Philippe Garrel is the proverbial underrated genius. He’s the closest thing to a poet functioning today in French cinema. – Olivier Assayas
Born in Paris in 1948, Philippe Garrel, the director of LES AMANTS REGULIERS, was just twenty-years-old in May, 1968, the month and year when the social, economic and cultural stopgaps formed by General Charles de Gaulle’s already unstable government finally gave way, revealing a deep fissure that exists in France to this day. Raised in a loving and artistic, if sometimes tumultuous, environment by his father, Maurice Garrel, a French character actor, mime and puppeteer, the nascent filmmaker and the rest of his left-leaning household participated in the lead-up to these epochal events along with over two-thirds of the workforce who joined arms in protest against Gaullism. Almost two hundred years after the French Revolution, the battle between the Left and the Right, progressives and conservatives, blue collar and bourgeoisie, finally reached a tipping point, one that was long in the making.
LES AMANTS REGULIERS, a careful rumination on those fateful days, opens modestly, with black-on-white credits. The first image we see is of the Seine, calm and darkly glittering at night. A couple of twenty-something revolutionaries cross a bridge and ascend a flight of stairs to smoke hash. The first full line of dialogue – “Do you think I should publish them … my poems” – is spoken by the stoned Francois Dervieux, played by Louis Garrel, the real-life son of the director who functions as a stand-in for the filmmaker forty years ago. “You know, I’d never want to be famous or important. I want to be anonymous,” a young painter replies. Glimpses of fresh-faced students throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the Girondists, barricades built with cobblestones and flaming, overturned cars, and stone-faced gendarmes lined up in full riot gear soon follow. When the revolution breaks out in earnest relatively early in the film, Francois winds up on the rooftops, hiding from the police and peering down at the firestorm below. Philippe Garrel filmed on the same buildings he found himself on in May and it’s from this birds-eye vantage point that Francois first begins to feel pangs of ambivalence and remorse.
Philippe Garrel was a young contemporary of the nouvelle vague generation, the same one that spawned all those titans of the French New Wave – Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, et al. – yet he never entered their ranks, nor did he especially aspire to. Still, no one creates films in a vacuum, and even someone as isolated as Garrel has been throughout his career still has to have some kind of model, a source of filmic inspiration. But in tracing the lineage leading to Garrel’s unique brand of cinema, one finds very few films mirroring his own. One notable exception, in terms of subject matter, technique and status as an outsider, is that of the great French filmmaker Jean Eustache and his sadly abbreviated oeuvre, particularly his first feature film, LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN, starring Jean-Pierre Leaud (a regular in Garrel’s later films). Eustache, a close friend of Garrel’s until he committed suicide in 1981, provides the closest parallel to Garrel’s method, and it’s impossible to watch LES AMANTS REGULIERS without thinking of that seminal milestone in French cinema. Like Eustache and his career, Garrel and his films are staunchly independent, uncompromisingly personal and anti-climactic in a way few films of the French New Wave (whose much-publicized revolt against French classicism arguably never amounted to the kind of cinematic revolution that it continually professed) ever dared to be.
Garrel makes family films, in the Cassavetes sense. His ability to convey intimacy on-screen has few rivals and his work always reflects deeply personal feelings not always readily apparent to his audiences. Garrel’s work also became more ascetic, less adorned, as he grew older. His early, experimental short films and features made immediately following the revolution were surprisingly elaborate and full of surreal visual effects. Perhaps it is telling that out of all the New Wavers, Godard is the only filmmaker Garrel speaks of feeling close to in his sporadic interviews, admiring his refusal to compromise in both an artistic, commercial and, most importantly, political sense throughout his long career. Garrel’s films have never reached the same level of international notoriety. Structurally, they most closely resemble Pascal’s Pensées, thoughts and fragments of thoughts grouped in bundles of paper, liasses, cut and sewn together. Bresson, in his “Notes on the Cinematographer,” once wrote to himself “… film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along,” which speaks perhaps more to the stubbornly elliptical nature of Garrel’s cinema than Bresson’s own. His roots, like Bresson’s, lie in impressionism, with narratives often broken up into a series of vignettes and digressions rather than a single story arc. In interviews regarding his latest film, Philippe Garrel has repeatedly invoked Stendhal’s THE RED AND THE WHITE, the great French novel of post-Napoleonic France and its tragic tale of idealism and ambition of young Julien Sorel, as an inspiration for the film’s structure and meaning. This method of revisiting history at the crossroads – how you cross history and how history crosses you – informs his films at every turn.
“They’re losing the revolution indoors,” Jean-Christophe, a disillusioned freedom fighter writes in a letter at one point halfway through LES AMANTS REGULIERS. The revolutionaries’ apathy and ennui, captured so exquisitely in this film, is charted through their clandestine meetings, which at first take place in subterranean bunkers and non-descript flats, but, as the story progresses, become more chic than bohemian, with parties increasingly more decadent and elaborate. Anarchy and abnegation segue into pleasure-seeking escapism. It is at one of these gatherings that Francois meets a young sculptor, Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), and their rendezvous marks a turning point in the film’s focus away from all the impassioned rhetoric. Love, the true subject of Garrel’s late films, irrevocably intrudes on the militancy of his revolutionary zeal. When Francois quotes from the Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno, the self-satisfaction on his face only underscores the hollowness and ineffectualness of the whole enterprise. One disgruntled Marxist asks if they can sustain a “revolution for the working class despite the working class,” a question that’s made rhetorical by the film’s end.
When Francois is finally arrested for refusing to take a medical exam for obligatory military service, at his hearing his defense argues for the delicate sensibilities of the would-be poet. The judge answers: “the Rimbauds, the Baudelaires … they all need to be put in prison.” The invoking of Baudelaire is especially apt, since it’s through the eyes of the flâneur that we see the events of May ‘68 for what it was – an idyllic rebellion encapsulated by Francois and his face blackened with soot. Unlike Bertolucci’s unabashed cinematic paeans to the revolution and all its promise, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (to which LES AMANTS REGULIERS makes explicit reference) and THE DREAMERS (which coincidently also starred Louis Garrel), Garrel is more interested in the revolution’s shortcomings and surprisingly uneventful aftermath. Quoting French poets like the 19th Century poet and novelist Musset, Francois’ fervor eventually dwindles into nothingness. This sentiment is clearly made manifest in the film’s coda, the dream of an idealistic young man on his deathbed which harkens back to Garrel’s first feature-length narrative film, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, made immediately after the revolution in 1968. Yet the perfect summation of Garrel’s feelings regarding the revolution comes not from Francois but from the director’s actor-father, Maurice Garrel, who makes a brief appearance in LES AMANTS REGULIERS, playing Lucien, Francois’ grandfather. Despite his short time on-screen, he nevertheless delivers the most important and depressingly prophetic insight spoken in the film. Speaking to his grandson, still full of rebellion following his night at the barricades, he tells him flatly, “It’ll be like none of this ever existed. Like nothing ever happened.” Forty years later, one need only to look around at the current political climate, in France and elsewhere, to see the sad truth behind that statement.
-- By Jameson West, Associate Programmer, Austin Film Society
