428 - Gang of Four, France, 1989. Dir. Jacques Rivette.

Sunday, March 5, 2018

428 - Gang of Four, France, 1989.  Dir. Jacques Rivette.

Anna sits at the cafe finishing her coffee.  One of those tiny, strong coffees they drink in Europe.  With a wet sugar cube sitting on the saucer.  She bends back her paperback book.  She reads.  She places some coins on the table.  She exits.

Anna walks the sidewalks to the theatre.  She enters the back door and lands directly on stage.  The walls are a deep crimson.  The boards are mud brown.  The wood shows the wear of years of shows.

Anna removes her black jacket.  She wears a tapered black sweater, sleeves at the elbows, and a bright yellow pleated, full-length skirt.  She has on a simple gold chain around her neck, small wide hoop earrings, and her tightly curly hair pulled back behind her ears.

Raphaele suddenly enters behind her, as if in a hurry.  As if late.  She throws her bags on the steps and removes her red tartan scarf.  She considers taking off her black leather jacket but decides to begin speaking.  She has on a pink crew neck shirt and high wader pants tapered at the cuffs with white socks showing above her black boots.

Raphaele begins an argument.

Listen to me.
Oh, just leave me alone!
Come on.  Be reasonable.
No, I don't have to if I don't want to.

The two ladies traverse the stage.  They argue.

At one point Raphaele turns her back to us and peaks at something stuffed inside her pants, at which point another woman corrects her.

"No scripts."

Constance Dumas sits with the rest of the drama students, all women, in the theatre seats.  She is the owner of the theatre, after whom it is named, and the rumored inhabitant of the second floor.  She expects Raphaele to be off book by now, to have her lines memorized.  The girls continue.

Anna and Raphaele are rehearsing a one-act romantic comedy written by Pierre de Marivaux called Arlequin Refined by Love.  It was first performed October 17, 1720, by the Comedie Italienne, a receiver of the tradition of Commedia dell'arte.  The term slapstick comes from Arlequin, as a literal stick, in this case the fairy's magic wand, used to beat people on stage and cause the audience to laugh.

We know Arlequin as Harlequin, a stock character of the zanni, or comic servant class, in the tradition of the Jester, or Fool.

Anna is playing the role of Silvia, the Shepherdess with whom Arlequin falls in love and seeks to join by overcoming the magic power of the Fairy.  Raphaele is playing Trivelin, the servant of the Fairy.

As Dumas criticizes Raphaele for not knowing her lines, she criticizes Anna for not feeling her lines.  Anna speaks forcibly with loud volume, but she does not communicate.  The audience does not understand her.

Dumas turns to the other students for input.

Louise, one of the many redheads, says it seems like a whim.  Jeanne, another redhead, has no answer.  Cecile says we are not convinced she is thinking about Arlequin.  Her roommate Joyce, our redhead, nods and laughs.

Lucia calls out.  Lucia has the answer.  "When you're in love, people can see it.  People should see it anyway."

Dumas concurs.  "If you don't feel the situation, others see nothing."

"Have you ever been angry, Anna?  Anger is not a fixed emotion.  Anger rises.  The heart starts beating.  But with you the anger was superficial.  Your anger was static."

Another girl, one who played Silvia previously, asserts that Dumas' advice to her was different and now she feels confused.  Dumas explains that both critiques are true and both need to be applied.  The girl complains no matter what they do it is never enough.  Dumas says that is right.  She expects everything.  Then she has Lucia get up and take over Raphaele's role of Trivelin.

And sitting there in the audience, one of the acting students, almost an extra in this film, is our beloved Irene Jacob, not yet discovered in 1989, but future star of The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and Three Colors: Red (1994), among others.  Known to Americans as Desdemona in Oliver Parker's version of Othello (1995), the one with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh.

There are moments in this film when the camera pans across the faces of the acting students, the principals and the extras, and there sits Irene Jacob, fully present, fully engaged, fresh as a daisy, her face radiant.

We are watching a Jacques Rivette film.  Jacques Rivette is the remaining member of the influential 1960s French New Wave and the one most similar to Eric Rohmer.  Therefore, it is necessary that during the film we stop and have a conversation about what it means to feel love.

The girls will tell us.  They tell us as they try to answer their drama teacher's questions; they tell us after class as they return to the cafe and hang out; and they tell us when they arrive home and eat together.

Four of the girls are roommates.  The gang of four.  Let us see if we can follow them.

Cecile is the mysterious one, and no longer one of the four.  She is now the fifth one.  And the one around which everything revolves.  Somehow she has money, and she has a new boyfriend that none of them have met.  She has just moved out of her room on the top floor of the skinny old house they share.  They will continue to see her in acting class--when she is there--and their lives will be caught up in some kind of intrigue that her love life seems to have initiated.

Anna is the ostensible leader, if there is one.  She is the bold, confident one.  Tonight her photographs, which look like abstract paintings, are on display in a show at a high-end gallery in the city.  For some reason she does not invite her friends, though neither they nor the film seems to notice.  She can dress up and fit in with the jet setters who adore her art, and she can return to her suburban bohemian struggle with apparent ease.

When she is offered a three-week photographic tour of Africa by a wealthy benefactor, she declines, claiming she really loves her acting classes that much, that she would not want to miss three weeks' worth.  She reasons that theatre is her true love and that photography is just something she does to pay the bills.  Never mind that this offer is going to pay the bills.

Later we wonder if perhaps she turned down the gig because she really did not take the pictures.  Anna, who has been making strange phone calls to Los Angeles, reveals to a roommate on the sidewalk one day that she is not actually Anna but Anna's sister Laura.  The real Anna has been missing for over three years and they are still hopeful they will find her.

Again, neither the roommate nor the film seem to pay any attention to this revelation.  The two just smile and keep walking down the sidewalk enjoying the day.

Remember that part where your drama teacher was criticizing you for not feeling your emotions?  I wonder if that is true for Anna in real life.  Or for Fejria Delibra, the actress that plays her.  Or if it is Rivette's direction.  But it is part of the odd charm of the film.  Things one expects to be important are tossed aside as superfluous.  You have to watch it again to catch them.

Joyce is our redhead.  She comes from Limerick, Ireland.  She is everybody's friend.  She tells the story of the frog with the big mouth.  She has no problem playing males or females.  And it appears she means not just in acting class.

Claude is the cute one with the wavy hair.  She seems to be from France, meaning not having immigrated to Paris from somewhere else.  Claude and Joyce live in adjoining rooms off the kitchen.  You have to go through Joyce's room to get to Claude's.

Lucia is the new roommate, from Portugal, who has taken over Cecile's old room at the top of the building.  She has a mysterious bottle of liquid, which arouses her anger when Joyce drops it.  It has some emotional power over her.  She says it is nothing but bad memories.

Ten days ago a man named Lucien approached Joyce about Cecile.  He wanted to know about her boyfriend, and if she had anything hidden in her room upstairs.

Tonight a man named Henri rescues Anna from some bad guys when she leaves the art gallery.  He poses as her brother in order to be her hero.  The two men rough him up instead of her.  He offers her a safe ride home.  Remember, she lives in the suburbs.  She appreciates his chivalry, but then something seems strange.

He talks to her about Cecile and her boyfriend.  What is going on with them?

Anna observes that as he drives he makes the correct turns before she tells him.  And somehow they end up in front of her house.  She is guarded and suspicious.  He wants to see her again.  She says you know where to find me.  At Constance Dumas' acting class.

Finally, a man named Thomas begins dating Claude.  She falls for him.  Falls in love with him.  She calls in sick to acting class and makes love with him in her room while the others are in class.  He gets up to go get her some tomato juice from the kitchen, and while he is out of her room he searches for something in Joyce's room.

Lucien, Henri, and Thomas are the same man.  He has a mysterious relationship with Cecille's boyfriend, whom we discover is named Lucas.  And they are either involved in something nefarious or chasing those who are.  He mentioned printing fake ID cards, art forgery, gun smuggling, Mafia involvement, police corruption, hidden documents that implicate a judge, and any number of mysterious involvements.  He is either a police officer, a corrupt police officer, a former police officer, a police officer relieved of duty, a criminal, or a con man.

And he is determined to find something in that house.

Lucia finds some keys in her fireplace flue.  She hides them.  She says she threw them in the Seine.  We do not believe her.  But we never see them again.

Claude loves Thomas.

So how do you respond when a strange man, who calls himself by a different name to each of you, who changes his story every time he tells it, who openly manipulates one of your roommates to fall in love with him so that he can move in and search everyone's rooms for something when you are not there, and who then tries to kiss the other roommates to work them over?

The women handle it as best they know how.  It does not derail them.  They find it interesting.  They deal with it.  They move on.  Now it provides material for their acting.

Jacques Rivette has come along way since his inauspicious first picture, Paris Belongs to Us.
http://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/109-paris-belongs-to-us-1961-france-dir.html

This film is sprawling in length yet narrow in focus and light in tone.  And he tantalizes us by throwing away the most important details, which you may only get with repeated viewing.

Such as Constance Dumas' harboring of Cecile's boyfriend Lucas in her upstairs apartment above the theatre.  And therefore, maybe Cecile herself.  To protect Cecile?

What is going on?

In some ways the loose ends do not matter.  The daily lives of the women, in class, at the cafe, and at home, are what drive the film.  The intrigue of the mysterious man is almost an afterthought.

Here is a slice of life.  In the lives of these five women.  Who make up a gang of four.