The Face Knife

Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 begins with a shot of colorfully-dressed five person theatre troupe facing away from the camera with their asses in the air and their heads tucked under their shoulders. These quite limber actors right themselves and begin stretching their bodies as if they were prepping for some sadistic Tae-Bo-esque workout. It’s a very funny scene and it prepares the audience mentally for the upending of cinema conventions about to ensue, not to mention the pre-occupation with the body and the forces that have power over it that is one of the sub-texts of the film. Unfortunately, at this point the film does not pause for a corresponding calisthenics intermission, as it sure would behoove the audience to make sure that their bodies are warmed-up so as to endure with as little soreness or fidgeting as possible the grueling, 8 episode, 12+ hour marathon (split over two days) that awaits. Particularly the first two episodes. For those I could have used a full-body massage as an overture.

Out 1 is one of the most famous films maudit of all time - the head curator of the Museum of the Moving Image here in Astoria, New York, said that this weekend (Dec. 9-10) was only the sixth public screening of the film, and there was only one print in existence*. Naturally, I had been greatly anticipating checking this one off my list. Of course, I was also hoping for much more than a big ?ol notch in my New Wave belt. I was hoping for some revelatory experience, a moment of transcendence, the out of body experience that the best movies can give us. Out 1, like most movies, failed to live up to that promise. Perhaps it was just a function of my expectations (or a function of my chair), but I would have to number Out 1, to use a supercilious expression of the sharply drawn douchebag from this film, ?minor Rivette. ?

In a way, all of Rivette?s films are ?minor,? and in the same way, Out 1 contains all of Rivette yet exceeds none of it. It is a small, centerless film blown out of all proportion, an experiment in theatrical staging, a clash of acting methods, a study in free-floating paranoia and a series of interlocking games and puzzles where the purpose is not to ?win.? An attempt to sum up or ?solve? Out 1 would similarly miss the point, and I?m not going to attempt it, particularly because there are several other of Rivette?s films that interest me more and I would rather be defeated by (Duelle, Le pont du nord and the incredibly opaque and Kabuki-esque Noroit, of the ones I?ve seen. Even the similarly flawed L?Amour Fou has some indelible moments).

I’m going to try to make a few small notes about the film and what interests me in it. In the notes MoMI distributed at the showing (from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s out-of-print Rivette collection) is a quite dense Rivette interview I haven’t yet properly digested - although, unfortunately that alimentation may not prove possible as he refers to several films I have not seen and don’t think I’ll get the chance to any time soon. Besides, I’m probably only writing this piece for the aforementioned public belt-notching. N.B. You may not want to read below if you plan on attending one of the upcoming screenings or if you’re already disgusted with the way I’m treating this film. And this piece will end arbitrarily, kind of like the film.

I’m having a hard time starting this sentence without using the words “plot”, “structure”, “organized” or “story”, all of which would be misleading for reasons mentioned above, so I will say that the film is centered around a few separate groups and individual characters**.
(1)The aforementioned upside-down theatre group, led by red-head Lili, (Michele Moretti) is rehearsing a humorously noisy version of Aeschylus’s “Seven Against Thebes.”
(2) Another theatre group, planning a version of Aeschylus’s “Prometheus,” using rehearsal methods that could double as CIA torture techniques. This group is led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), who proves to be intimately involved with nearly every other character in the film.
(3) Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a (faux) deaf-mute who plays the harmonica and receives bizarre messages which he deduces to reveal the existence of a secret society. He’s pretty greasy looking.
(4) Frederique, (Juliet Berto) a marginal street kid who likes to pickpocket, swindle, etc.
(5) Pauline/Emilie, (Bulle Ogier) owner of hippie hang-out. One of several characters with multiple names.
(6) There are two other “characters” in this film who are prime movers of the story as such but who never actually appear (to my knowledge - it may be possible that Pierre appears in one of the first two episodes, unremarked upon, as one of Colin’s “victims” - this is a completely unfounded theory, but I like it). As I am becoming a seasoned moviegoer and I am well aware of some of the stock though nonetheless moving pleasures of the form, I thought that Pierre-this or Igor-that would lead up to a Harry Lime or Ringo Kid-esque appearance in the 7th or 8th episode, but alas, they remain unearthly powers. At least Juan in Paris Belongs To Us has the decency to be definitively dead, if still the topic of every fucking conversation.

Both groups of theatre folk are in a constant state of transition- nothing is ever finished or settled upon. The rehearsal scenes of Out 1 are not as satisfying as those in Rivette’s previous filmL’Amour Fou, which uses a similar schemata. In L’Amour Fou the text of the source play (Racine’s Andromache) becomes doubled or tripled or quadrupled in meaning while the words stay exactly the same, through repetition (to the point that the audience themselves is rehearsed for the scene) who is delivering the lines and where they are delivering them. I prefer that type of “play” with the text to what Rivette does in Out 1, where both troupes more or less jettison their texts right away (The Thebes group plans to have a character appear onstage who never appears in the play (sort of the opposite of Out 1’s Pierre), and the Prometheus group actually starts with multiple texts in multiple languages (but by the end of the film Thomas is saying that Prometheus is entirely missing from the play)) and approach the problem of interpretation from a much more abstract and even mythical angles.

The two troupes have entirely different philosophies, however, but it’s easy to differentiate between them, even though they both center around the movement and position of the body. The Thebes group approaches Aeschylus through autonomous actors moving against each other with dynamic forces. They are also taking a disturbing though humorous choral approach to the play, using un-musical screeching as counterpoint to the action. When one of the actresses tells the music director that she cannot perform a difficult musical run without taking a breath, the music director tells her not to worry because everyone else will be making noise. The group in this case functions to maintain the individual. When one of the actors wins the lottery and announces that he will share the windfall with the group, the collectivism of this sentiment is too much to take - one of the other actors runs off with the money, selfishly, thereby maintaining the individual boundaries. Lili, it is revealed, has a sideline of providing fake “papers” to people of nebulous origin - and while the slant of her business was unclear to me, it is possible to read the service she provides as being aligned with the individual against the state - providing free passage and open borders in defiance of the restrictions placed on travel and residency.

In contrast, Thomas’s group is all about the submission of the body to the collective. You can picture his acting workshops by imagining the 60s bohemian version of the “trust-fall” at corporate retreats. The notorious first appearance of this Promethean group consists of a 45 minute scene of the actors rolling in the primordial muck, babbling, biting each other and constructing and destroying a red idol made out of a dress-maker’s dummy. Another rehearsal scene involves a young woman laying absolutely still and expressionless on the stage while the other members of the troupe do things like slam a chair next to her face.

Thomas, himself, though, is inviolate. One of the most interesting scenes of rehearsal involves Thomas as a wounded Prometheus, where the sometimes-used subtitle of the film “Noli Me Tangere” in invoked (though in French “ne [me] touchez pas”) where the actors coming in supplication to Prometheus are barred from touching him. Thomas seems to be allowed to paw anyone he wants to at any time, and indeed, his function as a connector in the film is primarily erotic (he has past or present relationships with 4 of the women in the film, and even convinces two of them to engage in a menage a trois with him). Apparently, in the four hour Spectre version of the film Thomas is even more important, but even in this version I think he is one of the more sharply drawn characters, a hierophantic troll who nonetheless radiates a powerful magnetism on those in his orbit.

The actions of Thomas, as an eventually revealed member of the Thirteen, gives an inkling as to what “The Companions of Duty” are about. I’m not going to delve to deeply into Conspiracy Theory theory here, as I’m bored with that and trust my readers are familiar with the Eco or Pynchon or whom have you’s versions, but the corollary to the (very reductive and almost banal idea) that “everything is connected and nothing is connected” there’s the more practical question of Power and the threat of power. Secret forces can exert power by whisking you away in the night, or maneuvering behind the scenes to prevent your expose from being published or merely the idea that these things could happen cause those not a member of elite to give up power, whether it is power over their bodies and how they can use them or power over what is permissible or not permissible to think or imagine. The struggle against the people making use of these forces is anti-Fascism.

As the one member of the cast who eventually engages in an armed struggle against the forces of evil (though, perhaps she does so as the result of a pun - “Les Compagnon de Devoir
(the Companions of Duty)” for “Les Compagnon de D?vorer” (the Companions of Devouring))- Juliet Berto gives an embryonic version of her immensely entertaining performance in Celine and Julie Go Boating, but that’s exactly what is - an embryonic version of that performance. The physical cues that make up the later character are all but absent here. The failure of her character to play any game properly be it chess or (and incidentally, if I see another movie where a metaphor about playing chess with yourself is thrown up onscreen, I just want it to be a joke about ‘polishing the bishop,’ knowwhatmsayin’?) blackmail or conspiracy is the result of the actress’s failure to create a convincing character - and thus she simply has to die.

Jean-Pierre Leaud fares a little better, as he is responsible for the one transcendent cinematic moment of the film, where he chants verse from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” while a handheld camera is in his face, walking down a street. His Colin is a marginal figure, refusing to work, instead haunting the cafes running penny-ante scams (more or less annoying people - for cash!).

It has been mooted that the failure of the groups and ideas of Out 1 to cohere are a metaphor for the death of the 60s following May ‘68, but the political content of this film is much less overt than it is in other Rivette’s (and even, for example, in Paris nous appartient and Le Pont du nord, where it is still more alluded to than actually made manifest). All the tuckered-out, jam-loving hippies in the world aren’t enough to make that point, and the French cinema would have to wait a few more years for a film that shares some of the same cast as Out 1, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, for an autopsy of that generation. As you will have to wait for my essay on that film. It’s been in progress for quite some time. Wait for it.

Related and Elsewhere:
Aaron Hillis at The Reeler
Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door
At Critical Culture, links to all 8 episodes of Out 1 (no subtitles, apparently)
Reverse Shot
Screengrab

If anyone else posts a review to a blog, I’d love to read it.

*There will be another screening March 3-4. Tickets are available via the link above. I believe there may be a showing in the offing in LA, as well
**and if I had half a brain, it would have occurred to be PRIOR TO THE FOURTH FUCKING EPISODE to make a flow chart of these relationships. Maybe that will be what March is for. Maybe.

When last we left Paris, in Godard’s Two or Three Things…, she was undergoing a process of destruction and rebirth, assisted by various strange and powerful apparatuses and totems. Over a dozen years later, in Jacques Rivette’s Pont du nord, the process continues - Paris is always the same in her mutability. The same red cranes piercethe sky like crucifixes and the same cement-mixers jiggle their swollen, primary-colored bellies while the same constant din of vibrating engines and falling concrete sets you on the edge of paranoia.

Into this crucible is tossed Marie (Rivette mainstay Bulle Ogier), recently released from prison, where she was incarcerated due to various politically motivated criminal acts. Dressed in an alchemical wardrobe of black and red (like the Juliet Berto moon goddess character in Duelle, Marie attempts to reconnect with an old lover/comrade in arms, who immediately involves her in a nebulous game involving cryptic maps of Paris and a number of “Maxes,” clandestine operatives of the forces of Fascism, or some other conspiracy.

Marie acquires a protector early on, in the form of Baptiste (played by Bulle Ogier’s daughter Pascale) , a street punk with a penchant for motorcyle racing, karate and compulsively defacing advertising posters (by using a knife to gouge out their eyes). Pascale Ogier, like Juliet Berto in Rivette’s Celine and Julie… is impossible to take your eyes off of. Rivette apparently once said that EVERYTHING an actor is doing should be interesting, and the stylized, full-body performances given by his actresses are the fruit of that belief.

Marie and Baptiste wander Paris aimlessly until they acquire a portentous map from the black and red briefcase they are asked to safeguard. The map divides the city up into 63 areas. Immediately they liken the layout to a boardgame, and mark up the squares on the map with the traditional Traps, like the Well, The Inn of the Golden Apples, and the Bridge, which is guarded by a Dragon which Baptiste defeats in a brilliant battle.

Unfortunately, battles that end in such clear-cut victory are usually imaginary, as the climax of the film proves. Hope is provided, however, as the main “Max,” whose allegiances are not so clear cut (he speaks German a bit in the film to Marie), spars with Pascale, teaching her just what the kata forms of Karate are meant for - to visualize past and future battles as if they were happening NOW.

He goes on to explicitly point out that what they are doing is not a dance, but come on - everyone knows that all the best movies end in dancing, and while Pont du nord might not be among the all time cinema classics, the ending is superb. More importantly, it’s a much more hopeful ending that Two or Three Things…, pointing a way out of the system, even if it is invisible and all-around, through a drift and defamiliarization. *

* Does anyone know if Rivette was influenced by the Situationists? Because the occult metaphors mixed with economic critique seem very akin to them.

Paris may not belong to us, but Paris* owns your ass (even when she’s in the midst of a crane-assisted makeover), and it’s this alienation between human beings and the things they create that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things… explores. The modern city creates unnatural “needs” for its inhabitants because of class structure, the distribution of wealth, urban planning, and the omnipresence of advertising.

Our inverted relationships to our environment and the commodities we produce may be a piece of our death, but they’ve never looked so good as photographed by Raoul Coutard in Two or Three Things…. It’s like Rodchenko photographing a world where Jack Kirby was an instructor at the Bauhaus. Eye-popping color like something out of a Tashlin comedy (another genre where objects sometimes do not behave quite as expected or desired) made me salivate over the prospect of owning this in the sure-to-be-forthcoming deluxe DVD edition, to be played on that widescreen HDTV I’ve been hurting for for so long.

It may sound like I am, but I’m not enjoying my symptoms.

Being something of a feminist, I squirm in my seat when Godard resorts to metaphors of prostitution (embodied always in HOT, foreign born Parisiennes) to illustrate the soul-killing effects of the cycle of work, but the matter-of-fact way in which the encounters take place in this film are drained of titillation and approach black comedy around their irregular margins.

But all the flashy Pop commodities in the world, from spicy dresses to toy machine guns to candy-apple red automobiles can’t point to a way out. The film is littered with posters for air travel to destinations where liberation struggles are going on (you know, I’ll have to watch it again to make sure that that is the case), and maybe that’s the only way out of the struggle. Or you can just sit at a table and stare into a coffee cup.

*or, you know, New York, as the case may be.

On the margins/in revisions/where we both first made our livings/in an alcove/full of sawdust/there a new light shone upon us
Although many prominent film critics (and Face Knife favorites) such as David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum count Jacques Rivette among the “masters” of cinema, Rivette’s films, particularly those of the 60s and 70s, are difficult to see, being barely if at all available on video, and that’s not even touching the quasi-mythic Out One: Noli Me Tangere, which was perhaps the most famous film maudit before its recent resurrection. Rosenbaum, in the review linked above, compares Rivette’s ouerve to that of Thomas Pynchon in terms of shared themes and pre-occupations, but while I was watching Paris the author I repeatedly flashed back to was William Gaddis, and his debut novel The Recognitions. In all likelihood it was the bohemian party that launches the protagonist (if one could call her that - she’s more of a dogged stumbler) on the “quest” that passes for the plot that reminded me of a similar, hilarious though sometimes harrowing scene in Gaddis, but I think the resonances go even deeper.

Girish posted today about Manny Farber’s infamous “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” , and although in Negative Space there is no extended treatment of Rivette he is often name-checked and praised in the highest terms as someone who is creating “termite” art. Even more so than the dudes mentioned above, I hold Manny Farber in high esteem not only because I think he’s a rad stylist but also because the dude’s a pretty excellent painter (there was a great Franklin Bruno article about him in The Believer a few years back, before I even started writing about film or even really watching it), like the two main things on my self-actualization wishlist.

It’s sort of odd to think of Rivette or Gaddis as being on the termite side of the line, as both have almost exclusively created work where duration is the key word. Somewhere along the line, duration or length has come to signify “masterpiece art,” where as I would say that Rivette and Gaddis (and I have not near exhausted either’s body of work) are not producers of masterpieces. Each of their works is a chunk of a larger work, or a probe launched at related concerns, and it certainly not a hermeticly sealed universe unto itself.

Termite art is all about the porousness of certain boundaries (to crib from another influence), and although Paris Nous Appartient is nearly claustrophobic (made more so because the bootleg DVD I watched resembled an over-inked screenprint) in its evocation of a system of connections that exists right below our every day lives the narrative is constantly offering other ways to opt out, even though the pull of oppressive order is almost inexorable. The orphans, atheists and nomads who create and populate Termite art may end up fucked-up and doomed, but at least they end up there because they have explicitly rejected the burden of changing art or changing the world. It can make for a frustrating viewing experience and I’d imagine a sore back and not a few worn welcomes, but when the quotidien feels like a trap it’s good to be reminded that there are options if you only know where to look.

But let’s hope there will still be places to look in the future. The final paragraph of Gaddis’s novel, and epitaph of sorts for one of his fictional alter-egos, a composer who perishes in an organ-driven church collapse, could equally apply to Rivette: “…most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoke of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”

the Museum of the Moving Image will allegedly hold a Rivette retrospective in November, with a screening of Out One: Noli Me Tangere. Anthology Film Archives just concluded a mini-retro, of which I was unlucky enough to catch only one, Noro?t.

The “title” for this entry is a lyric from The Mendoza Line’s “Catch a Collapsing Star”

continued, sort of, from Boudu Saved From Drowning

Robert Bresson’s Mouchette famously ends with the drowning death of the title urchin, after a long night during which she was raped and her mother died. The next morning, a succession of characters offer Mouchette charity, in the form of clothes, in the form of food, but she spurns them all before rolling down the embankment and into the water. On the face of it, it certainly seems like Mouchette was in a helpless situation and couldn’t be “saved,” despite any help that could be offered her. The fact that the help in question is offered in the spirit of pity rather than empathy doesn’t make a difference.

In what little reading I’ve done about Bresson, the idea of him being a Jansenist filmmaker is quite prominent. Most “modern” Catholicism and Christianity stress “works” as the key to the kingdom of Heaven, so grappling with the Jansenist ideas of original sin and predestination can be alienating. The idea that human effort matters little in determining one’s place in eternity is antithetical to the more or less liberal, secular values of the Western World.

Even the most fervent believers in “free will” cannot deny that there are three circumstances of a person’s life that are completely out of one’s control: where you were born, when you were born, and to whom you were born. These are, for lack of a better word, Fate, and Mouchette’s Fate seems inescapable when it comes to all three.

Jansenist thought posits that one thing can redeem the human soul: grace. Recall the end of Diary of a Country Priest: “all is grace.” I’m not sure that that would hold in Mouchette, because the world is a torturous place - a mudscape where the sound of metal scraping on metal shakes the night. You can almost smell the carbon monoxide given off by the trucks that pass Mouchette’s hovel.

In Catholic dogma, God can bestow his Grace on the supplicant through the Sacraments, the first of which, and the most important, because it removes the stigma of Original Sin, is Baptism. Is Mouchette’s drowning a baptism, or a denial of the possibility of Grace? Our urge to be charitable - born of pity - leads us to the first explanation, but maybe the answer is not so kind.

I like to think of myself as a charitable person. I’ve given change to the homeless, donated my blood (and refused the complimentary cookie), shopped at the Salvation Army for cool clothes and every Thanksgiving I have every intention of bringing in some canned goods for my office’s food drive. But even though I am by all evidence bursting with love for the unfortunate, if I ever see a tramp in mortal danger I’m going to mind my own business. Call me a hobophobe if you’d like, but if fiction is any indication, saving a tramp will totally fuck up your life.

Still, although my heart has been thus hardened, I can’t help feel pity for the poor and weak. But is “pity” a good reason to be charitable, or even the right reason? Is the “right” reason different if you’re (even nominally) a Christian or secular humanist?

The great part about the humanism of Renoir or Bresson is that it never champions asceticism - any moral or ethical message is always grounded in the inescapable facts of our corporal bodies and their needs and limitations. I think a lot of “spiritual” or “philosophical” artwork has the tendency to elide the realities of the body, though those realities are always present (and almost by definition, necessary) in the very highest art.

The body of Boudu is mostly whiskers and rags covering the great Michel Simon. Boudu has a companion, a dog, who runs away in the first scene. This is apparently the last straw, and Boudu throws himself in the Seine.

There’s a cliche that killing yourself by hanging is a unconscious wish to punish yourself for a crime and the metaphorical implications of, say, blowing your head off with a shotgun are pretty apparent. As far as tossing yourself in a body of water with the intention of not surfacing until you’re blue and bloated, my best guess is that it’s tantamount to a baptism, a desire to be close to God. Perhaps, though, it is an anti-baptism…

In any case, Boudu certainly thinks Paradise can be found on the riverbed and is justly peeved at the bourgeois bookseller, Lestingois, who pulls him from the Seine. I like Lestingois, and it’s harder to fault him as a benefactor than it is some other more supercilious would-be literary saints. When we are introduced to him, we are made immediately aware of his affair with his maid, and although he is in love with books and the literary life he doesn’t seem to be a snob. He’s aware of his faults and doesn’t seem to think he’s better than anyone else (except perhaps his wife). Thus it’s hard to see the effect that Boudu has on his life as any sort of ‘comeuppance,’ unless we see it as comeuppance for the ’sins’ of a class of people rather than any individuals within a class.

Boudu totally screws up the social order by failing to keep his bodily impulses constrained within the rules of a household. He spits everywhere, chases the maid and woman of the house around, and generally messes up the place. He’s the one-man version of the hobo wrecking crew/last supper in Viridiana.

Ultimately, instead of throwing Boudu out on his muttonchops, Lestingois attempts to “normalize” the odd relationships that develop between the 4 people living in the house, but Boudu will have none of it. He capsizes the whole enterprises and floats away, reclaiming some rags from a scarecrow upon his liberation.

Has charity, in this case, failed, and if so, who has it failed? Is Boudu’s intransigence a rebellion against those who (arguably, I would say) patronize him, or is it just that some people can’t be “saved”?

To be continued Monday in a review of Mouchette (1967)

Boudu Saved from Drowning is available on Region 1 DVD

Even the goodiest of two-shoes treasure stories of misbehavior from their youth. I still love to tell the story of Sister Ludgera breaking a yardstick over my back in 7th grade, or the time I was the ringleader of a band of agitators, surrounding the elementary school chanting songs (mostly the theme song to the Brady Bunch) to protest the unfair cancellation of gym class. There’s a great photo of a nun yanking my tie out there somewhere (it was a good-natured yanking). And now, where am I? Rushing from work in forever rumpleed business casual in order to catch a screening of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct at BAM.

It may have just been the dwarf, but I couldn’t watch Zero for Conduct without thinking of Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s own anarchic, blasphemous and crude schoolboy-inspired farce appeared onstage nearly 30 years before the release of Vigo’s film, and while the overturning of order is less violent in Zero for Conduct, Pere Ubu’s redolent, over-ennunciated ‘merdre’ echoes in the protestations of the effeminate Tabard, the catalyst that ignites the scheming schoolboys into full-fledged pagan riot. The character of Tabard, with his sullen demeanor, his broken heart and shaggy page-boy hair looks like a young Kurt Cobain*. He even looks like he’s cross-dressing half the time.

Jarry’s fictional science of ‘pataphysics was the examination of the “laws that govern exceptions,” and as we all know, every schoolboy (or girl) thinks himself exceptional, until proven otherwise. Which is pretty much the action of Ozu’s I Was Born But…, another schoolboy farce (though with slightly younger children) from the early 30s that while formally worlds away from Vigo’s film, offers some great points of comparison, particularly in each film’s treatment of Charlie Chaplin.

Vigo’s film has one adult sympathetic to the boys - he’s “alright” - a teacher who imitates the little tramp, walks on his hands, and doodles while standing upside down on his desk. In contrast, the two boys of I Was Born But… are humiliated when they see film footage of their father acting like a Chaplinesque buffoon to entertain his boss, the father of their schoolmate and sometimes enemy.

Ozu’s children learn their place in the world and how to toe the line, but Vigo’s film ends on a note of infinite freedom and anarchy, with symbols of the rules of everyday life being flung into the abyss. His schoolboys burn brightly, while Ozu’s will lead lives of quiet desparation, no doubt wearing Dockers.

* If things go as planned, by the end of the next week I’ll review Gus Van Sant’s The Last Days, his fictional account portrayal of Cobain.

1 part bedroom scene from Breathless
1 part chapter structure from My Life to Live
1 part sexual politics from Contempt
1 part whispered narration (by JLG) from 2 or 3 Things…
1 part negative photography from Alphaville
1 part advertisements from Masculin-Feminin
= most boring JLG film I’ve ever seen.

A Married Woman is currently unavailable on Region 1 DVD

Based on a novellete by Denis Diderot, Robert Bresson’s minor-key drama Les Dames… is the story of the revenge jilted Hélène exacts on her feckless lover, Jean, by striking at that most vulnerable organ of the aristocracy, the reputation. It is not simply that Hélène engineers a romance between Jean and Agnès, a former society girl reduced to cabaret dancing and more or less prostitution. The rehabilitation of a “fallen woman” could certainly be affected provided her lover/sponsor was aware of “the rules of the game,” so to speak, but Jean is completely unaware of Agnès’s very recent and very scandalous past (for example, in a shocking scene, after a disrespectful swain blows smoke at the top-hatted Agnès’s, she furiously stubs the cigarette out in his face and runs to her room, which by the way precipitates another great Bresson off-camera sound moment. ) and is thus unable to finesse the shock and titillation of ’society.’ Perhaps even if he did know what he was getting himself into, Jean would be unable to pull it off (or unwilling), as his dialogue, written by Jean Cocteau, is full of the airy, pseudo-poetic flights of fancy that would embarrass even the most ardent lovers, if not the writer.

Les Dames… includes several Bresson stylistic tics that will show up to greater effect in later movies such as Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and A Man Escaped (1956). I’m not sure how he does it, but the eyes of characters in Bresson can communicate more than the whole bodies of most actors, and most of that is simply through reflected light! In Les Dames… the light in the eyes means sad resignation, in A Man Escaped fierce rebellion, and in Diary the divine inspiration of God. The off camera sound moment I’ve already mentioned, but the most striking thing that unites the three films is the use of writing, particularly writing by a character that will not be read by anyone else. Agnès tries to confess her past to Jean in a letter, which he at first tries to tear up, then gives back to her. As he speeds away in a car, Agnès puts the letter in the window, only to have it, in a beautiful sequence, blow off the car and directly back to her. A Man Escaped of course featured a pivotal moment when Fontaine refuses to give up his pencil to the Gestapo, even though he could be shot for it, and Diary’s many writing scenes need no mention (except this one). The character of Agnès herself prefigures the women of New Wave, like Demy’s Lola, Truffaut’s Katherine, and Godard’s Nana, in her inability to escape from the role a few mistakes (or actions taken on purpose) have condemned her to.