Iván Forgács Art of textbooks

Philippe Harel: La femme défendue

Isabelle Carré (Muriel) 49 KByte

We are living in the age of textbooks. Recent times have apparently convinced both authors and publishers that producing textbooks is a safe business, and I am not convinced that it is simply because of the stimulative effect of the NAT (National Core Curriculum). It seems as if more and more people all by themselves chose this form as a means of expounding their thoughts since more and more people are able to realise that they don't have truly genuine thoughts. So what? Well, there is this immense amount of knowledge. It has to be systematised and transferred. This is not an easy job to do, either, you may not even consider it useless. However it may be, it is as if textbooks symbolised our intellectual life. They comprise a range which is impossible and prohibited to break out of and which orders us to get stuck in the achievements and unsolved problems of the past. A "literary genre" which does not expect any creativity from the evaluative communication and, later on, from the acquisition a tremendous knowledge, a device which guarantees scholarly education and, at the same time, exempts us from the burden of studying science creatively. In art, it is slightly more difficult to define this trend, but its existence is well perceptible. It definitely must exist since it would be strange if our age did not aim to be secure in this respect. Some people call it mass-produced art, others festival art, but it is all the same, the heart of the matter is some kind of jig-saw puzzle aestheticism: it is there and just has to be reconstructed. It is true that you cannot do so without having certain skills and knowledge either, but it may not have the slightest cathartic experience in store for you because of its telling premeditatedness over a certain point. For quite a while, French film art seems to have been teaching rather than studying how to be original, new-wavish and alternative in style. That would not be a problem by itself since important values can be kept alive until another prime time comes. The problem is that the function of these culture-oriented products is completely different in practice: they satisfy the artistic needs of a snobbish class to the extent that those who belong to it lose all their susceptibility to the real avant-garde trends, which perhaps grow out of nothing. Phillippe Harel's work titled Forbidden Woman is some kind of a two-tier teaching material of secret affairs between men and women and professional art-film making. I would not offend him unnecessarily, moreover, I would prefer not to offend him at all. For two reasons. Partly because his film is really about something and partly because he avoids any unnecessary self-reflectivity, devoting no room for proving his own talent. In short, Harel represents the "textbook" art of our age in a very likeable and almost characteristic way. That is all he can offer now, but never mind! It may not be enough to satisfy the snobbish, but another layer of the audience seemed to be awfully grateful for the modest and sincere tone and for analysing a topic common to everyone, and they took pleasure in entering into the spirit of the film in spite of the minor examples of affectedness. For the majority, watching the film must have been a meaty one and a half hour, even if thinking over it retrospectively revealed that they spent it at the commonplace level. Harel is no Woody Allen and I do not think he wants to be either, but had he taken the risk of being an epigon and had not taken on a kind of sociologist tradition of looking at things, he may certainly have not walked into the trap of banality. It is not always worth telling a story about the so-called "everyday heroes". Especially not, if it is a love story and, on top of that, an extramarital affair is included. Of course the problem is not that Muriel works at a travel agency and François is a real estate agent, but that they should show their lower middle-class faceless selves during an affair which, barely because of its "technical" complications and constant moral trials, every figure experiences as a fulfilment of their own characters. The director may not like this sort of romance, but he cannot really think of anything else but to make the story dull. He confines himself to using stereotypes and he practically finds himself looking for clichés this way. The 39 year-old François picks up Muriel, who is a lot younger than him, after a party, he drives her home and rings her up the following day, the first date comes and then they have lunch together, a walk in the park is followed by the moany exploration of the family situation and it turns out that they cannot go on with each other like that, but they do, the girl has another boyfriend, but that does not matter, they head for a hotel intending to have some kind of a harmless undressing, which of course ends up in a maddening sexual intercourse, and troubles begin, difficult situations, lies, several examples of resentment and reconciliation, jealousy and petty-minded revenge, break-ups and restarts. And meanwhile, thousands of telephone calls coming in to make answer-phones busy all the time. This is an accurate, thought-provoking case study, but incapable of depicting the emptiness, reserved cold and everyday cowardice of our lives at a metaphorical level. The film, on one hand, does not intend to explore motivation and depict inner progress at a deeper level, but its structure, on the other hand, is not alienating enough and not without buds of inner struggle. Harel is unable to be consistently cruel enough to make us see his heroes only from outside, and although he makes some interesting observations, he is not courageous enough to enter their souls either. But how rightly do the dialogues characterise these nerve-rackingly sterile, but at places exciting situations! A couple of signs expressly suggest a dramatic situation: Murial realises almost right at the beginning that their affair is no game to play, the liberal sounding François dares not to take on the girl in any way, he is led by his daily state of mind to use her on some occasions as a means of reaching orgasm or as a means of conjuring up the cathartic state of love on others. (Anyway, he probably loves her.) Harel is also paralysed by some sort of uncertainty. He is all for making an author's film, but with no intention for the slightest showing-off. He certainly invents something, but this structural idea may only relieve him of his inhibitions, from the artistic point of view it is a compromise that results in the creator's complete helplessness. If the main points made above are acceptable, then it is obvious that the only level at which the director would have been able to add to the series of events an interpretation of a characteristic aesthetic value or dramatic filling is the narrative level. But he confines himself to the narrowest ranges of form by making us see everything through the eyes of François (the camera, that is). That, moreover, is a mechanical principle, which has to be followed all through the film. In other words? In other words, it is useless for interesting remarks and tragic situations to be outlined on the screen, due to a solution that is form-breaking but by no means new, we cannot see anything but the streets of Paris gliding past the car, the most important details of the scenes and Muriel (plus François when he looks into a mirror). Philippe Harel found a formal device which he could depend on to guarantee the art-film and, at the same time, commonplace nature of his work. However, it would be foolish not to realise and think over the problems which lie hidden in Forbidden Woman. The fact that this film is to a certain extent an abortive attempt does not necessarily mean it is empty or worthless, and it will most certainly help many of us to confront with the chaos of our personal lives and, instead of waving a hand, to go on searching for the modern interpretations of the relation between the two sexes and of family life, soberly loosening the moral bounds of experiencing love.

Isabelle Carré (Muriel) 60 KByte