Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Jan 1993Nowadays, an astonishing half of the French films made each year are co-productions--"les co-pros"--most of them disastrous mishmashes of language and sensibilities without a place to call home. Jean-Jacques Annaud commits the unpardonable sin of making English-language (or more accurately, no-language or international) films that are good enough, and certainly successful enough, to give life to the idea of co-production. Of course, his films aren't co-productions in the usual sense (a Russian making a French-language film about Russia in France), nor does he fit into that venerable tradition of Europeans (mostly German or East European at that) who have gone to Hollywood. His co-pros, from Quest for Fire ('82) and The Bear ('89) to The Lover ('92), are international fables, anthropological romances, primitive stories of tribe and family and survival served up in a physically dazzling and cunningly edifying package.
Although the sexual coming-of-age and accession to power of a teenage girl, the young Marguerite Duras, is the core story of The Lover, the most interesting aspects of the movie, for those who have read the book, are the details in the portrait of family. Against the torrid and somewhat too tastefully photographed affair between the rich Chinese lover and the French schoolgirl is set the fierce and despairing, obsessional yet clear-eyed attachment of the girl's mother to her wastrel older brother. This relationship, sketched in in the original novel, receives fuller treatment in the new work--that is, both the movie and Duras's own literary rebuke to the film, The North China Lover. It serves as counterballast, two Oedipal dramas playing off each other, and culminates in a wrenching parting scene to which the girl's own leavetaking is almost an anticlimax.
Watching The Lover, we know now what we didn't know when we saw Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959: that the interracial love story, in that case the taboo affair between the Frenchwoman and the Japanese (and before it, between the Frenchwoman and a German soldier), is the primal story to which Marguerite Duras returns over and over again, in her books and films. Her love stories are not without larger political vistas, as personal attractions reflect national and class conflict. The power shifts between the woman who belongs to the elite culture but is disenfranchised (because she is poor; because she is a woman) and the man who is one of the vanquished but is enfranchised (because he is a man, because he is rich).
In Annaud's The Lover, a further modification is made from book to film (and new book). When the young girl of 15-and-a-half (18, for propriety's sake, in the movie) first meets her lover-to-be, she knows he is afraid. However tartishly she might be dressed, in her gold high heels and man's fedora, however poor, she is still French and of the ruling class.
In her original novel The Lover Duras writes: "From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he's at her mercy."
In The North China Lover: "The man who gets out of the black limousine is other than the one in the book, but still Manchurian. He is a little different from the one in the book: he's a little more solid than the other, bolder. He is better-looking, more robust. He is more 'cinematic' than the one in the book. And he's also less timid facing the child."
In other words, as played by Tony Leung he is handsomer, as leading men in mainstream movies must be, and therefore more powerful. This politically correct and sexually reassuring solution--we can't have an Asian man enslaved by a mere slip of a European teenager--removes whatever tension might remain in a situation that has already acquired the soothing patina of a forbidden love made over into art and now being recycled as film.
Having French characters speak English is both incongruous and awkward, but the movie has already left the realm of sociological authenticity behind when the two lovers meet on the ferry. Annaud is treating the book as a bestselling international artifact, in which the most important element is the look of the girl, i.e., finding the right face, the haunting childwoman that looks boldly out at us from the cover of the book (and in the ad), with its eyes underlined by dark shadows, its bright red lipstick. It's the image of herself the author still treasures, the reflection that became old before its time, the face of a drunk (before its owner drank) only two years later. Jeanne Moreau's familiar raspy, life-exhausted voice, in the English-language narration that introduces the film and means to clarify it at certain points, is the equivalent of Duras's drinker's face, as if these two great female sensualists had recognized each other--"mon semblable, ma soeur." Yet the pairing is one of many blurrings of lines and boundaries by which identities become increasingly indistinct (are we watching or listening to Duras? Moreau? a French writer speaking English? a young French girl speaking English to a Chinese man?).
The English model Jane Marsh is as close as one could hope to get to the skinny, insolent yet innocent, strangely beautiful little creature, but for the most part she fails to stir more than faint approval. Her rightness is almost a handicap: "the child" no longer seems fresh and idiosyncratic but patented, her look fetishized with a magazine-cover chic that conjures up the most vulnerable aspect of Duras's prose.
When I was in Paris last September, in the contentious days before the Maastricht referendum, the conservative paper Figaro gleefully broke a story, in its literary supplement, that Duras's latest novel had been turned down by her publisher. Figaro also announced the perpetration of a hoax whereby a journalist had submitted in manuscript one of Duras's earlier novels--having changed the names and rearranged a few incidents--only to have it rejected. To the editors (who announced in a box that their revelation had nothing to do with politics, thus confirming suspicions that it did), this was a way of discrediting everything Duras had ever written. For me, it was merely another example of that phenomenon peculiar to certain writers, and especially Duras, who at her best is always skirting the periphery of self-parody. The woman's world of emotional trauma and suffering, the self-absorption, pain dwelt on and celebrated, the variations on a theme of being excluded, the fondness for elegant women, for luxurious settings, an attention to the thingness of life bring her into the domain of intellectual soap opera. But what gives her work its status is the intellectual rigor in her lack of self-pity, the refusal to see herself as victim or to deny the pleasure of pain, the clear-eyed perception of the tradeoff involved in the weighing of loss against gain. The writer's success has been won at the expense of youth, love, and beauty. She uses words not to deny the various fears gnawing at the soul but to let them in.
When Hiroshima, mon amour came out in 1959, response was divided. Many saw it as an important film about the devastation of the atomic bomb set against the subordinate tale of a perverse love affair, while others (a smaller number) saw it as an intriguingly told love story set against an earnest, documentarylike meditation on Hiroshima (less effective than director Alain Resnais's great documentary on the Holocaust, Night and Fog). The tension was less between the Nouvelle Vague and the Nouveau Roman than between Resnais's impersonal, montage-oriented approach and the sensuously autobiographical (and anti-nouveau roman) sensibility of Duras. The obsessive concern with memory, with the way the mind reconstructs and reinvents the past, was the theme that united director and screenwriter, but each took this notion in diametrically different directions: Duras in the direction of flesh and feeling and the celebration of pain as the conscience of memory, Resnais into the cerebral high style in which events and emotions are referred to rather than experienced. Even at her most deadpan and unconventional (as in her film Le Camion), Duras makes us feel the weight of real people inhabiting space, while Resnais, even at his most carnal (as in La Guerre est finie and Muriel), is curiously bloodless.
Duras's heroines are circled round with the threat of emptiness, of loss and forgetting, and are intimately acquainted with poverty--the parallel stories of Ann-Marie Stretter and the beggar-woman in The Vice-Consul, the story that formed the basis of her film India Song. The dark night that surrounds the embassy might be the falling off the planet of love and desire that awaits those who don't remember.
Her hard-core academic defendants find in her the embodiment--in both her writing and her films--of what might be called an ecriture feminine. (Sounds a lot better than "women's writing.") The idea is that Duras has managed to carve out a space and a language that resist both the imperialism of a male-oriented visual scheme, and what some would see as the intrinsically masculine dynamics of narrative itself--that is, forward-thrusting and conquistatorial. In one of her more memorable phrases, she told interviewers that she made films and wrote books because it was easier than doing nothing--and one always feels the pull of doing-nothing, of blanking out, wrapping oneself in a soft cocoon of amnesia, like the heroine of The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein. Not so much a passive way of seeing the world, but what one writer called "anti-aggressive." For Duras as well as her heroines, suffering actively embraced is the crucible of memory.
Duras broke with Annaud during their pre-filming collaboration and wanted her friend, cinematographer-turned-director Bruno Nuytten, to direct--hence her written "version" of the film. The North China Lover is characterized by more verbiage, more details; characters that either didn't exist or were sketched in (Helene Lagonelle) are given prominent, overtly sexual identities. But somehow the whole--both second book and movie--is less sensuous, less provocative.
At the end of the new book, which has just been published in English (a tie-in with the movie?), is a series of suggested images that may be inserted where the viewer/reader/hypothetical director would like to put them. This addendum reveals a contempt for the film. Or is it for the filmmaker with whom she feuded? Or for herself, caught between her reputation as an avant-garde artist and the exigencies of big-budget filmmaking?
It's not likely that Nuytten, who directed the stiffly theatrical Camille Claudel, would have made a film in the austere, anti-mainstream mold of Le Camion or India Song, and in any case it could hardly have been more slavishly faithful to the original novel than Annaud's version, whose gravest betrayal is in the domain of size. Duras's slim, spare, elliptical work becomes a visually fulsome epic competing with Indochine, the other erotic-historical spectacle in which the subject of the French presence in its former colony is examined through and across the barriers of race and age. The love affair between the young French girl and the rich Chinese businessman, along with the casually mentioned intimations of incest with a younger brother, now resemble genteel incest at one remove, like Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart (in which the casting of an Italian actress as the mother made the transgression seem less French, international rather than interfamilial).
As the story is refracted and spun out in yet another retelling, the woman Duras becomes a voyeur of her own younger self, urging that self to take on other forms. In the arms of the North China lover, she is not just reminded of her brother, she becomes her brother, and insists that the lover, too, think of and love little Paulo. Thus does the taboo affair take in and represent all incestuous desires, heterosexual and homosexual, all perversions (sadomasochism, voyeurism, etc.). But by merging and amplifying these fantasies into an atmosphere of polymorphous pansexuality, Duras seems to be evading rather than confronting her central obsession.
It is these details, and the sumptuous pictorialism that insists we see everything through a prism, that leaves nothing to the imagination and makes the steamy love scenes so pallid. The most erotic moment is that in which Jane Marsh reaches over in the limousine and touches the slender, slightly darker male hand, confirms the awakening of desire--or maybe just desire for desire--and initiates the love affair.
Annaud tries to capture, as did Resnais before him, the woman's viewpoint: a woman regarding the body of a man with lust, appreciation, making his skin palpable to us, the back above all as somehow innocent, vulnerable, unaware. The lover allows himself to be caught from behind. Yet the contemplation of a beautiful body, be it male or female, seems too routinely easy to be exciting. It's a convention that tells us something about the woman, her capacity to feel desire, without awakening our own.
So--and yet--that scene in the limo remains, exciting for the way in which it differs from other sensual scenes, scenes of pure contemplation, of pure lovemaking. In its originality; for this is a story about sex that introduces art and money at the very beginning of desire. The story not of an older man harassing, abusing, taking advantage of a younger woman, but of a younger woman taking full advantage of a man--the extent to which she will "use" him--for money, for amusement; ultimately and most importantly, for material of a lifetime's literary and cinematic career not yet clear, yet somehow there, implicit, in the small hand upon the one that has trembled (less in the movie, more in the original book) minutes before.
Molly Haskell is Artistic Director of the Sarasota French Film Festival.
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