Claude Goretta

The Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta died on February 20. As sometimes happens, news of the death of an artist I admire, a writer, musician, or filmmaker, reaches me late here on my island that time overlooked. I didn't get the news about Goretta until last week. Fortunately, someone at The Guardian knew something about film and had a memory longer than a gnat's to recall how Goretta had, more than forty years ago, made at least one film for the ages. In my memory, The Lacemaker (1977) invites revisitation, and amply rewards it.

The Guardian obit is replete with the biographical details one is accustomed to find: "born 23 June 1929; died 20 February 2019." (89 years, 8 months) But it is skimpy with insights into the man. For that, an interested cinephile will have to turn to what interviews are available online. Along with Alain Tanner (who, undeservedly, got the most attention) Goretta rode the New Swiss Cinema (was there an Old Swiss Cinema?) for as long as it lasted - less than a decade it turned out. Goretta emerged from Swiss television in the late '60s and returned to it in the late '70s. The last production of his that I have seen was an excellent biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was from Switzerland) called Les Chemins de l'Exil (1978). Then - nothing. I never heard of him again - not until last year when I found a short film he made with Alain Tanner in London in 1957 called Nice Time, and also located a film he made in France in 2000 called Thérèse et Léon, an affectionate portrait of Léon Blum, French prime minister of the doomed 3rd Republic, and his wife. It reunited Goretta with Dominique Labourier, who played Gérard Depardieu's wife in Pas si méchant que ça (1975). Goretta's reputation, however, rests squarely on three films, L'Invitation (1972), Pas si méchant que ça (Not as Bad as All That, stupidly retitled The Wonderful Crook by its American distributor) and his masterpiece, La Dentelliére, The Lacemaker. All three were Swiss/French co-productions, which enabled Goretta to use French actors, Jean-Luc Bideau, François Simon (son of Michel Simon), Gérard Depardieu and especially Marlène Jobert and Isabelle Huppert. It also ensured that his films would be seen in the wider, French-speaking world.

In The Invitation, co-workers let their hair down at a party, with consequences that are somewhat predictable (it anticipated Bruce Beresford's much more biting Don's Party). If The Invitation showed more promise than substance, Pas si méchant que ça delivered, but with a very light touch. Gerard Depardieu is Pierre, the son of a furniture maker who gets in over his head when his father becomes ill and he has to take over the running of the company. He discovers that the company is in serious debt and, rather than close down and lay off all its employees, he resorts to a life of crime - robbing a bank, a post office, and a supermarket. And instead of finding customers to buy the furniture his factory turns out, he trucks it to deserted waste ground and incinerates it. Pierre is attracted to Nelly, a postal employee (Marlène Jobert), after he traumatizes her in an attempted robbery. He settles into a double life, with no apparent conflicts. But the police are soon on his trail and, inevitably, they catch him.

Goretta wrote an original script for Pas si méchant que ça, but for his next next film he relied on a script by the author of an award-winning novel. The Lacemaker is a wonder in so many ways. Its subject is a shy, innocent young woman who works in a hair salon in Paris. So disarmingly unspectacular, more still and unhurried than a Dardennes Brothers film, it is one of the best films of the '70s. That Pascal Lainé chose to make Béatrice (or Pomme to friends) the center of the universe for the whole length of a novel was a challenge, but Goretta's even greater accomplishment of giving - gifting - the length of a film production of weeks and dozens of people to her is even more amazing. Young(ish) filmmakers eager to capitalize on the modest success of their first feature efforts would never turn to such an unshowy, unassuming, utterly tender and attentive portrait of a young woman deeply damaged by her first contact with heartlessness, an apple bruised by life, by an experience that everyone else, it seems, treats so casually, so callously. Heartbreak? It's to be expected. The world will never align with our fantasies, with romance novels. Life always falls short of the ideal. When François, an upper class young man with whom Pomme has fallen in love, learns that she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, and visits her there, and comes away knowing how deeply his thoughtlessness had hurt her, he is moved to tears. And so is the viewer.

So why, then, did Goretta sink into obscurity after such critical success? The answer isn't hard to discover. François Truffaut made an even bigger critical splash with his first three films, but as gratifying as this recognition surely must have been for Truffaut, it didn't make him very much money, and it didn't get him any closer to becoming what he evidently most wanted to be - a professional filmmaker with an assured future ahead of him. To achieve that, Truffaut had to forsake the world of little art films for more consciously commercial products.

The same can be said of a filmmaker who was more of a contemporary of Goretta's. Jean-Jacques Annaud made two films, La Victoire en chantant (known as Black and White in Color in the US) and Coup de tête, that got him enviable critical attention, but very little else. So he absconded into international productions starting with Quest for Fire, and, while managing occasionally to make a good film (like The Lover), the artist who made those first marvelous films hasn't been seen since.

I don't think Goretta compromised himself. I simply think that a reputation for small, quiet, unspectacular films like The Lacemaker wasn't the most promising way to establish one's career. He made twenty-five films after The Lacemaker, short films and features, most of them for Swiss television. Like the Guardian obit says, "Much of Goretta’s subsequent film work, including his second adaptation of a Ramuz novel, Si le Soleil Ne Revenait Pas (If the Sun Never Returns, 1987), remained little known outside francophone countries." We need to be reminded now and then that our access to even the finest film work is contingent on forces quite beyond the fairest or most sensible control. Now that he is gone, perhaps more of Claude Goretta's films will be more accessible. It can only contribute to our esteem of this fine filmmaker.