HEAD AGAINST THE WALLS (Georges Franju, 1958)
There is certainly this much agreement: Georges Franju, who along with Henri Langlois founded La Cinémathèque française, is one of the essential artists of world cinema. After a string of highly regarded documentaries, Franju made his first feature, La tête contre les murs, from the novel by Jean-Pierre Hervé-Bazin. The script was by the film’s star, Jean-Pierre Mocky, who was himself barely in his twenties when he played François Gérane, who is supposed to be 25 but acts like the teenager that James Dean played in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), which Mocky has declared his principal inspiration. Franju, twenty years senior, and Mocky locked horns continually during the shoot, with Mocky always prevailing. Actors who are shits always think it’s permissible to behave in such a fashion; Franju felt demoralized. Many times throughout the years Franju disparaged the film, even repudiated it. This added credibility to the stance of reviewers who themselves dismissed La tête contre les murs as preliminary to Franju’s worthwhile feature-length films. Franju, for whom objectivity in this matter was impossible, can be forgiven; but Head Against the Walls, Franju’s fourteenth, is a magnificent film.
At the opening of the film François, son of a rich Paris lawyer, solitudinously rides his motorcycle down a steep ravine, around, and back up again, one part of this pointless “journey” visually canceling or undoing—if you will, burying—the other. Plainly this “lone wolf” is going nowhere; he has time on his hands in the country, and he fills it with empty gestures. In between the Indochina and Algerian Wars, even his nation has no use to which to put him. Meanwhile, François needs money. When he cannot get anyone else to lend him any, he decides to ask his father, from whom he has been more or less estranged following the mysterious death of his mother, possibly a suicide. We are given to understand that this recent traumatizing death has made François feel like an orphan. When he rides up to his father’s mansion, we hear the sound of a dog barking. It sounds forbidding, even dangerous; but as he walks up to the mansion, the family dog greets François warmly. It is the only warmth he will receive. A child’s song fills the soundtrack, a heart-piercing projection of the mother’s tenderness that François misses and of the father’s coldness, insensitivity, even cruelty against which (like a head against a wall) François perpetually feels like a helpless, powerless child. Part of his pedestrian approach to his father’s house appears in extreme long-shot, making a moving dot of him, and even a closer shot of him, as he approaches the front door, emphasizes by his hesitant, unself-confident gait François’s feeling, at least at this moment, of being small and feeble. (This contrasts with his earlier, arrogant behavior among his peers.) Once François is inside the darkened place, the child’s music box tune entrancingly continues, and we think, “He is in his mother’s house as well.”
The elder Gérane is hideous, almost Nazi-like. In a more conventional Oedipal mode, having stolen his way into his father’s house, François rifles his father’s desk, stealing money. In the process he discovers on top of the desk a legal brief, some of whose supportive documents he burns in a symbolical assault on his father. It is as if François, mesmerized, were under the spell of the childhood tune that we hear and is therefore unable to do other than what he is doing. It is almost as if his mother’s spirit were directing him. It is at just this moment that his father enters the room and the music stops. It is as though the father has killed the music, at least chilled it out of memory, breath and existence. He assails his son with a monstrous remark: “I had hoped you would take after me, but you have turned out like your mother.” François slaps his father across the face, and no slap in cinema is more richly deserved. When the father reaches for his gun in his desk drawer, without a hint of fear François reminds him of the issue of bourgeois propriety that will prevent him from killing his son. Bull’s-eye: the boy is confronting his father with the man’s unnaturalness. Nowhere in the film is the father given a first name because he is a stand-in for all those who represent petty oppression.
The French are very good at flipping over the Freudian assumption of the Oedipal complex. In The 400 Blows (1959) François Truffaut, instead of showing an adolescent boy hankering for his mother, shows the woman harboring sexual feelings for her son (I am referring to the scene in which she dries Antoine after he has taken a bath)—this, in the context of her unrewarding marriage to the boy’s stepfather. In Head Against the Walls, Franju unmistakably shows François’s contempt for his father, which his mother’s death has clarified; but it also shows, in their chilly confrontation, the degree to which the father hates the son, perceiving in him a threat to himself, if only the threat of youth. To this soul François seems to epitomize a rejection of his authority and work ethic. Here, Franju anticipates key issues a decade in advance, especially when in their context the romance with his motorcycle encapsulates his hankering for freedom. Franju doesn’t sentimentalize this or fetishize the bike (the extreme long-shot at the beginning, where boy-on-bike is a dot moving across terrain, certifies his resistance to doing this), but he plainly opposes the authoritarianism that François’s nasty father exudes.
François’s father arranges to have his son’s freedom taken away from him. He has François imprisoned in an insane asylum. Some may argue that this happens all too easily, but they would have to be incredibly naïve to pose such an argument. Today, fifty years later, power and influence remain all that is necessary to have someone difficult to deal with, like a pesky son, committed to a psychiatric hospital. The cruelty of the father’s action is handled by Franju swiftly, brilliantly. In their scene of confrontation by the father’s desk, the father phones the police, there is a cut to an automobile ride in the dark, during which the boy, obviously drugged, is flanked by men in white coats, there is the arrival at the secure facility, and the boy wakes up to the harshly lit, oppressively white and sterile waking nightmare that will characterize (except for a brief escape) what little remains of the boy’s life. The father has set in motion a course of events that culminates in his son’s finish.
Along the way there is a debate between doctors (one of whom is excellently played by Pierre Brasseur) on the way best to treat mental patients; but this parody of discussions about different forms of Christianity in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1954) isn’t germane to the film’s essential tragedy. Rather, it gives those viewers who are wedded to a bogus humanism something to hold onto; by doing this, Franju exposes the self-important nonsense and meaninglessness with which the psychiatric establishment (like the legal establishment) concerns itself. Critic Roy Armes bemoans the following: “[N]o answer is given to the vital question of whether [François] is really insane, or whether he is a sane man institutionalised by his father out of spite.” This criticism is ridiculous on two different fronts. Spite and viciousness motivate the father regardless of the state of François’s mental health. One thing has nothing to do with the other. However, it is totally irrelevant “whether [François] is really insane,” and this is why it would have made for a poorer film if Franju had conveniently resolved the matter in order to placate anticipated quarrels with his obligation as artist to develop his material thematically rather than according to narrative convention. What is relevant is that the confiscation of a human being’s freedom cannot assist in an insane person’s recovery, and can only damage or altogether destroy either someone who is or isn’t insane.
One may disagree with Franju’s position (I do not), but this film is Franju’s, not anyone else’s.
Tags: Franju
