A Good Lelouch? Yes

Another text from Recrudescence.

A Good Lelouch? Yes

If we knew quite well how a bad Lelouch looked on the big screen, we didn't yet know how a good Lelouch would appear on the small one. Since Monday evening with Love is a Funny Thing (1969) on channel 3, we have a better idea. A good Lelouch being, by definition, a strange object, its tele-viewing could only accentuate its strangeness and add to its value. 

Right, people will say, but what exactly is a good Lelouch? A good Lelouch, we will answer without batting an eye, is a Lelouch which, instead of ostensibly under-playing the great mawkish sentiments (the dreadful threat of sing-alongs about suppressed modesty on a background of love for life), over-plays very finely petty little feelings. It's when he films hollowed moments that Lelouch is interesting, not when he believes he's filming between the lines. And it so happens that the star couple of Love is a Funny Thing (Belmondo as a friendly coward and Girardot in cutting sincerity) was already caught, at the dawn of the seventies, in that phenomenon that we keep observing: cinema no longer really knows what to do with its last stars. They are ringing hollow!

One can see Love is a Funny Thing as a documentary that changes subjects once or twice along the way. A documentary on the "world of cinema" on one side and a documentary on "America" on the other. And since documentaries, although a very respected genre, still bore everyone, Lelouch asked two very popular and very French actors to serve — through them and their weak love story — as common threads. Thanks to them, we enter without fuss (Lelouch prefers music to sound and harmony to fracas) into these two supposedly enchanted worlds: Cinema and America. French and knowing to be so, the two stars are already recycled in gracious performance and luxurious begging. "Don't forget the tour guides!" they seem to tell us at every moment.

They are therefore neither good nor bad, they are — in every sense of the word — elsewhere. The only problem is that this elsewhere, it too has become hollow. It's terrible, but elsewhere is no longer what it used to be. Too late for cinema navel-gazing on itself. Too late for the American dream or exotic America. Too late for the France-centric conquest of the West. Lelouch, no doubt, wasn't thinking of getting beyond simple demystification (showbiz people love to multiply the proofs of their normality) but in doing so (let's remember it's a good Lelouch), he carelessly handed over the doctored keys to his own aesthetic.

For there is something joyful in the two scenes where Belmondo (who plays a film composer) is filmed at work, in the process of adding emotion to a weak scene with great sweeps of violins, or later, explaining to Girardot how one writes music for an Indian attack scene. First, it's rare that a film shows work. Also, it's rare that a film shows bad work. Finally, it's rare that a filmmaker dares to offer himself so unreservedly to self-criticism. As for America in Love is a Funny Thing, it is no longer at all a land to discover or to mythify; it's simply a country still surprising enough where it's possible — between two planes, two affairs, two films — to do a bit of tourism, with the missus.

Lelouch's frankness is, it too, likeable. It captures from its very beginnings a socio-aesthetic phenomenon: the resistible rise of the touristic idea at the expense of the old metaphysic of the voyage. It lacks grandeur, certainly, but, as early as 1969, it freed up a way of filming that is entirely real: that of ordinary tourism with its false emotions, its clichés, its bad English accent, the anecdotes one will embellish when back at home, the airport waiting lounges and hotel lobbies all alike, the jet-lagged flirting, the stupid laughs in Las Vegas, and all the false naturalness of the little French people's timid bravado when showing off in "ze states".

This produces a film that has the atonal charm of the seventies, the decade when we began to abandon pathos. In the management of "almost" dead times and the impossible surprise, Lelouch certainly doesn't have the fierce anti-effectiveness of a Ferreri. But by dint of never filming big things head-on, he just about managed to record little things, at an angle. Hats off!

First published in Libération on November 16th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.