 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
Philippe Garrel: |
 |
|
Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
As incredible as it seems, Philippe Garrel, at the
precocious age of 16, had already sketched most of the now familiar elements of
his cinematic style in the opening shots of his first film, the 15 minute Les Enfants désaccordés (1964). Everyday
banality; locations leached of identifying marks; the rhythmic alternation of
entries and exits from static images; the fondness for lyrical walk-and-talk
scenes.
But these disaffected runaways are headed somewhere mysterious,
exotic, enchanted. “I don’t really know where they went”, commented Garrel in
1968. “I filmed something abstract, a kind of chateau with nude guys hanging
around … When I watch it today, I find it captures exactly what was happening
to our generation: completely alienated from consumer society, we needed to
break away”.
This central situation of an impulsive, anarchic
flight from society, driven by the idealism of romantic love, will remain a
constant in Garrel’s cinema. Les Enfants
désaccordés was screened on French television, and, in an introductory chat
with Garrel, the presenter found him to be a snobbish dandy: “Your collar, your
long hair …”.
The dandy label would stick to Garrel for a long time;
indeed, Sally Shafto’s informative 2007 book on the experimental filmmakers
known as the Zanzibar group evokes in its title the “Dandies of May 1968”. By
that year, Garrel was all of 20 and, thanks to benefactor Sylvina Boissonas, able
to realise an ambitious series of relatively luxuriant features, including Le Révélateur (1968) and The Virgin’s Bed (1969). He had not wasted
the time in between: further shorts, work for television “magazine” programs,
and a freewheeling debut feature, Marie
pour mémoire (1967).
As for the political events of May ’68, Garrel
participated at the barricades and helped assemble a fragment of avant-garde
reportage, Actua 1 (long thought lost
but rediscovered in 2014). Regular Lovers (2005) revisits, in a fictional recreation, that experience, and also shows
what followed: not conventional militancy but another, more countercultural
type of resistance. Like the heroes of his early work, Garrel embraced poetry,
flamboyance, travel, love, music, drugs and eventually an increasingly
marginalised cult reputation.
1964 to 1979 form the first major period in Garrel’s
career. The best films of these years reveal the extreme tendencies of his
approach. In The Inner Scar (1972),
long tracking shots, staged in the landscapes of several countries, record
richly coloured, painterly tableaux in which medievally adorned figures (Pierre
Clémenti, the singer Nico who had become Garrel’s partner, and the director
himself) strike romantic poses, utter enigmatic lines and enact a tortuous choreography
of attraction and repulsion. The connectives of plot disappear in favour of
psychodramatic moments and ritual actions charged with mythological symbolism.
Les hautes solitudes (1974), on the
other hand, reflects drastically altered material circumstances: living in near
poverty, sharing a drug habit with Nico, shooting silent footage on leftover, black-and-white
stock, Garrel redefines cinematic “minimalism” at ground zero. And yet no one
receptive to the mute power of the images of Jean Seberg, as she cryptically
improvises for Garrel’s camera, can ever forget this movie.
By 1979, Garrel had kicked drugs, ended his
relationship with Nico and, with script assistance from Annette Wademant (collabroator
of Max Ophüls and Jacques Becker), initiated a project of self-renewal: L’Enfant secret. He spoke of it as picking up where Les Enfants désaccordées had left off –
telling, with necessary artistic licence, the story of his life. But he had to
wait three years to have enough money to retrieve it from the lab. Publicly
unveiled in 1983, L’Enfant secret was
a revelation, and remains so today: a film so painfully intimate, so close to
the fluxes and flows of the unconscious mind, that spectators can feel like
they are dreaming it into existence.
To cite a critics’ slogan of the time, Garrel had
staged his personal “return to fiction”. From that point on, each new film,
step by step, would explore – and slowly master – another aspect of cinematic
narrative: the plotting of time, the direction of actors, the crafting of
dialogue, and the formation of a unique mise
en scène (he shoots, for example, in the strict, linear chronology of the
script). He would even try his hand at what he described as a “B movie” in Liberté, la nuit (1984), set during the
Algerian War. But there is no mistaking it for a Michael Mann or even a Jean-Pierre
Melville special: the use of ellipsis, the raw edges, and the general air of
hushed minimalism make it uniquely Garrelian.
Garrel’s audience would remain small but loyal
throughout the ‘80s; wider acclaim eluded him until J’entends plus la
guitare (1991). His other masterpiece of these transitional years is Emergency Kisses (1989). It has
ostensibly the slightest premise of all his plots – a filmmaker (Garrel) goes
on vacation with his actor wife (Brigitte Sy) and their son (little Louis
Garrel), to heal the rift caused by his casting of another woman (Anémone) as
his latest leading lady. But the film’s lyrical fusion of music (by Barney
Wilen) and image, its razor-sharp view of “love’s malady”, and its seeming air
of home-movie intimacy (in fact, carefully staged) are indelible.
The bare facts of Garrel’s biography – his successive
wives (Sy and Caroline Deruas), parents (especially his father, Maurice), children
(Louis and Esther) – fill all his films, to varying extents and in diverse
ways, from L’Enfant secret onwards. Yet it is upon this canvas, angled slightly
different each time, that Garrel works increasingly novelistic variations.
The Birth of Love (1993), for
instance, tackles certain, recurrent themes in Garrel’s filmography, but
presents them in the more classical form of a dichotomy: two friends with different
trajectories and desires. Paul (Lou Castel) is a married actor who feels
increasingly oppressed by family life, and is drawn to younger lovers. Marcus
(Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a writer seeking reconciliation with his wife, Hélène
(Dominique Reymond), who has abandoned him for another man. The film negotiates
these two forces: on one hand, the intensity of first encounters, the renewed
experience of love, the openness of what is yet to be discovered; and, on the
other hand, the weight of promises and sacrifices accumulated down the years,
the responsibilities of marriage, family, children.
This novelistic tendency in Garrel’s work is given a
new spin in his most recent films, as his roster of collaborators has changed
(writer Marc Cholodenko, for instance, in the 1990s; Jean-Claude Carrière
today). This is largely due to the use of voice-over narration that, even if
sparse, recounts the story, linking events and filling gaps. But do not expect
any kind of realism. In A Burning Hot Summer (2011), one of the central characters, Paul (Jérôme Robart), narrates the story
of his best friend, Frédéric (Louis Garrel), offering commentary on even those
incidents he has not witnessed. For In
the Shadow of Women (2015) the narration is more ironic, giving the film
its surprising tone as an astute comedy of errors.
Voice-over has not, however, made Garrel any less fond
of ellipsis. In fact, his latest projects seem to be arriving at an extreme
narrative purification, as if to achieve the bare bones of a film: Lover for a Day (2017) gives proof of
this drive.
J’entends plus la guitare, although
situated at the very beginning of Garrel’s second major career phase, is where
he takes this novelistic ambition furthest. Dedicated to Nico (who died three
years previously), the film covers two decades. It starts with Gérard (Benoît
Régent) and Marianne (Johanna ter Steege) in Positano, Italy, where Garrel and
Nico lived at the end of the ‘60s with Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont (the
latter relationship is the basis for A
Burning Hot Summer), and tracks their on-off relationship until Marianne’s
sudden, accidental death. The film also portrays the encounter and first years
between Gérard and Aline (Brigitte Sy), who helps him quit drugs and has a
child with him. The intense scene of encounter between Marianne and Aline is a
summit of Garrel’s cinema.
Months, even years pass between each incident depicted
in J’entends plus la guitar, without
any specific indication of the time elapsed. In one exchange between Gérard and
Marianne, she introduces him to heroin; in the next scene, he has already
developed a serious habit. The first conversation between Gérard and Aline is
followed by a glimpse of their child, already born. Meetings (or reunions) and
separations, happiness and crisis, succeed each other brutally, with nothing in
between.
Verisimilitude does not interest Garrel. He never
bothers to indicate the passing of time by altering the physical appearance of
his actors; nor does he ask them to imitate the gestures or expressions of the
real-life people on which their characters are based. Sometimes he will ask the
same actor to repeat his or her role over several films – but seeing that Anne
Wiazemsky (in L’Enfant secret and Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les
sunlights, 1985) and Johanna ter Steege (in J’entends plus and Le Cœur
fantôme, 1996), very different “types”, are both called upon to incarnate
Nico, “likeness” is hardly his casting principle. Rather, what defines the
characters in Garrel’s films are the forceful events they experience. These
same events are constantly evoked across his films, but in changing
configurations.
The discovery of a “secret child” (L’enfant secret, J’entends plus la guitare), the failed or successful suicide
attempts (Les hautes solitudes, the superb
short Rue Fontaine [1984], Night Wind [1999], Frontier of Dawn [2007]), May ‘68 (at the core of Regular Lovers but insistently
referenced in many others), electroshock therapy (L’Enfant secret, Frontier of
Dawn), the inaugural infidelity of the female partner (Emergency Kisses, J’entends
plus, The Birth of Love, Regular Lovers, A Burning Hot Summer, Jealousy [2013], In the Shadow of Women), the
birth of a child (J’entends plus la
guitare, The Birth of Love, Frontier of Dawn, A Burning Hot Summer, Jealousy).
It is the traumatic or joyful mark left by those events in the memory of the
filmmaker that dictates their reappearance from film to film, as if the emotion
associated with them compelled their depiction.
For Garrel, the incorporation of elements from his own
life is not just a matter of literal fidelity. Rather, there are multiple
experiences in the mix, split or condensed, refracted or reimagined.
Interwoven, also, are artistic sources of inspiration (such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Théophile Gautier’s Spirite, or
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” – which might be inventively/poetically
rendered as “Le cœur fantôme”), as well as details drawn from the lives of
friends and collaborators. It is rarely a matter of simple transposition and
repetition, but rather a careful reworking and expansion. Ideas may begin in
the personal realm and carry a sting of intimate truth but, thanks to their
creative treatment, go far beyond that, into history and society.
Some of these recurring events are undeniably
spectacular, but mostly Garrel’s films relate typical, even mundane situations
of meeting and parting, work and love, birth and death. Moments shared in
bedrooms and toilets, family conversations at the kitchen table, walks in
streets, first looks and kisses, the embrace after a long anticipated
reconciliation, the close-ups on intertwined hands or on faces: these express
the greatest turmoil with the smallest gesture.
Such are the types of scenes, which he frequently
refers to as “universal”, that fill Garrel’s cinema. He cherishes these moments
and gives them an unusual emphasis, treating them with care, building and
rebuilding them in different variations from film to film. Taken as a whole,
Garrel’s body of work is as passionate ode to the lasting primacy and
significance of the private sphere in our daily lives.
MORE Garrel: Sauvage innocence, The Salt of Tears
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin May 2017 |
