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Around the corner:Nine |
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A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Dear Jack,
Exploring the issue of the legs further, I almost coincidentally stumbled across Eric Rohmer’s Le genou de Claire (Claire’s knee, 1970), the fifth in his series of moral tales. To my surprise it’s not only a film that involves tennis, the two protagonists are actually playing a game very much like ours! The players are two diplomats, old lovers perhaps, who meet during summer holidays somewhere in the countryside: the Romanian Aurore is writing a novel and is visited by Jérôme, a man of around forty, yet “above suspicion” since he will get married upon his return. Walking in the garden they end up at the edge and look out over a tennis court, which inspires Aurore to a game. She makes up a little story about a man of around forty who comes to watch the tennis game there on a daily basis and develops a crush on one of the young girls, etc, etc. What kind of ending should she write for the story? Aurora teases Jérôme into an experiment to simply act out the rest of the story and then report to her so she can write things down. Why not start with seducing the youngest daughter of the family? It’s only later in the film, when the older sister Claire arrives, that matters become more complicated. It again happens at the tennis court – if tennis provides a public space for performing a restrained, ritualized sexuality, revolving around the exposure of the calves, then the trouble starts indeed when moving towards the knee and higher up. In Jérôme’s words: “Every woman has a most vulnerable point. In the case of Claire, it was her knee.” Touching it becomes his goal in the game with Aurore.
Rohmer’s is a typical French movie with lots of talking and philosophizing about love and life, a moral tale moreover with a certain theatricality, game structure and fairly contrived choreography. While the storytelling has rather too much weight for my taste, the penultimate scene is quite intriguing. The night before returning home, Jérôme visits Aurore for sharing his report of at last having touched Claire’s knee and muses upon the fact that “some women always seem to escape”, attempting once more to have Aurore answer his stories, upon which she quickly answers: “Moi, je suis hors jeu.” (“I am not in the game.”) And right after, she looks very briefly into the camera with a gaze of complicity. It’s a brilliant moment, with Aurora claiming to master even the cinematic reality and her ability to step out of that frame.
As the film reminded me of Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), I was wondering whether such an outsider’s point would appear in it. And yes, as soon as Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovic) have set the contract of their altogether more sinister game, Glenn Close looks briefly into the camera with a self-assured gaze, after which she will remain on top of her game, but also be sucked gradually into its consequences: games do really touch life and get under one’s skin – even when on the brink of comedy sometimes, this is after all not the lighthearted existentialism of the French wave, but the contract of British realist cinema.
Last week François Ozon’s comedy Potiche came out, with Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, which provided me with the opportunity to wander around a little more in French cinema and its tennis games. Though Depardieu played in François Truffaut’s tennis film, La femme d’à côté (1981), I decided to pursue the question of women’s legs and follow Luis Buñuel’s choreography of Catherine Deneuve’s legs in Belle de jour (1967). As Sévérine/Belle de Jour, Deneuve walks into the film several times with her legs introducing all the narrative layers: first she is dragged into the woods and whipped in an SM dream sequence; later on we see a child’s legs, a memory heavy with pedophilia and trauma; walking away from a tennis court, she makes up her mind and will embark on that other game; before she actually enters the brothel to offer her services (where she will repeatedly hear: “This is not a game!”), there is a good deal of wavering on the staircase. Belle de jour is a subtle and complex film, including more leg choreography and deadly games. Buñuel leaves in suspense the question whether Sévérine is actually able to step out of all these games: she leaves the brothel and literally walks out of the scene when Mr. Husson pays a visit to “tell the truth” to her husband in coma. We’re carried out of the film by the sound of little jingling bells, traveling again with horse and carriage into the phantasmal landscape we know from the SM dreams.
Or maybe into a Magritte painting, such as La voix de l’espace (1931), with the bell being a sign for the female sexual organ, and according to Bart Verschaffel also a symbol in which two secrets converge, just like in Courbet’s L’origine du monde: the seduction of the image and sexual difference as the image’s horizon and ultimate limit.
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Dear Jack, it seems impossible to escape the discursive rant when addressing French cinema, and this letter risks becoming a tennis potlatch, with me seduced by returning tennis balls left and right, an occasional ping-pong ball, also the eyeballs stuttering across the court and now even these bells. Magritte reminds me of Hitchcock again, with The 39 Steps (1935) being nothing else than a filmic remake of Ceci n’est pas une pipe (first occurrence in 1927) – and a central scene of the film involves a pipe indeed! Rohmer is inspired by Murnau, which would lead me to Wenders’ alter ego Friedrich Munro and his attempt to grasp the edge of the image. And then perhaps further on to Japanese golf stadiums or pinball machines… Yet for now, I will stick to tennis and try to work my way out of the game, or at least out of this letter.
Yesterday I went around the corner to see François Ozon’s Potiche. In the opening sequence we follow Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) in a red jogging suit and white sneakers running through a park and into the film. She takes a pause to stretch and greet the animals: a bambi, a bird, two mating rabbits, a squirrel. All of it is bathed in a kitsch atmosphere that announces a comedy about a housewife who writes poetry. Yet we’re in France in 1977 and this is French cinema, so the conceptual landscape requires some political complexity too. Announcing the backdrop of social conflicts, class issues and strike, as well as the feminist movement and its impact on family and work, in the first dialogue, Robert, director of an umbrella factory, tells his wife that she should leave kitchen work to the maid and waives her coming to club Badaboum with him. Her reply: “My place is not in the Badaboum, my place is not in the kitchen, so where is my place?” What follows is a funny, well-written tale about emancipation and the negotiation of place in recent history. Curiously, the film’s narrative has one quasi-loose end, one way out, which concerns the question who of Suzanne Pujol’s lovers in May 1952 is actually the father of her son – if not Robert Pujol nor Maurice Babin, then probably Master Ballestra. Or maybe even the tennis teacher we’ve seen in a brief flash, throwing up a ball for service?
I did enjoy watching the film, but now it feels like I’m repeating myself, and though I promised in an earlier letter not to re-enact tennis games from film history I already knew, the balls keep coming! In John Clarke’s novel The Tournament, the journalist of Paris Match, named Roland Barthes, causes an incident by stating: “Tennis went through fundamental transformations, nowadays the relation between reporters and public is the most important intellectual contract.” According to Barthes, “the tennis player is actually dead.”
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued |
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