1
Jacques Prévert is a jerk
Jacques PrĂ©vert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom; more generally, he was pretty much on the side of freedom. He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises; he sometimes gets confused with Jean Gabin. Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques PrĂ©vert â especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed. Itâs dismaying to note that this repulsive poetic realism, of which PrĂ©vert was the main architect, continues to wreak havoc â we think weâre paying Leos Carax a compliment by identifying him with this style (just as people make out that Rohmer is undoubtedly a new Guitry, etc.). In fact, French cinema has never recovered from the advent of the talkies; one day these talkies will finally kill cinema. Too bad.1
After the war, around the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques PrĂ©vert enjoyed enormous success; one canât help being struck by the optimism of that generation. These days, the most influential thinker is more likely to be Cioran.2 At that time, people listened to Vian, Brassens âŠ3 Lovers smooched on public benches, there was a baby boom, and plenty of low-cost housing was built to accommodate all those people. Lots of optimism, faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit. Obviously, weâve got a lot smarter since then.
With the intellectuals, PrĂ©vert was less fortunate. Yet his poems are full of those silly puns that are so entertaining in Boby Lapointe âŠ4 Still, itâs true that the chanson is, as we say, a âminorâ genre, and even intellectuals need something to relax to. But when they focus on written texts, their real livelihood, they become harsh critics. And PrĂ©vertâs âtextual workâ remains embryonic: he writes with clarity and a real naturalness, sometimes even with emotion; heâs not interested in writing as such, nor in the impossibility of writing; his main source of inspiration, it seems, is life. So on the whole he hasnât provided fodder for postgraduate theses. Today, however, he has entered the PlĂ©iade, which constitutes a second death.5 There his work lies, complete and frozen. This is an excellent opportunity to wonder why Jacques PrĂ©vertâs poetry is so mediocre â so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it. The classic explanation (his writing âlacks rigourâ) is quite wrong; through his puns, his light and limpid rhythms, PrĂ©vert actually expresses his conception of the world perfectly well. The form suits the content, which is the most that can be demanded of a form. Moreover, when a poet immerses himself so much in life, in the real life of his time, it would be an insult to judge him by purely stylistic criteria. If Jacques PrĂ©vert writes, itâs because he has something to say; thatâs all to his credit. Unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid; sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. There are pretty girls with no clothes on, and middle-class men who bleed like pigs when their throats are cut. The children are charmingly immoral, the thugs are alluring hunks, the pretty girls with no clothes on give their bodies to the thugs; the middle-class men are old, obese, impotent, and decorated with the Legion of Honour; their wives are frigid; the priests are disgusting old caterpillars who invented sin to stop us from living. Itâs all very familiar; one can be forgiven for thinking that Baudelaire does it better. Or even Karl Marx who, at least, doesnât miss his target when he writes that âthe bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand [âŠ] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculationâ.6 Intelligence is of no help at all in writing good poems; it does however stop you writing bad ones. If Jacques PrĂ©vert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic clichĂ©. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques PrĂ©vert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically, an idiot.
Weâve been splashing about in the âicy water of egotistical calculationâ since our earliest childhood. We can live with this situation, we can try to survive it; we can also just let ourselves sink. But what itâs impossible to imagine is that freeing the powers of desire alone is likely to melt the ice. The story goes that it was Robespierre who insisted on adding the word âfraternityâ to the motto of the French Republic; weâre now in a position to gauge the full irony of this anecdote. PrĂ©vert certainly saw himself as a supporter of fraternity; but Robespierre was not an opponent of virtue â far from it.
Notes
- 1. Houellebecqâs summary of the reasons for PrĂ©vertâs notoriety includes references to the films directed by Marcel CarnĂ© for which PrĂ©vert wrote the screenplays, including Quai des brumes (1938), starring Jean Gabin, Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and Portes de la nuit (1946). Antonin Artaud seems to have written fifteen screenplays for films, of which only one was made (La Coquille et le clergyman, Germaine Dulac, 1928). As a director, Leos Carax â whose films include Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and Holy Motors (2012) â is noted for his âpoeticâ style, if not exactly for his realism. Ăric Rohmer (1920â2010) was noted for his talkative films, part of the French New Wave; and Sacha Guitry (1885â1957) was active in theatre and then cinema: he decided that the advent of the talkies was a boon for film and became a prolific cinema director.
- 2. Emil Cioran (1911â1995), born in Romania, settled in Paris in the Second World War and became known as a French writer of pessimistic essays and aphorisms.
- 3. Boris Vian (1920â1959) was talented in many artistic fields, well known as a singer and songwriter; Georges Brassens (1921â1981) was also a famed singer and songwriter.
- 4. Robert (known as Boby) Lapointe (1922â1972) was a humorous chansonnier and actor known for his word play.
- 5. The BibliothĂšque de la PlĂ©iade is a collection of (mainly French) writers deemed to be classics; to âenter the PlĂ©iadeâ is a mark of literary consecration.
- 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.
2
The Mirage by Jean-Claude Guiguet
Acultivated middle-class family on the shores of Lake Geneva. Classical music, short sequences with a great deal of dialogue, cutaways to the lake; all of this might give one the impression of dĂ©jĂ vu. The fact that the girl is painting intensifies our worries. But no, this isnât the twentyfifth Eric Rohmer clone. Itâs, oddly, much more than that.
When a film constantly juxtaposes the maddening and the magical, the magical rarely wins out; yet thatâs what happens here. The actors, somewhat hit-and-miss in their approach, have a hard time interpreting a script that seems overwritten and sometimes borders on the ridiculous. People will say they havenât found the right tone; this may not be entirely their fault. Whatâs the right tone for a sentence such as âThe fine weather has come to join usâ? Only the mother, Louise Marleau, is perfect from start to finish, and itâs undoubtedly her magnificent love monologue (itâs an amazing thing in films, the love monologue) that elicits our unreserved approval. We can soon forgive some of the dubious dialogues, some of the rather heavy-handed musical punctuations; in any case, none of this would get noticed in an ordinary film.
Starting with a theme of tragic simplicity (itâs spring and the weather is fine; a woman of about fifty aspires to experience one last carnal passion; but if nature is beautiful, itâs also cruel), Jean-Claude Guiguet has taken the maximum risk: that of formal perfection. The film is as far removed from the TV advert effect as it is from sputtering realism and arbitrary experimentalism; here, the sole pursuit is that of pure beauty. The way itâs cut into sequences, classic, refined, tenderly daring, corresponds exactly to the impeccable geometry of the framing. Itâs all precise, sober, and structured like the facets of a diamond: a rare work. Itâs also rare to see a film where the light so intelligently suits the emotional tone of the scenes. The lighting and decoration of the interior scenes are profoundly right, infinitely tactful; they remain in the background, like a discreet and dense orchestral accompaniment. Itâs only in the outdoor scenes, in the sunny meadows bordering the lake, that the light bursts out, playing a central role; and this too is perfectly in line with the filmâs purpose. There is a te...
