Coco (Audrey Tautou) demonstrates her understanding of the erotic charge offered by the 'orphanage dress' she creates as fancy dress for her friend, the Parisian actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos).
Gill Branston described this film as a ‘chick flick’ given the majority of the audience in Cardiff were women. I’m not sure there was the same majority in Hebden Bridge, but then Hebden doesn’t follow conventional demographics. I was pleasantly surprised by the film and I enjoyed it throughout. I can see why some audiences, expecting a straight biopic about Chanel were disappointed, but Anne Fontaine, director of a script she co-wrote does exactly what the film’s title suggests and offers us a young Coco before she became the iconic haute couture designer – although there is a strange coda to the film which shows the more mature Chanel at some indeterminate time in the future when she clearly is famous.
The film is interesting in terms of its take on that French take on the ‘heritage drama’ that developed across the Channel at much the same time as its British counterpart. The houses and costumes look very good and all the performances are fine. The narrative worked well for me (some find it slow) and though I can see that Coco might be an unappealing character for some, I found her interesting and intriguing. It isn’t really a biopic as such as it offers only part of a life – and that the life before the subject had gained the height of her fame. I guess that the principal generic repertoire is really the romance. But it is also in a way a history lesson. I know little about fashion and care less, but the film certainly showed me why Chanel could be considered as innovative in costume design in France before 1914.
The major impact for me was the star performance of Audrey Tautou. I think she is one of the few contemporary stars who bears comparison with the great stars of classical cinema. Tautou has a distinctive face and the kind of slim body that shows off the clothes to perfection. Unlike most youngish Hollywood female stars, Tautou has her own star image – the modern gamine with a sense of determination. It seems to be working here as the film is doing reasonable business in markets across Europe. It has taken over $3 million in the UK , $2 million in Germany, $2.2 million in Spain and $1.6million in Italy to go with the $6 million plus in France. With the smaller markets chipping in and the US to come, the final total will be near the Warner Bros investment in production costs. With a reasonable afterlife on DVD and TV this might make up for some of the losses on A Very Long Engagement from the same star and studio.
The family, France, her mother Aimée and father Marc. Does the composition suggest that Aimée and Marc are not necessarily that close?
Everyone I have spoken too since the release of 35 Rhums has said what a fine piece of filmmaking it is and for me it is the best film I’ve seen this year. It has made me more determined to see the rest of Claire Denis’ work.
I remember when Chocolat was released, but not why I didn’t see it at the time. I was surprised to see on IMDB that it made over $2 million at the box office in North America. But then I think there was a vogue around that time for films set in Africa (Out of Africa was a big hit in 1985). The responses suggest that people who did see Chocolat were often disappointed or confused. That doesn’t surprise me, but it is also good to see that there are several perceptive and fascinating reviews of the film (see below). Having watched the whole film now on DVD (having seen only extracts before) it strikes me that Claire Denis arrived as a filmmaker ‘fully formed’ with her first feature at age 40. Chocolat was quite clearly made by the same filmmaker who directed L’intrus and 35 Rhums. Of course, Denis was not a neophyte – she had served a long apprenticeship to directors such as Costa-Gavras and Wim Wenders (whose company helped produce Chocolat).
I can tell you about the content of the film since there is little in the way of plot or narrative in the conventional mainstream sense. As in the other films by Denis that I have seen, things happen, some of them surprising or shocking but they don’t occur in a classic cause-effect structure with a clear narrative resolution. Chocolat begins with a young, white woman on a remote tropical beach as she watches a black man and his small son splashing through the shallows. As she is walking away from the beach, the man drives up and offers her a lift. The main part of the film is then constructed as a single long flashback in which the woman, named ‘France’ remembers her childhood as the daughter of a French colonial official administering a remote region of Northern Cameroon. The little girl spends much of her time with the ‘houseboy’ Protée, a tall, strong and very beautiful young man in his twenties who is caught in a kind of no-man’s land between the house and the servant’s quarters, being neither fully ‘French’ or fully ‘African’. He is representative of the impact of colonialism and the crisis of identity. France’s father Marc is often away from the big house and an uneasy relationship exists between France’s mother Aimée (also young and beautiful) and Protée (and the other servants).
The ‘external incident’ that stirs up the household in the second half of the film is a forced landing by a French plane carrying a colonial official from another district and his new (French) wife, a planter and his female (African) servant. The plane needs a spare part in order to continue its journey and this will take several weeks to deliver. It is also necessary to prepare a runway for take-off and there is the problem that any runway will not be usable if the rains come, so there is a time pressure. The disruption also attracts another French couple and a team of African labourers amongst whom is Luc, a ‘rogue’ Frenchman who seems to be travelling across the territory and whose function in the narrative appears to be to challenge the sense of ‘order’ in the community. With all these new arrivals, there is bound to be conflict in the household. There is also a short coda in which the grown-up France has another brief exchange with the man from the beach.
If the above sounds like the plot of a colonial melodrama, it is and it isn’t. These are the elements of the colonial melodrama (which usually explores a charged emotional relationship across the taboo boundary line of coloniser/colonised) but here Denis uses the possibilities of combining the elements in a different way. The theme of the film is still sexual desire and the consequences of colonial power relationships, but not expressed through melodramatic excess. (I have commented on an extract from Chocolat used by Rona on our evening class in an earlier post.)
I’ve left out some of the narrative information from the outline above because if you do decide to see the film (Artificial Eye released the Region 2 DVD in 2005) you may want to keep some element of surprise. But I will refer to some of the background to the film. Claire Denis grew up in similar circumstances to little France, although I haven’t determined exactly where in French Africa her family was stationed in the 1950s. It may have been Cameroon or possibly Niger. The choice of Northern Cameroon for Chocolat is interesting for several reasons. Its remoteness helps the narrative in terms of isolation. It also allows Denis to make references to the ‘European’ rather than specifically French nature of colonialism in Africa. Cameroon was first colonised by the Germans and after 1918 was split into two mandated territories governed by France and Britain. The two separate colonies were reunited after independence. In Chocolat, France and Aimée are seen in a small cemetery where the German colonisers are buried. They have an English-speaking cook and they are visited by an Englishman who comes to dinner. I don’t think these are simply realist touches. Denis is not too concerned about ‘authenticity’ as such since the timescales are wrong – the older France looks to be in her late twenties in what appears to be contemporary Cameroon (i.e. the late 1980s), but the colonial narrative, in which France is seven or eight, must be at least 30 years earlier as independence in French Cameroon came in 1960.
The region used as a location is in the far North of the country, a wedge driven between Nigeria in the West and Chad in the East – land that is usually hot and dry with distinctive landscapes. It reminded me of films from Chad, but also from Mali and the rest of the Sahel further North (it’s actually not that far from the Northern tip of Cameroon to the Sahel region). I was reminded of incidents in Sembène Ousmane’s films such as in Aimée’s dismissal of a local Christian missionary in the predominantly Muslim local community and also of the visual similarities in some of Agnès Godard’s beautiful compositions, using the light against the compound walls, the long shots of the house and its inhabitants and the way characters disappeared into the dark of the surrounding night. It is the closest that I have seen a European filmmaker get to making an ‘African’ film. It is also a forerunner for the breathtaking imagery of Beau Travail (1999) located on the other side of Africa, but with similar landscapes. Landscape is an important element in the film, not least when France is told about what the horizon means by her father.
I’m not going to undertake a detailed reading of the film here, since there are already several very good reviews listed below. What I will say is that Claire Denis has become a kind of critics’ darling – both those critics who write in the specialist film magazines (she is one of the ‘visionary filmmakers’ in Sight and Sound, September 2009) and in the academy where she is a focus for both the application of contemporary theoretical writing to a body of work (such as the ideas of Gilles Deleuze) and also as a key figure in film studies within French language and cultural studies. This is great, but it would be a shame if Denis was thought of as somehow ‘difficult’ or impenetrable as a filmmaker. As long as audiences can get past their own attachment to Hollywood conventions about storytelling, Denis’ films are quite accessible on several levels with engaging and interesting situations and characters. So in Chocolat it is possible to use the film to explore how individuals and their desires are caught within the systems of taboos and restrictions of colonialism and post-colonialism. They react as functioning human beings, not as characters in a fiction, in what is a very clear-sighted representation of the worlds we all inhabit. I can’t wait to review some of the other films and find the ones I’ve missed.
There are several reviews and articles about the film and about the work of Claire Denis in general. The following are worth a look (along with the other entries tagged Claire Denis on this site):
The usually reliable Roger Ebert provides a useful way into the film without the need for a strong theoretical background.
In the course of compiling this list I came across the ultimate Claire Denis resource collection compiled by Catherine Grant at Film Studies for Free. If you are serious about accessing all the critical work, this is undoubtedly where to go.
In the week that sees the UK release of the first of two French films about Jacques Mesrine, the French gangster figure from the 1970s, it seems opportune to explore the concept of the polar or crime thriller in French Cinema. French crime cinema now exists in an interesting relationship with Hollywood and Hong Kong Cinema in a seemingly endless flow of influences between the three. I’ve just watched the slightly disappointing Public Enemies in which, as some commentators noted, Johnny Depp tries hard but can’t really nail being as cool as Alain Delon in a Jean-Pierre Melville film. Eventually, I hope we also get to see the latest Johnnie To crime flick with French legend Johnny Halliday in Vengeance (2009).
Here is an update of some notes I used for a day school in 2006.
The thriller and crime fiction
In any film culture, the ‘thriller’ is likely to be one of the main broad generic categories. In France, as in Britain during the later studio period from the 1940s to the 1960s, the crime thriller was arguably second only to comedy as a popular format. France has a long history of ‘crime fiction’ – the first ‘detective story’ could be said to be Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 with a character perhaps modelled on Eugène François Vidocq, a real life crook turned thief catcher who became the first head of the Sûreté in 1811 (and the basis for a feature film in 2001). Poe offers an early American connection with French crime fiction which was to become more important in the 20th century.
But the police were not the heroes of early French crime fiction. More important were ‘super crooks’ such as Fantômas and Arsène Lupin who were defeating clod-hopping policemen in films from the 1910s. It was not until the 1920s that the French police found their hero in the form of (Belgian) Georges Simenon’s Maigret.
The roman noir, ‘dark stories’ of doomed characters began to appear in the 1940s and soon set up a kind of dialogue with ‘hard-boiled’ American fiction, both being published in France under the famous ‘Série Noire’ label. In the 1950s psychological mystery/crime novels gained a higher public and critical profile through the works of writers such as ‘Boileau-Narcejac’ and Sébastien Japrisot. The former is a pseudonym for a pair of writers, Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, perhaps best known outside France for the original novel used as the basis for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and for Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955). Japrisot’s books have also been used for films, most recently for the story which became Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004).
It isn’t difficult to make the links between French novels and films and American novels and films, with various French film directors turning to the work of ‘hardboiled’ writers of the 1940s, e.g. Truffaut turning to the work of William Irish/ Cornell Woolrich in The Bride Wore Black (1968) and La sirène du Mississipi (1969) and to David Goodis for Shoot the Pianist (1960). Goodis was also the source for Jean-Jacques Beneix’s The Moon in the Gutter (1983).
Jean-Paul Belmondo as Silien in Le Doulos (d. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
The polar
The term polar seems to have been coined in the 1970s. Like many terms in idiomatic French, it’s a corruption or slang term, perhaps deriving from film policier. It now has a fairly loose meaning which covers films that may include ‘police procedural’ work or which may focus on the milieu of the criminals. It has also sometimes been widened to include spy thrillers and more action-orientated films. In critical usage, various French Cinema scholars have referred to the polar as a means of tracing how representations of crime, criminals and police work have changed over time. This is one of the important aspects of genre study. Because genre films are composed of elements mixed together in patterns of ‘repetition and difference’, we can use genres to log changes in references to issues of gender, race and class and to broader changes in French society. This is neatly set out by Phil Powrie (1997) in his book on 1980s French Cinema, a period when the polar was again popular. Powrie suggests three aspects of the polar that could form the basis for study:
its use as a ‘vehicle’ to carry comments on contemporary society;
an indication of the state of French-American cultural exchange;
the focus on a hero who is ‘marginal’ to mainstream society.
Although the term ‘polar dates from the 1970s, we can trace it back at least as far as the 1930s when Jean Gabin was the major star of French cinema.
Pépé le Moko (1937)
Pépé (Jean Gabin) is a Parisian gangster (originally a ‘moko’ – ‘from Marseilles’) exiled in Algiers where he is holed up in the Casbah and supported by a network of people all dedicated to making sure that the police can’t arrest him. He is doomed because he can’t stop himself being attracted to beautiful women and because his network is vulnerable through the naivety of his ‘surrogate son’ and the sly manipulations of a local police officer.
The Casbah is carefully constructed and photographed in a Parisian studio – so effectively that in some ways the film looks like an early rehearsal of the famous scenes in Battle of Algiers, shot on location in 1965. Gabin/Pépé is a recognisable character in a category of films given the title of ‘poetic realism’ in which a romanticised hero from the working class is shown to be ultimately defeated. Surprisingly perhaps, most of these pessimistic films were made by supposedly ‘left-wing’ directors. In this case, the director was Julien Duvivier, not generally seen as of the left. Gabin continued to be a major star into the 1970s, dying in 1976. He set the standard for the masculine hero, rugged and brutal, but also romantic and well-dressed.
Jean Gabin (left) and Lino Ventura (right), two great stars of the polar in Rouge est mis (France 1957) part written by Jacques Audiard's Dad, Michel Audiard
Plein soleil (France/Italy 1960)
This version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, starred Alain Delon in one of his first roles as the cold-blooded killer Tom Ripley. Delon went on to become a major star of both auteur films and popular polars, later appearing in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville. It was directed by René Clément, one of the directors who perhaps suffered by association with la tradition de qualité attacked by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma. Plein soleil refers to at least two of the polar’s features in the early 1960s – an origination in American crime writing and and to some extent Hollywood filmmaking in colour, on location in Italy. The Italian setting also refers to the sense of the new environment of the ‘periphery’ (i.e. ‘not Paris’) which began to appear as a locale at this time.
À bout de souffle (1959)
Now famous, alongside Truffaut’s Les 400 coups, as the films that heralded la nouvelle vague for cinephiles around the world, À bout de souffle shows director Jean-Luc Godard taking the elements of the polar and the American crime B-picture and creating something new. In the opening of the film, we see Jean-Paul Belmondo ‘playing’ with the image of Humphrey Bogart and then moving into an exciting drive from the Cote d’Azur to Paris and trashing the conventions of the ‘well-made’ film along the way.
Belmondo was both the male star of the New Wave and the heir to Gabin’s role. In À bout de souffle he is a charming young thug who dies on the street in a scene at once ‘romantic’, futile and ‘marginal’. He appeared in other polar-related films for Truffaut and Chabrol and for the ‘mentor’ of the New Wave, Jean-Pierre Melville. He also appeared in more commercial films, e.g. alongside Alain Delon in Borsalino (France/Italy 1970) a 1930s set Marseilles gangster movie which refers perhaps to both the Warners films of the 1930s and to contemporary ‘buddy movies’ such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (US 1969).
Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le Samourai – eat your heart out, Johnny Depp!
Le Samuraï (France/Italy 1967)
Delon again, for Melville and playing the ultimate hitman ‘Jeff Costello’. Melville had developed a highly individual style in his earlier polars, which were both ‘popular’ (i.e. commercially more successful than the New Wave films) and attracted cinephiles intrigued by his commentary on the crime film, American cinema, existentialism etc. Costello is clearly ‘marginalised’ and seemingly anachronistic in the Paris of the mid 1960s.
Subway (France 1985)
Writer-producer-director Luc Besson is one of the figures associated with the cinéma du look of the 1980s. Powrie argues that the polar was revived in the 1980s and filled an ‘ideological gap’ left by the dramas drawing on left-wing ideas in the 1970s. Other auteur directors of the period (e.g. Beneix, Leos Carax) also made polars, but Besson has always been interested in popular genre cinema and the American connections which saw his Nikita (France 1990) re-made in Hollywood and Léon (France/US 1994) set in America, are an integral part of the history of the polar.
Other polars released in the UK include Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘realist’ study of the Parisian drugs squad in L.627 (France 1992) and Maurice Pialat’s Police (1985), a classic polar with Gérard Depardieu as a police officer falling for a mysterious woman. Depardieu could be seen as the 1980s successor to Belmondo/Delon as a polar hero.
References and further reading
Susan Hayward (1993) French National Cinema, London: Routledge
Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) (2000) French Film: Text and Contexts, London: Routledge
(Includes papers on Le Samouraï, À bout de souffle and Nikita)
Phil Powrie (1997) French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity, Oxford: OUP
Websites
Useful sites giving background on French crime fiction:
Thomas (Romain Duris) and Miao-Lin (Linh-Dam Pham) in The Beat That My Heart Skipped
De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, France 2005)
Jacques Audiard (born 1952)
Audiard’s father, Michel, was a prolific writer/director of thrillers/polars, responsible for over 100 scripts between 1949 and his death in 2000. Jacques Audiard also became a screenwriter and in 1994 directed his first feature Regarde les hommes tomber. Unlike his father, Jacques began as an editor, before moving to writing and finally to directing. He has spent much longer fashioning his scripts and has directed just five features to date. All have been widely praised and each represents a form of commentary on the history of the thriller. The first two films both feature Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz.
In Regarde les hommes tomber (See How They Fall, 1994), the veteran Trintignant (himself a star of crime films, alongside other genres and auteur films of the 1960s and 1970s) is an ageing hitman who takes on a younger partner (Kassovitz) with learning difficulties. The film is more of a character study than a straight thriller. In Un héros très discret (Self-made Hero, 1997), one of the best French films of the 1990s, Trintignant and Kassovitz return as older and younger versions of the same man, a successful politician of the 1990s recounting his own bizarre story from the Occupation in the 1940s. This isn’t a thriller as such, but again it features a rather weak character who is taught how to behave and who discovers a talent for inventing himself as a new personality. Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips) in 2001 certainly was a thriller. A working class criminal released from prison meets a thirty-something woman with a hearing impairment who is being cold-shouldered in her work as a secretary for a building company. She hires him as her assistant and gradually they are drawn together to form a an unusual partnership which benefits from her skills as a lip-reader. The relationship strengthens as they become enmeshed in a thriller narrative.
Audiard’s films all feature partnerships. Regarde les hommes tomber is perhaps most clearly related to the polartradition, with its surrogate father-son relationship. Un héros très discret offers several different relationships all involving the central character, but all in some way based on a deceit – fitting for a story set in the context of exposing the ‘myth’ of resistance in the 1940s. Sur mes lèvres is unusual in focusing primarily on the woman, but creating through the partnership a kind of amalgam figure related to the polar hero. De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté returns in a way to the (real) father/son relationship.
Putting aside the ‘special case’ of Un héros très discret, Audiard’s three polars all take place in a world that is recognisably the ‘real France’ of the 1990s/2000s, but which also makes reference to the generic locations/mise en scène of earlier polars. They are mostly set in Paris, but more in the suburbs than the centre and, in Sur mes lèvres, the kind of industrial/residential sprawl with its clubbing and high rises that features in many European cities. There are strong elements of realism in the depiction of Paris in a range of polars – marking the genre as aesthetically removed from the quirky fantasy world of Amélie or the earlier ‘heritage’ films set in the ‘glorious’ past.
The two most recent Audiard films are interesting in terms of their central characters. Vincent Cassel plays against type in Sur mes lèvres. Cassel has all the qualities that would make him a modern counterpart of the Belmondo/Delon characters from the 1960s/70s. He has the same physical beauty and presence and the skill to suggest the peculiar mixture of intelligence, brutality, coldness and tenderness that they display. But in Sur mes lèvres, he becomes the object of attraction for Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), who herself displays a similarly complex array of personal traits. Carla is the lonely and isolated figure, drawn into criminal activity through her repressed sexual desire. For some audiences, the move into the thriller territory is something of a disappointment after the slow build of the first half of the film which carries a strong sexual charge.
Perhaps the clearer generic narrative in De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté has enabled it to become a bigger commercial success. The film is a remake of Fingers, the 1978 American ‘independent’ film made by James Toback and starring Harvey Keitel. Bizarrely produced by Brut “the great smell for men”, the plot outline sees a young man who is caught between the demi-world of his criminal father and the more gentile world of his mother a concert pianist.
Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris) in the remake really does seem to be the Belmondo/Delon hero. His dark good looks and stylish, if casual, clothes, his mix of brutality and delicacy are all suggestive of the earlier characters. Duris is some thing of a throwback in this performance with his longish hair, leather jacket and cuban heeled boots. He has entered his father’s business as an unscrupulous property developer who buys up apartment blocks after evicting squatters with violence and threats. He wearily beats people up for his ailing father, but refuses to endorse his parent’s new relationship (with Emannuelle Devos). His chance meeting with his dead mother’s agent/impresario prompts him to take up the piano again and to seek out a piano tutor, Chinese conservatoire student Miao-Lin.
Duris is fantastic and manages to be brutal and sexy, immoral and honourable. Audiard makes excellent use of the mix of classical piano with ‘techno’ and edits the film tightly so that it is a tense thriller even if the actual narrative incident is relatively slight. This is possibly the best polar of recent years – at least before Audiard’s next film which did so well at Cannes in 2009.
Here’s the trailer:
Discussion questions
1. Think about the ending of De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté. How does it compare with the traditional polar? What do we think of Thomas and his situation at the end of the film?
2. Is Thomas the ‘marginalised figure’ alluded to by Phil Powrie? If so, in what ways?
3. What kind of environment does the film inhabit? If you have been to Paris recently, is it a ‘realist’ environment? Does the film feel like it is dealing with a recognisable society in 2005?
4. Should we take anything from the fact that Audiard has ‘remade’ a (relatively obscure) American film? Does the film have anything to say about that unique French/American/crime connection?
Déborah François and Catherine Frot in The Page Turner
The new film from French auteur director Denis Decourt is about to be released, so it seems a good moment to publish some education notes dealing with study of his previous film, La tourneuse de pages (The Page Turner). These notes were first published in 2007 as part of a Narrative Study for 17 year-old Film and Media students in the UK. (There are similar notes on films such as Tsotsi and Hero elsewhere on this site.)
These notes assume that students have already seen the film, so they include Spoilers.
Introduction
The Page Turner is very much a French film, dealing with aspects of middle-class French provincial culture. The characters and the location are not really found in the same way anywhere else (although the director did add an element of what he considered to be ‘Britishness’ – did you spot any British references?). Part of the ‘Frenchness’ of the story is to do with ‘tone’ and the attitudes towards high culture (e.g. classical music). The treatment of the story is also associated with ideas about French cinema. The pace is slow and deliberate and the style is cool and detached. To fully appreciate the film, you need almost to ‘turn off’ your senses attuned to Hollywood and then retune to something rather different (even though the basic narrative ideas and conventions are similar).
Plot outline
Mélanie is a 10 year-old girl from a small town who as a child learns to play the piano and has an ambition to become a professional pianist. When she auditions for a conservatoire place, she is distracted by the inconsiderate behaviour of one of the judging panel, professional pianist Ariane. Mélanie fails the audition.
Several years later, Mélanie gets an internship with a legal practice in Paris and when one of the partners needs someone to look after his son when he is away on business, she volunteers. The partner turns out to be Ariane’s husband. The couple live in a large country house outside Paris and Ariane is recovering from a serious accdent and trying to piece together her concert career. The son is learning to play the piano under his mother’s guidance. Mélanie gradually begins to exert her influence over mother and son. Ariane does not know she once failed Mélanie and is so impressed that she asks her to become her tourneuse – at home and for a performance for a radio producer. Ariane becomes professionally and emotionally dependent on Mélanie – unwittingly offering her the perfect opportunity to take revenge.
French provincial life: Background
France is quite similar to the UK in some ways, but there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences. First, France is a much bigger country, so distances are greater and small communities are more isolated. France still has a significant agricultural sector and a much stronger sense of a rural community than in the UK. Secondly, Paris dominates French social life to an even greater extent than London in the UK. Small towns and villages are conservative and the ‘25 miles from Paris’ location of the ‘big house’ in this film means something rather different to what ‘25 miles from London’ might mean in the UK.
The lawyer’s family in the film might be described as ‘middle-class’ or ‘upper middle-class’. It is a very large house and husband and wife both have jobs which are high in cultural status. The French education system focuses on ‘élites’ in special schools like the British system, but possibly with even greater emphasis. The ten year-old butcher’s daughter auditioning for a music school of some kind could potentially move out of her class through a specialised education. Because she fails to do so, she is faced with ‘serving’ the middle-class in some way – unless she is prepared to move to the city.
Hitchcock, Chabrol and the psychological thriller
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was one of the greatest showmen in cinema history as well as one of the most skilled directors. In over sixty films and numerous television programmes he established a rapport with audiences and a reputation for certain kinds of films, especially thrillers in which he would ‘play’ with the audience’s identification with characters – often inviting us to identify with both villain and victim or, perhaps, confusing us with characters who might be ‘good’ and/or ‘bad’. Much has been made of Hitchcock’s Catholicism and the power of guilt and moral uncertainty to unsettle characters. This aspect of his work and his ability to make highly entertaining films which also ask serious questions have attracted plenty of disciples, not least amongst the young filmmakers in France in the late 1950s and in Hollywood in the early 1960s who became New Wave directors. One of these in particular, Claude Chabrol, has been associated with the psychological thriller.
Chabrol has been making films for nearly fifty years at the rate of more than one film per year. Although he has made films in several genres, by far the majority are crime films of some kind. The setting for many Chabrol films is bourgeois (middle class) provincial life with some kind of social or moral issue underpinning a particular criminal act. Unlike many of Hitchcock’s entertainments with their carefully orchestrated chase sequences and sometimes shocking moments of violence, Chabrol’s films are more about manners and subtle actions (although there is often one or more violent actions).
Revenge and the stranger
The Page Turner draws on the Hitchcockian/Chabrolian idea of the psychological thriller and on a familiar narrative premise – the arrival in a specific family or small community of a stranger. The stranger is not recognised but is in fact intent on revenge for some action previously undertaken by the family/community. There are many variations on this premise. The stranger could be the child of the wronged person. They could be physically altered in appearance so that they are not recognised. They could be a ghost . . .
In each of these cases, the director has the chance to offer or withhold information for the audience or for the members of the family. As the audience we are both intrigued and fearful about what will happen as our understanding (our ‘story knowledge’ is manipulated by the director). The Page Turner was written and directed by Denis Dercourt. Dercourt was originally a highly-rated music teacher in the world of chamber music – a professional world full of tension and possibly brittle egos. He wrote the script during a period working in Japan where the revenge tragedy is a very important element of generic narratives in traditional theatre as well as cinema.
Examples of ‘stranger’ narratives
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is a Hitchcock film set in 1941 (just before the US entered the Second World War in a time of seeming safety in California). A family get news that ‘Uncle Charlie’ (the mother’s brother) is coming to visit them after many years when they haven’t seen him. The eldest daughter is delighted that he is coming since she is ‘young Charley’ and she has always believed she has a special affinity with her uncle. But in the opening scenes of the film, the audience is shown that Uncle Charlie is a shady character who is being pursued by two men and who has travelled incognito to California. We fear that he is going to bring danger into the family or that he will corrupt young Charley.
La ceremonie (1995) is a Chabrol film, based on a novel by Ruth Rendell. A bourgeois family needs a new maid/housekeeper and a young woman answers their advertisement. She is given the job, but although she proves to be very efficient, there is something odd about her. Her behaviour becomes disturbing for the family when she links up with the local postal clerk in the village, another single woman who is mistrusted by the family. Gradually the situation deteriorates and the narrative has a rather shocking denouement.
Merci pour le chocolat (2000) is another Chabrol film that concerns a complex set of family relationships. At the beginning of the story (set in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) a well-known concert pianist re-marries his first wife after the death of his second wife (who was the mother of his son). A young woman, who is a music student, discovers that at the time of her birth there was some confusion at the clinic with babies being wrongly identified and that she may be the pianist’s daughter. She visits the pianist and begins to take music lessons. As the plot develops, she and the pianist’s son begin to suspect that the stepmother (whose own family owns a chocolate company) may be adulterating the chocolate she offers the family each evening.
Narrative Structure
The Page Turner has a very simple structure. The opening sets up the ‘inciting incident’ and then the events which detail the revenge all take place over a few weeks, several years later. The distinction between Act Two and Act Three is less clear cut, but there is a climactic moment, even if the resolution of the film is relatively open.
Questions of cinematography, mise en scène, music etc.
The Page Turner is in some ways a very ‘slight’ narrative in terms of action. Therefore it is important that whatever we see and hear conforms to a particular mood or tone that enables us to ‘feel’ the tension. Music is the central unifying factor in the narrative. Dercourt wanted to be sure the music worked and so despite his own high skills, he commissioned a complete score for the film from Jérôme Lemonnier as well as carefully choosing the pieces to be played in the concerts. To complement the music the cinematography and editing need to be ‘cool’ and fluid. The country house is presented in terms of understated wealth and elegance. As some critics have pointed out, the atmosphere of bourgeois provincial French life is one of politeness and formality (i.e. rather than ostentation). It might be useful to consider the contrast between how the house is presented in The Page Turner and how similar houses are presented in UK television dramas such as Inspector Morse or ‘heritage’ literary adaptations.
Although some of the action takes place in Paris, in the radio station, there is no attempt to make use of the bustle of the city. Apart from one long shot of the France Radio building everything is interior – like a chamber concert. The big house stands in open country, emphasising its isolation.
The final element in creating atmosphere and tone is the performance by the two leads, Catherine Frot and Déborah François. Frot is a very well-established actor France, although her films and television work are not particularly well-known in the UK. For Dercourt it was important that she could play the piano pieces used in the film and she does (but the sound of the playing is dubbed by a professional pianist). If we couldn’t see her fingers on the keys and feel confident that she was actually playing, the atmosphere would be lost. Déborah François is the sensational young rising star of Francophone cinema (she is actually Belgian/Walloon). She first appeared at Cannes in 2005 as the 16 year-old single mother in L’enfant, the Dardennes Brothers film that won the Palme d’Or. The Page Turner is only her second film and the difference between the two films is striking. In the first she has to act in a very naturalistic way and in The Page Turner, she must do the opposite, playing someone almost supernaturally composed. We may want to discuss how her physical presence effectively controls this film.
Narrative resolution
Above, we have suggested that the resolution is in some ways ‘open’. Mélanie leaves, walking down the deserted country road wearing her enigmatic smile. Has she resolved her own inner torment with her cruel actions? Or is she seriously deranged and a threat to society? The big question here is how have we reacted to her? Do we begin in sympathy and gradually realise what she is attempting to do? Are we still cheering her on at the end? And what of Ariane? She has seemingly lost her husband (and possibly her wealth), her son’s piano-playing future, her career and probably her self-respect. Does she deserve this? How do our attitudes towards her change over the course of the film?
Genre
We have set up the film in the context of the Hitchcockian/Chabrolian psychological thriller and the revenge drama. The third major repertoire that we have not so far mentioned is the melodrama. In introducing this possibility, we need to be careful because melodrama is a much misunderstood term with a range of possible meanings and some of them seemingly quite contradictory. Nevertheless, ‘melodrama’ is a term that has been consistently used by producers and critics over the whole history of the cinema. At the most basic level, ‘melodrama’ is derived from the Greek ‘melos’ = music plus ‘drama’. From this we get a dramatic narrative that uses music to express a commentary on action and the emotional states of the characters. More generally, especially in European cinema, melodrama has been seen to refer to narratives with a focus on a complex array of emotional relationships, often in a small social group. These emotions are then expressed through a range of stylistic devices, including music. This is also relevant for The Page Turner. There are three or four ‘small groups’ in the film: Mélanie’s family, the lawyer’s office and the two main groups, the lawyer’s family and Ariane’s work colleagues. We could argue that the ‘coldness’ and formality/politeness of the relationships and its expression via colour, lighting, camerawork, music etc. is what we might expect in a French bourgeois melodrama.
Reading a film case study: the opening to The Page Turner
Whatever the film, you are likely to want to analyse a short sequence in detail (around 5-7 minutes is about the right length). The chosen sequence will play a significant role in the narrative structure. It is likely to be:
the opening
a sequence which marks a shift in direction, a ‘turning point’ in the narrative, or
the closing sequence
The opening to The Page Turner is actually quite a long sequence which ends around 10’ 30’’ into the film with a fade to black. This is too long for a detailed analysis so we’ll split it into two. The credit sequence lasts 3’ 10” until the final credit, the film’s title. At this point, the girl leaves her darkened room and the camera focuses on a photograph of a concert pianist tacked to her wall.
The credit sequence performs several narrative functions. First it introduces the central character, Mélanie, aged 10. She is an intense little girl seemingly dedicated to practising for her audition. We first see her lying in bed, playing the keys in mime on top of her bedsheets. The room is dark and the camera circles around above her. The editing includes a number of overlapping dissolves which create a ghosting effect rather than a clean image. The soundtrack is particularly interesting in that it conveys a dreamy, echoing background sound with two distinctive piano parts mixed to the fore. There is a plaintive piano melody and also a separate single piano note which jars. The soundtrack ‘bridges’ a fade from the bedroom to the girl playing the piano at home during the day.
Once we see the girl in daylight, we begin to get a sense of setting. The room is quite small (we can see the kitchen in the background) and the sequence cuts between the girl playing and a butcher at work. Eventually we see the butcher’s shop both inside and outside. Finally when the girl comes to the family dining table, we realise that the father and mother both work in the butcher’s shop.
The short sequence around the dining table establishes that the parents are proud of the girl’s achievements in her playing. The father says that he wants her to enjoy her playing and tries to reassure her that even if she fails, they will stay pay for her lessons. She simply says ‘Non!’ This is a determined young woman. After the dining scene there is a cut back to the girl lying in bed and again we hear the piano part.
The credit sequence quickly establishes a character in a social context and introduces a familiar narrative question – will she pass the test and what might be the consequences either way? But we also learn a great deal more from the sequence. The music and the camerawork, as well as the editing and the young actor’s performance, all suggest that though she is determined, there is something disturbed or disturbing about the girl. Added to this is the editing together of the piano playing and butchery. The close ups of the father jointing a carcase and then preparing chops, of meat hanging in the cold store and displayed in the refrigerated cabinet seem excessive. They aren’t really necessary in order to tell us that he is a butcher. The wider shots of the shop do this quite effectively. Throughout the sequence the music and sound effects are unsettling (especially since there is no diegetic sound in the shop and even when we see the girl playing the piano, the sound is not diegetic (i.e. it is not her playing we hear, but music ‘outside the film’) but instead ‘disembodied’. The disturbing effect of the sound is matched by the camera which for much of the time is moving in circles round the girl, as if unable to be settled.
What do we make of this? If we are Chabrol fans, we immediately think of one of his most famous thrillers, Le boucher, in which a provincial butcher is a serial killer of young girls. But even if we don’t know this reference (from 1970), we have to consider the montage in the credits which juxtaposes cuts of meat and unsettling piano playing. Quickly we learn that the butcher himself seems a rather pleasant character and a caring father. Does our attention then focus on the girl?
In the second sequence we see Mélanie practising in the dark. When her father comes into the room she asks him if she can play the whole practice piece for him. He agrees, but we don’t hear this, instead the action cuts to the next morning when Mélanie attends the audition with her mother (who leaves her in the rehearsal room). The shots of Mélanie and her mother walking through the courtyard, up the stairs and into the suite of rooms is there to emphasise how busy it is – how many other young hopefuls are nervously waiting. Mélanie herself appears composed, but her mother stands rather awkwardly watching her go into the rehearsal room – does she feel out of place?
We see Ariane arriving in the courtyard below in a ‘point of view’ shot (the camera is clearly peering through a window). This could be Mélanie’s point of view, if she has looked out of the window. It can’t still be Mélanie’s view when we look down on Ariane coming up the stairs. This is more like the progress of a celebrity and its purpose is clear when we see Ariane accosted in the corridor by a fan seeking an autograph. Mélanie and her mother sit in a waiting room – almost like a doctor’s surgery and smile at each other. When Mélanie is called, she goes into the audition room, but her mother is stopped at the door by a look from the usher (almost as if she should know she is not allowed in – another suggestion of class/cultural difference). Mother must wait outside.
The audition itself is shot in quite a conventional way, but it offers a good example of how ‘film language’ works. The majority of shots are from a position slightly behind Mélanie, so that we see her in the foreground and the panel in the background. An occasional reverse shot ‘matches’ the panel’s view of her. Ariane is placed carefully in the centre of the five panellists, so that as we see Mélanie in close-up, side-on, Ariane (out of focus) fills the left side of the frame. The two are linked visually before the moment when the autograph hunter appears and Mélanie is so disturbed that she stops playing. Ariane then speaks to her quite condescendingly, “You needn’t have stopped. Carry on, dear”. With her concentration gone Mélanie plays on and makes several mistakes. When she stands up, a close-up of Mélanie’s face shows her determined look at the panel. The reverse then shows Ariane (and other panel members then looking down and away from Mélanie).
When Mélanie leaves the room, an odd shot shows the panel captured in a reflection in a large wall mirror with Ariane saying: “How many more?” ‘Mirror shots’ are common in expressionistic films (i.e. melodramas/thrillers) and they can have many different meanings. Often they can suggest that either a character has two sides to their personality or that they don’t necessarily see themselves as others see them. Here it could be a clue to Ariane’s later fragility or it could be suggesting her narcissism (being more interested in accepting fan worship than in focusing on the job at hand). Either way, it is an intriguing way to end the scene. One other point to make about the placing of the characters in the room. The panel sits in front of large windows with sunlight streaming through. This gives them a ‘halo’ of light around their heads and Mélanie must look towards them – towards a potential golden future which has just been thwarted. This may seem a trivial point, but would the scene have worked in the same way with the windows behind Mélanie?
When Mélanie emerges in the waiting room, tears are rolling down her cheeks, but she maintains her composure and doesn’t speak. When she collects her coat, she deliberately knocks down the piano lid when another girl is rehearsing – a harbinger of what is to come? Perhaps the odd thing here is that her mother says nothing (we assume she has seen the piano incident just now). Instead, the two turn and walk out together. The camera stays upstairs and shows them leaving the courtyard below in long shot. Perhaps daughter is like mother – pleasant most of the time, but capable of cold fury?
In the final part of this opening sequence, Mélanie is at home, putting away her Beethoven bust and locking up her piano – as if for good. A chapter has clearly ended – fade to black.
Essay or discussion questions on The Page Turner
1. The central figure in the film is Mélanie. How do you relate to her? Do you ever sympathise with her? Do you ever feel she is a complete villain? How does the filmmaker manipulate the audience in their attempts to identify with the character? How would you describe the performance of Déborah François as Mélanie?
2. Is this a linear narrative?
3. Does the film have familiar character roles? Mélanie may be the hero or the villain – what is her quest and are there ‘helpers’ and ‘blockers’?
4. What do you make of the ending of the film? Is Ariane completely destroyed? Will Mélanie do something similar in future? Is the ending satisfying or frustrating?
5. How does Mélanie ‘control’ Ariane? Why doesn’t Ariane see the danger that her friend in the trio clearly sees?
6. If the film is a ‘bourgeois melodrama’, it will make use of social class differences. How are these used in the film?
7. Music is central to the film. Select any sequence and discuss how the music aids the narrative development. A good sequence might be the first performance by the trio at the radio station when they play a Shostakovich piece.
8. In what ways does the director exploit the two main locations in the film – Ariane’s house in the country and the radio station – in terms of mise en scène?
9. Discuss why the film might be seen as a psychological thriller.
10. There are some scenes in the film suggesting that we are about to witness something from a horror film. Which scenes are they and why do they suggest horror?
11. In the final scenes, Mélanie gives Ariane’s son, Tristan, the small Beethoven bust that she had as a child. What meaning do you attach to this?
12. Film narratives are not necessarily understood or appreciated by all audiences in the same way. Discuss in your group who enjoyed the film and who didn’t (or look for negative reviews on the internet). What kinds of factors are important for those who don’t like the film?
References and Further Reading
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (1997, 5th edition) Film Art, London and New York: McGraw Hill
Gill Branston and Roy Stafford (2006, 4th ed) The Media Student’s Book, London: Routledge
Nick Lacey (1998) Image and Representation, London: Macmillan
Nick Lacey (2000) Narrative and Genre, London: Macmillan
Nick Lacey (2005) Introduction to Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave
I’ve criticised several of François Truffaut’s films featuring men stuck in adolescence, but when it comes to presenting children and real adolescents as believable characters on screen he really has no equal (apart from Jean Vigo, perhaps). L’argent de poche has no plot as such. Instead, it details what happens in a small community over a few weeks at the end of the summer term and into the holidays. The classroom here is the obverse of the terrible hole that confronts young Antoine Doinel in Les quatre cents coups. French pedagogy (rote learning) seems stuck in the pre-historic era in the year before schools go co-educational, but humanity shines through in every frame.
The film was made in the town of Thiers in central France (and some scenes are strongly reminiscent of Les Mistons, filmed not that far away and also featuring children, albeit with a different focus). The adult casting includes several actors, but the children play themselves. Truffaut here moves towards a more neo-realist style with several scenes played out in long shot and long takes as well as more conventional scenes in the classroom and family home. (I’m not sure that the shooting style is that different to earlier films, but it feels different.) There is one terrifying scene of potential tragedy, brilliantly handled, but cat-lovers should turn away. Elsewhere it is a deft mix of comedy, careful social observation and a little drama.
Once again, there is a Truffaut alter ego in the boy who is abused and neglected, but everyone else is part of a wonderful community – a community that visits the cinema en masse and where Pathé Newsreels are still showing alongside an adventure film with an exotic title that reminded me of the potboiler watched by the couple in Brief Encounter. Was the world ever like this? I doubt it, but it feels so real that only the completely insensitive (there are a few such commentators on IMDB) will fail to be filled with a warm glow after watching L’argent de poche.
Claire Denis delivers a nuanced portrayal of a relationship between a father and his grown-up daughter as their relationship reaches a defining moment moving from their symbiotic closeness to try to move beyond to start their own lives not without but beyond each other.
Denis uses many of her typical collaborators – Agnès Godard as cinematographer, Jean-Pol Fargeau on the script and ‘Tindersticks’ (lead singer, Stuart A Staples has written for Denis before on L’Intrus) for the scored parts of the film. It reminded me of Vendredi Soir where a chance meeting of a couple leads to a night of passion – but the film spends its time on the nuances of their mutual attraction as it builds. In Vendredi the Parisien buildings and skyline is the mesmeric presence throughout the film, shot by Godard so that the lights glimmer and create a beautiful cityscape to frame the stories within it. In that film, the city is thematically an ephemeral place where people have little contact, distracted and disconnected within their cars until they are forced to stop and made to touch. In 35 Rhums the city is there again but, even cinematically, plays a completely different role. It has been reconstituted because these are the lives of very different people and therefore seems to take on something of their perspective. Lionel is a train driver and the city is represented as a web of rails and moving trains through the high rises. Lionel and his daughter Josephine live in one such, near their neighbours including Gabrielle and Noé, pining for father and daughter respectively.
Godard, Denis and Fargeau are able to tell this story with great simplicity and yet embody the complexities that are present in relationships – the ebbs and flows of emotion between people as they seek to let each other go but can’t quite, or as they move in and out of desire or longing. Denis is unafraid to play the symbolic moments thrown up in these narratives (sometimes very literally) but they are blended so seamlessly into the narrative flow by the cinematography that there is no jarring or loss of dramatic impetus. (e.g. the death on the train rails). This moment of melodrama in 35 Shots almost jars because Denis is most powerful when she conveys the impact of an emotion and the state people are swept up into – visually and sonically – through moments of detail. Through Godard’s cinematography the visceral is conveyed through the visual. Early in the film, Lionel puts his foot into the slipper brought by his daughter – a resonating symbolic moment of their domestic symbiosis accentuated by the focus on that physical pleasure of slipping on our comfy shoes on getting home.
The performances are nicely underplayed, emotions seen passing through characters’ eyes in close-up. Gregoire Colin (a Denis regular) plays the courtly lover upstairs and the two central performances from Alex Descas and newcomer Mati Diop are absorbing in their simplicity – in keeping with the overall aesthetics of the film. Everything appears ordinary and flat on the surface (I’m reminded of the opening of L’Intrus with Colin’s character engaged in the domestics or Chocolat where Aimée sits idly on the back of the truck with Protée or where the legion soldiers in Beau Travail attend to their washing out in the desert); but in Denis’s films the flat surface is always slowly peeled away to reveal the depths of emotion that sit beneath – ordinary emotions create the dramatic tension in her films rather than melodrama.
Helene (Stéphane Audran) and her lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet)
Given my recent work on Claude Chabrol films from the last few years and from the New Wave period of 1958-62, it was interesting to go back to Chabrol’s most successful period in the late 1960s/early 1970s. La femme infidèle offers us ‘Helene and Charles’ (the characters’ names reappear in many Chabrol films) as a bourgeois couple living in a country house outside Paris. He’s a lawyer, she’s a woman of leisure and they have a son aged 8. Charles begins to suspect his wife is having an affair and pays a private detective to find Mr Pegala.
From the beginning, this is pure Hitchcock. Charles’ mother (a very Hitchcockian character) tells Helene not to allow Charles to get out of shape. Michel Bouquet as the husband is terrific. He is indeed a little podgy and jowly and he struggles manfully to carry out a Hitchcock murder and disposal of the body. Stéphane Audran moves through the film like a goddess and it’s nice to see Maurice Ronet again.
The whole film moves to its conclusion like a well-oiled machine. It’s fantastically smooth and controlled and ever so slightly preposterous with its almost comic policemen. I won’t give away what happens when husband meets lover, suffice to say it is a great gag with a comedy prop that references Hitchcock again with an over-sized prop. In short the film is a masterpiece – flawless filmmaking. There is very little in the way of plot, but I found myself almost mesmerised by the way it is played. Best of all, the film ends with a beautifully shot sequence which is open-ended so that we can guess at what has happened, but we can’t know. This is similar to the endings of Les Cousins (1960) and The Girl Cut in Two (2007).
I don’t remember watching the film in the 1970s but I’m sure that I did and it struck me that somehow the film seems more ’strange’ now than it did back then – i.e. I don’t remember Chabrol being ‘odd’ in any way, as some audiences do now. Is it just me who has changed as a spectator or are most films just made differently now? I’m not sure, but going by the recent Chabrol films, he has just kept on making them in the same way. He really is the true auteur, making virtually the same film each time with just enough difference in setting and narrative detail to keep us interested.
One technical point – the Region 2 Arrow DVD I rented had the wrong aspect ratio and I had to find ways of converting the digital file into one which allowed me to correct the mistake and achieve the correct ratio. It worked fine but was very fiddly.
Two French thrillers were released in the UK by Metrodome without too much fanfare in May and June and I managed to see both in the same week on digital prints at the National Media Museum. My first reaction, much like last Summer’s when a swathe of French films appeared, was why don’t we get British films like this on a regular basis – interesting genre films with star names presented in ‘Scope? What’s not to like? Well quite a lot if you are certain British critics, but I was engrossed.
The two films are actually quite different. Of the two, I think Pour elle (Anything for Her, France 2008) worked best. It reminded me of classic crime thrillers – what the French call polars. The set-up is very simple. A young mother, Lisa (Diane Kruger) is arrested and convicted for murder on seemingly incontrovertible evidence. Her husband, Julien (Vincent Lindon) believes she didn’t do it and determines to spring her and reunite the family (Oscar is their young son). And that’s it. In some ways, the situation is pure Hitchcock with an innocent man forced into dangerous and criminal acts because he loves his wife. The difference is that Hitchcock would cast Cary Grant. The woman would be Grace Kelly and it would all take place in a glamorous fantasy world. But Julien is a teacher in a nameless Paris suburb (much like the teacher in Entre les murs). This time, however, we learn little about his classroom, except that his students seem rather docile and the writer/director Fred Cavayé has a little joke when one of Julien’s students gives a short talk about George Simenon and Maigret – as Julien looks out of the window pondering his next move.
Vincent Lindon is terrific – he could easily be a character in a polar by Jean-Pierre Melville with his gravelly voice, lugubrious expression and ‘bashed in’ face giving him the look of Belmondo crossed with Lino Ventura. The main criticism of the film appears to be that it is implausible – in other words that ‘ordinary people’ like this don’t do extraordinary things such as springing the partners from prison. Teachers can’t be ‘extraordinary’. Pah! I’ve known several extraordinary teachers, at least one of whom was an ex-paratrooper. But that’s not the point. If this was a Hitchcock film, nobody would worry about plausibility – and nobody criticises Batman for not being plausible. Pour elle is a genre movie and it includes several genre tropes related to getting hold of money and prison breaks. As long as the characters are plausible and the plotting shows intelligence, I don’t have problems.
Cavayé has the neat device of Julien pretending to write a book about a famous prison escapee (played by Olivier Marchal, director of 36, Quai des orfèvres). Julien gets all the pointers he needs, but can he carry them through? Much depends on whether we believe that he loves his wife and son and that he would do anything to keep them together. I think the script is generally pretty good. Everything is held together by Lindon and the action sequences are genuinely exciting and convincing. If you’ve seen 36, the ending is in some ways similar.
I hope that this does as well as Tell No One from 2007. It’s not as glamorous as that film and doesn’t have the same central Paris chic. It’s more noirish in every way. In France the film made around $5 million and in the UK it opened in the Top 20 from only 43 screens and with a healthy screen average of over $3,400. This bodes well, but the film probably won’t make it to North America as Paul Haggis and Lionsgate have already announced an American remake. That’s a shame, I think. Lindon is terrific and for much of the film, I idly wondered where I’d seen him before. He’s a prolific actor in French cinema and TV, but a little research soon answered my question – he’s the drunk who helps the three lads escape from the police when they try to steal a car in La haine (a film I must have watched a dozen times).
Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire, right) confronts Elsa (Catherine Frot, left) in Mark of Angel
The other recent thriller is Mark of an Angel (L’empreinte de l’ange, France 2008) – a more problematic proposition for me. I was drawn to the film as it was produced by the same team responsible for La tourneuse de pages (The Page Turner, France 2006) and features the same star, Catherine Frot. La tourneuse de pages is terrific and I hoped for more of the same. The two films are both psychological thrillers/melodramas which again have a Hitchcockian feel and Mark of an Angel also has something in common with Claude Miller’s Ruth Rendell adaptation Betty Fisher and Other Stories (France 2001). The narrative set-up is that Elsa (Catherine Frot) sees a small girl at a children’s party attended by her son. She becomes obsessed with the child, convincing herself that the girl is her own daughter who she had been told had died soon after she was born. Elsa is separated from her husband and struggling to work and look after her son. Her obsession leads her to inveigle her way into a tentative friendship with the girl’s mother Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire) in order to observe the child more closely.
The criticism of this film has also been based on ‘implausibility’, but this time it is complicated by the opening title that informs us that the film is based on a true story. I certainly fell into the trap of pursuing the implausibility argument, but only because I had the nagging feeling that Catherine Frot was too old to play the role of Elsa. I’m a bit ashamed of this reaction. Ms Frot is an excellent actor and I’m all in favour of starring roles for older women. There is no real reason why she shouldn’t play characters a few years younger than herself, although film is a pretty unforgiving medium. I’ve since revised my initial reaction for two reasons. First, I happily accepted Vincent Lindon as an older father in Pour elle, so why not Catherine Frot in this film? Secondly, children born to mothers in their mid-forties are now more common and in narrative terms it actually helps the film since it makes Elsa seem more ‘other’ in comparison with the younger Claire as the supposedly ‘natural mother’. It seems to me that Elsa also dresses younger at times.
Lots about the film worked very well for me. In fact it worked too well. I watched several scenes through my fingers because I found them painful and excruciating (i.e. extremely effective). There are some pure Hitchcockian moments in the film, including a wonderful sequence in a theatre where the girl is performing in a school ballet and both women are watching her. On my first viewing I found the ending of the film very hard to take. For some other viewers this was because they deemed it implausible. For me it just wasn’t ‘enough’ – I was hoping for more of a melodrama ending. I think it retrospect, I was too harsh on the film and I suspect that on a second viewing I would be more favourable. I don’t know anything about writer/director Safy Nebbou but he seems to have made several films that sound interesting – I’ll certainly look out for them.
Postscript (11 October 2009)
In her review of the film in Sight and Sound (June 2009), Catherine Wheatley suggests that Pour elle might be the first ‘Sarkozy-era thriller’. Her argument is that aesthetically the film is a slick, Hollywood-style action thriller, but with a production design that emphasises the cold unsympathetic state. She casts Julien as a conservative symbol ( a teacher of French) and specifically a representative of a traditional French community under siege. The police and the criminals are, she argues, predominantly Arab whereas Lisa and Oscar are almost ‘angelic’.
I’m not averse to this reading and indeed I did feel a sense of Julien almost like a Michael Winner style ‘ordinary man’ against the ‘filth on the street’. But I think that’s pushing it. On the whole, I still think that the script justifies Julien’s move to taking enormous risks. He is a driven man with an obsessive love for wife and child. The charge of racial typing does make me think again, but I’m not sure that the effect is quite what Wheatley argues. I will continue to reflect on this.
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Subway (France 1985)
