachenay walks
slowly down his corridor, deep in
thought, frequently peering down at the pairs of shoes, parked outside the
rooms. The music is melancholy, lamenting, and creeping, and it draws out the
strangeness of hotel corridors: door upon door, each identical, like a play of
mirrors, and shoe upon shoe (mementos of missing persons). The camera closely
represents his viewpoint, travelling over each pair, briskly but insistently,
as he surveys them. The alternation of Lachenay and his viewpoint, along with
the attending music, transforms the shoes: these everyday objects, routinely
deposited, receive undue attention. They insinuate secrets, as he considers
creating his own.
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Lachenay now enters the hotel
room, that anonymous space open to all but, for the time being, temporarily,
reserved only for you (both extremely public and extremely private). Almost
immediately, he considers leaving to go to her room (Number 813), but
hesitates, and stays. His use of the light switch marks this suspended moment
of hesitation. He moves his hand to the switch, and there is a little delay
before he switches it off rather deliberately. He stops, decides to stay,
closes the door, and stands in the dark for a few moments before switching the
light back on. The music is still lingering on the soundtrack, but both the
switch and the door make pronounced noises, clicking and catching. The tension
and indecision of the situation is dramatised through that familiar marker of
entering and leaving a room – the light switch – both through the physical act
of the switching, and through the consequent darkening and illumination. The
lights of the hotel room continue to shape the scene. Their use gives us a
vivid sense of a space that is lacking in interest (without distorting that
fact). (16) As he makes his telephone call to Nicole, he sits in the dark on
the side of the bed. Nobody will see him, and he will not be caught; he can
call out, while remaining hidden. He executes his daring act with a cool
self-confidence but without exhibiting, to her or to us, the expertise of a
practised seducer (which he may or may not be). (17)
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16. Le Cain: ‘the film's settings
might be, on the whole, banal and even drab ... but Raoul Coutard's photography
imbues them with a controlled, wintry luminosity that is memorably atmospheric,
suggestive of the emotions smouldering beneath reality's increasingly porous
crust. The discreet but palpable beauty Coutard is able to conjure forth from
such lacklustre surroundings without significantly altering them places La
Peau douce among his greatest achievements’.
17. The next night when they return to her room, he guides her assuredly out of the elevator, and then, as she turns to him outside her bedroom door, at that crucial unresolved moment – goodnight kiss, or more – he efficiently takes her hand, nestles comfortably in behind her, and carefully guides them through together. She switches the light on, but he immediately, without consultation, switches it off. Close-ups capture the clarity and decisiveness of both actions and are striking in a film that generally prefers to situate the characters. He is in control yet impassive making him seem self-assured yet unimposing. This fits with the general impression that Lachenay, always on the way to somewhere, necessarily between places, is determined and indeterminate. |
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Only after the phone call, and her
rejection, does he switch on the bedside light. He is disappointed now, but he
will not be in the dark. He walks across the darkened side of the room to a
full-length mirror, but back into the light when she calls him to apologise and
accept his invitation to have a drink. As he puts down the phone, the film cuts
to a longer shot that takes in more of the room. The music perks up as he
rises, and he moves around the room’s circumference switching on all the lights
– the remaining side light, the bathroom light, and then the one for the living
area. Restricted and contained, his elation is limited to sequentially turning
on lights in this uninspiring locale. As each light is switched on, the music
swells, rises, and hovers. For those who stay in hotels there may be, on
entering a new room, a brief moment of expectation before realising that it is,
yet again, just another hotel room. Nevertheless, there is a keenness to
resuscitate it and eagerly greet the over-familiar features: switch on the
lights, open the cupboards, inspect the mini-bar, turn on the taps, and take a
little bounce on the beds. Lachenay performs a euphoric variation. At 1am in
the morning, he has nowhere to go, so he creates a journey within this compact
room and the switching on of lights is an audacious attempt to expand its
boundaries. He even tidies his tie and collar as if he were meeting her now, a
premature preparation, perhaps, while celebrating his smartness. He completes
the circle, moving into the vestibule so he may actively re-enter the main bedroom. The hotel room is a civilised cage, but
he concludes by springing onto his bed, satisfied, and stares out at his
conquered domain. The sequence lasts only 25 seconds, and is inconsequential in
moving the story forward. The impression is of the film staying around a little
longer than it might have done to catch an instance of jubilation which takes
place alone, in private, and which would customarily remain unobserved.
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The next evening they meet for
drinks, and leave the restaurant in the early hours. Apart from a shot of them
exiting and moving away from the restaurant, the film only provides one short
shot of them returning to the hotel through Lisbon. They take their happy place
in the city in long shot, lovers at dawn, going to bed as others go to work; a
skip, to the jaunty soundtrack, in front of an early morning tram. This is but
a fleeting glimpse of the romantic, for them and us, indeed, one shot, only an
image. It quickly disappears as the film abruptly cuts to them entering the
hotel elevator. The dreamy image, and that precious skip, reminds us that
despite the importance of roads and streets, and the film’s ease in handling
the movement through these spaces, there are no energetic, sprightly steps
through cities invigorated by a nouvelle vague spirit. (18) The film’s central
passage is set in the provincial, lifeless, no-where streets of Reims (and the
cinema in Reims, where Lachenay introduces a film about André Gide, is in the
darkness on the edge of town). On the way to Reims, they stop at one of
contemporary life’s ugliest in-between, nowhere places, the highway petrol
station, bleak and soulless. We see them turn into the petrol station from a
characteristic viewing position in the film: inside the car, through a
windscreen. When Nicole decides to change from jeans into a skirt (because of
Lachenay’s recently announced preference), she checks his back is turned, through the back window, and we see her
scurry away to the toilets, through the side window. So much seen, and envisioned, through a mode of transport. And the car appears to control
perspective and direct vision in more ways than one. Standing outside, Lachenay
looks out upon other vehicles speeding along the highway, his face cut together
with shots of passing traffic; is he contemplating meaningfully, or staring
unavoidably (at the inescapable – escaping)? Close-ups of petrol station action
punctuate the scene – pump removed, dials turning, pump replaced, cap screwed,
and ignition pressed – intensifying the functional. The sequence and the film
drolly concentrate the indistinct.
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18. Le Cain expands upon the peculiarly synthesised relationship between space and character in this Truffaut film. He writes that Truffaut’s films are always attentive to the personality of spaces but the integration of dramatic elements is looser: ‘[For] Truffaut ... the tight degree of interaction between space and character and the systematised use of space as vehicle of movement is uniquely elaborate here. Consider even the layout of the Lachenay family flat. Coming in from the hall, there is a flight of stairs that leads to the living room which is, arena-like, on a lower level than the rest of the house. Alongside it, at hall level, is a short passage and a room with a partition that can be wound down like a car window. Truffaut frequently films this unusual layout from above, often with people moving from the lower level up or vice versa. It never feels like a calm, closed place for relaxing in but seems instead to be an almost theatrical space for the constant agitated circulation of bodies. While interiors in Jules et Jim also sometimes displayed a similarly open quality, this was to allow the characters the liberty to circulate at will, whereas here they seem regimented by the spaces they pass through. Space in La Peau douce is an engine of predetermined narrative progression instead of a variable expanse of character-generated possibility.’ Ibid. Manny Farber disliked Truffaut’s ‘constant agitated circulation of bodies’. He called Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) ‘two ratchety perpetual-motion machines’, where ‘people and incidents [are] flat, jiggling manikins ... in a Mickey Mouse comic book, which is animated by thumbing the pages rapidly. This approach eliminates any stress or challenge, most of all any sense of the film locating an independent shape.’ Farber says the films have a ‘meaningless vivacity’ where the imagery is always ‘disappearing’ and ‘evaporat[ing] off the edge of the screen ... Truffaut’s imagery is limited to traveling (running through meadows, walking in Paris streets, etc.) ... without any actual muscularity or propulsion to peg the film down. As the spectator leans forward to grab the film, it disappears like a released kite.’ Manny Farber, ‘White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art’ in Negative Space, pp. 140-2. I largely share Farber’s discontent with the manner of Truffaut’s early films, but La Peau douce would seem to be an exception where the execution and exploration of ‘travelling’, and even of evaporation perhaps, has ‘stress’ and ‘shape’. It is strange therefore that this is a rather neglected film of the director. My attentions are partly an attempt to stimulate interest in it. |
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The film sharply etches the
particularity of unimpressive situation: the specificity of characters getting
through any old place with which they are uninvolved. The camera films from
inside the hotel in Reims as they collect luggage from their car, pulling back
as Nicole enters through the glass entrance door. It then swivels to the left
to show them moving through the reception area and up the stairs (where she
points to his picture on a poster), all in one take. The continuousness of the
shot helps their entrance appear unbroken, condensed and hasty, but at the same
time, the camera’s set-up seems disproportionate to the importance of the moment,
and therefore points out the transitional.
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Interruption also highlights the
transitional, preventing characters reaching, and settling at, destinations. It
is just at the moment that Lachenay
is about to leave Nicole for his speech when she says she needs him to get a
ticket for the screening and some
stockings. (‘There goes my last pair,’ she says, but, of course, it is always
the ‘last’ pair. Incidentally, Nicole would not have damaged her stockings had
she not changed out of her jeans and into a skirt earlier at the garage. She
does not mention this perhaps because she is a little ashamed about her own
susceptibility or perhaps because she is leaving it to Lachenay’s sensitivity
to notice, as the film leaves it to ours.) It is just as he is entering the official hotel, where he is to meet the
provincial dignitaries, when her voice speaks in his head and says, ‘Don’t
forget my stockings’. He finds a lingerie shop just as it is closing but ... the shop attendant lets him in, the
film creating a cliffhanger out of an irrelevancy. He rushes back to tell her
he must rush off again because the dignitaries have organised a dinner for him.
Because she is in the middle of
bathing she must follow him out of the room, wrapped in her towel, to the hotel
landing (one in-between place) where he tells her she must get her ticket at
the box office (another in-between place). At every stage, the film insistently
shows him hurriedly getting in and out of his car (at one point he even bumps
another vehicle). The stockings symbolise their affair: not enjoyed, but
fretfully sought. They should typify the attraction of her youthful femininity,
flawless and smooth – la peau douce perhaps – but instead represent the impediments of practicality and obligation.
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The screening is sold out so, as
Lachenay introduces it, the film cuts away to show Nicole drifting about in the
foyer. When he has finished, he is collected by his ‘friend’ Clément, played by Daniel Ceccaldi, they walk
backstage behind the screen (rather
than settle in front of it), and emerge in the foyer. Clément knows Lacheney’s
wife and family, so Lachenay now cannot acknowledge Nicole. Clément insists
they have a drink together, and throughout the sequence, he chatters on and on,
oblivious to the situation. The film builds up the frustration, the sequence
becoming a Hitchcockian set piece, where the consequences are deathly but not
dangerous, and where the narrative anxiety congeals into a mood of indignity.
Shots of Lachenay, staring out at Nicole through the café window, helplessly
fixed and fixated, alternate with shots of her stranded, floating in the dark
streets, which seem drearily provincial and eerily supernatural (and a strange
creature more than once harasses her). Indeed, there is a science fiction
quality to the situation, which provides a metaphor for the lovers separated by
age and circumstance: both marooned in space, staring into the other’s world,
near, yet unreachable, each unable to carry out a rescue.
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In order to free himself, Lachenay
feigns illness, and they walk back to the hotel, by the parked cars. As they
walk, Clément looks down, and comments, ‘To every man his woes – mine are
shoelaces’ (Clément later says he put on his best shoes in Lachenay’s honour).
He ties them on a car bumper but even when finished the camera stays close to
his legs (and Lachenay’s close by). They walk between the parked cars and back
on to the pavement, and only then does the camera pan back up to show their
upper bodies. The camera studies and exaggerates the trivial frustration of
undone shoelaces; like the buying of stockings, the tying of laces becomes
overwrought and distressing. Sandwiched between bumpers, dark and
claustrophobic, a trifle becomes woeful. Having finally lost the ‘pest’,
Lachenay scampers into his hotel, where Nicole is sitting in the reception
lounge, an area that rhymes with hallways, foyers, and street corners, her
locations of waiting on this unfortunate evening. She has obviously decided
that if she is to be displaced (and misplaced), she will at least sit down. (To
his infuriating question, ‘What are you doing here?’ she replies, ‘That is a
good question!’ rather generously acknowledging its unintentional philosophical
aspect).
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At the end of the film, it is
Lachenay who is seated, but dislocated. He decides to leave his wife, but this
prompts Nicole, worried by the seriousness, to end their relationship. (19) He
has only one place he can now call home, his favourite restaurant, the Bar Val
d’Isere. He telephones his wife to make amends. The nanny answers: she calls for
Madame down the elevator shaft, and then goes to the window, but her car is
already roaring away. As he returns to his regular table, tightly set back into
the corner of the room, the camera sticks to his profile, as if camera and
character, after all their travelling, are now glued together irreparably and
uncomfortably. The camera’s sturdy and dogged attention matches Lachenay who,
despite anxieties, returns head held high with an air of stateliness and pride.
His constant moving was always in tension with the stiffness and restraint of
his body; he was active but never lively. When seated, he empties the remaining
cigarettes from one pack into a new one. Keeping things together, this is a
typical piece of behaviour for Lachenay, and probably habitual, but it appears
particularly measured given that his life is now disturbed. Similarly, he
daintily brushes crumbs off his plate with his palm, and then calmly unfolds
his newspaper. The film attacks this image of unhurried self-containment (up to
now troubled only by the lamenting music) by cutting to his wife noisily racing
in her Mini. She enters the restaurant (hunting rifle hidden under her
overcoat). His little corner of the world, a place of security and comfort, now
takes on a different aspect. He is trapped with nowhere to go – pushed back by
the table into a tiny triangle of space – and unsafely situated for a man who
exists to be on the move. She shoots him dead.
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19. Le Cain gives an account of
this scene set in an ‘incomplete flat’: ‘The scene of their break-up, also the
last time Nicole is seen in the film, takes place in an incomplete flat in an
apartment block still under construction. Lachenay hopes to buy the flat for
them to start a new life in. The outline of the building, still too incomplete
to keep out the cold greyness of the sky, in which Lachenay finds his schemes
for a future so abruptly aborted, is the most overtly symbolical use of space
in La Peau douce. The shell of a living space is both a future home that
will never be and suggestive of ruin, the wreckage of his family life. Its
height above street level further highlights Lachenay's plight as a man adrift.
It is also the end of the line: the couple stands over the movement of the
city, removed from the comings and goings that kept them together. Briefly
existing above the forces of movement, they have to confront each other for the
first time in lucid stasis. The scene ends with Lachenay helplessly watching
Nicole rejoin the agitation of the city from the vantage point of the flat,
truly high and dry.’ Ibid.
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IV
Louise is in exile. She lives out
in the New Town suburbs with her partner Rémi, but wishes to spend more time in
central Paris (where she works for a design firm). (20) Rémi, played by Tchéky
Karyo, works for the new town planning department, and he is comfortable with their location (according to Louise, played by
Pascale Ogier, he considers it his moral duty to live in the sort of places he
designs). A few minutes into Les Nuits de
la pleine lune, her journey from the suburbs to the city is shown, not in
its entirety, but in segments that concentrate on typical passages. She walks
across a rather desolate square, past a shelter, a bus stop perhaps, to the
train station entrance (15 seconds); she hurries off the top of the escalator
onto the platform (10 seconds); she reads a magazine on the train (6 seconds);
and she walks along a street in Paris that leads to her place of work (10
seconds). Each section of her journey, although mundane and workaday, is given
continuous attention, but is then cut abruptly short as the film jumps to the
next section: the square; escalator/platform; train; and street. The film
dwells, then it snatches; consequently, each portion of the journey is routine and pointed. The segments also catch an
ordinary movement, gesture or piece of behaviour and we recognise the
unremarkable: the little scurry as she reaches the station; the scrunching of
her scarf under her chin as she looks down the platform; the turning and
folding of her magazine. The images are without artificiality, and naturalistic
sounds of travel, train and traffic, often noisy, accompany the entire journey.
In contrast to the street created just for Bogart to cross, just there and then, many people walk these streets.
Location pre-exists Louise’s presence. Her place and her purpose are
unexceptional, and despite the noisy, lifelike precision – the concreteness –
these in-between spaces of the everyday commute, familiar and unimpressive, are
indistinct. They disappear to leave only the person – the big red scarf moving
against the watery blue-grey sky and urban repetition – with her thoughts. The
routine commute is a period of self-contained thinking and provides a picture
of self-absorption (a seemingly paradoxical product of the objective coverage).
(21)
Louise is fragile. She has a very
slim frame, swamped here under a thick coat and scarf with thin legs poking out
(squeezed further by tight leggings). She looks girlish, rather than womanly –
off to high school – with a large turquoise ribbon in her hair, tied with a big
bow to sit upon her head, and rather than a briefcase, she carries a trellis
jelly bag. Her occupation requires no formality, but these workday
accoutrements are indicative. Her bag declares that she is open and carefree,
but it is also skeletal and without security. Later, she shows her friend
Camille the sort of lamps she designs: like Louise, the elements are tiny and
spindly, and the construction angular, pokey rather than elegant, and easily
broken. It also stands alone – precious – unable to assimilate into the
surrounding décor. After completing the redecoration of her flat in Paris, she
makes the final adjustments to the pieces on her table, many brightly coloured
toys exhibited as if they were in a museum display cabinet: all neat and tidy
and precisely the right distance from each other. She pinches one tiny item,
moving it painstakingly, ever so slightly, to the right, and she lays out a
picture book face open at a particular page; she stands back to assess the
affected arrangement, and fastidiously wipes away some dust. Her flat in Paris
gives her a space away from Rémi and the suburbs; she can party late into the
night, and not worry about the return journey. How is it then that the
accommodation of a liberated, independent woman is the secretive retreat of a
young, teenage girl?
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20. The proverb which opens the
film reads: ‘He who has two women (wives?) loses his soul/He who has two houses
loses his mind’.
21.
Stanley Cavell suggests that for Ralph Waldo Emerson walking is a
‘philosophical picture of human thinking’. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian
Perfectionism (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1990),
p.96.
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With the room perfectly prepared,
she is ready to go somewhere else. Unfortunately, one friend rings to cancel;
and although she speaks to a couple of other friends, they too are unavailable
that evening. While she is on the phone, there are no cuts to show these
people; the film determinedly stays with her in the room (over-determined, like
Louise, and her arrangements). Other
people are out there. She is not
settled but confined, and between people and parties. She resigns herself to
staying in, collects a couple of books (one appears to be a large comic book),
places them neatly in the middle of the bed, arranges pillow and covers, and
brushes out the creases as if readying it for the pleasure of someone else
(like a maid servicing a hotel room). She leaves the shot, but the film stays,
resolutely once again, and stares at the bed, fixated; rather like Louise’s
life, it should move on but it is unable. The bed is on display, but empty.
Like her table with its toys and open book, everything is in its place but she
cannot be; an apartment created perfectly in her own image, now renders her
invisible. (22)
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22. In her penetrating article
‘Representing the Sexual Impasse’, which discusses the operation of desire in
the film, Bérénice Reynaud emphasises the importance of off-screen space (and
unites Louise with female characters in Le
Maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1973, Fr) and Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975, Fr): ‘Louise’s life becomes
more and more dependent on what happens off-screen while she continues to deny
that this is so ... the space these women inhabit ... specifically shown as their
emotional base, becomes too small: since they have mentally projected
themselves into an outside where, at this specific moment, they are not wanted.
Their own imaginary, so to speak, devours the frame of the image: the space
they are left with is no longer the space of their desire, which is outside ... the
inside [is] emptied by the outside ... Rohmer remembered the lessons learnt in
watching Hitchcock’s films: the bus ride undertaken by Sylvia Sydney’s kid
brother in Sabotage, for example,
becomes a real nightmare for the spectator because we know there is a time bomb
in his satchel: the invisible ‘contaminates’, so to speak, the visible.’ In Susan Hayward and Ginette
Vincendeau eds., French Film:
Texts and Contexts (Routledge: London, 2000), p. 260.
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Earlier, the apartment was more
straightforwardly provisional, prior to decoration and furnishing, and Louise
took her friend Octave, played by Fabrice Luchini, to see it. It is between
stages, like Louise, and everything is out of place. Akin to the sequence in
the elevator in La Peau douce, the
scene is openly emblematic of the film’s concerns, suitably so given that the
apartment is not yet fully presentational. Her red scarf drapes over the
wardrobe door; his newspaper and book sit on the ladder; her handbag, filled
with pink, is prominent, sitting by her on the floor like an obedient and
attentive pet. The combination of odd objects, often vividly coloured, in a
sparse and unformed location creates abstracted configurations. Through the
doorway into the kitchen, three oranges (which they had carried with them) and
a small white jug sit on a pine shelf in front of a cream background: a
distilled still life. These images emerge naturally from characters temporarily
inhabiting an impermanent space, and are typical of the way the film seamlessly
fuses the concrete and the conceptual. The abstracted appearance matches the
philosophical nature of their conversation that often condenses aspects of their
experience into epigram (easily extractable: ‘the other person’s desire brings
out mine’, ‘you look ethereal but really you are very physical’, ‘the one
experience I’ve missed is loneliness’). The space is embryonic so they are free
to open up (somewhat), but the intelligence of the insights flatters their
veracity and applicability. Louise and Octave are equally rehearsing and
performing ideas on this bare stage – trying
them on. (23)
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23. Gilbert Adair notes, ‘the
recurrent presence on screen of a pair, one to each home, of abstract paintings
(in reproduction) by Mondrian ... His most distinctive compositions – typically,
two, three or four rectangles or squares in bright building-block colours,
which are deployed on the canvas along an intersecting grid of thick, black
straight lines – attain [a] sweet poised serenity ... And it is precisely such a
serenity that Louise is endeavouring to impose on her own messy little acre of
reality, as though craving abstraction in a world which remains irrepressibly,
cussedly figurative’. Gilbert Adair, ‘Les
Nuits de la pleine lune’, Monthly
Film Bulletin, December 1984, Volume 51, Number 611, pp. 387-388.
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The makeshift space also exposes
them; indeed, it makes them shift. As Louise attempts to justify her need to be
independent of Rémi, her fidgeting betrays her insecure rationalisations. She
kneels on the floor and leans forward on the coffee table; she moves to the
chair; she puts her foot on the table, rocks back on the chair, and brings the
other leg up; she folds her hands, first in her lap then over her knees; and
finally she returns to kneel on the floor again. Even Octave, who is not under
the same pressure to defend himself, can’t quite sit still, and rather deliberately
repositions his legs as if he was self-consciously aware of a camera’s
scrutiny. (The camera often remains with a character even when they finish
speaking so that the other character
is heard speaking from off-screen, once again maintaining, not unlike its
characters, a single-mindedness.) (24) Their attempts at making themselves
comfortable are somatic expressions of unease. ‘I want to love him’, Louise
says, ‘but the only reason I can’t is that he loves me too much’. On this claim
of suffocation, she moves away to the wall, for breathing space. This is an
apparent place of safety, and the crossing of her legs appears to be casual,
but she is at the edge, alone, with her back to the wall. Octave soon follows
her, and leans within the kitchen doorway; in choosing to join Louise, he
unsurprisingly ends up suspended (between rooms). (25)
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24. A
characteristic way of presenting conversations in the films of Eric Rohmer.
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25. And leaning. For more on
leaning and its suspensions see my chapter entitled ‘Unconcealing the Obvious:
Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime’
in Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the
Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Flicks Books:
Trowbridge, 2000), pp. 170-205.
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By attentively monitoring the
prosaic, the film suggests the mysterious stirrings that determine the
characters’ positions. It never shows Louise dwelling in the house in the
suburbs that she shares with Rémi. It does show her between floors, going up
and down, or looking up and down, the stairs that lead from the front door to
the bedrooms – often just before coming in or going out. She has a work desk
squashed underneath these stairs, and on one occasion, while Louise and her
friend Camille ascend, the film keeps the desk in view as if it were drawn, or
drawing us, to ponder its placement. Is the desk snuggled in to make a den,
conjuring childlike cosiness (and if so, why would this be sought), or is it
trapped in a nowhere place, between rooms, and smothered? When Louise goes to
the toilet in a café in Paris, she catches sight of Rémi and, not wishing to
see him, must loiter in the most ignominious of in-between places. Waiting to
leave, the cleaner enters, and she is forced to feign business, turning to
fiddle with the taps. The camera stares at her intently, as if it were
patiently observing the activities of wildlife, and indeed, as she hides behind
the door, clutching her yellow and black spotted purse, Louise has the face of
a young animal, as yet unformed, lost and hurt.
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The film recognises something
primal in the realistic. Louise sleeps with a young biker she has met at a
party, but early in the morning, as he sleeps, she must creep naked from her
bed (before rescuing her clothes). To show her brittle nakedness in this
context stresses her frailty and vulnerability, and it exposes – on this night
of the full moon – a creature. The civilised and rational are stripped away.
She skulks out of her own flat as if for survival (‘I nearly choked,’ she later
admits) and waits in a bar, until the trains start running back to the suburbs.
She sits on a table adjacent to an avuncular artist, played by László Szabó,
who calmly explains to her that many people fail to sleep on the night of the
full moon. Much to his surprise, she says she had not noticed it was a full
moon (‘You Parisians’ he exclaims disdainfully). Modern, enlightened Louise is
rather reluctant to accept his supernatural explanation for her sleepless night
(‘I had a reason’). She asks him if he really believes such a thing, and rather
than saying ‘oui’ he claims that it affects him because he is ‘suggestible’. In
disallowing the artist’s explanation, Louise is rejecting a certain
suggestibility to a world of alternative explanations, where the reasons for
behaviour might be deeper than the ones she can readily proffer. She finally
returns home, but Rémi is not there. Later that morning, after an ellipse, he
returns and explains that he is now in love with another woman, Camille’s
friend Marianne (not Camille, as Louise and Octave had reasoned). She must
leave again (she says, ‘I couldn’t stay in town and now I can’t stay here’) but
the telling image of her dislodgment, resolutely ordinary and uncanny, comes a
little earlier, after she realises that Rémi is not at home (but before he returns and she learns of his
new relationship with Marianne). In all her clothes, Louise is sleeping,
slightly scrunched up, on the small sofa, bathed in the blue dawn light. (26) Is
she casually, temporarily, resting while waiting for Rémi or is she suspended in an earth bound, gloomy, limbo land – between
beds, between men, between night and day?
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26. Blue occurs throughout the
film. Indeed, in both senses of the word the film is blue. The quality of light
is so precise in Eric Rohmer’s films that they frequently convey seasonal and diurnal particularity.
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V
In Secret défense, Sylvie’s traumatic adventure originates within the
routinely transitional. Sylvie, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, stands on a Métro
train platform having just visited Paul, her brother, in hospital. He plans to
avenge their father’s death, and she is concerned. Will she now take on the
responsibility of revenge? (27) As the train pulls into the platform, one woman
gets off and another woman gets on but unexpectedly Sylvie does not move. Her
behaviour is obscure. Does her furtive look left and right suggest a guilty self-consciousness
about her movements and a worry that people might now be reading her mind? Does
her last moment jump upon the train, just before the doors close, suggest a
leap into the unknown? The film suppresses these vital and pivotal thoughts (to
her and to the narrative) by confining them to an ordinary location and
situation that limits the potential for disclosure.
We now see the journey in real
time, without ellipse, between two consecutive stops, from getting on the train
to getting off it (1 minute 45 seconds). (28) The familiar train carriage,
without personality, is a suitably routine environment for a controlled
experiment, related, perhaps, to the sterile laboratory where Sylvie works. From
now on, Sylvie is under (our) observation. She stands alone (rather than sitting amongst others), and remains alone for
the journey (no person enters the image), clutching her bag in one hand and the
handrail in another. Because she travels alone, she cannot reveal her thoughts
through conversation. Her isolation in the shot also emphasises her as a
singular subject for examination – uncontaminated – and it intensifies
concentration (hers and ours). Within this inexpressive environment, the
performer might use any gestural movement, facial or otherwise, at her
disposal. On the contrary, there is little variation in her manner: her body
and face remain largely still and only a sideways movement of her eyes seems to
mark a progression in thought. Her outward appearance remains appropriately
restrained and unobtrusive for public transport. The passing scenery, behind
her and next to her, provides most of the movement, as if it were graphically
monitoring her passing thought. Without significant alteration of movement and
gesture, the extended duration does not permit a more exact interpretation of
her thoughts, but rather emphasises Thinking, consuming and prolonged (despite
its containment and impassive manifestation). Bonnaire sustains the intensity
of interiority without distinguishing or clarifying the details of thought, and
without losing her composure. (29) Yet, it is during this short journey where
Sylvie seems to launch her bold, even reckless, enterprise. (30) The film
provides a telling picture of a common experience: the extraordinary
progression of thought during the ordinary progression of a journey, and the
imaginative transporting of our selves while being routinely transported. We
are close to our own thoughts, but closed off to the thoughts of others
(properly hiding behind sedate masks). The melodrama of thought conceals itself
within the undramatic practicality of urban travel (between here and there).
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27. Sylvie’s brother, Paul, played by Grégoire Colin, tells her that the death of their father, thought to be accidental – he fell in front of a train – was in fact murder. The murderer, according to Paul, is Walser, played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, a partner of their father, and a close friend, and possibly lover, of their mother. Sylvie seems convinced by Paul’s evidence (a photograph shows Walser on the platform just before their father’s death). It is likely that it is during the métro journey I discuss here that she makes the decision to travel to their childhood home near Chagny where Walser is residing (possibly to dispose of Walser herself). Indeed, immediately after this métro ride, she undertakes this further journey which takes approximately 15 minutes of screen time (starting after 45 minutes of the film). Nick Roddick writes of the later longer journey, ‘the film’s intricately frenzied plot is in sharp contrast to its cool, elegant surface, exemplified by the tour-de-force journey Sylvie takes from Paris to Burgundy – one of French cinema's great ‘travelling shots’ – to commit the act that will redefine her world.’ (National Film Theatre Brochure, May 2006). Jared Rapfogel writes, ‘Rivette ... makes what is usually transitional and thus hurried over or merely alluded to, into something like a set piece. Her journey becomes ... a chance to sink into the movie, to observe, at great length and with great intimacy, Sylvie’s character. And the surprise is that, instead of losing us, the story becomes far more interesting, deeper and more mysterious, as a result. Letting us share the character’s sense of time brings us closer not only to her but to her story – we’re not being told her story, we’re experiencing it with her. This emphasis on what happens between the conventionally important moments ironically focuses our attention on what matters in the story, on Sylvie's thoughts and emotions, on what she knows and doesn't know, and, thanks to the interminable wait separating her resolution and her action, on the momentousness of what she intends to do.’ (Jared Rapfogel, ‘Secret Défense’, Senses of Cinema (October 2000; Rapfogel’s emphasis). On this journey which Rapfogel so fruitfully illuminates, she inspects her gun in the train’s washroom, and it does indeed appear that she is intending to shoot Walser. Yet, her genuine intentions are always unclear to us, and possibly to herself. She in fact ends up shooting Walser’s girlfriend by accident. The preceding period on the Métro, the sequence which I discuss, is a distilled version of the longer journey to follow, but it is genuinely in real time, and crucially between seeing her brother and travelling out of Paris. 28. The journey is on line 5 of the Paris Métro (Place d’Italie/Bobigny-Pablo Picasso), one stop from Gare d’Austerlitz to Quai de la Rapée. Both placards with the station names are clearly displayed in the film, and I mention the real details of this journey to emphasise that the film shows a complete journey, between two stations, in real time without ellipse (although this is pretty clear from the sequence without any exact knowledge of Paris). Her brother is probably staying at the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière near Gare D’Austerlitz. |
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Eventually, there is a break in
Sylvie’s concentrated period of reflection. She makes one large movement, 15
seconds from the end of the journey, crossing the carriage to the opposite set
of doors. Her move places her on the correct side of the carriage to disembark,
but it equally indicates an adjustment in her train of thought. She is now more
responsive to her surroundings, looking intently out of the window, as she
awaits her destination. This final period echoes her train journey on the way to the hospital where we only saw the final 15 seconds and where
she appears in the same position in the train and in the frame. (31) The film’s
use of continuous, real time emphasises that on this occasion, we see the whole of this journey; and a particular
segment of it, once perfunctory, is now charged. Métro journeys appear
identical but her life has changed forever. Dispensable and indispensable
periods of existence take place on the same stage, and join hands.
The film further complicates its
meditation on what constitutes relevant time (in film, in life). (32) As Sylvie
alights at the station, she hurriedly walks down, through the underpass and up
to the opposite side of the tracks. At first, she appears to be merely changing
Métro lines – the film eager to show the most intermediate and unimpressive
aspects of her journey, perhaps to impress the significance of this occasion.
On closer inspection, however, she has simply crossed to the opposite platform
of the same line (and the train she
just has got off is now pulling away). It appears as if she was originally
travelling home, but made the decision to return to her office (where she
discreetly collects a gun). This might account for her earlier hesitation on
boarding the train and the reason why she urgently crosses the carriage when on
it. (33) Nevertheless, Sylvie’s behaviour remains opaque, and equally the film
barely acknowledges her change in
direction. It respects her private thought and secrecy (her secret defence,
perhaps), and preserves the journey’s mystery and banality, both essential and
inessential (in getting her to where she wants to be).
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29. As I
suggest as the start of the essay, the three French films discussed in this
essay exemplify three different rhythms: fast, medium and slow. In La Peau douce, Lachenay is always in a
rush. He moves through in-between places quickly; he must get through them to
arrive at the next destination. Despite logistical diversions, he is
purposeful. Louise moves through her in-between places less resolutely and
urgently. They are places she must walk through everyday, at a regular pace,
and thinking fills the time (and this thinking later unveils an elegant, social
version of itself in conversation). Sylvie is given more time and space within
which to dwell (as is the audience). If Nuits
de la pleine lune manages to infer a vague sense of inner thought from Louise’s journey from the suburbs into
the city, Secret défense, while never
clarifying the particularities of Sylvie’s interiority, makes it a focus for
attention. For an extended discussion on the expression of interiority in films
where specific thoughts are not clarified see David Turner, The Interiority of the Unknown Woman, unpublished
Doctoral Dissertation (University of Kent, 2007).
30.
Rapfogel writes that ‘each moment that could be considered a plot development
feels like something much more authentic. Life doesn't consist of a rapid
succession of dramatic moments; every important action in our lives struggles
to stay afloat amidst a sea of contemplation, interpretation, and
stabilization, stretching away on all sides. Secret Défense manages to
tell its story without being false to this quality of experience.’ See also my
study of the undramatic in Klevan, Disclosure
of the Everyday.
31. Although the segments rhyme in time and appearance, this is not literally the same stretch of journey. 32. A preoccupation
throughout Rivette’s career, but the exploration of duration is particularly
eloquent here because it is disciplined by, and in conversation with, the
situations and impetus of the ‘thriller’ narrative.
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Most of the film takes place in
communal areas like the hallway, where people cross each other, or come across
each other, like the grassy hill that we often sight down the alley between all
the houses (and where the boys play their ritualistic game, hazardous for the
boy who can’t master it, of learning to fart on command). Public and private
intersect at doorways, entrances and porch areas where conversations with
neighbours – welcome or unwelcome – take place. It is a fidgety film, where
characters come and go, once again between the houses. Mrs Haraguchi, scurries
around her neighbours, both creating gossip and trying to extricate herself
from it. The film explores how human beings need lines, physically and
verbally, most notably in the film’s title expression, ‘Good Morning’, which
the boys complain is a false and worthless greeting, to which their tutor explains,
‘The world needs some unnecessary things.’ ‘Good Morning’ is one expression of
the rigidities of human behaviour, both necessary and unnecessary, which Ohayo explores figuratively by
emphasising a world of physical straight lines – hallways (with or without
televisions), walls, screens, washing lines, picket fences, alleys, pylons,
poles, roads, tracks, platforms – and observing the various ways characters
work within, or manoeuvre between, them.
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33. Her original direction is
towards her home which is north of Gare d’Austerlitz and the river at Métro station
Richard-Lenoir (line 5), but her workplace where the gun resides is south of
station Gare d’Austerlitz in the other direction. This sequence closes with her
standing on the platform and it is possible to see the overhead sign showing
the southerly direction indicated by the terminus – Place d’Italie. Although it
is possible, therefore, to piece together the geographical jigsaw, with a
complementary knowledge of Paris – and playing that detective game is one of
the options offered by the film – I must emphasise that the film does not
situate this sequence, or ones leading to it, in such a way that Sylvie’s
movements could be self-evidently located.
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The film and the box are now at
rest, but this tranquil arrangement is temporary. A passing stage, conveyed
through immobility. The television in the box expresses containment: it
accommodates aspects of the past and is yet to unleash its mass of moving
images and noise. It evokes the drama that has preceded it – the boy’s speaking
strike, the father’s worries for his family, Mr Tomizawa’s struggling
retirement – and insinuates about the future. (Washing lines have a similar
effect such as in the shot that closes the film where the gentle fluttering of
clean pants whispers furtively of breaking wind and soiled consequences.) An
image of a cardboard box in a hallway absorbs and mutes events, stills and
distils them into a picture of dull domesticity that takes on an amused, yet
hesitant, poignancy.
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from Issue 1: Histories |
© Andrew Klevan and LOLA, 2011. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |