La séparation
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La Séparation is a 1994 French language film by writer/director Christian Vincent after the novel La Séparation by Dan Franck.
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[edit] Plot
Parisian parents Pierre and Anne go to see a film; it bothers Pierre that Anne rejected his overtures during the movie. Not long afterwards Anne tells Pierre that she 'thinks she fell in love with someone'. Pierre registers the news without reaction. Indeed, both seem determined to remain composed and deal with Pierre's hurt pride and Anne's new interest rationally.
Pierre's discusses the situation with mutual friends Victor and Claire. Their reassurances are little comfort. Anne's new relationship begins to strain at Pierre. There is also the added complication of their 18 month-old son Loulou. Despite the regular presence of a nanny, Laurence, each find reason to claim the other is neglecting him. Paranoia and recrimnation begin to escalate. Fights break out, most bitterly after Pierre discovers that Anne has taken Loulou to her mother's.
Pierre surprises Anne at work and asks to talk. He is more composed and tells her that he has decided he must leave. Anne reciprocates with the news that her affair has ended. Digesting this news with the same outward calm as at the beginning of the film Pierre walks Anne back to their flat. He feels unable to go in. Instead he wanders the streets, lost and unable to hail a stream of passing taxis.
[edit] The Characters and their Relationships
Notwithstanding the camcorder prologue of Loulou sleeping, the film opens with Pierre, Anne, Victor and Claire reminiscing at a table in a cafe. This is the natural milieu of these ageing soixante-huitards, who must have been chewing over ideas and gossip in Parisian cafes for many years. At once Vincent gives us the two tectonic plates of the film: the rational zealots, once militant students, who tried to prescribe the way they were going to live their lives through argument; and the middle aged nostaligics who cling fondly to the memory of those days for mutual protection from the realities of the modern world. At Anne's catastrophic news Pierre is outwardly calm. He seems to want to treat this key juncture in his relationship with Anne with the same prescription he once ascribed to the rest of his life. The nature of his own feelings and hurt he deems superfluous.
When he speaks to Victor and Claire they too treat the issue with irony ('It's your first crisis?!') and a flippancy that is designed to collude with Pierre in belittling his feelings.
What is different about Pierre and Anne's relationship is that they have a son. Loulou is an important symbol of the manifest mutual responsibility Pierre and Anne have to one another and of the new world in which they live, wide-eyed to new instruction, oblivious of the long-established. Pierre's relationship with the child, though warm is antipathetic: he films him with his camcorder and discusses whether or not he could win custody of the boy with a lawyer. His behaviour towards the family unit is also unilateral. He suggests that they buy a stake in a parochial holiday villa – ‘You'd be bored in a week' Anne bluntly reminds him. On the occasion he feels compelled to spend the day with Loulou he (voluntarily) fails to tell Anne of their whereabouts. Doing this he fails to make some point about his parental autonomy, succeeding only in inflaming Anne's distress as a co-parent.
[edit] Themes and Symbols
The film is fairly uncluttered with visual motifs, although they do exist sporadically in nuanced counterpoint to the narrative. A strong recurring symbol is that of colour and particularly red. Pierre, with his dark/muted dress pursues a black-and-white view of the world through his camcorder. He does have a grasp of colour but only in fantasy, illustrating (in red) a book of children's stories. Anne's first close-up, as they discuss the impact of her lover has a full spectrum of colour on the bedspread behind her; the next morning she tells Pierre to mind her red lipstick. Her place of work, populated with children, also has red doors.
On the beach Pierre takes great satisfaction in Anne's inability to control the primary-coloured kite. During this episode Pierre thinks that he has made a point about her dependence only for Anne to dismiss his point-making as ridiculous – the reality is that he has to go and retrieve the toy.
Pierre's day with Loulou is strongly marked with the colour red. Loulou wears a red hood and Pierre a red scarf. One cannot help but recall Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, in which Donald Sutherland battles a debilitating grief at the loss of a child. He wears a red scarf and pursues a red-hooded vision of his daughter across Venice to the terminal detriment of his marriage.
The primary cinematic reference however is that of Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51, the film the couple are watching at the time of their opening confrontation at the cinema. In this film the death of a child symbolizes the failure of its parents to maintain their relationship and the couple realise that their marriage is scuttled.
[edit] Texture
La séparation has no added soundtrack. There is music at the beginning and end of the film, the Air from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations – the varied development of a theme, only to return changed and enriched to its original state (the form of this piece of music) might be a succinct synoptic outline of the film.
The story is told quite straightforwardly. Episodes in which time passes are not dwelt upon – Pierre's day out with Loulou and his impotent visit to Anne's mother's house are visually no more than inventoried. Vincent reserves the scrutinising eye of the camera for those moments when the characters are considering their current situation or moving to the next through dialogue. Generally his observational record is less about what happens than the manner in which it happens.
There is no explicit sexual content or even connotation during the film. We never see Anne's lover. There is a subtle counterpoint to this in the deployment of Laurence, the nanny. As the film progresses so her dealings with Pierre become slightly more protracted, culminating in the late scene in which she gets back off a bus she has just boarded; she has seen Pierre lost in the street and wants to help him. In addition to her covert assumption of this caring role, built up implicitly through her professional duties, Laurence is also plainly sexually mature. A (surely fortuitous) seqeunce early on in the film sees Loulou biting her nipple through her jumper as they play together, which shocks her momentarily. However, Pierre considers her interesting neither as a revenging sexual conquest over Anne nor as a source of comfort.
[edit] Conclusion
The film ends with opposing and equally viable possibilities to the denouement. Pierre has achieved his goal of taking a rational decision to resolve the conflict but acting on it - leaving - may suddenly not be necessary. The audience doesn't know whether he will choose to stay away permanently or whether he will return another day.
Unfortunately for Pierre either decision is intolerable. If he chooses a permanent separation, he must reconcile himself to losing everything. Alternatively, he could return to his life as if nothing had occurred. However, though the crisis has shown him the value of his relationship with both Anne and his son Loulou - making him ever more ready to re-invest in it - it has also demonstrated the practical illusion of his Existential autonomy. His life has been predicated on out-moded ideas and assumptions; he has seen that responsibility for leading his life in conjunction with others can be taken from him or negated. He can return - but never will he have been more alone. In the words of Michel Houellebecq (Extension du domaine de la lutte, also published 1994):
'I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed.' (trans. Paul Hammond 1998)
[edit] Critical Reception
The film received two César Award nominations for Best Actor (Daniel Auteuil) and Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) in 1995 (the year of its UK release). The film took four years to find a distributor in the United States but following its release in 1998 it was nominated for a 1999 Golden Satellite Award as Best Foreign Language Film.
[edit] Cast
- Isabelle Huppert - Anne
- Daniel Auteuil - Pierre
- Jérôme Deschamps - Victor
- Karin Viard - Claire
- Laurence Lerel - Laurence
- Louis Vincent - Loulou
