Jacques Demy | Le bel indifférent / 1958

a storm of words

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Cocteau (writer, based on his stage play), Jacques Demy (director) Le bel indifférent / 1958

 

Based on a short play by Jean Cocteau, Le bel indifférent (1940)—very similar in its monological structure and themes to that writer’s play of a decade earlier Le Voix humaine (1930)—Jacques Demy’s 1948 monologue film features a singer (Jeanne Allard) who lives in a small red wall-papered hotel room with her lover, Emile (Angelo Bellini). 

     Night after night, apparently, she returns from her performances to the room to find Emile still out, forced to impatiently wait for his return while listening for the steps of others who pass by her door, who slowly rise in the hotel elevator, or ring at the front door for entry. Presumably the same pattern has been going on for weeks or even longer, but on the night that we witness the silence of her empty frustration is also punctured by a telephone call from his sister, who may or may not be also checking up on the whereabouts of her brother. The singer claims he is in the bathtub and deems it to immoral and undesirable to leave the tub naked to talk on the phone.

      C, the name the script gives to the singer also calls a local bar, speaking with Raymond, evidently the bartender or owner, to ask after Emile and briefly discuss the dive’s business. The business is evidently brisk and Emile has been there, so Raymond tells her, and left.       

      When finally, Emile does return, he enters, hangs up his hat, takes off his coat and hangs it, unloosens his tie and unbuttons his shirt, removing them as well and hanging them up before brushing his teeth, picking up the newspaper and lying down on the bed to read. He does nothing

else during the entire film, except perhaps for a few moments to doze off, as C. gradually builds her early questions about his whereabouts into a long and endless harangue about his night escapades real or imagined with other women, particularly an older one she imagines he has been seeing; and her suspicions of his having endlessly lied to her about everything, including visiting a dentist when he has actually visited his mother.

      For anyone in a long relationship, the monologue is familiar: the one feeling most hurt by the other, having kept quiet about the pain she or he has long felt, lets loose on her or his pent-up feelings, imagining all sorts of terrible acts the other has committed while rejecting the hurt one’s offered love.

       In this case, however, we can only wonder—given C’s endless attack and her growing threats of ending the relationship and even suicide, as well as her own admission that even before his nightly wanderings she has been jealous of the figures Emile may dream of while he sleeps—if this might not be a kind of nightly ritual. Particularly given Emile’s impervious demeanor and refusal to even be slightly piqued by her carryings on we can only wonder whether he has grown inured to the dramatic enactment of female suffering we witness. After all, no matter where he has been, he has returned to her; yet she has made his life so miserable upon that return that by work’s end he is determined to redress and leave her for another night on the town, possibly this time not willing to continue the relationship. Indeed, despite the fact that he does not speak or even show any emotion during her ceaseless attacks, perhaps his leaving yet again represents the true dramatic action of this story, and his actions speak far more loudly than all of her words

      Presumably Cocteau’s original audience was far more sympathetic with C simply because she was performed by the real life singer Édith Piaf, who one can imagine was a far more volatile and emotionally-charged figure than is Allard, although Allard is surely up to the task the role demands. And while Piaf, with her high forehead and the immense distance between her energetic and captivating eyes and her pencil thin brows, cannot truly be described a great beauty, she is certainly more lovely to look at than the older and plainer Allard. Indeed, in Demy’s version the male is truly such a “beauty” (Demy certainly chose the most handsome imaginable for most of his film roles) that, particularly given his indifference, we can only wonder how these two have come together and maintained a relationship. C even crudely disparages his sister and mother, the later of whom calls late in the play, saving him from the countdown before his partner’s threatened leap from the window. Surely his night wanderings are indication of his dissatisfaction; but what keeps bringing the handsome man back to her bed. Is her relationship with him somewhat like an older woman and a gigolo, she paying to keep him near with the money she makes from singing?

      And although we are given no obvious clues to his activities outside the room except that he visits various “dives,” as she describes them, we can only wonder—beyond her suspicions that he is having affairs with other women—what he might really be up to. I reiterate, neither Cocteau’s play nor Demy’s film actually answers such a question. But given the fact that both men were homosexuals, Cocteau openly so, Demy in 1958 far more closeted—although already in 1951 in had made his coded “coming out” film Les horizons mort—it is hard to resist wondering whether instead of being heterosexually involved with dozens of women  as his lover imagines, he might not be spending time out with the boys. When C telephones to check up on Emile’s whereabouts it is only to Raymond to whom she will speak, suggesting she is willing to wait until he’s able to come to the phone. Obviously, if nothing else Raymond is someone likely to know about Emile’s whereabouts and is the only person she will trust to know of his actions. Before gay bars were as ubiquitous as they were in Europe by the mid-1960s, working-class all, male “dive” bars or even coffee bars often substituted as meeting places for gay men.

      If Emile is, in fact, an Italian gigolo (the actor Bellini calling up the Italian reference), the whole reminds me a bit of dancer Carolyn Brown’s comments in her memoir of Cunningham and Cage, where while traveling with Cunningham’s company in Italy during the early 1960s, she observes that what in the films of Federico Fellini had appeared as surrealist like grotesques, particularly the images of older women accompanied by muscularly beautiful young men who when the ladies weren’t looking longingly posed for one other, was in fact a realist portrait of an aspect of Italian gay/heterosexual life. 

     And if I’m being prurient in my even noticing the homoerotic positionings of Demy’s hero upon a bed in a lit-up red-lined room, the director also helps to put that gay possibility into our heads by allowing us to overhear outside the desolate woman’s door the voices of two lovers, having evidently just finished with sex, attempting to plan for their next meeting. By the timbre of the voices both appear to be those of males, although one speaks more sibilantly in a whisper, the whispering plotter suggesting (s)he cannot meet the day the other proposes because s(he) will be working. Although we know that the phrase “working” cannot exclude the female gender, in 1958 is was far less likely to be a woman speaking those words. And besides, if we explore the facts behind the filmmaking we quickly discover that Demy himself provided the “other” voices, even the occasional squawk of a sister or mother on the phone. And in any event, to me, after listening six or seven times before I read the credits, they sounded like two men planning their next sexual rendezvous.

       

     Finally, the images that swirl around some of Demy’s portrayal of his central figure surely hint at something destructive about C’s entire being. Her appearance in the very first scene of the film, as dressed only in black she enters the closed French door on the far side of the bed, immediately reminded me of a more contemporary work of art by another gay artist, the American Chicano painter and set designer Gronk, whose “La Tormenta” poses, in reverse, in the very same position. And later C also poses looking away from us and the camera, peering out the window onto the street at the door behind which the two males lovers plan the time for next gathering.

       Gronk’s title surely calls up Francesco de Goya’s El Coloso, commonly called “La Tormenta,” a gigantic figure in black with his face turned away from us while below the Lilliputian figures escape in the terror of war and destruction. And these figures, in turn, call up yet another tormented tormentor of men, Hedda Gabler of Ibsen’s play (for which Gronk also designed sets) who makes good on the threat of suicide by shooting herself. 

     The fact that none of these were direct influences on one another (except perhaps for Gronk) does not lessen their signification of the singer representing a force of destruction of the weaker beings (in this case symbolized by a gay or at least sexually straying man) around her. She is a force who in her very power destroys not only the world of the “other,” but her own world and self in the process. It is evident that if the listener in this case may be a beautiful man seemingly indifferent to his lover, she is far more beautifully indifferent to the world she already possesses and will now possibly lose in her storm of words.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).