 |
| Director Christophe Honoré |
 |
| Léa Seydoux at Venice festival, 2009 |
 |
| Seydoux and Louis Garrel at San Sebastian, 2009 |
 |
| Seydoux and Garrel with their director at San Sebastian, 2009 |
LA BELLE PERSONNE (The Beautiful Person) – made for TV A- France (93 mi) 2008 d: Christophe Honoré
I love you too much to let you think I can live without you. I don’t care if you cheat on me as long as you are honest and tell me. I don’t care if you hide me away as long as you come to find me again. I am patient. And while I await you I will recall your whole body. I’m even in love with your knees. —Martin’s secret letter to Mathias
Honoré returns us to a high school setting that couldn’t be more radically different from Laurent Cantet’s Palme D’Or winning The Class (Entre Les Murs) (2008), loosely adapting Madame de La Fayette’s 1678 novel of forbidden passions, La Princesse de Clèves, one of the first modern French novels set hundreds of years ago while offering commentary on current sexual practices and modern era standards of morality. Honoré, author of a dozen novels, decided to adapt La Princesse de Clèves after French president Nicholas Sarkozy criticized the novel, which is required reading in French schools, declaring in a public meeting in Lyon in 2006 that there was nothing today’s generation could learn from a dusty old novel like this one, having no relevance for desk clerks, claiming he “suffered” through his youth by being forced to read it, suggesting whoever made it obligatory was “either a sadist or an idiot.” Of course, sales of the book doubled within a year, while also generating student protests, occupying faculty buildings while reading the novel in its entirety on loudspeakers outside hundreds of government facilities across the country, even as far away as the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, as the French magazine Télérama asked a hundred writers to name their favorite books, coming in third behind Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Reflecting on a literary passage, “Never had a court had so many beautiful people,” this triggers a move from the 17th century French court of King Henri II into a contemporary Parisian high school setting, shot on location at Lycée Molière (Paris), where two enormous 19th century wooden doors are pulled open to reveal the entryway, with balconies overlooking an open courtyard, where a new student arrives, setting off a ballet of combative flirtation, as they fight and desire one another, spreading rumors, speaking behind each other’s backs, resulting in dramatic twists of fate, with teachers and students openly spying on one another, ultimately reviving a historical tale of love, courtly intrigue, infidelity, and death. With music punctuating the performances, it becomes an elegiac teenage rapture of a dreamy yet doomed youth, expressed with an airy romanticism. From the outset, we are immersed in the hectic energy of hallways and classrooms, where modern day kids hover around one another with good-natured ribbing and catch up on the latest gossip. The subjects may be mathematics, Italian, or even Russian, where some students stand out with their intelligence and brash challenges to the teacher’s authority, yet over time we become more familiar with various students and teachers. What’s apparent here is Honoré’s framing of faces in close-up, creating a stream-of-conscious montage of student’s faces, all in the same room, but each absorbed in something uniquely different from the other, creating a PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) silent era resemblance. This actually focuses the audience’s attention on reading the faces of characters, as most are invariably hiding something from one another. We are soon introduced to an Italian teacher, Louis Garrel as Nemours, now in his 4th film with this director, synonymous with the face of French cinema, son of director Philippe Garrel and an heir to the French New Wave’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, in particular Léaud’s character Alexandre in Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), who film critic Roger Ebert describes as follows: “Alexandre is smart enough, but not a great intellect. His favorite area of study is himself, but there he hasn't made much headway. He chatters about the cinema and about life, sometimes confusing them… He spends his days in cafés, holding (but not reading) Proust… women can let a man talk endlessly about himself while they regard him like a specimen of aberrant behavior. Women keep a man like Alexandre around, I suspect, out of curiosity about what new idiocy he will next exhibit,” The Mother And The Whore movie review (1999). This is the character Louis Garrel has inhabited, the guy who talks feverishly to one woman while keeping his eye on another, dropping women whenever it suits him, never giving them a second thought as he’s on to his next conquest. In the book his character is known as the dashing Duke of Nemours.
The focus of Nemours attention turns to a student in his class, Junie played by Léa Seydoux, where the specter of Anna Karina haunts her performance, a strikingly pretty girl with dark hair who appears moody and keeps largely to herself, a new girl living with her cousin who has joined mid-term following the death of her mother and is subject to mood swings, but also exhibits a liberating sense of honesty, as she doesn’t believe in keeping secrets. This is in striking contrast to Catherine in an early screen appearance from Anaïs Demoustier, playing something of a bad ass by threatening anyone exposing her secrets, as she hides the fact that she’s cheating on her boyfriend. Junie allows Otto, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, so good in LOVE SONGS (Les Chansons D’Amour) (2007), to sweet talk and kiss her, a quiet, sensitive guy who adores her on first sight, as does most every other guy, but Otto is so innocently pure that he’s described by another student as “a saint.” She treats him more like a friend than a lover, as he so willingly provides whatever suits her purpose. What we witness are plenty of pairings, where the object of one’s love is often in love with someone else, as love is often hidden or can only be expressed in secret. In class, Nemours plays a recording of Maria Callas singing Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, setting into play a choreography of tragic emotions which has a profound effect on Junie, suddenly aware that she’s the center of attention and the object of everyone’s desire, Léa Seydoux - La Belle Personne 2 YouTube (1:16). This environment of love in the air resembles musical chairs, as Nemours, obsessed by her allure, instantly dumps his two girlfriends, one with a teacher colleague (Florence Perin) and the other with Catherine, wiping the slate clean, while confiding his swelling feelings of love for Junie to a fellow teacher, La Belle Personne 2008 Segment 0 x264 YouTube (2:27). But Junie is no naïve girl, like the character in the book, who despite her royal marriage suddenly swoons and falls passionately in love with the Duke of her dreams. Instead she remains heavily guarded, despite being handed a love letter and told it was written by Nemours, thinking it was referring to her, supposedly seen falling out of his pocket, but it actually originated as an exchange between her cousin Mathias (Esteban Carnival Alegria) and his secret gay admirer Martin (Martin Siméon), an affair they kept secret which is now suddenly out in the open, causing a scandal when another student Henri (Simon Truxillo), Martin’s former lover, vindictively gets his revenge. This is a brilliantly inventive handling of the original source material, retaining the purloined letters and eavesdropping on private conversations, while also cleverly integrating a brief appearance by actress Chiara Mastroianni, who had a starring role in Manoel de Oliveira’s LA LETTRE (1999), an adaptation of the same novel, while Jean Delannoy, aided by an adaptation written by poet Jean Cocteau, also filmed his own French-Italian version of LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES (1961). Discredited by American audiences as a French recreation of a Gossip Girl episode, unable to see the tight-knit complexity of Honoré’s work as a gay auteur, or the darker underlying implications of unexpected violence, yet there is an exquisitely directed display of tenderness and lyricism, where Seydoux, wonderfully expressive with very little dialogue, embodies a sense of emotional restraint in a series of events that are continually swirling out of control, like a form of combustible energy, as for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, where everyone soon finds out what’s going on behind closed doors. Junie is ensnared in this same web of intrigue, as she’s got a safe guy who loves her, but her thoughts lie elsewhere, so she confides in Otto, who soon discovers the real object of her desire, where a fatal misunderstanding sends him into a jealous tailspin. In an astounding scene, Otto begins singing to himself as he walks through crowded space, a device used in DANS PARIS (2006), while everyone around him is oblivious to his character or his thoughts, as if he’s invisible, until he throws himself off a balcony, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet - Comme la Pluie YouTube (3:20), dying in despair, convinced his lover has betrayed him, ending in a striking image that resembles Manet’s The Dead Toreador, The Dead Man (Manet).
What’s remarkable in Honoré films is the consistent tone of emotional authenticity, even when using an artificial Sirkian melodramatic means to express it, such as the assaultive metal music taking the place of unspoken grief in Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard) (2002), the hedonistic and incessant use of Oedipal sex while spewing philosophically transcendent dialogue in MA MÈRE (2004), framing characters speaking directly to the camera before veering into a reverential tribute to both Godard and Jacques Demy in the energetic French New Wave style in DANS PARIS (2006), or the clever use of original songs in a naturalistic musical that soar into the stratosphere of poetic expression in LOVE SONGS (2007). In this film, much like the last, it’s the exquisite use of pop song culture that expresses the emotional sincerity of the teenage students, all of whom are more mature than their teacher Nemours, even in their mixed up confusion over being rejected or fooled in love, viewing love as an adventure, never knowing whether it will work out or not, where first loves are the most beautiful, while also the most painful, as nearly all the characters are tormented by their first encounter with love, with the director accentuating the restlessness brewing beneath the surface. Their anxious emotions are real, even if covering up the catastrophe that is teenage life, literally drowning in existential angst, with everyone displaying a surprising nonchalance about student-teacher affairs, except Junie and Otto who are both devastated by its moral implications. Honoré is deft in using music as a psychological thread throughout this film, first as background music or later as a read-aloud poem in Italian by Junie in class that turns out to be a pop song that is first read in Italian before being re-read again as it is translated back to French, Léa Seydoux - La Belle Personne 1 - YouTube (1:37), but he also uses the playing of a jukebox song or the recording of the opera, all creating a romanticized operatic atmosphere drenched in the spirit of love, exploring its essence inside and out without ever resorting to explicit sexuality. There’s a wonderful line by aging bar owner Nicole (Chantal Neuwirth), who matter of factly confesses “I haven’t been French-kissed for 23 years,” later playing an old standard on the jukebox expressly for Junie that perfectly encapsulates what is going on, with the camera lingering on her passive expression, “She was so pretty that I didn’t dare love her,” Alain Barrière "Elle était si jolie" | Archive INA - YouTube (3:03). There’s an interesting side story about a widowed librarian (Clotilde Hesme), who everyone assumed was quietly living alone with her grief for years on end, only to discover she had a secret lover all along, suggesting appearances are not the reality. When Nemours obsessively turns into a stalker in pursuit of Junie, who is obviously avoiding him, unsure of herself, she agrees to talk with him, where he rushes her into a hotel room only to become a starkly realistic breakup scene where she describes what a cad he is, how she doesn’t wish to become another number in his forgotten list of lovers, so she’d rather avoid him altogether, deciding to honor Otto’s love even in death rather than disparage it, La Belle Personne YouTube (2:55). What makes Honoré’s nuanced film memorable is the unique difficulty in adapting Madame de La Fayette’s novel, as it focuses on the inner workings of the heroine’s mind, making it difficult to exteriorize, yet Seydoux’s measured and remarkably understated tone mirrors the restraint that characterizes Lafayette’s 17th century representation of the royal court. From an era of forced or arranged marriages to a day when women are free to speak their minds and reject interested suitors, it remains resolutely clear that despite any sexual or women’s liberation that has taken place, love still hurts in every way imaginable. Nothing has changed that inherent fact of life. Indescribably, this film was made for television, though there are no noticeable compromises in style or substance, with excellent camerawork from Laurent Brunet, brilliant editing from Chantal Hymans, terrific ensemble work all around, and an intriguing use of music from Alex Beaupain with songs by Nick Drake that enter the film like an unseen character.
La Belle Personne - ENGLISH subs. - YouTube Entire film with English subtitles (1:33:35)
