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Travolta et moi
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One of the most exciting
program strands in the Melbourne International Film Festival of 1995 was a
selection from a series of films commissioned for French TV, Tous les
garçons et les filles de leur âge. Ten directors were asked to come up with
a memoir of their teen years, true to the time and its feeling, if not exactly
to true to every detail of the filmmaker's particular autobiography. The only
conditions that came with this commission is that each film had to use pop
music from the period; had to have a party scene; and had to employ a minimal
amount of period recreation. Chantal Akerman’s beautiful Portrait of a Young
Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels (1993), André Téchiné's Wild Reeds (1994) and Claire Denis' U.S. Go
Home (1994) also hail from this remarkable series.
A restricted copyright
arrangement with Sony, covering presumably only initial TV and festival
screenings, has unfortunately meant that a number of these films have become
officially unshowable ever since – Olivier Assayas had to embark on a Herculean
process to make Cold Water (1994), also from the series,
available in its longer form. And the saddest of all these losses is Patricia
Mazuy’s Travolta et moi – which
happens to have everything from The Bee Gees and Bob Dylan to Nina Hagen and The Clash on its
wonderful soundtrack. You need to go the illicit routes to find it for private
viewing these days. (Mazuy, at the time, was philosophical about the film’s
lack of cinema distribution: “I really conceived it for TV: the endless extreme
close-ups, the too much colours –
it’s for TV, this stuff that in cinema looks kitsch”.) (1)
Mazuy is a fascinating
figure – and a fantastic director. Her Peaux
de vaches (Thick Skinned, 1989)
counts among the cinema’s great debuts. Out of nowhere, as it seemed, Mazuy
blasted in with a fully accomplished film (Jacques Rivette loved it) that
already laid out what were to become the favoured motifs and obsessions of her
subsequent work: fire and water (and ice!); the grind of daily labour; a
“refractory” view of individual psychology; derangement of any prior, tenuous,
interpersonal equilibrium through the forces of passion. Not to mention the
extraordinary work with actors including Jean-François Stévénin and Sandrine
Bonnaire. Plus: a fascinating sense of small town or suburban psycho-geography,
every site (home, bar, church, school, skating rink) similarly cheek to jowl in
the landscape, and several of them often caught in a single configuration by
the framing. (In the interview quoted
above, Mazuy details the various, quite different versions experimented with in
editing – including a plot detour set in Australia, which helps explain the
Triffids song reference, complete with an indigenous sidekick for Stévénin!)
And those camera moves!!
Even in the smallest, most cramped space (a chaotically packed storeroom, a
crowded bus), Mazuy’s mobile camera captures (and creates) tensions, captivations,
sparks, outbursts. (She personally regards these manoeuvres as hit-or-miss in
their effectiveness, but I love them.) The off-spaces of a bakery are
especially well-used – comic relief included. For Peaux de vaches, she went straight to the top for a cinematographic
collaborator: Raoul Coutard, who executes some of the finest, most ‘graphic’
pans in cinema history for her (as he did once upon a Nouvelle Vague time for
Godard and Truffaut). In Travolta et moi,
Éric Gautier (who has also worked with Arnaud Desplechin and Assayas) takes the
handle. When Mazuy gets the combo of that calibre of camera work, strong
editing and an always stirring and surprising choice of music going, it’s pure
punk magic. (Note her use, across several films, of John Cale as composer.)
Travolta
et moi is, in retrospect, one of
the principal films of the 1990s. Mazuy was greeted as one of the “ten
directors to watch in the ‘90s”, alongside Jane
Campion and Emir Kusturica, according to a Cahiers
du cinéma list, straight after the revelation of Peaux de vaches. Yet, in that decade, Travolta et moi turned out to be one of two telemovies she managed
to make (an American crime-thriller with Elliot Gould fell through). The
curious historical drama Saint-Cyr (2000), starring Isabelle Huppert and more stately in its approach, followed and, in the subsequent two decades, only three
further fiction features: Sport de filles (2011), the riveting Paul Sanchez is
Back! (2018) and Saturn Bowling (2022). Now in her early 60s, she seems to have come full circle, happily, to
her darkest and most violent story terrain – Yves Thomas has returned as her
co-writer, the same function he served on Travolta
et moi. (For an insight into Mazuy’s sensibility and cinephilia, see the
splendid 1996 interview in Admiranda magazine referenced above).
I love American teen movies
– Reckless (James Foley, 1984), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986), Say Anything … (Cameron
Crowe, 1989). But French teen movies – I’m thinking now of 36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat, 1988), The Disenchanted (Benoît Jacquot, 1991) and The
Sound and the Fury (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1993) – are something else. They tend
to have a glum, desperate, nihilistic aura. Alienation and amorality quickly
pass from interior states to the most flagrant “acting out” (this clinical term
even pops up in the parent-child exchanges of Travolta et moi – families are usually morbidly dysfunctional,
hothouse units in Mazuy). Sex is always a rather compromised, messy initiation
and into a cruel, predatory, adult world – scarcely an edifying “rite of
passage”.
Yet inside the darkest of
these French teen movies there's a jolting spirit of resistance, of youthful,
romantic ardour hurling itself against the strictures and unhappy endings of
the adult world. When Akerman made her wonderful Nuit et jour (1991),
she said she wanted to capture youth as a time of absolutes – where people live
out, almost without thinking about it, absolute ideals of beauty, love,
passion, honesty, and free thinking. This reminds me of a quote that I have
long adored from Robert Benayoun: “The normal qualities of youth: naïveté, idealism, humour, hatred of
tradition, erotomania, a sense of injustice”. (2)
Travolta
et moi is a ferocious teen movie,
plunging us headlong into the frustrations, desires and resistances of a
sixteen-year-old girl, Christine (played with astonishing intensity by Leslie
Azoulai, aka Azzoulai, who appeared also in Van
Gogh [1991] but enjoyed only a brief acting career in film and TV between
1989 and 2001), roaring through two very eventful days of her caged-in
existence. Events track a hallucinatory escalation and obsession. Christine is,
shall we say, “emerging” from a strictly one-way fan absorption in the image
and performance of John Travolta (there’s a generous clip from Saturday Night Fever [1977], probably
now constituting another copyright hindrance). At the start, Leslie meets and
falls hard for the enigmatic, sullen, local lad Nicolas (Julien Gerin, his only
screen credit) – a guy who can not only quote Nietzsche's philosophy or
Rimbaud’s verse but, as we later learn, can live it, too.
What Christine doesn’t know
is that Nicolas is only trying to lay her in order to win a whimsical bet among
guys. This cruel set-up has been used in a few American teen movies, such as
Nancy Savoca’s intriguing Dogfight (1991), but in French cinema it’s
virtually official Jean Eustache territory, right from its initial airing in Les mauvaises fréquentations (1964) –
and Mazuy goes even a step further with it for her pay-off than the Master; the
final shot (scored to “White Riot”) leaves your heart racing.
There’s a Maurice Pialat
air (mixed with Jean-Pierre Mocky) of twisted-up, paroxysmic realism here.
Christine’s moods and attachments swing wildly from elation to depression,
fixing on one ideal guy and then another during the big party scene, as teenage
(only teenage?) emotions do. But the flights of feeling spring off a solid
bedrock of the everyday (a trait Mazuy admired in John Woo’s work): observations of the quotidian
grind in a ghastly, concrete “new suburb” milieu (of the genre that Éric Rohmer sometimes documented, with more geometric dispassion and far less heat). This
is particularly so for a long, hilarious, hair raising section in which
Christine’s parents leave her to mind their bakery (it’s an element from the
director’s own past) – she goes completely nuts in the process.
Travolta et moi packs an indelible wallop. See it however you
can.
MORE Mazuy: Saturn Bowling
1. “Entretien avec Patricia
Mazuy”, Admiranda, no. 11/12 (1996),
p. 148. back
2. Robert Benayoun, “The
Emperor Has No Clothes”, in Peter Graham & Ginette Vincendeau (eds), The
French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009),
p. 185.
© Adrian Martin June 1995 / November 2022 |
