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FILM COMMENT
January / February 2004
ANTI-SOCIAL REALISM
Why Jean-Claude Brisseau is France's most misunderstood filmmaker.
By Frédéric Bonnaud
Left: Secret Things
Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things will be shown as part of
Film Comment Selects
.
Jean-Claude Brisseau is the most atypical of great French filmmakers. His themes, his career, his influences, his personality all conspire to make him truly marginal. He belongs to none of French cinema's "families." He's a lone wolf, and pays a high price for his independence. His integrity and meticulousness scare off producers, and each of his 10 films was the result of a fierce struggle. His nonprofessional debut, La Croisée des chemins (75), has never been seen; he only became known following the 1987 Cannes premiere of Sound and Fury (De bruit et de fureur) and the film's subsequent critical and box-office success. During the long years in between, Brisseau relied on the friendship and support of Eric Rohmer, who encouraged this schoolteacher and part-time filmmaker (a double life that Rohmer himself led 20 years earlier).
Sound and Fury was the first French film to depict the youth of the suburban housing projects and the gangs they formed in those zones of exclusion. At the time, gang culture was just beginning to alarm mainstream society - years before the triumph of Mathieu Kassovitz's Hate and the subsequent wave of banlieue films. But even as Sound and Fury marked the emergence of a singular cinéaste, it also laid the groundwork for the misunderstandings that have continued to dog him. For the PC leftist critics, Brisseau was simply a "socially concerned filmmaker," committed to revealing the violence and exclusionary politics at work in the projects and the dead-end life of the underclass. But that perception ignored the fantasy elements, surreal touches, and strong sense of the grotesque that constantly disturb the film's apparent naturalism, much as in Buñuel's Los Olvidados, Brisseau's acknowledged model. Brisseau was thereafter doomed to live with the reductive, burdensome label of "realist." As a result, he has consistently disappointed those critics who believed they had finally found a filmmaker capable of tackling the country's big issues and social evils - for which he paid a very high price.
During the release of his previous film, Workers for the Good Lord (Les Savates du Bon Dieu, 99), Brisseau told me, "None of my films are realistic, and certainly not naturalistic, including Sound and Fury, even though it touched on a certain social reality. They all contain a shadow zone. I do like to come back to social reality, but I do it through the mixing of genres and the insertion of surrealist elements. When the Cinémathèque Française asked me to select some films that had influenced me to accompany a retrospective of my work, I realized that I'd chosen movies that all assumed an air of realism while completely evading it. Take Alain Resnais's La Guerre est finie: the film seems to deal with the political reality of the time, and yet that isn't what Resnais filmed. In my own work, the subject is never naturalism but a certain kind of relation to reality. With each film, I try to find a new way to confront these complex relations. Watching one of my movies, you always have to ask yourself if you're reading it correctly - for instance, should you be laughing at a film that began in such a somber way. During the first screening of Sound and Fury, the younger audience members laughed, and I was more or less with them. Meanwhile, the more serious viewers felt the kids had no right to make fun of such things."
The American viewer, encountering Brisseau for the first time via his most recent film, Secret Things (02), won't have to deal with the thorny - and very French - issue of naturalism. From the opening strip-club scene, the tenuousness of the film's attachment to realism is apparent, and this first impression is confirmed by the fanciful job-interview sequence, in which two ambitious young women instantly land secretarial positions simply by crossing and uncrossing their legs - despite the fact that they're absolutely unqualified and France has three million unemployed!
Secret Things is an amalgam of genres bringing together an apprenticeship narrative à la Balzac (Lost Illusions is an explicit citation), softcore porn, a conte cruelle, and Hitchcockian suspense. The film describes the rapid social rise of Sandrine and Nathalie, two young women of now (and forever) who set out on a quest for power using sexuality as their principal weapon. They learn to arouse themselves, to control and simulate pleasure as needed, and to guard against love with a capital L, the main obstacle for aspiring femmes fatales. It may be the product of naiveté, and it certainly leads to a bloody catastrophe, but their program of political resistance is directly related to the imaginary.
In essence, Sandrine and Nathalie are actresses both playing the roles of maneater. But above all, they are spectators, the kind of people who voraciously consume imagery both high and low, from melodramas to soaps. The basis of Brisseau's film isn't social reality but reality as deformed by the society of the spectacle. He's not trying to film the real world but rather a world haunted by the phantasms its inhabitants have created, a world in which everyone turns their lives into their own movies or novels, in which everyone gorges on clichés that could be titles of shallow, mass-market fiction: Sex in the Subway, Love at the Office, How to Seduce Your Boss, Fatal Passion. Sandrine and Nathalie realize their own threadbare phantasms with complete success - until they encounter a figure who could have stepped straight out of a tragedy, whose family history includes destruction and sacrifice. At this point the film takes on a true grandeur.
