Movie Enthusiast Issue 50: French New Wave Diaries I
Last time I mentioned that I’d be filling in the gaps of my knowledge of the French New Wave this spring. Over the next few months, I’ll be holding myself to that goal by keeping a viewing log in this newsletter.
Le Beau Serge (1958)
Directed by Claude Chabrol
Who is Claude Chabrol? He’s always mentioned in the same breath as all the other big-name nouvelle vague directors, but only usually after an oxford comma. Isabelle Huppert always talks about him and how formative her work with him was to her career as an actress. He directed, astonishingly, over 50 films in his 50-odd-year-long career. He made his first—Le Beau Serge—when he was only 27, which means I have some time in me yet to make a splash as a filmmaker.
Le Beau Serge is spoken of as the first film of the French New Wave. Yet it doesn’t announce itself as the start of anything especially new or formally inventive. It's a pretty straightforward story about François, a man in his 20s who returns to his hometown in the country in after many years away. The people he knew growing up have changed, in some cases dramatically, and have made him acutely aware of the otherwise imperceptible effect of the passage of time on youth. The movie was filmed entirely in Sardent, a village some 4 hours south of Paris; like The 400 Blows and Breathless that would follow in the next 2 years, it’s a story told through the eyes of young people about challenges particular to those who are still young.
There was a lot more religious content in this film than I had expected for something I chose pretty much at random to watch on Western Easter. The village priest gets a lot of space to air his grievances about how none of the young folk in town ever turn to him or the church for help in times of need and distress. The priest is my favorite character in the film. I totally get his mild anguish over not being able to reach the younger townsfolk, or not knowing how. His is one of various microtragedies playing out across town. Serge, the handsome man for whom the movie is named, could perhaps especially benefit from some spiritual guidance through his own tragedy. He’s been drowning away his young adulthood in wine after he had a stillborn child by a wife he begrudgingly married because he had gotten her pregnant (with said child). He’s the only character in the film to wear, or seemingly even to own, a leather jacket. That’s how you know the grief is serious.
Chabrol explores this tale of (seemingly) wasted youth through François’s attempted interventions into Serge’s life and his romantic dalliances with Serge’s sister-in-law. At the same time, François’s status as an outsider gives the director some space to meditate on the rural-urban divide. This has always been a fascinating subject to me, though with regard to France it’s one I’ve only recently taken an interest in. Watching Le Beau Serge, I was put in mind of Jérôme Reybaud’s 2016 film Jours de France, in which a city boy in his 30s leaves what we are left to discern is a shaky relationship with his boyfriend to go on an aimless pilgrimage through rural France. The people he meets in his travels respond to him in ways you’re not used to seeing onscreen if the only French movies you’ve ever watched are the ones that are set in Paris. (Imagine if your idea of America were informed entirely from watching movies set in New York City or Los Angeles!) Likewise of the characters in Chabrol’s film.
What Chabrol accomplishes in Le Beau Serge is to breathe some life into the village by virtue of the attention he pays to it. He uses a lot of well-blocked takes of considerable (though not taxing) length and tracking shots where other directors might instead opt for the ole shot-reverse-shot to keep things moving. His method gives us the time and the space to let our eyes and mind wander from whoever’s talking at a given moment to whatever’s just there in the background, whether it’s a row of hardy flatbed trucks lining the street or the sounds of church bells calling the village grandmothers to mass. When 21st-century film critics complain about modern-day movies in rural locales lacking a “sense of place,” I’m pretty sure it’s with films like this one in mind. You can film on location, use nonprofessional actors, tinker with the dialogue until it sounds just right, maybe even drop a nice establishing shot or two of some notable landmark, but nothing gives you the same effect of feeling like you’ve gotten to know a place like letting your camera roll, and roll, and roll without regard for whether whatever you’re filming is “serving the narrative” or not.
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center next week. It is very difficult for me to suppress the urge to splurge on Amtrak tickets for an overnight visit so I can go see it. (The film will open in Baltimore this May; D.C.-area friends, hit me up if you want to go.) In a short reflection on the making of the movie for Film Comment, Martel makes an interesting observation about historical fiction that I liked so much I’m sharing it here:
When I tried to adapt Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s science-fiction comic The Eternaut [the project Martel attempted before making Zama], I was forced to think about the representation of another time. We might think that this particular category of fiction is preceded by the word “science” because of its predictive nature. It is a fiction that anticipates the future, even as a hypothesis. Yet strangely when we insist on thinking about the past, it would seem that the sciences that address it do not have a predictive capacity. There may be certainty about whether or not a white wig was worn in such a place in the Spanish colonies, but what can we say about what the dialogues were like? Period cinema should be a subgenre of science fiction. We would get less confused. Fiction was probably born as an antidote to history.