* *I just didn't like this movie even though I really wanted to.
It has a lot going for it. I like the editing, the compression of the story; I'm alway appreciative of a movie that shows someone walking to a car and cuts to driving, sparing me having to sit through the predictable door opening, key insertion, blah, blah. And like in Temoins, there's engaging psychology here and what is, for me, the frankness about relationships. Hélène is complicate, Gilles is complicated and even minor characters like the sister, the gay postal guy and the two women friends of Hélène are complicated. And lots of the visual is nice, from Catherine Deneuve to her primary-colored wardrobe and the views of Biarritz from the perspective of a local.
The problem I couldn't get past was the blockiness of the narrative. Hélène is distant, then vulnerable, then suffering in mad love; Gilles is sweet, then depressed, then crazy. There are too many big jumps and jolts in the movie. In the later Temoins, there are also jumps and empty places in the narrative and portrayal of the characters, but these gaps aren't so far or abrupt that my experience would keep me from filling them in. Here, though, there is so much distance in the jumps that a scene loses touch with the previous, a mood or attitude loses touch with the previous, so there's no overall arc or unity. Maybe the movie just tries to cover too much story and character development in too short a period of time, but I caught myself thinking "What!?" more often than a viewer should have. And the hackneyed music doesn't help matters.
Sixteen years before Temoins, Techine is already looking at some of the same themes: the difficulty of expressing and realizing love, the persistence of love after loss, the pain that accompanies love, and the complexity of individuals' psychology and desire. There are also gay characters, openly interacting with straight society (though out of the main narrative here), and there's even cruising in a park.
Techine does a much better job of controlling the range and gaps in is films in the later Temoins than in this one, and that's a pity. I would have liked to know Hélène an Gilles as well as I know Sarah and Adrien.
And was I in France in 1981? Those narrow ties brought back some uncomfortable memories of my life at the apex of fashion.
