Andre Techine’s new film, “The Witnesses”, is a difficult and courageous vision wrapped in a gay romance and sophisticated contemporary folklore. Set in Paris, 1984, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it weaves together the fates of five characters whose lives passively bear witness to their era, location and personal histories. For each one of them there is a moment of experience in which the observer becomes the act-or, awakening momentarily to witness in a deeper, evidential way the truth of his/her singular existence and struggle and is permitted, through the convergence of freedom and necessity, to make some mark in the world.
That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.
The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.
In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.
Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.
Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.
Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.
The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.
Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.
At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.
Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.
The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.
Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.
Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Duchess of Langeais
“The Duchess of Langeais”, Jacques Rivette’s new film, opens with images leading the viewer across an ancient church floor patterned with symbols redolent of mysterious power, patched and faded beyond legibility if not resonance. A filigreed iron grille of prison-like bars separates absolutely the luminous space of an elaborately carved high altar, glistening with gilding and color and embellished with narrative images that we cannot see, from the darkened nave where seated congregants dutifully listen to a vocal concert Mass by the convent nuns, now used to celebrate the latest regime change: post-Napoleonic royal restoration. The church and convent is the crowning and orienting complex on an isolated rock of island jutting up into the sky from the pure blue line of the sea.
The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.
Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.
Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.
Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.
To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.
Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.
Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.
The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.
Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?
Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.
Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.
Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.
Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.
The film demarcates spheres of possibility and action and requires that the viewer abandon a premise normally taken as axiomatic: that the storyline will unfold in a fashion where the narrative elements build so as to reveal an underlying depth dimension.
Whatever vertical dimension exists in this work lives outside the story proper. It is referred to in the tale told by Armand, a French general; equally it shows up in the imagery of the up and above convent to which Antoinette, the duchess, repairs after her unconsummated affair seems to render daily life in society intolerable to her. Each of the two main characters encounters a life moment which offers the potential for a transformative experience. Neither, however, is prepared to receive an unanticipated shift in understanding, so that no defining moment can occur.
Antoinette and Armand meet at one of the elegant nightly soirees that constitute the socially acceptable round of amusements for upper class Parisians. She is intrigued by the damaged and illustrious soldier; he determines to make the beautiful duchess his mistress; more deeply each intuits in the other a trustworthy reflection of a substanceless stance.
Armand in successive segments tells the duchess of his time on campaign in the desert of Africa when he had to march barefoot under a punishing sun over a brutal terrain that never seemed to get closer to its goal. The native guide had lied about the distance, for there was no way back. Armand’s bitter denunciation produces no response from the guide except an indifferently offered dagger with which he may end his suffering, if he so chooses. Marching on, pushing himself beyond his physical limits and carried for the final distance on the native’s shoulders, he ultimately reaches that place which offers him a clear vision of the equal presence of opposites: desert on one side, oasis on the other. Life, he is invited to see, challenges him to choose a direction that calls to him.
To Armand, however, the experience he describes has no impact. The journey, far from being an entry into awareness, becomes reduced to a harried remembrance of when physical survival hung in the balance. The ordeal opens no new understanding because Armand does not have the capacity to encounter himself in a new form. Rather, he continues on the same road he will follow when he begins to woo the duchess- a determination to successfully complete a quest with which he is not actually engaged.
Suitably married to a husband of the right rank, Antoinette is only required to fulfill her mundane social duties. She is more than welcome to a love affair if she so desires, provided discretion is exercised as to the where and when. It would seem from very early in the film that we are witnessing the unfolding and inevitable consummation of a passionate liaison.
Something, alas, is missing. The lover, though often ardent in his words of pursuit, is barely lukewarm in his actions. Similarly, the woman for whom he is supposedly pining away speaks as though her whole life between their meetings is just dead routine. Antoinette is a flurry of energetic anticipation in preparing for Armand’s visits, yet, as soon as they are together, she is as distant in the present as ambiguous about a future between them.
The duchess takes the poses of a woman falling in love, even as we witness her infatuation with the style, not with the man. Armand brusquely makes a demand he cannot effect and Antoinette trumps his bluff by simply asking “how?” He arranges for the duchess’ abduction, but in parallel fashion loses the spark once it could catch flame. Armand has all the trappings of a man of action, but we recognize them as circumstantial, not characterological.
Once it is unmistakable that the two will never become lovers, Rivette teases us with the cleverness of the unraveling. They who cannot but be appearances to each other must remain hot in pursuit of what neither would know how to want. How can the frustration of this failed attraction be rendered meaningful?
Miraculously, the film provides an unexpected, though forceful, answer. The surrounding characters function as mouthpieces of the idea that adherence to social form and subordination of any feeling to the necessity of weighing how it is to function in the world is precisely what gives life meaning. Forget transformative experiences, grand passions, religious conversions, liftings of the veil- no one wants them. If some misfit is seduced by a moment of inner revelation into imagining a different life, it is everyone’s task, by way of censure or complicity, to unite towards supporting that person in keeping the personal private until it can be conveniently forgotten.
Each of these characters is in harmony with his/her station in life; they are survivors. The aging and practical Princess, like the convent’s Mother Superior later, understands that form is the only unconditional reality of any given collective; the worldly and veteran Monsieur de Pamier understands that life can only be lived at the juncture of appearance and sentiment. The duchess’ maid, Lisette, can easily resist the luxurious cream-filled pastries that do not agree with her and Julien, the Majordomo, knows that his lot is to obey command and bell alike. Like the Princess and Pamier, these two know how to negotiate advantage from the small, yet immensely variable, slice of latitude that social form and the necessities of life allow.
Antoinette and Armand have found in each other the needed foil for their own reflections. Seemingly the misfits, they are, in fact, utterly conventional. Their security lies in being told that there can be no life outside the rules. Neither wants the substance of contact, for each knows of his/her incapacity to fully surrender to experience. Their gamesmanship ratchets up into high gear until the duchess ruins herself socially, eventually finding her way to the inspired depravations of the religious refuge.
Armand plans to abduct the duchess a second time. With his band of accomplices, the weary and sickly general breaks in to the convent, too late: the duchess is dead. Again, he can think of nothing better than to follow through on his original plan and steals Antoinette’s lifeless body, carrying the corpse back to his waiting ship. Armand is now as adrift as the directionless vessel that suddenly no longer has purpose. His cohort suggests tying weights to the meaningless body and dumping it into the sea, henceforth thinking of the entire experience like a childhood story, or a poem.
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