Adieu Philippine

Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.

The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.

Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.

At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.

The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.

Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.

I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.

I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.


(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."

The Ghost of Henri Langlois

"Since like everybody else, I was full of silly prejudices I missed out on incredible things. Salome with Theda Bara was for sale. I thought, 'Fox, Theda Bara, American spectacle...who needs it?' Now the film is lost forever. It was probably quite good. From that point on, through trial and error, I saw that people, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything and buy everything. Never assume you know what's of value." -Henri Langlois

Obviously, film archivists (and Langlois was one of the first) are the opposite of film critics. Whatever faculties the critic uses to discriminate good from bad, the archivist must ignore. The result, for the Cinematheque Francaise, was an archive of over 50,000 films. It is simply incredible that Langlois could've watched them all. (1) That he probably did is one measure of the man's devotion to the medium. In my own lifetime, I would guess that 10,000 is the most I could've seen, but that number is probably too high. And the thought of all the horrors I had to sit through before I had seen something that made all that wasted time worthwhile makes me shudder. The problem is, unlike every other medium except music, slumming is too often a necessary part of filmgoing, especially for a critic.

Though it is a little surprising that the idea of preserving films took so many years to take shape, it is not at all surprising that so few people cared about the fate of films that were no longer in circulation. For the vast majority of films, then and now, there was a kind of planned obsolescence, at least in the positive print, just like any other manufactured goods. Because there were so many films in circulation, and a limited number of venues to exhibit them, they were allowed a limited run in which they could be viewed, and then they were either destroyed or shelved with the intention of eventual destruction.

Starting with a film club in 1936, Langlois met plenty of people who saw the need for preserving films but none of them, especially those in government, had a practical appreciation of the logistical problems or were forthcoming with funding. Unperturbed, Langlois managed to convince the right people to help, and his collection was born. During the war years, when the Germans were seeking out and destroying certain significant films, like Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1931), Langlois used ingenious subterfuges to acquire them and then hide them. He used a tiny 80-seat theater to screen three films a day from 1948 on, attracting young people who would eventually become critics for a film magazine founded by Andre Bazin (2) in 1951 that transformed French film criticism, Cahiers du Cinema. And many of these critics, Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, would go on to transform French film itself in the Nouvelle Vague.

What made Langlois so appealing to the Cahiers group was the obvious fact that, like them, he was a fan - a devoted lover not of the art of film but of films - all films whether good or bad. The Cahiers crowd proved that the only thing a bad film needed to be good was a good review. So between them, Langlois and Cahiers du Cinema, they made artists out of time clock punchers like Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and spent entire weeks and months of their lives devouring every film directed by Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. Langlois helped create not a way of seeing films but a way of consuming them. He told his young followers (according to Jean Rouch) that, if they wished to become filmmakers, they should "eat 300 films" a year, sitting smack in front of the screen.

Max Tessier claims "I went nearly every night [to Langlois' screenings] and subsisted on sandwiches. Real life vanished and reel life took over." Raphael Bassan, journalist and director, who, the credits assure us, has seen more than 30,000 films states: "It's always ruled my life, to the exclusion of all else. I've tried to step back the past three or four years to absorb a bit. It was an all-consuming passion. Even if you were with a girl, if a rare film was on at half-past midnight, then you'd leave that woman's bed to see it."

The ideas outlined by Francois Truffaut in his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français", aren't half bad. But even Andre Bazin saw its excesses, and pointed them out in his own essay "On the Auteur Theory" (1957). It was Truffaut who coined the term "la politique des auteurs" which became the "Auteur Theory" thanks to Andrew Sarris' clumsy translation. Serge Toubiana, current director of the Cinematheque Francaise, put it this way: "The notion of authorship certainly took on visibility [in Langlois' screenings] and became obvious to Truffaut as a critic in the 1950s because Langlois reinforced the auteur theory by showing everything an auteur made, even long-ago artists. The idea was afoot that each individual film contributes to an auteur's body of work. Which differs from the now-current, somewhat mistaken notion of 'the director'. That's not quite right. An auteur isn't a director. It's someone who has a vision for each film, but also from film to film."

Corpulent, epicene, Langlois was a strange sort of midwife at the birth of the New Wave. As Rohmer explained, Langlois "taught us nearly everything we know". So it was only fitting that they should have come to his defense in the absurd events of '68, when the French government tried to pull his creation, the Cinematheque, out from under him. With the most amorphous convictions, aimed at nothing more but those in power, the demonstrations that followed, the tussles with riot police, the passionate and ludicrous public statements, proved just how committed French cineastes could be when their vanity was threatened. Langlois refused to comment - or, rather, stated he wouldn't comment: "I never wanted to talk about the "Langlois Affair". I don't want to go into the subject as long as I live, I'll come back as a ghost and I'll talk about it." Hence, Jacques Richard's title for his film Le Fantome d'Henri Langlois (2005).

Considering how many enemies Langlois made in government agencies that he had fought with for so many years to help him run his utterly unmanageable collection, it is surprising to see how peevish his supporters are about the manner of the government's assistance. But it was, after all, such a uniquely French idea - collecting films out of purely personal zeal until the collection becomes too enormous to handle oneself, and then expecting the government to get involved in something it had never considered worthwhile.

Langlois was at work, as usual, when he died, without a sou, at the age of 62 on January 13, 1977. His coffin, since he was by then heavier than ever, was enormous. And at the funeral his widow, the formidable Mary Meerson (3) showed grief to some while arranging to evacuate films from the Cinematheque with others. There was an obscene tug-of-war over his Musee du Cinema until a fire in '97 conveniently settled the dispute. It was moved, its elements intact but without Langlois' spatial design. With Langlois gone, there was no one to stand in the government's way any more.

Jacques Richard closes his film on a sad note: "The 40-year saga of Henri Langlois was carried along by the unchained, voracious and unlimited passion of one man. Will the secret recipe that drew several generations be found one day like the lost alchemy of Jean Vigo? How will tomorrow's youth learn about cinema, its history and essence? Perhaps Langlois' ghost will visit them one day like Nosferatu reconciled with Sunrise. Like a program imagined by Henri Langlois."

(1) 50,000 films would require one to watch three every day for more than 45 years.
(2) Strangely, Jacques Richard's film never mentions Bazin.

(3) Meerson died in 1993.

A Tale of Springtime

[Since 2000, I have had the pleasure of contributing to the Melbourne Cinematheque's Annotations on Film. I would volunteer to write about a film that they were scheduling, as long as I had access to it on DVD, sometimes without having seen it yet. This put me in the precarious position of being committed to write about a film whether I liked it or not. Since I was writing a "scholarly" piece rather than a critical one, I could keep my opinion to myself and simply introduce the film to an unsuspecting audience. Or so I thought. Luckily, this happened to me only once, when I had to write about Eric Rohmer's 1990 film A Tale of Springtime. Rohmer had always interested me because his films were never easy to like. So I wrote my annotation without ever having to admit that I thought little of the film. It did, however, teach me something more about Rohmer.]



A Tale of Springtime

If someone could've witnessed, since earlier this afternoon, everything I've done and said, even they wouldn't understand the meaning of the situation.
– Jeanne in A Tale of Springtime

Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) has been making films for more than 50 years, but he is known internationally for the films he has made since 1967. Shot with a 16mm camera, La Collectionneuse (1967) was the third of his “Six Moral Tales” (the first two were short films), a series that established him as one of the most distinctive voices of the French New Wave. His style has been called “lapidary” by the late Pauline Kael, and he definitely has an eye for the minutiae of things and an ear for the ironies and double-meanings of the French language (1).

The critical and commercial success of his completely unostentatious little films has enabled him – through the auspices of his own production company Les Films du Losange – to experiment with two extraordinary literary adaptations (of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O… [1976] and Chretien de Troyes' Perceval le Gallois [1978]) as well as launch two more series of his inimitable and elegant films in the 1980s and 1990s – the “Comedies and Proverbs” and the “Tales of the Four Seasons”.

A Tale of Springtime is, appropriately enough, the first of Rohmer's “Tales of the Four Seasons”, and bears out its title with a portrayal of incipient love. It also reveals, somewhat playfully, how impossible it is to force love to conform to our designs. Jeanne is a high school philosophy teacher who meets Natacha at a party in Montmorency. Since neither of them knows anyone else at the party, they strike up a conversation.

Jeanne shares an apartment in Paris with her boyfriend, who is out of town. But he's left the apartment in a shambles and Jeanne stays just long enough to take some clothes and two books with her – Plato and Kant. She then stops at her own apartment, but her cousin Gaelle is using it with her boyfriend, who is on furlough from the military.

Natacha lives with her father, Igor, a 40-year-old reluctant bureaucrat. But he rarely turns up – or so she assures Jeanne – since he lives with his 20-year-old girlfriend, Eve. Since Jeanne has no other preferable place to stay the night, she gives Natacha a ride home and stays at her place. Whether by accident or design (and even Rohmer's accidents are part of his pattern), Igor comes home the following morning while Jeanne is in the shower. Complications ensue, which form the crux of Rohmer's tale.

A subplot is introduced when Natacha tells Jeanne the story of her missing necklace, implicating both her father and his girlfriend in its disappearance. This little mystery is solved near the film's end when Jeanne finds the necklace by accident, and Natacha's explanation for its sudden reappearance absolves both her father and Eve. But only such solvable mysteries find such easy resolutions in Rohmer's universe.

With his very first shot – of Jeanne walking out of the Lycee Jacques Brel – Rohmer informs us that we are going to spend some time in the company of cultivated people. But by making Jeanne a philosophy teacher, Rohmer elicits most of the film's conflicts, along with some interesting dialogue. Jeanne tells Natacha that, instead of pedantically preaching about absolute truths, for her philosophy is the art of “thinking about thought”, that what she tries to instill in her students is the ability to “think about thinking”. Over dinner, she assures Igor and Eve that most of her students are from the working class, and yet they find it embarrassing to get a bad grade in philosophy. “It's like saying they're unable to think”, Jeanne insists. “We can brag about being bad at math, but not philosophy.” Yet all of Jeanne's thinking can't protect her from her own self-deception.

One of Rohmer's themes in A Tale of Springtime is that nobody wants to allow anything to run its natural course – they're always trying to force things to happen. Consequently there is a disconnection between his characters' thoughts and their feelings. They seem too aloof to surrender to a powerful emotion. When Igor asks Jeanne if she is madly in love with her boyfriend, she answers quite directly, “How could I be? I'm not mad.”

This exchange occurs in Igor's house when he and Jeanne are left alone by Natacha's sudden departure with her boyfriend. Jeanne and Igor play a rather silly game that quickly turns serious – Jeanne grants Igor three wishes, to sit beside her, to hold her hand and to kiss her. It all seems so mechanical until Jeanne decides things have gone too far and insists on leaving.
Against the intensity of his dialogue, Rohmer plays out his tale in wondrous locations. The places themselves are exquisite – Parisian rooms from some displaced ancien régime converted none too carefully into functional homes (2). And they are invariably lined with overstuffed bookshelves – masterpieces of bookbinding, if nothing else. But Rohmer's people don't keep ideas like pets. For them, ideas are to be contested, at every opportunity.

Rohmer's people suffer personal spasms that don't cause ripples beyond their immediate vicinity. But within the framework Rohmer has made for them, his microcosm, every spark – the slightest word or gesture – can change the course of their lives. Rohmer's dramatic strategy is to bring a group of disparate characters together, watch them react to one another, and have them splinter off again in different directions. He watches as fates intersect and then alter their courses accordingly - such is Rohmer's own dialectic.

(1) From his carefully wrought dialogue you could conclude that Rohmer's twin fixations are philosophy and eroticism. These fixations are often surprisingly juxtaposed.

(2) As usual, there is no set designer listed in the film's credits, suggesting that Rohmer used real people's homes, with “real” décor.

My Night at Eric's

I have always found the work of Eric Rohmer, who turned 89 this year, more than a little boring. Except for The Marquise of O... (1976), which is his masterpiece and quite unlike all his other films, his foremost quality is an intellectualized sensuality, where the one invariably nullifies the other. Since he is a somewhat lightweight intellectual, Rohmer is much better when he lets sensuality get the upper hand, as he did in La Collectionneuse (1967), Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), Pauline at the Beach (1983) (thanks to the beautiful Arielle Dombasle), and My Night at Maud's (1969)

Another quality of Rohmer's work is irony: how knowledge is often withheld from the most knowledgeable; how the truth is most elusive to those who pride themselves on their honesty; and how happiness is sometimes the product of self-deception. Rohmer knows that it is good not to be wise in the ways of others or in one's own.

Jean-Louis, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, works for Michelin in Clermont, but is not adapting well to his new surroundings since his return from Vancouver and Valparaiso. He notices a pretty blonde in church (Marie-Christine Barrault), who also notices him. Then he runs into Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a friend he hasn't seen in fourteen years. Through Vidal he meets Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee who, after an evening of banter on love and marriage, impulsively invites Jean-Louis, after the tipsy Vidal has gone home, to her bed. How Jean-Louis responds to her invitation sets in motion events that will change the lives of three people.

In one sense, the film is an argument against Catholicism. Rohmer's lengthy church scenes, while they made me squirm nearly as much as I did every Sunday when I was a boy, cleverly illuminate the drama of looks and gestures going on between Jean-Louis and the blonde, Francoise. And other looks and gestures between Francoise and her co-conspirators, Vidal and Maud, provide glimpses of a much broader drama that Rohmer leaves unspoken.

It is, after all, that unspoken drama that contributes an intriguing dimension to My Night at Maud's - the intersection of disparate lives, libidos, and egos, their reactions, and the resumption of their personal trajectories. Something happened at Maud's. Even Maud talks about that night with unabashed nostalgia. Near the end of the film, Jean-Louis refers to it as "that evening," and Maud corrects him: "Evening? Night, you mean. Our night." By so italicizing that wintry night in Clermont, in which two people attract, but ultimately fail, each other, Rohmer comes close to the rueful, fate-streaked universe of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy:


The Afternoon Sun

This room, how well I know it.
Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it,
as offices. The whole house has become
an office building for agents, merchants, companies.

This room, how familiar it is.

Here, near the door, was the couch,
a Turkish carpet in front of it.
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—no, opposite—a wardrobe with a mirror.
In the middle the table where he wrote,
and the three big wicker chairs.
Beside the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

They must still be around somewhere, those old things.

Beside the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

...One afternoon at four o’clock we separated
for a week only... And then—
that week became forever.


Rohmer makes that moment between Maud and Jean-Louis into a legend, making My Night at Maud's such a moving and personal experience, one of those lovely films that are fixed for us in a moment of time, the first time we saw it, but which grows on subsequent viewings.