Jan 16: Ma saison préférée/My Favorite Season (1993--Andre Techine)

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I was completely engaged in this film, and when it was over, I didn't know how to talk about it.

There aren't many traditional elements to deal with Ma saison preferee. There's a story, but it’s hard to find any Aristotelian structure to it unless you focus on the mother, and she’s not who you spend most of your time with in this film. And there are characters, but they don’t move to any revelations, act on hubris, learn anything or experience personality growth. Well, not much….

Ma saison preferee, instead, just shows us relationships and gives us info about the people involved in them to let us fill in the gaps. But it does this by showing us such a rich breadth that we feel like we know who these people are, and by the end of the film, we almost predict how they’ll act and what they think. It’s a very unique movie in giving so much information and insight but not seeming to move in any particular direction. We watch Emilie and Antoine interact with each other, with their mother, with others they know, and we learn about them intimately as they do so, but in the end, we’re left with a brother who is so close to his sister that he’s truncated his own life and a sister who has always coped by organizing and directing. We see these two personalities reveal and express themselves throughout the film, we learn what has created them, but by the end of the film, there’s no great insight of social importance. We’ve simply seen an intimate portrait of how a particular brother and sister relationship has developed and how it functions. It’s the depth and intimacy of the portrait that makes this movie so fantastic.

And as I see so often in Techine’s films, there’s a fabulous excess in Ma saison preferee. If the film were simply giving the history and present of Emilie and Antoine, there would be no need for the kids Anne, Lucien, and Khadija. Yet the three, along with Bruno, get plenty of screen time and have their own depth. They’re more shallow than Emilie and Antoine, but the other characters do more than reflect or introduce element of the main two siblings. They have their own development, conflicts and personalities, the kids perhaps beginning to reflect the influence of the parents as Emilie and Antoine reflect the influence of theirs (Antoine’s talking to himself if an especially obvious example of this since his mother does the same thing).

It’s a film about families, about modernity, about France and about generations and siblings. On reflection, I’m delighted at the range of experience and knowledge in this film.

Last note: Again, I note the absence of a father in a Techine movie. This film focuses on Berthe and her effect on her kids Emilie and Antoine. And of the parents in the film, we see much more of Emilie than of Bruno, who appears just a little hapless even though Anne is partial to him. All the fathers I’ve seen so far are inarticulate or clumsy. Techine is certainly partial to the role of the mother, another original element of his work.

Jan 15: J'embrasse pas/I Don't Kiss (1991-- Andre Techine)

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I loved this movie, and it's very clear to me that Techine had hit his stride when he made it. You could see it as an homage to 400 Blows, but it's more than that. I think it's an update of Truffaut's film to a time that's got its own brutalities and in a medium with more flexibility because of relaxed social mores. J'embrasse pas considers what would have happened to Antoine Doinel if he'd been born in the late 70s and convincingly finds he'd have ended up a hustler in the Bois de Boulogne.

Like Doinel, Pierre faces some hard obstacles. He leaves a less-than-ideal family for Paris, and I was cringing at his beatific smile and naive optimism as soon as he got there. He's used, robbed, beaten and raped in the course of the film, a series of events that hammers the adolescent.

But many of his problems are also self-inflicted. Like the kid Thomas in Le lieu du crime, Pierre fiercely rebels against any authority or external control. He’s sexually attracted to Mireille, though when she gives him money to try to hold him, he immediately leaves. He goes with Romain to Spain, but when he feels (imagined) pressure to join the Romain’s team, he bolts. His knee-jerk rejection of authority eventually leads him to cross the path of a particularly vicious pimp, and that encounter gets him severely beaten.

In each of these situations, Pierre is following his heart, though his heart isn’t always right. With Mireille, Pierre was only interested in sex and didn’t care about her or her situation. Romain (a precursor of Adrian in Les temoins) was more concerned about Pierre’s future than sex, a fact that Pierre’s visceral homophobia prevented the kid from seeing. Pierre’s obsession with Ingrid eventually leads to his getting beaten. In all these, Pierre doesn’t have a good perspective on himself or on others, and this lack of perspective is what leads him into making bad decisions and becoming disillusioned.

Pierre also lacks perspective about himself. He doesn’t have the education to play Hamlet, and the scene in the film where he fails at that reading is painfully honest; after his failure, Pierre drops his dream of being an actor, a dream so naïve that even the kid working at the hotel remarks on it. Pierre then focuses on money, but when Romain asks him what he’d do if he had it, Pierre can only say he’d be respected. He doesn't have a vision and doesn't know what he wants to do, but he's dogged. His are a much stronger version of the problems Doinel faces in 400 Blows.

As life in Paris takes its toll, Pierre seeks refuge and eventually lands in the army. He’d previously rejected military service because he rejected authority, but after his beating, perhaps he saw he wasn’t handling life as well as he’d thought. He had plenty of money as a prostitute, but it didn’t get him Ingrid, didn't get him respect, and didn't prevent his beating. He sought refuge, if an unhappy one. Unable to control his determination even in the army, he spends evenings berating himself in the mirror. Unlike the other army kid, Pierre doesn't reject love; he rejects failure to follow his own ideal.

And upon leaving the base, Pierre heads yet again to follow his dream, and J'embrasse pas makes its most explicit reference to 400 Blows. The responsible, societal thing to do would have been for Pierre to visit his aging parent nearby like his brother advised him, but he heads to the coast to see the sea that Ingrid had told him about. The final shot of Pierre in the ocean , and the scene has the same bittersweet tone as that in 400 Blows. Pierre hasn't changed, and the same world awaits him.

One of the things I especially notice in this film is how it doesn't leave gaps in psychology that I can't fill. Unlike in Le lieu du crime, for example, when Lili is suddenly in love with Martin, none of the shifts in Pierre's character are so sudden that I couldn't follow them. Perhaps Techine made Pierre easier to understand because Pierre is the sole focus of the film. Rather than trying to bring 2-4 characters along, J'embrasse pas brings along only one, and it therefore has the time to look at Pierre in some depth.

Techine doesn't neglect secondary characters. Mirielle has her motivations and conflicts, and so does Romain. Even Said has personality. One of the things I like in Techine is the character richness that his films have and his willingness to wander off on details that don't necessarily have to be in the film. I wonder if Hollywood would have kept Said as a character at all. And I don't see that the scene with Romain and Dimitri had to be there. Nor, for that matter, the all the scenes with the Brazilian transvestites. These, though, give a huge depth to the film that makes J'embrasse pas resonate even more.