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FILM COMMENT
January / February 2004
ANTI-SOCIAL REALISM: CONTINUATION
Why Jean-Claude Brisseau is France's most misunderstood filmmaker.
By Frédéric Bonnaud
Left: Secret Things
Having exhausted its heroines' trajectory and swept away all the sentimental images and erotic clichés, Secret Things rises above these shreds and tatters and reveals itself for what it is: a melodrama of today, of the here and now, with an eye on the crumbling state of our colonized imaginations, before re-establishing itself on the side of pure lyricism, finally purged of everything that has stood in the way of its expression, finally cleansed of impurities. Fundamentally, Secret Things is about redemption, in the Catholic sense of the term: redemption of the characters, redemption of the images. But it goes down a long, painful road only to rediscover the original purity of classic melodrama. A brilliant reflection upon the degraded state of the contemporary imagination, Secret Things is difficult to grasp. Difficult because Brisseau treats, in a resolutely classical fashion, the postmodern condition in which images mediate our relationship with reality and the world. Working with hackneyed material - a tale of social climbing with a heavy erotic charge - Brisseau refuses to play to highbrow viewers by adopting an ironic or detached stance. He tackles the clichés head-on, without winking. As he says: "I like to play with the iconography because it allows you to make yourself understood faster, to speed up the story. And all of us live in an imaginary space that we can never completely escape." But Brisseau doesn't condescend to the popular types he uses. His method is to gradually exhaust them, until others take their place. He sets his sights more on the neighborhood movie theater than the cinémathèque, and dreams of reaching a mass audience - speaking to them through an only slightly skewed imitation of current pop-culture forms. The great subject of all his films is communication - at heart he's still a teacher, always hoping for a final catharsis. Brisseau is a filmmaker in search of transcendence.
For he is a profoundly religious artist. Which is to say, he practices cinema as if it were a religion of which he is the last devoted priest. He claims to have learned how to make movies by taking apart Psycho innumerable times. Even today, he still enjoys inviting friends to his home to show and then analyze his pet films. Brisseau is a great connoisseur of classic American cinema (and a hopeless admirer of Gary Cooper), and his imagination is filled with dark plots, femmes fatales holding both the secrets of sex and the workings of social class, and naive heroes forced to confront the world's horrors head-on. Brisseau's project consists of applying the plots and codes of American film noir to the reality of French society, not unlike Claude Chabrol under the influence of Fritz Lang. The difference is that, like Lang, Chabrol always positions himself as the omniscient demiurge, even if he is careful to disguise his despotism under the appearance of a gentle and comprehending acceptance of human foibles. Brisseau, however, is more profoundly Hitchcockian. He projects himself willingly onto his damaged protagonists and allows the spectator to empathize and identify with them.
Five years after the huge public success of White Wedding (Noce blanche, 89), with Bruno Cremer and Vanessa Paradis - yet another pure melodrama dealing with the difficulty of communication and the impossibility of achieving true romantic fusion between a man and a woman - Brisseau (for once with a comfortable budget) threw himself into the film of his cinephile dreams: The Black Angel (L'Ange noir, 94). François Mauriac's novel, set in Bordeaux and France's prosperous Southwest, enters new territory: the haute bourgeoisie. And of course, he shows everything he believes to be wrong with this luxurious vipers' nest of hidden horrors. But he moves beyond this somewhat banal discourse to focus on the opaque Stéphane (played by the singer Sylvie Vartan), an exterminating angel as well as a black one, an ice block of hatred inhabiting the film's plush interiors. She is the worm in the apple, the envoy of a world of suffering and humiliation, sent to subvert the tranquility of the rich from within. She's waging a covert war against respectable society, mimicking bourgeois propriety the better to destroy it, using sex as the ultimate weapon. Retracing the course of her life by way of a police investigation, which becomes a fascinating interplay of clues and suggestions, the film conveys the hopelessness of revolt and the inevitability of romantic betrayal. Like its main character, The Black Angel walks the razor's edge, running the risk of ridiculousness and camp as it twists a classic Hitchcockian melodrama (Rebecca, The Paradine Case, and Vertigo are cited) into an incendiary political declaration. This explosive cocktail produces a proudly unique film, a grand slam from a filmmaker still hanging on to the cinema of his masters and his own fantasies on the one hand and his anger toward an all-too-well-established social order on the other, the former shaping and illuminating the latter. One scene repeats word for word the famous exchange between the lovers in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar: "Lie to me. . . . Tell me you still love me like I love you." But this is a scene in which a young woman masturbates in front of her lover while he videotapes her - a typical deviation of the "project Brisseau."
The Black Angel found only a handful of defenders, among them Cahiers du cinéma, which did a cover story. The film, a commercial catastrophe, was widely ridiculed. Following this serious and undeserved setback, Brisseau found it difficult to get his projects off the ground and endured a five-year silence, which ended with Workers for the Good Lord, an apparent return to the proletarian atmosphere of Sound and Fury that becomes a delirious philosophical fable. This epic film, with its abrupt shifts in rhythm and tone, featuring an African shaman who performs miracles, enabled Brisseau to finally shake off his reputation as a socially themed, naturalistic filmmaker. But it proved to be another commercial misstep. And so it was only with reduced means and inadequate distribution that he was able to make Secret Things. Boosted by almost unanimously enthusiastic reviews, the film was relatively successful - a nice surprise for a man who would rather be a working filmmaker than a professional bad boy.
Frédéric Bonnaud is a regular contributor to Film Comment.
©2004 by Frédéric Bonnaud
