The Living Word:
Le Monde de Eugène Green

by Christoph Huber

Eugène Green’s third feature film Les pont des arts was the saving grace of this year’s awkward Locarno line-up: a luminous, magisterial work about love, art and redemption, it unexpectedly rose like a shining angel from the sinful cesspool of half-baked humanism and mirthless melodrama that characterized the crippled 2004 competition. (The only exception: Toe Yuen’s endearingly wacky and decidedly surreal Hong Kong animation extravaganza McDull, Prince de la bun, which quite surprisingly shares a certain affinity to classical French literary legacy—in this case, mostly Voltaire’s Candide—and a heartfelt respect for the power of the spoken word with Le pont des arts, though little else.) The first Green film to actually have decent funding, Le pont des arts was the major event of the festival, firmly heralding a unique and commanding new voice in current cinema.

Green’s second feature, Le monde vivant, has built up quite a reputation as an eccentric and enchanting discovery since its premiere in Cannes’ Quinzaine 2003. A charming no-budget fairytale about knights, maidens, and a devious ogre, filmed in austere Bressonian style, with blue-jeans-clad young actors delivering their lines in modern slang yet modulating every sentence with extreme care while directly facing the camera most of the time, it provided an improbable, yet irresistible mixture of childlike innocence, highbrow references (including the “Lacanian Witch” whose mere mentioning terrifies the protagonists), and a spartan, effective mise en scène. But all kinds of questions remained: Is this some brilliant attempt at unpretentious, yet rigorous and intellectually committed cinema, or just a cute, off-the-cuff one-shot that merely dazzles because it’s so obviously sincere and so completely different? How do you come up with something like this in contemporary filmmaking, French or otherwise? Where does the guy who made all this up come from? And how, for crying out loud, did the Dardennes wind up as co-producers?

To answer the last (and easiest) question first, the Dardennes came in late, providing the funds for post-production after Green had run out of money, having shot the film “with means that would normally barely do for a short.” (Le monde vivant probably has even less locations than cast members, and the latter don’t even amount to a two-digit number.) Whereas the connection to the Dardennes is characteristic of (and was enabled by) Green’s good relationship to younger contemporary directors—he also employs their main man, Olivier Gourmet, in a queer supporting part as a smug theatre director for Les pont des arts—his background is hardly what you’d expect from a director whose three feature films (and one 20-minute short, 2002’s Le nom de feu) appear as French as they come.

Green was already 50 when he made his first film, the Flaubert update Tout les nuits (shot in 1999, but only released in 2001). Born in the US, Green emigrated to Paris—after short stints in Germany and Czechoslovakia—at the age of 20 in 1969, but maintains that he’s been living there “since the time when dinosaur necks were still flexible enough to pluck the leaves from trees.” The bio in the Locarno catalogue even goes as far as stating in its opening sentence: “A Frenchman, Eugène Green has always lived in Paris.”

Green has made no secret about the grudges he’s harbouring against his native country, which he refers to as “Barbaria” and holds responsible for “destroying the whole idea of civilization.” He even denies that he can speak English (but he’s fluent—and willing to talk—in German, Catalan, and Czech, and is currently delving into Basque, preparing, amongst other things, a film on the history of the Basque people). So in interviews he describes the (still-)current US President as “le buisson non ardent,” a certain major city on the East Coast as “le nouvelle York” and, most hilariously, Quentin Tarantino’s latest opus as Tué Guillaume, while the “néologismes anglo-klaxons” are favourite objects of his scorn. One could dismiss this as mere coquetry, but given Green’s deep commitment to language(s) it signifies something else, something deeper that also sheds a light on the aesthetic and peculiar humour of his work (both playful, but never frivolous): much of it is concerned with the power of words, which are often at odds with what can be seen, yielding exquisite paradoxes that are as fundamental as they are funny on the surface. An obvious, but shining, example would be the Lion Knight’s “lion” from Le monde vivant, a Labrador Retriever whom everybody accepts as a lion and (of course) emits a MGM-like roar whenever he opens his mouth. Or, as the deadpan dialogue of a first-doubtful passer-by assures at the sight of the young man in jeans and shirt, with a sword tucked under his belt and the Labrador by his side: “Of course you are the Lion Knight. You are carrying a sword and you are accompanied by a lion.”

Similarly, at the centre of Le pont des arts is an impossible and impossibly touching love story that is an illustration of another paradox, described by one character as an axiom of Baroque theatre: “To say two contradictory things at the same time, both of which are true.” Green, of course, knows what he is talking about. An ardent fan of the 17th-century aesthetic, he’s been writing plays since his arrival in Paris and in 1977 founded the Théâtre de la sapience, a company with a “twofold aim: to rediscover the modernity of Baroque theatre and to bring about a renewal in contemporary theatre” (substitute cinema and you get an idea of Green’s filmic project). Years of research on Baroque culture have resulted in his book La parole baroque (the title again emphasizing Green’s fondness for the word), and the prolific writer claims to have “shelves full of unpublished literature” at home, some of which has seen the light of day. He also can be heard reciting verses of the era on various specialized records with sonnets and music from the Baroque period, most of them releases by the French publishing house Alpha, for which he’s recently compiled a record collection of oral literature called “Voce umana.”

No surprise, then, that a record with Baroque music, notably Monteverdi’s moving “Lamento della ninfa,” is the key item for the relationship between the new film’s star-crossed lovers. One is Pascal (played by Alexis Loret, lead in all of Green’s movies so far), a literature student at the Sorbonne who can’t muster up enough energy or motivation for his studies, much less to write his thesis (the topic has, significantly, been chosen by his professor), and whose relationship with a more success-bent colleague suffers accordingly. Then there’s Sarah (the reliably excellent Natacha Régnier) who is also caught in a somewhat unfulfilling love affair—like Pascal, she feels loved, but not understood—and finds an outlet for her pain in singing for a Baroque ensemble presided over by a particularly nasty conductor, simply referred to as “The Unnamable,” played by Denis Podalydès in a marvellously hammy turn, all wolfish howling and self-absorbed, eccentric pomposity. That he gets an extra credit as an ensemble member of the worthy Comédie française must qualify as an in-joke, given how his enthusiastic, theatrical mugging stands out in comparison to the typical deadpan Green acting, not to mention the ridicule lavished on institutionalized art in general throughout Le pont des arts—exemplified not only in the Podalydès character, but in various other scathing caricatures of the priggish cultural powers-that-be, who pass lucrative assignments to each other with the same glib glee and ease as they exchange catamites. This culminates in Gourmet’s side-splitting self-humiliation in front of a male prostitute as he’s performing Phaedra to demonstrate his singular command over Baroque theatre. He’s rolling on the floor, grunting, puffing, and screaming, while he’s tearing off the arms and legs of a doll called Aricie. He still doesn’t get a discount, to his visible disappointment. Green is obviously satirizing a certain French—but, really, global—caste here, but this scene also picks up a staple of Baroque theatre, where ridiculous behaviour is associated with certain types, like the faux-scholar, characterized by embodying the incongruity of appearance and being. It all becomes clear once Pascal finds out why the conductor is actually called “The Unnamable.”

After one humiliation too many by her cruel, heartless fop of a boss, Sarah jumps off the titular bridge—in a Bressonian sound-for-image substitution that is typical of Green’s unembellished, fragmented, and stunningly clear style, you see her feet on the edge, next to the libretto she’s dropped, then hear the sound of a body crashing into the waves, the camera still aimed at the now-empty space. Meanwhile, Pascal also gives in to his suicidal intentions, but is miraculously saved by Sarah’s voice—sticking his head in the gas oven after he has put on the ensemble’s record (practically a parting gift by his girlfriend) one last time, her fervent interpretation of Monteverdi’s lament occasioning a last-minute change of mind. He embarks on a pursuit of the young woman as dedicated as it is doomed, but after he has learned of Sarah’s death, he meets her ghost on the Pont des arts, and, in an overwhelming scene, the Baroque paradox cited earlier is expressed: Sarah is dead (true), Pascal alive (true), so logically it’s impossible that they come together—yet they do. As they approach each other, Green cuts to their shadows merging on the bridge, which is flooded in the exquisite light of the morning sun. It’s an indelible moment, as much for its assertion that love and true art can transcend material reality as for its implicit connotation, and furthermore, demonstration, that cinema—the art of light and shadows—can do the same.

The transcendent quality of this image brings to mind Green’s fondness for Bresson: the stylistic similarities are obvious, but there’s also a shared belief that art and life must not be separated—that all creation stems from experience, as Green puts it. In both cases the pronounced materialism of the mise en scène heightens its spiritual possibilities, in part by sharpening the attention for what Manny Farber called negative space. Indeed, the wondrous revival of the dead Lion Knight near the end of Le monde vivant, which delighted me, but didn’t convince me entirely on first viewing, retrospectively gains power as it seems to spring from the same source.

Green has repeatedly spoken about his admiration for Bresson—his other obsession upon arrival in Paris was, of course, the cinema, where he spent entire days from the 10:00am screening onwards. Bresson’s work may have left the strongest impression—Green calls Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) “one of those things so strong that they overwhelm the intellect”—but he also insists on the importance of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), and feels even more strongly about Ozu, adding that he also senses a natural affinity to certain contemporary Asian cinéastes, especially Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Kore-eda Hirokazu. Additionally, Green stresses his amiable relationship to the younger French generation of filmmakers, who embarked on filmmaking about the same time as he did, even if he’s 30 years their senior.

Both connections pay off in an impressive scene central to Le pont des arts. Thanks to a chance meeting, Pascal visits a traditional Nô performance, which causes him to remark that he feels as if he understands Japanese. The play itself remains unseen: the plot is related via intertitles, while the camera pans along the fascinated faces of the audience—which include those of Mathieu Amalric, Bertrand Bonello, Serge Bozon, Vincent Dieutre, Jean-Charles Fitoussi, Abdel Kechiche, Judith Cahen, Eva Truffaut (the daughter of François, who had already helped in securing first funding for Le monde vivant), Julie Bertuccelli, actor Pierre Léon, Emmanuel Bourdieu, and probably a slew of others which I didn’t recognize. This could just be a coincidence, with guest appearances favours amongst friends and so on, but the importance of the scene within the film says otherwise: here it almost takes on the quality of a manifesto for a new, essential cinema, of which Le pont des arts would be the first masterpiece, if it comes into existence; one trying to connect to the roots of artistic expression after years of fast fads and—per Green—“an intolerant culture thriving on absolute certainties,” that, he implicates, have diminished the will and need to engage intellectually with the arts (and especially films), during the last two-and-a-half decades, amongst audiences and creators alike.

It seems far from coincidental, then, that the mood of Le pont des arts vaguely recalls the atmosphere of departure felt in the last great movement of French cinema before that backlash, the French New Wave. Although Green’s filmmaking is evidently entirely his own, one can’t help recalling the first films of Rivette or Rohmer (and their “new” look at Paris) on occasion, and Green’s acting axiom Loret repeatedly seems like a dead ringer for the young Jean-Pierre Léaud. Yet nostalgia clearly isn’t on Green’s program, no matter how many (including undoubtedly many that have remained elusive to me) references to literature, theatre, music, cinema, and painting are provided. (The title likely comes from one of the most famous paintings by Paul Signac, leader of the neo-impressionist movement, who renounced plein air oil painting to turn to watercolour, charcoal and pencil as his only materials, stripping down his style to the essentials just like Green.) For instance, one of the witty juxtapositions of the film is Pascal and his girlfriend’s strongly differing views on studying—while Pascal’s lackadaisical pursuit seems very much in tune with the 80s (when Les pont des arts is nominally taking place), his partner’s strictly career-driven ambitions to graduate as soon as possible are much more reminiscent of the contemporary situation. Economic demands—the “absolute certainties” of education policy these days, including the cutting of university funds and grants for the students—have made such an attitude almost inevitable. The dialectic couldn’t be more obvious and is strictly in tune with Green’s observations on cultural decline, but his position is clearly defiant, not defeatist, repeatedly asserting the opposite values. (Le monde vivant’s reference to the French “Jules Ferry laws” of the 1880s, which made primary and secondary education free, compulsory and nonreligious, springs to mind.)

Green’s films reach their immense tragicomic potential by insisting on the pleasure and edification that can be achieved by engaging with the richness of the world and its heritage. They are a proposition for the future, for a cinema that deals with serious matters in serious ways, but that, naturally, due to its conception, also seeks to delight, for it this the same thing. Green’s next project is a film version of Calderon’s La vie est un songe: The wor(l)d is living, and life (or art) is a dream.

Le Monde Vivant

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