Chat-brole, True/Faux, God::Art !

A note about the French Nouvelle Vague.

In Paris of the late 50's, a group of film critics from the famous Cahiers du Cinéma decided that it was about time to revolutionize the way of making movies. The most prominent ones among them were Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. They were the kind of guys that could watch ten movies and read ten books every week (specially JLG in fact); that could love american movies and pop culture religiously but stand up in the middle of an academic movie to say "C'est de la merde!" (again, JLG). And so they went on shooting four or five movies every year (yes, mostly JLG).

My point tonight is that I've been watching a few movies by Truffaut (Jules et Jim (1962)) and Chabrol (La Rupture (1970), Poulet au Vinaigre (1985), Les Noces Rouges (1973)), and I really cannot put them on the same level than the Godard's masterpieces such as A Bout de Souffle (1960) and Pierrot le Fou (1965). I find them unquestionably inferior.

Take Jules and Jim: it seems to me that it is nothing else but the work of someone who is very much willing to overcome old-fashioned ways of conceiving existence, but that is unfortunately unable to come up with something fresh and interesting to replace them, and ends up reproducing them in a transvestite way. (A bit like a rebellious kid who cannot go beyond his anger at his parents is doomed to recreate what he hates in them so much...)
Also, I could find a lot of cinematographic ideas that have been properly stolen from A Bout de Souffle. For example, Jeanne Moreau is saying at one point "Avant de vous connaître je ne riais jamais. J'étais comme ça..." and she makes faces that are frozen on the screen for a few seconds each time. It is of course directly inspired by the sequence of ABdS in which Jean-Paul Belmondo is looking at his face in the mirror and takes various exaggerated expressions...

Also, the supposedly "tragically beautiful" ending, is just stupid, pointless, and nihilist in comparison to ABdS's ending. At least, when Godard goes into tragic, he does it with the pinch of ironic ambiguity necessary to make it more than the banal expression of an existential mal-être: Lying on the street mortally wounded by the police, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) mumbles something like "chvraiment dégueulasse" ('mreally disgusting), and dies. But Patricia the American did not get it, and a man interprets (freely) what Michel said: "Il a dit: vous êtes vraiment une dégueulasse!" She looks inside the camera and says: "Qu'est-ce que c'est, dégueulasse?" FIN.
Alive, Michel and Patricia couldn't understand each other ("Je te parlais de moi, et toi tu me parlais de toi; alors que j'aurais dû parler de toi, et toi de moi..."), and death comes not as a resolution to this tension (like some kind of electric earthing), but on the contrary it comes to exacerbate the misunderstanding: his mea culpa degenerating into an accusation, and the very meaning of the words vanishing into interrogation dots... FIN.

In my sense, Truffaut takes himself way too seriously. He seems to believe that there is something edifying in the portrayal of a pathetic surrender to fatality. Godard knows that just the contrary is true: "La morrt ne peut jamais zêtrre une solution!" (Fritz Lang in Le Mépris (1963)). The passionate suicide at the end of Pierrot le Fou transcends the personal misery of Ferdinand by resorting to ancestral quasi-tribal (shamanic!) rituals: he paints his face in blue, and wraps it with a first layer of yellow dynamites and then a second of red dynamites. He climbs to the highest mountain, lights the wick, but suddenly realizes: "Après tout, chuis con! Merde, merde..." Too late: Boum! By going through the immemorial ceremonials that symbolize the travel to the other world, this individual comes to a more global perception of his life, and understand how it can still be preserved in this wider context. (Or is it just me being silly?)

[Here you might think: But hey, you were fustigating Truffaut for reproducing old values, and now you make the apology of Godard for going back to ancestral paganism?! And you would be right; in some sense. But I'd say that although I find it pretty sad to bluntly copy what the previous generation was used to do, recreating the magical actions that must have been going on inside prehistoric tribes where the collective unconscious has its roots is damn fine with me!]

I have also been rather disappointed by Chabrol, which I nevertheless learned to love through movies like Le Boucher (1970), another one in which Isabelle Huppert savagely murders an entire bourgeois family (La Cérémonie (1995)), and also some of his latest movies like Merci pour le Chocolat (2000) (even though I left the first time I saw it at an open-air cinema. I remember being deeply moved when, after the final rape/murder scene, the old auntie who killed both her parents with impunity in her youth says to her niece: "Le temps n'existe pas ma chérie. C'est un présent perpétuel"...).
La Rupture is kind of interesting, but again there is a very simplistic portrayal of the society, with the bad rich guys that want to crush the weaker ones, the nymphomaniac, the old ladies, etc. The only fascinating scene is the LSD deus ex machina at the end (but it comes a bit too late to be visionary, 1968 is already behind...). Les Noces Rouges is quite nicer, and almost brings Chabrol's redemption, as it could be seen as a satire of the fake adventurousness of bourgeois lovers, which can bring themselves to kill the weak wife and the strong (decidedly too modern) husband, but not to conceive that they could have just left their beloved little town altogether instead... The last image is a close-up of their handkerchiefs as we hear the voice of the commissioner who just arrested them ask them: "But I don't understand: Why didn't you simply leave?" - "Leave?? ... No, we never thought about leaving." All they could think about was to change this or that disturbing detail in their usual picture, but to start afresh with an entirely new canvas was just inconceivable...