DOCTEUR FRANÇOISE GAILLAND (Jean-Louis Bertucelli, 1975)

Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s Docteur Françoise Gailland, a “true story,” is about a French physician who is so busy that the film was called No Time for Breakfast in the States. This makes the film sound like a comedy—which until the Big “C” strikes it more or less is. But this is no piece of Hollywood trash, like Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983). The brilliant maker of Ramparts of Clay (1968), which fuses documentary and fiction, has here a lovely film.
     Annie Girardot (best actress César) plays the title character, the one with no time to eat. She is used to helping patients; now she herself becomes a patient. Discovering she has terminal cancer, Françoise begins to weigh the meaning of her life, tidy its complications, and integrate its precious essentials. Written by Bertucelli and André G. Brunelin from Noëlle Loriot’s novel, the film distills in a mysterious, absorbing way the sadness contained in the imminent loss of all of life that is dear. For all the complexity of Françoise Gailland’s life as it is portrayed (her medical responsibilities, shaky marriage, lover, unhappy daughter, thieving son, etc.), the film achieves the same purity of style that ennobled Ramparts of Clay, a film whose primitive setting and bold political leanings easily attracted it. Bertucelli, this time, is thus able to transcend the admittedly soap operatic material at hand.
     Ramparts of Clay proved that Bertucelli, like Claude Chabrol, knows how to get nonprofessionals to behave naturally in front of the camera. Again like Chabrol, he is no less adept at working with real actors: Girardot, in the performance of her career; François Périer as Gailland’s husband; Jean-Pierre Cassel as (as Gailland notes) her last lover; Isabelle Huppert as her daughter; William Coryn as her son.

SHADOWMAN (Georges Franju, 1974)

As he had for Judex (1963), Georges Franju dips again into the Wonderland of Louis Feuillade for his Shadowman (Les nuits rouges; Red Nights). (Franju scored this film, deliriously, as well.) It is his hommage to Fantomas—In the Shadow of the Guillotine (Fantômas—À l’ombre de la guillotine, 1913). The film is in color—but mostly black, white and red. Franju applies his Feuilladean bag of silent cinema visual tricks to this morally ambiguous film of his, the condensation of a TV series.
     Does the legendary treasure of the Knights Templars exist? Must we get hold of Sam Spade? No, there’s Shadowman! In his red mask! And that assistant of his, in a cat-suit!
     The imagery is fabulous: white-masked and -hooded men, in their secret chamber, in front of a gigantic black cross. Absolutely blasphemous—but this is Franju, you know.
     On television any night we can encounter dramatic instances of evil—so much so that evil ceases to appall. However, in Franju’s film some images contain so authentic a vision of it that evil disturbs us profoundly while light is thrown on some of its elusive complexity; and because Franju’s camera is so witty, we are gloriously entertained in the bargain. In one scene, a regimented group of people, transformed by a sinister operation into obedient robots, stalk and trap someone in a museum, marching ever closer and closer upon their prey. (See The Chess Players, Raymond Bernard, 1927.) In the film’s final shot, the “man without a face,” the personification of evil (or good?), makes his getaway in one of his disguises, that of a harmless old lady. We watch him move from the camera, back bent, his appearance quaintly humorous despite the mayhem he has wrought.
     Round up The Usual Suspects.

BLOOD OF THE BEASTS (Georges Franju, 1949)

See the first paragraph of my essay on Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, which is categorized under “film reviews.”

HOTEL DES INVALIDES (Georges Franju, 1951)

War’s hype and the legendary status that the state officially confers on warriors versus war’s killing and maiming reality: Georges Franju’s 23-minute Hôtel des Invalides assaults France’s military mystique.
     It is a subversive documentary, commissioned by the French government as a national self-advertisement; but Franju’s cunning handling of the material created a powerful antiwar film, a model of how an insinuated level of meaning can undercut surface meaning.
     The film begins as an innocuous tour of the French National Military Museum in Paris, which includes halls of military displays, a care facility for veterans, and a chapel. Holistically addressing the ideology that perpetuates war as a necessary, even noble endeavor, it takes institutional aim at both the military and the Church, and intellectual aim at such concepts as heroism and honor. We hear voiceover, sardonic for being disembodied, as well as trite guides, themselves disabled veterans, and we overhear the touring visitors on their tour, in particular, a deflatingly unimpressed young couple. Franju cuts between ghostly military exhibits, punctuating these with closeups of details (for instance, a medal for valor), and all-too-real mutilated men. A famous cut juxtaposes a statue of Napoleon with a veteran in a wheelchair. In effect, Franju is confronting the idea of war, so attractive to so many, with the horrific consequences of war for actual human beings. The guides are a reminder that war is in part perpetuated by stricken warriors who feel compelled to justify and validate their own sacrifices and the ultimate sacrifices of comrades-in-arms.
     The film’s subtle indirection accumulates into a quiet voice of reason and conscience revealing what individuals perhaps subconsciously feel about war in the face of its direct and official sanction and approval. The tour of L’Hôtel des Invalides unwinds somewhere in the mind of humanity.

THERESE DESQUEYROUX (Georges Franju, 1962)

Updating François Mauriac’s 1927 novel, Georges Franju’s Thérèse Desqueyroux shifts its sphere of thematic reference from sin and expiation to a woman’s interiority, from Roman Catholicism to a fusion of the existential and the lyrical.
     Accompanied by her solemn voiceover, Thérèse Desqueyroux’s flashbacks account for much of the film. Thérèse is acquitted of her real attempts to murder her husband, Bernard, by poisoning him, and that her acquittal follows his perjured testimony at trial ironically underscores his control over her. As punishment, Bernard banishes her from their mansion, imprisoning her in separate quarters on his country estate; but even he is moved to discover, when he finally can bring himself to look upon her, that she has deteriorated almost to the point of death. Suddenly his coldness melts; but this unexpected about-face yet again shows how dependent Thérèse is on him.
     Pauline Kael thinks that Thérèse poisons Bernard because he is dull. He is complacent, self-absorbed, overbearing. He gulps down soup and wine, and then turns the back of his chair to Thérèse to nod off facing the fire. He cares nothing about his wife’s feelings. Facing her, he holds a bird by both legs as it flaps and flutters wildly; Thérèse feels she is looking into a mirror of their marriage. She poisons Bernard to see, for once, uncertainty in his eyes.
     What filmmaking! A pan of the grounds comes to a stop that Franju holds—an anticipation of Thérèse’s feeling of imprisonment. In her husband’s prison an open window provides Thérèse with a draught of freedom: the wind singing through the trees. When Bernard releases her to Paris, another shot of these trees dissolves into a shot of bustling Parisian humanity.
     Claiming here her greatest role, Emmanuèlle Riva (best actress, Venice) is phenomenal.