Scattered Remarks on La maman et la putain

1.

Cafés, cramped rooms and

bottles of whiskey; tangled

arrangements: Léaud rants.

The lines above form one of the inadequate haikus I’ve started to write about each film I see. It obviously tries (and, I must say, fails) to convey something about Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (1973), which I’d been waiting to revisit for quite a while, given that my first viewing, some years ago, was far from ideal. It was a digital projection of the VHS version of the film with badly superimposed Spanish subtitles over the English ones (which sometimes froze for minutes at a time, making it impossible to follow the course of several of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s arguments, which, as my terrible haiku attests, are crucial to a reading of this film); not only that, but I was also quite exhausted at the beginning of the screening and I can’t say that I didn’t doze off briefly on a few occasions. In any case, I’ve now seen the film again, in basically the same form (sans Spanish text), and it blew me away once more. The other reason I had for wanting to re-watch it (beyond the pleasure I knew it would afford me) was as a form of preparation towards exploring both Eustache’s other films (none of which I’ve seen, though I will soon catch up with Mes petites amoreuses [1974] as well as his shorter works) and also some of the longer narrative French films of the early 1970s, specifically Jacques Rivette’s, whose twelve-hour Out 1 (1971) also stars Léaud.

2.

In his review of the film published in the mid-1970s, Jonathan Rosenbaum succinctly describes the setting and subject of La maman et la putain the following way: “From the Café aux Deux Magots to the adjacent Flore, from the streets and sidewalks of a grayish Paris to other people’s flats, for the better part of 219 minutes, Alexandre continues to hold forth.” Alexandre does speak about basically every topic imaginable, so that it’s not at all surprising when he gets around to referencing a great deal of films and filmmakers. On his first date with Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, luminous in her acting debut), a woman he is pursuing while living with Marie (the marvelous Bernadette Lafont, who recently passed away), he tells her that he “might like a woman because she was in a Bresson film.” Indeed, in an earlier scene we had seen him pestering an ex-girlfriend played by Isabelle Weingarten, who had an important role in Bresson’s adaption of the Dostoevsky novella “White Nights” titled Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971). Veronika, too, is largely inexpressive and blank for the duration of La maman et la putain (the notable exception being her amazing speech towards the end of the film, made all the more resonant in comparison to her usual behavior) despite being very frank about her fears and desires; no wonder the one time we see her smile it is because Alexandre has expressly asked her to, and the brief moment registers as a shock. Elsewhere, then, Alexandre mentions Murnau and Nicholas Ray, berates rich directors who think they are contributing something to the world and questions Veronika’s honesty by suggesting that, in a bad film, some of her statements might be termed “the message” of the work.

3.

Duration, the passage of time, is a key part of the film; its three-and-a-half-hour running time is not incidental to its purpose, but rather its very essence. What makes possible its descent into madness and hysteria in the last thirty minutes are precisely the preceding three hours where nothing really happens (which is, of course, another way of saying that everything happens, that nothing is singled out the better to let multitudes find their way in, just as Alexandre says that talking a lot or not at all are basically the same thing). There’s a narrative, sure, guided primarily by Léaud’s presence (his voice and mannerisms) in every single scene, but not very much of what passes for “conflict” in most films (the characters, especially Alexandre and Marie, bicker and all, but they quickly laugh it off and go on to their growingly divergent paths), so that the accumulation of minor incidents, encounters and moments add up to a richly detailed and minutely observed portrait of tedium (with its flashes of excitement) and Time as such; something finally snaps, of course, and it has to be one of the most shattering rhetorical shifts in the history of film, at once frightening and all-too-uncertain, culminating in that last despairing image of Alexandre, utterly defeated.

Drink Up

Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn’t bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten; it ignores the erasures and reads everything still legible in our heart. And we know there is no way of canceling anything there radically, as you can cancel a mistaken endorsement on a promissory note. All our history is always readable there, and wine shouts it, overlooking whatever life has subsequently added.

Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience

By some wonderful coincidence I wound up seeing Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies (2013) and Hong Sang-soo’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013) over the course of the same day (or, almost: I watched the former sometime after midnight yesterday; the latter around noon today). The work of Swanberg and Hong is strikingly similar in significant ways (both are prolific chroniclers of the aimless wanderings of young twenty- to thirty-somethings, paying close attention to their romantic entanglements as well as to their professional aspirations; they use improvisation as an integral component of their creative processes, with different but comparable effects; and even though Hong is about twenty years older than Swanberg, both belong to a generation of filmmakers who have wholly embraced digital filmmaking) and their latest films convey a desire to emphasize the role that alcohol plays in the lives of their characters, not to treat it as a minor detail to be largely ignored (as in most films, where all young people drink, after all), but rather as an important part of the everyday existence of these individuals, whose dealings with others and with themselves are affected to a large extent by their consumption of booze.

I discovered both of these filmmakers last year when I saw a film by each of them (Hong’s The Day He Arrives [2011] and Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends [2008]) before really delving into their work over the last few months. I have to admit that I haven’t been that impressed by all of Swanberg’s films (his collaborative efforts are especially juvenile, such as the awful Autoerotic [2011]), although at his best (as in Hannah Takes the Stairs [2007] or Drinking Buddies) he reveals a personal vision quite distinct from that of his fellow mumblecore filmmakers (Andrew Bujalski, the Duplass brothers, etc.): his films are truly intimate and heartfelt; to use a famous distinction (Andrew Sarris alludes to it in his discussions in The American Cinema), we might say that he’s a warm filmmaker whereas Bujalski is cold. Hong, too, is in some sense a cold cineaste, which is surely due not only to his personal temperament but also to the fact that he’s much older than the typical protagonist of his films, and his work is much more formally assured and precise than Swanberg’s.

Hong’s films are notorious for the amount of alcohol imbibed in them: there’s always at least one scene where his protagonist, usually a filmmaker or an academic or both (his films are sometimes set in film departments and take as one of their subjects the intrigues that brew there), gets drunk on soju and embarrasses himself in front of his colleagues or else a girl he is interested in romantically, and with whom he probably has a long and painful history. Before Drinking Buddies, on the other hand, I can’t recall a film by Swanberg where alcohol played as large a role as it does here (although, obviously, there were occasionally party sequences with beers aplenty and romantic moments initiated with the help of a wine bottle): two of the main characters work at a small brewery in Chicago (the city where, incidentally, Hong studied at the Art Institute and where Swanberg has set many of his films) and bottles of beer are featured prominently in almost every scene. (There’s also much more time devoted to the way the brewery functions than would be thought necessary in a typical film of this sort). The characters not only partake after work when they meet up at a bar, but also at lunch and at other times of the day. When Kate (the character played by Olivia Wilde) gets to her boyfriend’s (Ron Livingston) apartment after having spent a considerable amount of time at a bar, the first thing she does is grab a beer from the refrigerator, before scolding him playfully for not having finished the bottles she brought him from work. This small detail (that Kate loves beer, whereas Chris prefers wine) retroactively explains the growing rift between them. A similar dynamic operates between her coworker Luke (Jake Johnson) and his longtime girlfriend Jill (Anna Kendrick): there’s a scene where he gets home, asks her twice if she would want anything to drink since he’s getting a beer, she says no, and then later that same night she decides to bring up the subject of marriage while in bed. Swanberg, through these subtle parallels, is making a connection between Kate and Luke without making everything excessively tidy, as in most romantic comedies: whatever the disagreements between Luke and Jill may be, their relationship is much more solid than the one Kate is in. One of the loveliest moments of the film, which highlights Kate’s longing for a different type of connection than she has with her boyfriend, involves her getting out of bed at Chris’ cabin where the four of them are spending the night (he’s already sleeping) and going downstairs to hang out with Luke and Jill, who are up playing cards and laughing and drinking beers.

The titular character of Hong’s film is a young acting student played by Jung Eun-chae. The film follows her for three days in early spring (though, importantly, not consecutive days; there are lapses: March 21, then March 27, and finally April 3). Alcohol only plays an important dramatic role in the first of these days, although it is not completely absent in the other two. Critic Mike D’Angelo, who didn’t like the film very much, joked that it could aptly be called Lady Alcoholic. In the first of the film’s marvelous extended and drawn-out sequences, we see Haewon spend the afternoon with her mother, who is leaving for Canada the very next day. Their walk through the city demonstrates quite clearly that few filmmakers since Eric Rohmer know how to use specific locales recurrently and also public spaces as well as Hong (José Luis Guerín’s Strasbourg in En la ciudad de Sylvia [2007] is an obvious exception); there are moments here that are as beautiful as certain sequences in La femme de l’aviateur (1981). Saddened by the thought of her mother’s departure, Haewon decides to call her ex-boyfriend (Lee Sun-kyun), a married film director who has a kid and also teaches at her school. They meet up and, just before going into a restaurant, they spot several of Haewon’s classmates; unsure whether they have been seen, they decide it’s best to join them. What follows is yet another flawless example of what is perhaps the signature scene in a Hong film: a table dividing the frame, with the characters facing each other (their gaze directed either to the off-screen space on the right or left) and conversing and drinking for several minutes without a single cut. Here the shot lasts over nine minutes and during that time Haewon (who entered the restaurant with a defiant cry: “Fine! I’m drinking!”) predictably gets drunk, glances uncomfortably at the professor, while also trying to avoid revealing that there is anything going on between them to the other students; they, in turn, speak badly of her when she goes to the bathroom after downing several shots of soju in quick succession.

While the scene just described accurately and painfully depicts the process of drinking with others and the inherent conflicts which that situation involves (beautifully conveyed in the Svevo quote at the beginning and to which it would be foolish of me to attempt to add anything), the second instance of Haewon drinking is a sort of private ritual. It takes place towards the end of the film at the same park where both she and the professor spent the whole of the second day, and she has just effectively ended her relationship with him. She finds a man drinking soju by himself (the same man who, on that previous occasion, had spoken to the professor and encouraged him to make things right with Haewon) and asks him if she could have a glass; she drinks two. Before leaving the park she shares one final moment with the professor, who she sees sitting on a bench crying. It of course remains an open question what might happen next, especially since, at that precise moment, Haewon might not be at her most lucid for obvious reasons. What matters are the continuous attempts to understand that other person and, more importantly, to comprehend oneself. It’s also worth pointing out, as a sort of conclusion, that this penultimate shot of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon literally almost mirrors the final one of Drinking Buddies, with one important difference. Swanberg, who is making a fairly traditional comedy (although it’s difficult not to point out how special it is when compared to the films it superficially resembles), can show the expression on his characters’ faces and this ending benefits greatly from the way they gradually come to realize that things might turn out okay. Hong, who is after something different and largely indefinable, does well to keep this direct view partially hidden.