Tit for Tarn

Cahiers du cinéma no. 553; January 2001.

There is a break in Alain Guiraudie’s body of work, a radical change of direction, between his first short films, Les héros sont immortels (1990), Tout droit jusqu’au matin (1994), and his later films, the short La Force des choses (1997) and the medium-length Du soleil pour les gueux (1999).

In the first period, it’s a static art centred around a single location in a town, a large doorway (Héros) or a street (Tout droit), and based on a perpetual volubility that analysed provincial ennui, the limitations of the horizons of life in Blagnac or Rignac and the paltry efforts to (not) get out of the place. The abundance of text, off-putting at first, intrigues and stuns us with its permanence, its rapidity and its complete, frontally-exposed account of existence: Guiraudie’s characters answer each other without a second’s respite, giving tit for tat, tit for Tarn rather, since all of it takes place in the Tarn department of France or its surroundings—Guiraudie always films within a hundred kilometres of Gaillac, where he currently lives after having left his native Rouergue and taken up all kinds of jobs, including that of a location manager. It’s this speed of response—more than the rapidity, the permanence and the acuity of speech—that produces the emotion.

Today, it’s the contrary. Guiraudie has forgotten the city and headed to the countryside: forests (La Force des choses), Causses (Du soleil pour les gueux). These are films where we see hardly see a house, whereas we saw nothing but houses before. And Guiraudie substitutes for the painstaking description of everyday life in the province an imaginary world where characters have unpronounceable names: Djemagalone, Chaouchmaline—sorry, “mister Chaouchmaline”—Poulixanosasdai, Astanojovira, Erixolovodon, where the city-bred heroine sets out to the Causse du Larzac in search of men she doesn’t know but is a fervent groupie of: the ounaye shepherds. The ounaye is an animal we’ll never see, and which we’ll hear only in the last shot of the film. It’s something like the dahu or the unicorn of Larzac. From the world of Eustache, of Guédiguian and even of Flaubert, we go straight into that of Swift, of Butler or of Jarry. The turn towards pure fantasy is all the more provocative given that we are in Larzac, a place charged with socio-political implications. We jump from José Bové to Lewis Carroll.

An evident rupture, indeed, but there are also underground links. Firstly, the films are still set in a single location, outdoors instead of indoors, a forest or a Causse instead of a doorway or a street, and shortly a factory in Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (2000), which is convenient when you don’t have a lot of money, but which is also an aesthetic choice: you can shoot in multiple locations when broke too, it doesn’t take too much money. And it’s a good idea to harness one setting in depth over one hour if needed rather than jump from one setting to another.

Other links: Guiraudie’s volubility carries on even further. And the natural setting particularly embodies the elsewhere, the other side for those marked by provincial ennui1. Nathalie Sanchez, the ounaye fan, tells us that she works at a hairstyling salon where she makes 5,500 francs a month. The characters discuss ounayes, only to get back to the thirty-nine-hour workweek.

This sudden burst of realism into unrealism, naturalism into the artificial, is perhaps what makes for the essential power of Du soleil pour les gueux, which was THE big moment of the Pantin Festival and in which Guiraudie, at thirty-five, finally attains complete mastery of his art: the surge of dream-like, absurd, fantastical, hyper-fictive elements is constantly contradicted, revived and reinforced—a marvellous and enjoyable dialectic—by peaks where the naturalness, spontaneity and cheekiness—in the very speech, in the tone and in the manner—of Isabelle Girardet, who plays Nathalie Sanchez, shows through, alternating the familiar, “come on, hurry up”, “Oh là là”, “So that’s what an ounaye is!” (she’s then rather disappointed), and the straitlaced, “so be it”, or “the issue will be heard shortly”. There are even rhymes: “tenu, inaperçu, prévenu”. She’s brilliantly complemented by the extravagant and incompetent bounty hunter, who introduces himself as a “chase warrior” and who claims that he’s worn out by the jet lag on his return from Siberia.

This perpetual back and forth was already seen in La Force des choses, when the young heiress, who wanders the woods in a bright-red, very nineteenth century evening dress, rebels against her kidnappers: “Are you nuts?!”, and complains about the ordeals she was put through: “Especially with my scoliosis…”, but La Force des choses, a rough draft and prelude to Du Soleil pour les gueux, doesn’t have the power of the latter. Firstly because the female character that Guiraudie’s dialectic is based on and who grounds the viewer faced with a spate of the irrational only appears halfway into the film, while she is present right from the start in Du soleil. And finally and especially because the forest is an infinitely more banal and more familiar setting than the Causse, which is rather ignored by French cinema (with the exception of Pollet’s Sang).

The Causse, a flat and vast place that evokes the puszta so dear to Mikos Jancso, brings an emotion-producing aesthetic value, in conjunction with the sky and the clouds that necessarily complement it, the camera often capturing more sky than earth in the frame. The theatrical discourse—of a rare quality, à la Blier—is magnified, intensified and authenticated by the presence of nature and the evident formal splendour: it’s a theatre of vast spaces, a theatre without limits (the Causse is the place in France where we can see the farthest), a theatre of immensity, an infinite stage. Cinema, like in the latest Godard, is first and foremost a choice of sky and of clouds (cf. also the sea of clouds over the valley in La Force des choses).

There is, among other things, a magnificent shot where the head and the torso of a character in motion appear alone, deep in the frame, over the line of tall grass in the Causse.

But the Causse doesn’t just have an aesthetic value: within the Larzac, even when we move around—and the hero doesn’t stop moving in the film—we get the impression of being at the same spot. In addition to the formal value and the intense recreational value, we have a realist value obtained through a metaphor. Even when we go Elsewhere, we go around ourselves, exactly like we do Here, in the everyday world we flee. The criminal on the run wants to leave the Causse for the city, but he’ll never get the courage to do it. Immensity becomes inseparable from the Speck. It’s reduced to Void.

It’s in this that Guiraudie finds himself in the avant-garde of Aquitanian cinema, which (after Eustache, Breillat, Téchiné, Kané, Nolot…) is increasingly turning out to be the driving force of our cinema. The Garonne, and not the Seine, is the true lifeblood of French cinematic art. The tragic melancholy of Aquitanian petty bourgeoisie is at once erased and reinforced by the landscape. An integral regionalism—as opposed to the more limited, solely script-driven regionalism of a Denis, a Vautier or a Guédiguian—far from the usual agro-metallurgic grumblings.

Faced with this haunting locale, seen continuously for almost an hour, a shot of four seconds of the valley below produces an intense emotion. The Causse is defined as an “elsewhere”, but it has its own “elsewhere”, whose brief glimpse seems to betray its illusory character.

The film must not be reduced to a fixed aesthetic pattern: it’s constantly renewed—and made more discreet—by movements that are as incessant and contradictory as they are paltry and apparently useless.

This is how Guiraudie unwittingly arrives at the principle behind the “Indian chase” (forgotten by the Hollywood Western), which, among the Sioux or the Navajos, consisted of tracking the enemy over many days without approaching him or seeking to capture him: this obsessive and apparently perpetual pursuit always ended with the pursued man voluntarily surrendering without a combat. Du Soleil pour les gueux (what a terrible title for such a beautiful film!) reverses the principle: it’s the pursued man who lets the bounty hunter come close to him, but not too close. He even taunts his pursuer by going back near him and compels him to give up, since the hunter knows well that he’ll never get his hands on his prey. New version of Achilles and the tortoise.

A play of directions—all paths criss-crossing—but also of steps, now slow, now lively or opposed in the same shot: the shepherd walks normally on the tall grass, but behind him, Nathalie Sanchez keeps jumping over each group of plants, losing a lot of time in the process. She is then forced to systematically alter her tempo to keep up with him.

Speaking of systematism, we must make note of the film’s audacious cladding principle (principe de placage), made of long and wide shots (like Ce vieux rêve qui bouge), constructed around the unexpected arrival of inappropriate and unusual music. There are also, in a long shot with two characters, these annoying blades of grass in the foreground (that another filmmaker would have cut out: aesthetic provocation, or ecological concern, or both?). There are especially these long texts, off-screen but nonetheless synchronized with the image, where we hear the characters speak from up close and on the same sound level while walking at a hundred meters from the camera. This cladding principle, so repulsive in television and elsewhere, is fruitful here because its excess (perhaps deriving from a modesty of means) stylizes the film in a way that’s provocative, clearly desired by the filmmaker and ultimately very impressive.

Here’s a work which is like nothing else in French cinema today. We could establish links to Beckett or Pasolini (Ninetto Davoli’s movements in wide shots, the landscapes of Oedipus Rex or of Pigsty). But the difference of place and characters ensures that these are only distant parallels. More relevant seems to be the influence of Godard: the period costume and the familiar tone of Sandra Casellini in the forest of La Force des choses recalls the Emily Bronte of Weekend played by Anne Wiazemsky. And more generally, the constant juxtaposition of the unreal and the spontaneous brings to mind the work of Juliet Berto and that of Laurence Côte in The Power of Speech. But here too, we are dealing with a principle (too) rare in cinema: we’d be better of speaking of homage rather than plagiarism.

The most unquestionable aspect of Guiraudie’s work resides in the way he continuously jumps from one shot to the next, and even within a shot from one register, one point of interest to another: formal splendour, spontaneous acting, total fun, down-to-earth naturalism, avant-garde cladding, ennui, play of costumes, private jokes (the script seen in front of the camera, the oral credits of Héros). Guiraudie avoids redundancy with all this. A superior grace comes out of the whole, a twirling suppleness. What we witness is a very elaborate, almost Mozartian musical structure.

 

1Homosexuality in a working-class milieu—Ce vieux rêve qui bouge—is a utopia comparable to that of the ounayes.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]