foolish men
by
Douglas Messerli
André
Barde (libretto), Maurice Yvain (original score, with additional music by Bruno
Fontaine), Alain Resnais Pas sur la
bouche (Not on the Lips) / 2003
It
is tempting—and many critics had done so—to become dismayed over the fact that
experimental Alain Resnais chose in 2003 to film a 1925 French musical, keeping
it pretty much faithful to the original. Not only does the film seem odd coming
from such a grand experimenter, but the work itself contains basically silly
patter lyrics (generally rhymed in the English subtitles), and the music (the
original score by Maurice Yvain) is seldom very interesting.
André Barde’s original libretto seems
like a lightweight Feydeau farce, yet having little of the frothiness of the
boulevard comic author. Like any wealthy
Parisian socialite, Gilberte Valandray (Sabine Azéma) loves her business
husband, while flirting with several admirers, including the older and rather
foolish Faradel (Daniel Prévost) and the young Dada-Cubist-Surrealist artist
Charley (Jalil Lespert). Her husband Georges (Pierre Arditi), knowing of his
wife’s flirtatious nature, is unworried about the consequences since he is
under the strange notion that it is always the first sexual partner that
defines a woman, convinced obviously that he is wife’s first lover.
Meanwhile Gilberte has kept an
important secret from him, that she has been briefly married to an American,
Eric Thomson (Lambert Wilson), a relationship that was quickly invalidated
(although we never quite discover why). The only one who knows of her
relationship, other than Thomson, is her unmarried sister, Arlette (Isabelle
Nanty). But on this particular day, when in her self-centeredness Gilberte has
missed her own tea-time affair, she is met with the news that she and her
husband will be dining that evening with Georges’ new American business
partner—who turns out to be Eric Thomson!
Obviously, sparks fly, particularly when
Gilberte’s friend Huguette (Audrey Tautou) also admits that she has fallen in
love with Charley, and wants her help in catching him.
It hardly matters what happens in the
rest of this predictable contrivance: characters flirt, hide their true
feelings, and all wind up in Faradel’s bachelor flat, where in one room Charley
is being seduced by Huguette, while in others the rest of the cast rushes to
join them, believing that one other is involved with someone they shouldn’t be,
resulting in comic confusion but a loving resolution.
What I think one has to recall in this
quite beautifully filmed musical is Resnais’ life-long interest in the past. In
some respects, nearly all of Resnais’ characters—even in his most disjunctive
works—with the consequences of their past lives and their lovers from ages
previous. So the theme, one quickly comprehends, is a natural one for the great
filmmaker.
Here, moreover, while exploring these
themes with some postmodern perspective, he treats the genre seriously, which,
of course, only makes it appear more ridiculous than if he’s filled it with
knowing nods and winks. As in theater,
Resnais has chosen singers who can also act, let his designers create the most
elegant sets and costumes possible, encouraging, as well, his characters to
speak directly to the camera.
The outsized American, moreover, is such a
blustering individual who heavily tromps through the French language, and
refuses, it turns out—perhaps the reason for his invalidated first marriage—to
kiss any woman on the lips, making it a kind splendid satire of French-American
differences. In this case, Gilberte’s sister, Arlette, saves the day, by
insisting that it was she who was once married to Thomson, and to prove it,
kisses him, for the first time, on the lips. Not only does it silence him, but
obviously convinces him that the French women are better in getting what they
want.
Let us just note that this work was quite
popular in France, while attacked as mindless froth in England. It had no
distribution in the US.
Los Angeles, August
2, 2016
