Jean Eustache's Numéro Zéro (2003)

 

Jean Eustache's Numéro Zéro was made in 1971 and (unlike most people) he considered this his first feature film, although it wasn't until TF1 broadcast Odette Robert, a much shortened version of it in its series of films about grandmothers, or rather until Pedro Costa, via Jean-Marie Straub and Bruno Eustache, restored the film and brought it to the screen in 2003, that it could be seen in its glory.

Numéro Zéro is a film taken by two cameras, in 'real time', of Odette Robert (Jean Eustache's maternal grandmother), telling her life story. The film begins with Bruno Eustache (Jean's son by Jeanne Delos) walking down the street with his great-grandmother Odette to buy a baguette. They return to the flat where Jean sits with his back to the audience, Odette settles down to a table opposite her grandson, a bottle of Ballantine's is produced and poured into two glasses with a dish of ice cubes at the side, and Odette talks and talks for two hours, not even being allowed for the scene to be interrupted for her to have a glass of water.

It might not on the surface sound like rivetting viewing for the audience – watching a seventy-year-old woman with dark glasses smoking, drinking and talking animatedly about her life with no interruption, just the occasional remark by the shadowy director. But it is rivetting: we hear a long story of abuse, of Odette being mentally rejected and directly and indirectly attacked by her step-mother jealous of her youth, of her husband's constant philandering, reducing her at one stage to cut his mistress's beautiful hair off and serve it on a plate to him as a dessert. There are many things of fascination here and at the end she says she feels drunk – although the audience can't help feeling that it's hardly a result of the whisky she's been consuming in moderation but drunk on two hours' outpouring of her life. Odette's 'performance' is superb cinema.

Jean Eustache's Mes petites amoureuses (1974)

 

The autobiographical Mes petites amoureuses is Jean Eustache's revisiting of his past: he was born in Pessac (Gironde) and then moved to Narbonne (Aude). It was a commercial failure, although now Eustache's reputation has grown immensely. The protagonist of this second (and final) feature by Eustache is Daniel (Martin Loeb) who lives in a village with his grandmother (Jacqueline Dufranne) until his mother (Ingrid Caven) calls him away to the big town where she lives in shabbiness with her Spanish lover José Ramos (Dionys Mascolo)*, an agricultural worker.

His mother can't afford to send Daniel to school: OK, it's free, but there are clothes, books, etc, so no way: he'll have to find his own way. She procures him a kind of job working in a tool/vehicle repair shop where he not only gets by but manages to prove himself far more intelligent and resourceful than the owner, not that the owner has the intelligence to understand that.

But Daniel keeps quiet about his intelligence, in fact keeps quite about most things by saying very little. He can work out how to mend a light on a Solex, but most of all he learns about sex from observation: on his train journey to his mother's town (let's call it Narbonne) he's learned a great deal from three passengers; the screens pulled down, two young men kiss and fondle a young girl, which recalls to some extent the threesome in La Maman et la putain (only of course with two men as opposed to two women; in a scene in a cinema in the city, he learns that a way to enjoy the opposite sex is to whisper to a single girl in front and spend time kissing her.

Mixing with older males at the local café, Daniel also learns the downside of the females of the day: they won't sleep with you before marriage. During a bike ride with several café friends to a neighbouring village he meets a girl, only to learn (on feeling around) that she doesn't want him to go very far because, as his café chums have said, there's no sex before marriage.

*Dionys Macolo was married to Margurite Duras from 1947 to 1956.

Jean Eustache's Offre d'emploi (1980)

 

Offre d'emploi was Jean Eustache's contribution to the television series Contes Modernes, which featured stories dedicated to the world of work. It lasts for just 18 minutes and was his last work. After finding a job advertisement in the paper while drinking a coffee in a café Pelletier (Michel Delahaye) has an initial inerview and follows this up, as requested, by posting a letter that he writes over a beer in another café.

Letters are subjected to a graphologist's/psychologist's cold, crude, even brutal pseudo-scientific examination and in the end two potential candidates are picked, of whom Pelletier is one. The boss asks the interviewer what she thinks, which is very scientific. Maybe Eustache was trying to make a point, and if so it's a good one: avoid being employed by anyone as the entire system is arbitrary and you're worth more than that!

Jean Eustache's Les Photos d'Alix (1979)

 

Les Photos d'Alix is a short documentary, slightly under 20 minutes, made in 1981 with two people: the gifted photographer Alix Cléo Renaud (who married the ouplipien Jacques in 1980) explaining the making and the aethetics of her photos to Eustache's son Boris.

Alix describes photos she took in France, New York and (apparently her much loved) London: she very much appreciates the distancing the English take from others. She changes a number of photos, double exposing them, blurring them, soft focuses them and creates an illusion of the place in which many are taken, indeed often an illusion of what the viewer is seeing. She suggests that all photos are sentimental, which perhaps make Boris think as he says nothing.

Alix Cléo Renaud died in Paris of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 31 in 1983. Her huband Jacques, three years after her death, wrote a collection of poems to her: Quelque chose noir.

Jean Eustache's La Rosière de Pessac 79 (1979)

 

Eleven years after Jean Eustache's fist cinematic return to Pessac with La Rosière de Pessac in 1968, came a second visit with a recording of the same event, but with a slightly changed situation.

La Rosière de Pessac 79 still includes the debate and the vote regarding the most virtuous young woman in the Mairie, the walk to her home, the processional march, the service in the church and the final celebration, but there are some differences. The black and white film has changed to colour, Pessac is dominated by HLMs from one of which La Rosière comes, the celebration is held outside as opposed to inside, and is much more raucous: the drinking song is a little more adventurous: surely unbecoming for such a sober occasion? Yes, I jest. But Eustache didn't, he was just recording.

Two years after this film was made Eustache killed himself – the last of several previously unsuccessful attempts. He was just 42, but leaves behind twelve films, of which of course the marathon La Maman et la putain is recognised as one of the most important films in French cinema.

Jean Eustache's La Rosière de Pessac (1968)

 

La Rosière de Pessac is a tradition in Pessac (now a part of the Bordeaux conurbation) which honours a young woman every year for her virtuousness. The traditon dates from many centuries and in a number of places, but was renewed in Pessac in 1896 by a bequest and continues today. Jean Eustache, who was born in Pessac, made a documentry (62 minutes) of the events, although not out of nostalgia, historical imperative, or personal interest: he simply wanted to film the action of an event in a place with no voiceover, no ideological content, therefore no mockery at all. If self-importance and the love of pomp can be seen in this then it's in the eye of the viewer via the camera, although the camera is intended to cast a neutral light.

Eustache shows the initial debate and decision to award a young woman la Rosière de Pessac, which involves a discussion and a vote in the town hall. This particular vote in 1968 is for three virtuous young women – a fourth possibility having been excluded as her father was an alcoholic – and the vote as to who of those present should be her godmother. The decisions having been made, the town hall officials – in this three-day event – go to the young woman's family and announce the news with many instances during which people 'faire la bise'. There is then the crowning of the young woman with roses, a ceremony with choir in the church, the presentation of former rosières (including one aged 92), and a dinner attended by many people, with the inclusion of the drinking song 'Boire un petit coup'.

Eustache regretted that no cinematic record was made of earlier celebrations, including during World War I and 1939. He argued that a recording should be taken every year so that a view of the time could be made.

Jean Eustache's Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus | Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966)

 

At only 47 minutes,  Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (dedicated to Charles Trenet (who else?)) is Jean Eustache's second short. Like Les Mauvaises Fréquentations before, it slowly leads towards the masterpiece which is La Maman et la putain, only more so. The Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud in Eustache's landmark film also stars in this, and is also a penniless drifter cruising the cafés in search of a woman, any woman.

The setting is Narbonne, where Eustache spent his youth. The young Daniel here has equally macho friends who view women as sexual objects, and of importance here is the need to dress respectably. The jobless Daniel has no money to buy new clothes, steals books from booksellers, but dreams of forsaking the same coat that a friend gave him several years before, dreams of buying a duffel coat!

His luck is in when, this being before Christmas, a photographer offers him a job wearing a Father Christmas costume and taking photos of him in the streets of Narbonne with his arm round children and other people. Daniel sees this as an opportunity to buy a duffel coat by the new year, and also get off with girls who allow him to touch them through their winter clothes. His attempts to seduce them though dates backfires, although he manages to buy a duffel coat with this money, as well as working for a lottery in which he can fiddle money.

The final scene is of Daniel and his drunken friends staggering down a street singing about visiting a brothel.

Jean Eustache's Les Mauvaises fréquentations, aka Du côté de Robinson | Robinson's Place (1973)

 

In 1963 Jean Eustache failed in an attempt to make a short film called 'La Soirée', although the year after he made Les Mauvaises fréquentations, a film 38 minutes long. In it can be seen vaguely similar themes to what was to become his masterpiece, La Maman et la putain, but this time with two young men more down-at-heel but making money (this time illegally) from a woman. Cafés feature prominently, although neither men has any pretence to intellectual sophistication.

The story: one Sunday two dubious characters go in search of a girl. They find one in Montmartre, approach her and discover she's going dancing with a girlfriend, so they join her, although the girlfriend doesn't turn up. They go for a drink elsewhere and one discovers that she's separated with two children. They go looking for another dancehall and find Robinson, where they sit down with a drink but the girl is invited to dance by an older type the girl doesn't like but she accepts because she can't see any other way out. On the third time the same guy asks her to dance the two men get tired, quietly take her purse from her bag, walk out and then run. In the purse are five 'sacs' (fifty francs), so they take the taller guy's motorbike, go into another café and order two whiskies: the waiter, uncertain, says they're 2.50 francs each, they shrug, drink, order two beers, go though the contents of the wallet, share the money and leave. The following Sunday they leave home in search of a new conquest.

Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain | The Mother and the Whore (1973)

 

The late sixties brought a revolutionary fervour not only to France but to the whole world. It altered people's minds, it opened them up, it intellectualised people, it introduced many millions to new ideas in terms of culture in general. It renewed, refreshed, invigorated, and even if Mai 1968 failed to bring down France, it produced such profound, long-lasting effects which meant the world would never be the same again.

And yet just over fifty years after les événements France is still reeling from the shockwaves of the revolution that both was and wasn't. Vanessa Springora's revelations about the paedophile Gabriel Matzneff in Le Consentement reverberated and threw up buried facts about intellectual France's history of tolerance for paedophilia: The newspaper Libération's stance, the stance of many prominent intellectuals, the fact that the then leader of the Académie Goncourt, Bernard Pivot, had glibly welcomed Matzneff on Apostrophes as late as 1990, were hugely damning facts.

Unlike glib people claim with ignorant insults of 'soixante-huitards' in France (or the slightly different 'Boomer!' insult in the Anglophone world), it's not the sixties that are to blame, but the excesses of it. If the intellectual world pushed so far that even paedophilia was to be accepted, what of conventional heterosexual behaviour? If Philip Larkin was too late to join in the sexual jamboree, what of those who didn't gain from the release of the sexual shackles, but lost out from the excesses of it? And was sexual freedom really such a positive thing for women? All right, it may be significant that the main (male) figure of Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain teaches one of the two (female) figures what MLF (Mouvement de liberation des femmes) stands for, but then he's speaking from his imaginary ivory tower, dressed with his foulard round his neck in a faux-casual manner, and brandishing his copy of Proust's La Prisonnière (a novel of possessive, jealous love) at now iconic places such Les Deux Magots and Le Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés – but he's only a male chauvinist hypocrite*, an intello à la con. In 1973, La Maman et la putain heralded the end of the sixties, but not many people were listening.

Eustache's film – the importance of which we've perhaps only relatively recently begun to understand – stars the Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Alexandre, an intellectual layabout who sponges off his older live-in girlfriend Marie (Françoise Lebrun), the 'maman' who owns a fashionable clothes business. It also stars Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), the nurse who's taken full advantage of the new sexual freedom and has a penchant for alcohol (she's the 'putain', of course); she also has a penchant for Alexandre, and doesn't mind that he can't pick up the tab for the meal they have at Le Train bleu inside the Gare de Lyon. Alexandre spends most of his time flitting about the germainopratin cafés talking to friends (one of whom has an unhealthy interest in the Gestapo) and chatting up the women, playing with their affections: he has the youth and the looks so he thinks he can get away with it: unfortunately he's too immature to realise that he's playing with fire, that you still can't trifle with people's affections through the sexual freedom that's been newly accepted.

The crunch comes when Veronika falls in love with Alexandre and the three end up in bed together: it's not quite triolism (the utopia of the sixties Jimi Hendrix boasted of) but eventually all three of them come to love one another, which is of course a major problem. And it's a problem which concludes the film. Alexandre, with the trio fully clothed on the bed (there's nowhere else to sit anyway) tries to grab a breast of Veronika (who not so long before has insistently pleaded 'Baisez-moi !' ('Fuck me!'), which he does and which leads to Marie taking too many pills – the rules for the new morality haven't been written in stone. But this time Alexandre is violently rebuffed, and Veronika unleashes a long tear-soaked existential howl of pain. This of course is the crux of the issue: Alexandre's egocentric behaviour has boxed all three of them into a corner and it's now pay-off time.

Veronika's rant is stunning, almost definitely the major feature of the film, in which she at first tells Alexandre that sex is nothing, and continues to cry and launches into a drunken monologue in which the word 'baiser' ('fucking') is mentioned many times. It's this speech that is almost symbolic of the death of the sexual revolution, and yet (particularly with its emphasis on sex being necessary for children, and children being necessary) it is so devastating that it almost seems to be advocating a return to pre-sexual revolutionary times. The film ends with Alexandre driving Veronika back to her flat and she pukes into a bowl, leaving him to sit on the kitchen floor in a kind of stupor, at a loss to know what to do. Two women are in love with him, and both are suicidal: time to grow up?

La Maman et la putain is a major work in which the silences are often filled in by the music played in Marie's flat, which tends to be not of the period but before: Marie plays Piaf singing 'Les Amants de Paris'; Veronika sings Tino Rossi's 'Tout simplement', a love song, to Alexandre; and Alexandre plays Damia's 'Un souvenir' and Fréhel's 'La Chanson des Fortifs', a song about a lost Paris, by extension a France that has lost its old songs and singers, and will be renewed by others because there'll always be songs. There'll always be collective moods as well, and La Maman et la Putain brilliantly reflects the death of one.

*The Title La Maman et la putain is of course ironic, being the traditional way chauvinistic men see women: as mothers or prostitutes.