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3 Hearts
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Surface Pleasures
I can happily watch almost any film directed by Benoît Jacquot. Of course, his
relatively prolific output is uneven, and his subject or script material can be
stronger or weaker from one work to the next. At times, a sketch-like haste is
all too apparent, especially in his television assignments.
But a certain quality is almost always there: a fluid
elegance of mise en scène (often widescreen) and
dramatic construction; an ability to coax the best from actors and give them a
detailed characterisation to work with; an often affecting, emotive punch –
especially in the well-timed transitions from long take two-shots to
reverse-shot, over-the-shoulder volleys. In Jacquot’s cinema, the human face always captivates.
There is usually also, on another level of film form,
an aura of freedom that is a proud legacy of the Nouvelle Vague in French
cinema – sudden, ostentatious, “narrational” touches
where we are made deliberately aware of the hand of filmmaker: like shock edits
or transitions; whip pans; or a hitherto unheard voice-over (whether of a
character or an impersonal storyteller) making an unheralded appearance midway
through a film. The kinds of touches that send some reviewers barmy, like Ignatiy Vishnevetsky complaining,
in relation to Jacquot’s version of Diary of a Chambermaid (2015), about
“barely motivated flourishes of style”. But Jacquot claims his artistic right to such flourishes, which will not be disguised
within the “motivated” fabric of a purely classical mode.
There is something else, again, that speaks to me and
resonates in Jacquot’s work: an intimate and deep
feeling for dissociation. In his best films, including La Désenchantée (1990), À tout de suite (Right
Now, 2004) and Au fond des bois (2010), we closely follow characters who are, to varying degrees, “out of
themselves”, walking through life like sleepwalkers – but not, for all that,
entirely “alienated” in any recognisable or conventional sense. It appears to
be a different generation of dissociation than what we used to witness in
Antonioni, for instance, or even today in TV’s The Girlfriend Experience.
The relation between thought and feeling, commitment
and constancy, work and fulfilment, sex drive and death drive, always seem to
be askew – and yet, somehow, people go on functioning, and relating to each
other, however catastrophically in society’s terms. Some elegant pattern of
dissociated interrelation still manages to trace itself out – and this, too,
creates problems for the critical reception of Jacquot’s films, damned for their apparent surfeit of (to cite Vishnevetsky again) “surface pleasures”. The “cruising” ambience of Jacquot’s work, so much a part of his style, allows us to float among these surface
pleasures – and surface anxieties.
To grasp a logic to this
unusual spectacle of the emotions – often pitched, in terms of its scenography, at the shut-in level of chamber drama, or even
the more enclosed session of the analyst’s couch – we need to understand Jacquot’s close relationship to psychoanalysis,
particularly of the Lacanian variety. (He once married into the Lacan family,
and old Jacques himself – for whom Jacquot had made
the talking-head video document Télévision in 1973 – devotedly wrote a celebrity-review of
his first feature, L’Assassin musicien, in
1976.) Raymond Bellour has referred to Jacquot (in the course of a discussion of Au fond des bois, one of several of his
films dealing with varieties of the hypnotic seance)
as a “devoted Lacanian”. From that particular,
complicated web of Lacanian culture in France, I
shall draw only a particular, general attitude toward human desire (popularised
today by Žižek) – desire that is at once tormented,
forever displaced and, in its own, strange way, constitutive of everyday
reality.
In Jacquot’s films, it comes
down to this. Very often his stories hit a plateau where something resembling
“normal life” – marriage, kids, work – is being lived. It’s not necessarily
unhappy or dissatisfying: as 3 Hearts shows, in the relationship of tax officer Marc (Benoit Poelvoorde)
and his wife Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni),
there is sexual pleasure, happiness, even a kind of “complete” love. But there
is also the sense – beautifully conveyed by Jacquot’s stylistic treatment of such plateaux of normality – that his characters (or, at least, the chosen, central figures) are in a kind of
trance: the years are racing past, fading away, and its protagonists are not
really “there”, while all the same being fully there. There is an
unconventional itch at work: what Alain Resnais called, à propos his masterpiece Wild Grass (2009), a “desire to desire”.
A very Lacanian condition!
It’s the same “ordinary” state – chilling (in this
case) in its affectless banality – that Lili (Isild Le Besco) arrives at in the finale of À tout de suite. Yet what preceded it – and what often fills out
the drama of Jacquot’s cinema – is no less unreal: an
explosion of desire, burning up in an incandescence of lust or crime or exotic
adventure, or simply the groundless state of “getting away from yourself” and
going elsewhere, as Ann (Isabelle Huppert) does in Villa Amalia (2009). It is life lived at
the highpoint of fantasy, equally doomed – like normality – to, at some point,
evaporate. Jacquot’s films swing between these two
modes of evaporation of the self, of our ego-identity.
3 Hearts comes closer than Jacquot usually does to pure melodrama, even TV-oriented “soap
opera” intrigue. The script – co-written with three-time collaborator Julien Boivent, who also works
with Anne Fontaine – seems to take a leaf from (of all things) Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957): its opening movement hinges on the missed rendez-vous between Marc and the woman he encounters on the night streets of Lyon, Sylvie
(Charlotte Gainsbourg). Once that connection is manqué and the two characters are safely
ensconced in separate, distant countries, Marc then “just happens”, without
knowing it, to get involved with Sophie – Sylvie’s sister.
Jacquot deftly handles the implausibility of the situation (that Marc could
pass weeks and months without twigging to this fact of sibling relation) by
insisting on a wilful disavowal on Marc’s part: he fully knows there is a whole
stairwell of photos at the house of their mother, Madame Berger (Catherine Deneuve), that could prove or disprove his silent
suspicions … In fact, this is part and parcel of that “unreality of normality”
which Jacquot nails so well. We walk on through our
days and nights, blind …
Unlike, say, Olivier Assayas in laboured films such as Personal
Shopper (2016), Jacquot doesn’t make a big deal
about “new technology” as a defining part of his characters’ everyday life.
But, nonetheless, he contrives the most powerful moments of 3 Hearts – veritably Lacanian “brushes with the Real”! – around the uncanny
effects of this technology: the marvellous scene where Marc “confronts” or
unveils his presence to Sylvie, without saying a word, simply by turning
Sophie’s Skype connection on – resulting in Sylvie coming close to her screen
and scanning it, staring at it in disbelief. Likewise, the crucial moment near
the very end where both sisters anxiously utter the name “Marc” … with one of
them sounding through a mobile phone dropped on the floor.
The “3 Hearts” of the title refer, of course, to
this agonised, sentimental triangle, but also, in the manner of Hollywood
“weepies” like Untamed Heart (1993), to the actual,
physical heart problem suffered by Marc – he has several episodes of cardiac
arrest in the course of the story. This “bad heart” is less a heavy-handed,
dramatic metaphor, in this instance, than a key to characterisation,
performance and direction: Jacquot always gives his
players a very specific, physical “bearing” and traits to work with.
Poelvoorde is an actor I have never noticed much prior to this film, but here he
is remarkable, with his way of leaning his head forward, his nervous tics, his
rudely inquisitive manner … Equally impressive is Mastroianni,
who plays Sophie as someone always too close to her emotions, on the verge of
fright or panic at all times. Gainsbourg plays
emotional reserve: especially in the scene of a family dinner, her stony
evasion of Marc’s look is formidable … until the second, worthy of the glances
at the end of Garrel’s Les baisers de secours (1989), when she decides to give him the eye, full on.
I have elsewhere pondered the “trouble with fiction” that an entire generation or two of modern filmmakers seem to experience when they are faced with the prospect of conveying a “full-blooded” story on screen: better by far, it appears, to play it down, elide it, minimise it, de-dramatise it, stretch it out or compress it, place it in figurative quotation marks … Jacquot is part of this generational movement (as many of his films show), but in 3 Hearts he bravely, gamely takes the bait: he goes all the way with melodrama, and the result is very satisfying. MORE Jacquot: The School of Flesh © Adrian Martin January 2018 |
