witnesses
by Douglas Messerli
From the very first scene to the final images of the film, Bresson makes
it quite clear that, even though his androgynous hero chooses the solution of
suicide to cure his illness of "seeing too clearly," his commitment
is to life. But then Bresson's heroes,
from Mouchette and the Country Priest to his compulsive pickpocket, all choose
routes to salvation that might be damned by their faith. That is the way it is
with such a great deep moralist as Bresson: for individuals faced with the
evils of the world, probably the work of the Devil, there is no easy decision
in knowing how to survive and react.
Much like a kind of hippie cult leader, Charles (Antonie Monnier)
collects a small group of people around him—Edwige (Laetita Carcano) and
Alberte (Tina Irissari) as well as the drug addict Valentin (Nocolas Deguy) and
Edwige's former boyfriend, Michel (Henri de Maublanc)—as they undergo a series
of what might be described as educational explorations of the decline of contemporary society. Unlike some cult
leaders, he asks only that, with him, they witness discussions of the societal
problems. In return he offers each of them a deep love—which we observe most
intensely when Valentin is desperately in need of a fix and suffers withdrawal
symptoms, Bresson showing Charles not only obtaining the drugs but gently
pulling the covers around his suffering friend. At one point, Charles even
offers to marry the more needy of his two women friends.
It is almost inevitable, we come to see,
that the sensitive Charles should chose to commit suicide; certainly his
friends fear for it. But as he tells his psychiatrist, he does not really want
to die; it is simply that in such a world he cannot sanely go on living. Like
the Romans, accordingly, Charles chooses another—in this case, his drug-needy
friend—to carry out his wishes. Always in need of a quick fix and the money to
find one, Valentin agrees to become Charles' Judas, carrying out the awful deed
only too well, shooting and killing his loving friend mid-sentence, as if to
cut off any possibility of regret or his friend's ability to talk his way out
of the end he has determined for himself.
In his suicide-murder, Charles is also, probably, a kind of devil, but
at least he has been saved from seeing, like Cassandra, everything he has
predicted come true. Whereas, unfortunately, we must now daily face just those
horrors which Charles and his friends already witnessed, as well as facing all
those still in denial today.
Los Angeles, May 19, 2012
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