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Dusted
Off
By Jeff Reichert
Gabrielle
Dir. Patrice Chéreau, France, No distribution
Dissecting the vicissitudes
of fin de siècle bourgeoisie on film often results
in works that resemble dusty china cabinets, with
emphasis and focus placed squarely on silverware,
candles, dresses, and complicated codes of etiquette.
Period filmmaking is box-office kibble for the
gray-haired set, audiences old enough to romanticize
a time in which their parents and grandparents
inhabited, one during which, with the benefit
of hindsight, the calendar change from one century
into another seems to actually resemble a marked
divide between two distinct eras. For all the
intellectual capital spent in academia tracing
the birth of the modern and its offshoots in avant-garde
art of the time, cinema seems largely content
with looking back and turning out intricately
woven visual tea cozies; even if they may be updated
somewhat with Foulcauldian notions of festering
rots and illicit desires at the core of constricting
social codes and corsets. Recent films like Raul
Ruíz’s Time Regained, Arnaud Desplechin’s
Esther Kahn, and Olivier Assayas’s Les
Destinées aimed themselves at more daring
audiences by injecting welcome energy into a moribund
arena of filmmaking, and were rewarded for their
efforts with respectable if limited returns (too
hip or not hip enough?). And now, Patrice Chéreau,
who has been gradually becoming one of the more
interesting French filmmakers working today since
the international success of 1994’s Queen Margot,
returns to the New York Film Festival with Gabrielle,
which is, to these eyes, a more than worthy attempt
to take the turn of the century on its and our
aesthetic terms.
Based on Joseph Conrad’s long story “The Return,”
Gabrielle details the emotional and intellectual
fallout when a society wife, the titular Gabrielle
Hervey (Isabelle Huppert), leaves her husband
of 10 years for another man via letter in the
afternoon, only to return home later that evening.
The husband, Jean (Pascal Greggory), ranks among
that breed of emotionally deadened, supremely
confident, and narcissistic males who so often
inhabit these fictions. His choice to marry, as
related through voiceover that draws heavily from
the source text, though seemingly spontaneous
is the result of an eminently reasonable thought
process—on a beautiful day, the kind in which
“animated flowers smile at bewitched knights”
he decided that “happiness was the lot of all
mankind” and alighted upon the first flower to
catch his fancy: Gabrielle. He admits a lack of
intimacy between them (“no need” he offers), and
that to his collector’s eye (their home, with
a hallway full of glass cases and walls bedecked
with paintings appropriately resembles an art
gallery) she had become his “most prized item.”
Her letter cracks his faith in an airtight world
view (literalized as he shatters a glass decanter,
and the film’s black-and-white cinematography
bleeds into color), and the rest of Gabrielle
follows his contortions as he tries to “compose
the appropriate face” to wear in light of his
most cherished object’s infidelity.
Perhaps this sounds similar to the aforementioned,
derided cinema of crockery, where starched collars
and crystalline earrings substitute for real characters,
and Gabrielle traffics in some of that
hermetic sensibility, but to different ends. Chéreau
allows little immediate sense of a world outside
the bounds of the Hervey mausoleum and the emotional
crisis taking place—even the few exterior shots
scrutinize little more than Greggory’s ruggedly
anonymous countenance, as his voiceover briefly
sketches the narrative of his life—but this is
all so that he can clearly delimit the boundaries
of his fairly radical formal project. Abrupt shifts
from color to black-and-white, superimpositions
of swatches of text, jarring slow-motion, discomfiting
modernist musical selections that alternately
underscore and undermine the drama, an edgy camera
that can’t seem to decide where to rest—Chéreau
sets all of these mechanisms to work in this microscopic
examination of the wreckage of two lives, and
perhaps, if you’re willing to do the work, of
an entire class. It’s not unlike the treatment
I’d imagine someone like Arnaud Desplechin might
give this material, and the closest corollary
I can find for Gabrielle is his Esther
Kahn, except that Desplechin’s universes (aside
from their cockeyed optimism and sense of the
possible) feel pieced together from shards of
jagged glass into some sort of Chagall-esque harmony.
Chéreau seems more intent on starting a crack
in an unvarnished pane and watching its tendrils
spread slowly to its outermost edges.
Of course, to make all this work, the two lives
at the center of the eruption need compelling
performers to fill them out. Who better then,
than Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory to lend
heft to dialogue like: “The thought of your sperm
inside me is unbearable” or “I want to flow into
him like blood” or “I can trace your life in each
blue vein,” all of which read on paper like the
outline for some Catherine Breillat outrageousness,
but drop onscreen like heavy artillery? Greggory’s
career is less illustrious than his counterpart
(it took me until 2003’s Raja to really
notice him) but Gabrielle is constructed,
like the Conrad story, around Jean’s struggles
to comprehend his wife’s betrayal and compose
a reaction, and Pascal’s more than up to the task.
His huge, sad eyes rest above lips that draw easily
back into a contemptuous sneer and both are topped
by a graying, foppish mop that spends half the
movie in need of smoothing—it’s a visage meant
for coming undone which it does in splendid fashion;
his anguish as he lies on the stairs after attempting
to rape his wife is stunning in its complexity.
Huppert, for her part, plays the tragically ossified
socialite we’ve encountered her as before to the
hilt; it’s a performance more notable for small
satisfactions than wholesale surprises, but she
remains stunning nonetheless. As she grows more
hysterical in her embarrassment, Jean wonders
“Wasn’t the silent sufferer lovelier, more awe-inspiring?”
Do Gabrielle and Jean ever really elevate to the
level of characters deserving of our empathy?
Not necessarily, but that’s not Chéreau’s aim.
Unlike his last film, Son frère, (which
was, shockingly, produced for television), an
underseen modern masterpiece in which his camera
and editing were tightly synched to its quiet
human tragedy, Gabrielle’s form-first approach
pits his performers against his direction as they
simultaneously spar with each other.
To even out the playing field, Chéreau works to
buttress the Gabrielle character, expanding her
role beyond Conrad’s original creation. In “The
Return,” the wife remains unnamed, and the story
is clearly framed through Jean’s (Alvan in the
story) perspective. Referred to as “the girl,”
“that woman,” and “his wife,” she’s barely more
than a vision until about midway through, and
even then remains little more than a figure for
her husband’s bewilderment to bounce off. Gabrielle
adds in an ambiguous interaction between maid
Yvonne (Claudia Coli) and her mistress which,
in its movement from talk of past happiness to
classist venom and back complicates the pathos
that surrounds Gabrielle; she’s in many ways the
more sympathetic character, even if unfaithful
she admits to having found a way to love her husband
(though she notes minutes later that of the two
times she’d been happy in life, the second came
while composing her letter), but no less immune
from the sort of casual cruelty we’ve come to
associate with her ilk. Again, I have a sneaking
suspicion that it’s through his formal tactics
that Chéreau makes his most radical maneuver.
The shifts from color to black-and-white seem
almost arbitrary on first viewing, but given the
extra emphasis placed on the wife character by
Chéreau’s script, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps
he’s turned the tables on Conrad. That, instead
of rendering Gabrielle the object, there’s a concerted
effort to shift perspective in her favor. Jean’s
reveries in the first half hour remain largely
colorless and cold, whereas color most often figures
in their scenes together, and eventually takes
over the film as their tête-à-tête intensifies.
Jean’s voiceover, obviously, employs the first
person, but is it too much a stretch, given the
additional narrative threads Chéreau offers Gabrielle,
to imagine that somehow this is her reverie of
his self-perceptions that is alternately fortified
and splintered by his reactions to her letter?
It seems no accident then, that in her newly imagined
conversation with Yvonne, Gabrielle crosses class
boundaries and suggests the goal of all womanhood
has been relegated to, “return[ing] their gaze….the
men who look upon us.” Fitting that the one moment
of unity in Gabrielle might hold yet another clue
to the intents behind starkest its starkest division.
These shifts from color to B&W represent perhaps
the most interesting and perplexing tactic among
the host Chéreau employs, and I’m not sure if
my preferred interpretation necessary holds more
weight than another (and I can’t decide if I would
prefer the shifts in film stock to be arbitrary
or not). In many ways the film is an experiment,
and I’d call it an unqualified success, if not
for a few minor quibbles. Questions of desire
and sex circulate throughout “The Return,” but
much is left unspoken and alluded to, as per the
mores of Conrad’s day. Chéreau leaves nothing
of Gabrielle to the imagination—by the end of
the film, Huppert is left literally naked in bed,
having just offered her body to her husband. Boiling
its conflict down so blatantly to sex is a crude
gesture, not ineffective in and amongst all the
jarring camera movements, edits, and music, but
just because our strictures on sexuality in art
are looser than those of Conrad’s time doesn’t
mean we need always take advantage of that. This
move dovetails with my other complaint: that there’s
nothing so comparatively beautiful in Gabrielle
as this bit of Conrad’s prose from “The Return”:
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