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Wild Reeds
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The
prospect of an ardent French romance set against the distant backdrop of the
Algerian War of Independence may not sound too appealing, at least if one has
had the misfortune of seeing Patrice Leconte’s dreadful Le Parfum d'Yvonne (1994). But
André Téchiné’s lightly autobiographical memoir is a remarkable and passionate
film, and unquestionably high among the freest, freshest and best films he has
made in his career.
I
have always loved American pop teen movies (such as Clueless, 1995), but French teen
movies have their own, special quality. They tend to be more sullen and
thoughtful than their American counterparts – every French teen hero solemnly
quotes either Nietzsche, Rimbaud or Bob Dylan – but also more reckless, violent
and hysterical.
In
Europe, Wild Reeds has been the great
commercial success of the made-for-TV series The Boys and Girls of Their Time, first broadcast in 1994. As in
the other outstanding films from that bunch, Téchiné’s contribution (he is the
oldest of this chosen clan) is built upon the relatively unspectacular
dalliances of daily teen life: school, parties, picnics, going to the pictures.
These
teenagers, however, come fully alive as in very few films. François (Gaël
Morel) is Téchiné’s stand-in: frail, narcissistic, over-thoughtful, sexually
confused. Maité (Élodie Bouchez) is one of the most vivid and moving female
portraits in contemporary cinema: politically engagé, vacillating between joy, depression and temptation. Serge
(Stéphane Rideau) is a familiar Téchiné figure: mercurial, instinctive,
unintellectual, a bit of an animal.
But
the central catalyst for the action is Henri (Frédéric Gorny): dark, brilliant,
seductive and violently right-wing. It is his fierce opposition to the prospect
of Algerian independence which puts him on a collision course with all the
other characters. Téchiné traces, with consummate mastery, the gradually
evolving and shifting relations (both sexual and political) between these four
remarkable characters. It’s a narrative geometry created from testing out all
possible permutations and pairings.
As
a young critic for Cahiers du cinéma magazine in the 1960s, Téchiné championed films in which people were presented
in a mysterious, even ghostly fashion – whether Val Lewton’s fantasy-horror
movies (such as I Walked with a Zombie,
1943) or severe art films by Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer. Accordingly, these
teenagers seem driven, even possessed by passions and motivations that remain stubbornly
mysterious to them, and to us.
The
film’s style matches the openness and freshness of these young hearts running
free. Every emotion is expressed through a motion, as in the masterpieces of F.W.
Murnau: an individual breaking away from a pack, or a boat cutting across the
stillness of a lake. Classical music (especially Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for
Strings Opus 11”) surges up and dies away in brief, magical grabs. Even
technical blemishes (out-of-focus or overexposed shots) become part and parcel
of the lyrical poetry of this style.
The
movies for which Téchiné is best known beyond Europe (such as Scene of the Crime [1986] and I Don’t Kiss [1991]) often have a cruel,
misogynist streak. “Without sin and evil”, he once declared, “I cannot see how there
can be a motor for the story”. Unsurprisingly, the loss of innocence that his
young heroes ritually face is usually tinged with decadence and despair.
Curiosity, blind trust and rampant desire lead the typical Téchiné character to
an often violent disintegration of his or her very self. He has described his
heroes, including in their literally ghostliest form, as in Rendez-vous (1985), as the polar
opposite to the idealised, sentimental, sexless angels of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987).
Téchiné’s
films have long been obsessed with crossover experiences – those sudden moments of social or sexual mobility where people
find themselves attracted to an erotic partner, or an ideological position,
which contradicts everything they have hitherto lived by. This sort of
interpersonal dynamism – a twist on Stendhal’s famous notion of crystallisation as a psychic-emotional
projection governing one’s love-choice – gives Wild
Reeds a welcome frisson of political incorrectness.
There
are hard truths and painful experiences recorded in this story – especially the
stark breakdown of Maïté’s mother (Michèle Moretti) – but the overall tone of
the film is overwhelmingly generous and compassionate. Lovers of French cinema
will find themselves irresistibly recalling the great films of Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game, 1939) or François
Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague classic Jules et Jim (1962) – movies that balanced a
tough, philosophical realism with a romantic optimism and joy.
But
Téchiné adds something uniquely of own sensibility to this fine French
tradition. His sometime script collaborator Pascal Bonitzer once suggested that
all filmic stories should possess a “crucial secret” – something central and
unspoken which generates the intensity of the events and interactions shown.
The crucial secret of Wild Reeds is held
within the heart of Serge – and it is to him, in the final moments of this
magnificent film, that Téchiné gives one of the most haunting and heartrending
close-ups in cinema history.
MORE Téchiné: Loin, Alice and Martin, The Brontë Sisters © Adrian Martin August/December 1995 |
