Alice and Martin***
Part Two
It would almost be tempting to characterize Bresson as a director who created his own tradition; if his work has affinities with the films of older directors, it would perhaps be with the experimental creations of filmmakers like Marcel L'Herbier or Jean Epstein in the 1920's. Interestingly, Renoir dabbled in experimentalism in The Little Match Girl (1928), but he did not pursue his efforts in that direction. His first sound film, La Chienne (1930), was emphatically realistic, and while Renoir continued to deepen his conception of realism during that period and afterwards, he never departed from the realistic tradition to which he had contributed so much.
Although Cahiers du Cinéma revered Bresson, it would be difficult to find evidence of his influence in the work of most nouvelle vague directors. Only Resnais, among the leaders of the nouvelle vague, ever aimed at anything like Bresson's wholesale constructivism--and then from a wholly different angle. More than anything else, Bresson served as an icon, as an embodiment of artistic incorruptibility and integrity, whose name could be invoked as a magic charm in the 1950's, when it was always necessary to go on the attack against canaille like Christian-Jaque, René Clément or Claude Autant-Lara, in the decade before critics became themselves filmmakers and wrote a new chapter in the history of movies in France.
In this way, Bresson occupied a position akin to that of his contemporary Jacques Tati, and the two-- along with the two Jean's, Renoir and Cocteau-- were among the few native born directors to be canonized by the Cahiers critics as bona fide auteurs in that fallow period. The notorious enthusiasm of the magazine for American directors like Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller was as much the obverse side of the contributors' disenchantment with the postwar cinema in their own country as it was a naive infatuation with all things emanating from United States.
In the first part of the film, Martin in certain ways--in his inchoateness, his troglodytic attempts to live off the land, and his difficulty in communicating with others--reminded me of Joe Christmas, the ill-fated protagonist of William Faulkner's Light in August. Yet while it is possible to imagine Joe Christmas being transformed into a fashion model--at least in France if not the Deep South--seeing him as a tortured intellectual in search of salvation like Michel in Pickpocket calls for more than the usual dose of the willing suspension of disbelief, especially when this metamorphosis takes place in such an otherwise realistic context.
The prototype for Michel is, of course, Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but a Raskolnikov filtered through later famously alienated novelistic heroes like Roquentin in J.-P. Sartre's Nausea or Meursault in Albert Camus' The Stranger, a far from quotidian kind of guy who would not have much to say to either Joe Christmas or Martin, unless the latter's surname was Heidegger. No educated French viewer upon watching Pickpocket would have failed to recognize that Michel is an "outsider"--to use the title of a now justly forgotten but once widely-read odious vulgarization of intellectual history.
Robert Bresson sometimes showed a haughty disdain for such niceties of commercial film production as establishing a background for characters or supplying them with easily discernible motives, but in this case I don't think he really had to worry. By the time Pickpocket came along, someone like Michel was as much a recognizable type as any rustic inhabitant of the celluloid Provence fabricated by Marcel Pagnol. But who could mistake the almost acephalic Martin for an exemplar of the type of alienated intellectual?
Although Alice and Martin plays around with some Freudian-Oedipal themes in addition to its Bressonian-existential ones, it is basically the story of an unhappy but quite ordinary young man and how he ultimately embarks upon the road to reaching maturity. This is as respectable a subject for a movie as any other, but given the way Téchiné wants to approach it, I do not see the subject as ripe with the kind of profundity he wants to extract from it.
Juliette Binoche is the "star" of Alice and Martin in more than one sense of the word. Not only is she the most well-known of the performers, but without her contribution, I think Alice and Martin would be a much less interesting movie. All of the actors and actresses do far better than average work, but the only other performer that I found very convincing was Mathieu Almaric as Benjamin. I fell in love with Carmen Maura after seeing her in Pedro Almodóvar's All about My Mother, but she doesn't seem at home here, and it doesn't help that in her last scene the movie shows her acting like a kind of ogre.
With the exception of Benjamin, the other Sauvagnac's--including Martin--come across as a bunch of cold fish. Worst of all, Victor, bearing a suspicious resemblance to Charles Vanel in Wages of Fear, hardly succeeds in making the tyrannical family patriarch who drives one of his sons to commit suicide a very sympathetic figure. When Martin insisted on turning himself in, I almost felt he should be rewarded for having performed a civic duty. Since I never for a minute experienced the chemistry that should occur between players and their roles in a good movie, I suspect the problem lies with the script--credited to Olivier Assayas, Gilles Taurand, and Techine himself--or perhaps with an inability on Téchiné's part to help the performers see what he was trying to do.
Considering the high quality of some of Téchiné's previous films, I do not think it likely that the "borrowings"--if they deserve that name--from other directors in Alice and Martin resulted from a lack of inspiration on his part. In the first place, the movie may well be symptomatic of a state of perplexity afflicting many directors in France today. The surviving colossi of the nouvelle vague, Godard and the three "R's"--Alain Resnais, Erich Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette--are no longer young, and no figure comparable to them in innovative strength has yet appeared on the horizon. They may still make great motion pictures--I hope they do.
But Rohmer's later films, with art theaters on the wane, have only had a very limited release here, while several films by Godard, Resnais, and Rivette have hardly been shown at all. (I should mention that some titles by Godard and Rivette are available on video from Facets.) Over the head of any French director, whether an established one like Téchiné or one only starting out, lurks the dark cloud of what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence," coupled with the equally dark cloud of waiting for an uncertain future far more prey to the whims of economic than aesthetic forces.
I enjoyed Cédric Klapisch's When the Cat's Away which came out in 1997, although I only caught up with it after the cat came out on video. But I would hardly care to look forward to a future filled with French movies in the same genre. (I won't even attempt to describe my reaction to the prospect of a future filled with flatulently prestigious productions like Alain Corneau's Tous les matins du monde.) The Klapisch movie is truly a pleasure to watch--while watching Chuck and Buck how I longed for a tiny bit of the charm the French often manage to effortlessly inject into a motion picture--but only a minor one, and making this sort of little jewel comes to the French all too easily.
The early nouvelle vague pictures had a considerable bite to them which has mellowed down to almost nothing by now. Even an apparently romantic and glamorous film like Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, widely misinterpreted in this country as a lachrymose sermon on the text "Love Conquers All," was a terrifying depiction of the deadly stuffiness and conformity of French bourgeois life, as anyone would have realized who had seen the same director's Lola or La Baie des anges.
One possible alternative to the screwball gentility of When the Cat's Away which does possess some of the tragic pathos of masterpieces like Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, or François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, is represented by Catherine Breillat's remarkable Romance, released in this country last year. (A warning to readers who did not have the chance to see the film theatrically: don't rent the video from Blockbuster, which has been censored.) Romance is as much in the nouvelle vague tradition as Alice and Martin, but it is a far better and more aesthetically demanding movie.
Nevertheless, quite apart from its explicit sexual material--which Breillat might or might not use in another picture--Romance does not seem to me to be a very likely candidate as the wave of the future for the French cinema. Breillat is just as idiosyncratic and demanding a director as Bresson, and she seems likely to occupy the peculiar niche accorded mavericks in the industry--a place she will share with another gifted survivor of the 1960's, Agnes Varda, who has continued to go a way very much her own.
Viewed in this way, Alice and Martin could come across as an inventory of possible solutions to the crisis of the French cinema that Téchiné explores and apparently finds wanting before abandoning them for the promised land of Bresson, a promised land that turns to ashes the instant he tries to enter it. But why shouldn't great art resemble the fabled Sodom Apple, which is supposed to turn to dust the instant it is touched? Bresson, the student of Jansenism, would have been the first to acknowledge that it is just as difficult to decide whether great art is utopia or only another mirage in the distance as it is distinguish damnation and salvation from a finite, mortal point of view. At this point, mere film criticism has to abandon all hope of saying anything very intelligible. It can only report Téchiné's failure to reach his goal and the artistic implications of that failure for what he has sought to do in this movie. Beyond that point lie only the endless sands of the desert.
At its best, Alice and Martin has shots that really count for something and transcend anything I have so far seen in any other movie this year. One of these is the shot I mentioned above of the juvenile Martin; another occurs during the tour of the Alhambra, just before Alice tells Martin of her pregnancy, when the camera pans from a low angle up over the facade of the building to reveal an incredibly blue patch of sky framed by the cornices. I can just imagine Wolfgang Petersen or Paul Verhoeven dismissing a shot like this with total contumely, but its highly deceptive simplicity taps into a more than millennial European experience of the interaction between art and nature with the undiluted sublimity of one of the shots of the Mediterranean in Contempt, serving as a stele to mark the triumphs of the nouvelle vague and to demonstrate that their fecundating force has not yet exhausted itself.
Check out these other new reviews:
E-mail Dave: daveclayton@worldnet.att.net