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A French Woman
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I’m
fascinated by the many varieties of male pathos in film – movies where men are emotionally
excessive in one register or another, sometimes even violently so; but also lovable
somehow, precisely because of that excess. It’s a pardoxical, difficult, knotty
kind of dramatic emotion. In some stories you get the maudlin variation on male
pathos – stories about idealistic, grand old guys left behind by history or
shunned by society; Mel Gibson’s directorial debut, The Man Without a Face (1993),
is one very fruity variation on that. Just about every film that tries to milk
male pathos in these heavy ways tends to make me squirm – but I’m fascinated
and entrhralled, too.
There’s
a note of madulin male pathos to be found in the rather dismal A French Woman. This is a curious
attempt by Wargnier to do an honest biography of his mother Jeanne, who led a
free sexual life, somewhat scandalously for her time and place. At the start, a
young Jeanne (Emmanuelle Béart) meets the dashing and very proper soldier,
Louis (Daniel Auteuil). They marry, but World War II quickly separates them.
Jeanne tries to hold the marriage together for a while but, to survive the hard
times, she eventually flees, and starts taking lovers. Then Louis returns from
the frontline only “half a man” (as he puts it), and their relationship
worsens.
The
prospect of a male writer-director making a film that squarely depicts his own
mother’s errant, unconventional sexuality is an inviting one, for all kinds of
reasons. But this chocolate-box confection from Régis Wargnier (Indochine, 1992) can only tell us ad nauseam that Jeanne “lived for love”.
(Béart has claimed, incredibly and hyperbolically, that this is her first genuinely
“adult” role! Jacques Rivette’s La Belle noiseuse [1991] must have slipped her
mind at that moment.) Beyond her prodigious pouting and posturing, Jeanne is
invested with very little character. Jeanne is frequently found scanning each
location for those “desiring eyes” of men which (as we are also told) make her
feel like “a real woman”. And, as The Eagles almost sang, you can’t hide those
desiring eyes!
In
fact, it is hard, by the end, to find this particular French woman as anything
other than faintly repulsive – and infinitely more objectionable than any of
the rebels once incarnated by, say, Jennifer Jones in the great Hollywood
melodramas (like King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry [1952]) to which Wargnier makes a weak homage. Strong, arresting moments are
few and far between in this dull, numbing travelogue. Our repulsion arises not
because Jeanne behaves immorally or even irresponsibly; rather, it is because
she demonstrates not the slightest skerrick of human warmth towards anyone or
anything in her vicinty. One lover is virtually identical to the next in
Jeanne’s life; like the touristic backdrops, they pass by in a languid,
indifferent haze.
Since
Christian Vincent’s The Separation (1994), Auteuil has become a
shining, soulful beacon of male pathos in French cinema. He’s the hurt,
bruised, brooding man par excellence – hurt by love, hurt by the one woman of his life, hurt not least of all by
himself, by his own confused demons. In A
French Woman, Auteuil as Louis has metamorphosed into a full-on masochist,
passive, ever-suffering, a sad old cuckold the likes of whom you haven’t seen
in a movie since John Savage’s bizarrely contorted role in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Maria’s Lovers (1984) – another soldier-back-from-the-front
tale – or the tortured Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s and ‘50s.
There
are several explicit references to those Hollywood melodramas in A French Woman: to post-war male weepies
like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
and stories of furious female frustration like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956). Not to
mention the presence of a family clan clucking away disapprovingly in the
background. Béart was born to play the scene here where, after literally watching
that particular Sirk classic, Jeanne gets drunk, dons a plunging, flaming red
dress and dances like Dorothy Malone – the dance of a true hell-cat. Certainly,
the role-model is well chosen.
Where
the troubled father in another male weepie (of sorts), The Baby-Sitters Club (1995), unexpectedly
rides into town, this sad Frenchman
keeps finding excuses to ride out –
he signs up to serve in every war going, it seems. There’s one moment where
both he and Jeanne move to Syria and try, once and for all, to make their
marriage work. But then she gets bored and frustrated again, and her handsome
young German lover, Matthias (Gabriel Barylli), shows up to boldly take her
away. (This entire Matthias subplot, and the public scandal it involves,
recalls the real-life case of the French star Arletty [Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945], who once bravely declared: “My heart
is French, but my ass is international!”.) Then, for the first time ever, Louis
snaps out of his passivity: he comes alive and attacks this damn annoying lover.
For his trouble, Louis earns from Jeanne a deep, near-fatal wound in the back –
and a scar that he must bear forever more. Further emasculation! The male
condition, when faced with the magnificent libido of a woman, has rarely been
this despairingly portrayed.
One
of the key scenes of A French Woman shows a young boy, locked in his room and desperately wailing, while Jeanne
grabs a few stolen moments of passion in an adjacent sin-chamber. Is this meant
to be an autobiographical vignette of little Régis, our auteur? If so, the
bathetic intensity of the moment suggests that, in attempting to pay generous
homage to his late mother, Wargnier simply churned up emotions that he has not
yet successfully resolved, or even faced.
MORE Wargnier: East-West © Adrian Martin January/February 1996 |
