Patrice Chéreau | Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) / 1998

fighting for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Danièle Thompson, Patrice Chéreau, and Pierre Trividic (screenplay) Patrice Chéreau (director)

Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) / 1998

 

Imagine joining Mike Newell’s film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) only for the funeral of Gareth (Simon Callow); and instead of Matthew, Gareth’s long-time lover Matthew (John Hannah)—the two representing the only gay couple in this hetero-normative celebration of marriage, the two having been in a kind of marriage the others in Gareth’s intellectual clique could not recognize—that instead of delivering a beautiful eulogy by reading another “splendid bugger” W. H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues,” he were to deliver a short and bitter diatribe against his elderly lover. Or—if you haven’t seen that movie in which once again more demands that the gay charismatic figure must die so that the heterosexual others may celebrate their normative couplings—what if you were to attend a showing of Sidney Lumet’s stylish 1974 retelling of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express—featuring nearly every available British and Hollywood star of the day: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, and Wendy Hiller—set in a far less grand and crowded 2nd class train without the help of Hercule Poirot to untangle their relationships, some of them seemingly queer, and their connection with the murdered man Lanfranco Cassetti, alias Edward Ratchett onboard.

     Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 work Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) puts it audiences in much the same position as I’ve just suggested, and takes it one step further by peppering his group of acolytes surrounding the painter/sculptor Jean-Baptiste Emmerich with just a few women (one elderly self-declared lover of Jean-Baptiste, Lucie, and the wives of some of the artist’s close male friends) among a group of gay and bisexual men, lovers of Jean-Baptiste or one another all endlessly milling about in the crowded train from Paris to Limoges where the pedagogue has determined to be buried—one of the largest cemeteries in the world. The Jean-Baptise character and the film’s title were said to have been based on the documentary film-maker François Reichenbach, some of whose films I’ve reviewed in these volumes.

     One of the great joys—and frustrations—of the film is the requirement to piece together the soap-opera-like interconnections of the various characters we encounter on this mad train ride where cinematographer Eric Gautier’s hand-held camera weaves in and out of the train seat-and aisle-conversations while a child, Elodie (Delphine Schiltz) behaves almost as badly as Zazie in Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro (1960) as she steals candy, grabs photos central characters are studying, and basically attempts to create general havoc throughout. It is she, we later discover, who may inherit the dead man’s estate.

    The train sequences were filmed over a fourteen day period in two carriages attached to regularly running trains between Paris and Mulhouse. It’s estimated that the cast and crew traveled 12,000 kilometers during two weeks in filming these early scenes. As Sight & Sound commentator Chris Darke wrote, “...The journey to Limoges is a triumph both of exposition and choreography.....Éric Gautier's use of handheld 'Scope cinematography gives the feeling of both buffeting movement and swooping detail." And, I might add, it helps to confuse our attempts to piece out just who is who, who they love, and, just as importantly, who they once loved or want to.

     This is much of the fun of the first half of Chereau’s film, and if you desire that pleasure you should perhaps put off reading the rest of this essay until you have seen the film for yourself. But I do think that it is important to outline the interconnections I was able to unravel— particularly since numerous critics of the film were utterly flummoxed by these crucial facts, which help to explain the rather melodramatic actions of the film’s characters in its latter half.

    Let us just begin by restating what by the end of the film is easily discernible: the painter Jean-Baptiste, who has a twin brother Lucien (both played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) has not only served as a blusteringly ingratiating guru for most of the males in this film, but has shared his bed  with them. He has also apparently had a loving relationship with Lucien’s wife, who in reaction to Lucien’s revenge of silence, eventually kills herself, having remained in their relationship only for the sake of their son Jean-Marie (Charles Berling), who out of bitterness for his father also became an acolyte of, and perhaps was also buggered by, his uncle. The family fortune, overseen by Lucien, was apparently obtained through the production of shoes (rooms of their home are still filled with them), which, along with porcelain, is one of the two major industries of Limoges. Late in his life Jean-Louis evidently also had an affair with Lucie (Marie Daëms), who, having kept in regular contact with the artist, describes herself his “impossible woman”—an epithet to which another member of the group responds is perfect for the “impossible man”— who evidently has made the travel arrangements for this group outing, and is the only one who actually seems to be grieving Jean-Baptiste’s death.  

    In the early scenes, we observe François (Pascal Greggory, director Chéreau’s longtime lover) looking over slides and scrapbooks of the artist’s work, in seeming preparation for a eulogy he never delivers, the fact for which Lucie later criticizes him. He is later described by others as Jean-Baptiste’s “favorite,” and has been working for years on a book on the painter without evidently finishing it. Indeed, one of the subplots of this movie is how all of Jean-Baptiste’s friends and lovers, although sustained by him, broke with him due to the artist’s abuse, his fickleness, or insatiable demands.

   François’s lover of the past few years, whom another of the group members, Bernard (Olivier Gourmet) gauchely refers to as François’ fiancée, is Louis (Bruno Todeschini), a beautiful man who seems to be attending the funeral simply as François’s friend, but who apparently has also come to know Jean-Baptiste through their mutual visits. We never know if he might have been one of the original disciples or whether François met him through the artist. But, oddly enough, it is Louis who becomes one of the major figures by film’s end.

     Before I describe the complexity of Louis’ character, however, I should finish Bernard off, since he is later characterized by Jean-Baptiste himself as an “a loser and an ass-kisser,” who when he is mocked by the others, presuming it is because his wife Lorette is mad. If nothing else, he actually has written a small book about the author. But in his sudden recognition that he is being laughed at for his own behavior, not his wife’s, so hurts him that he abruptly leaves the wake—which we might better describe as an “awakening” for the guests. But enough about this hanger-on.

     Louis has a problem from the very beginning of this masterwork of death, desire, love, and rejection. Even as he arrives at the train station, he encounters a stunningly attractive young boy named Bruno (Sylvain Jacques) from whom he asks directions. Soon after Louis has joined the group at a railway coffee shop, he again spots the boy at a nearby table, the two glancing at each other with an intensity that goes far beyond mere “cruising,” and would surely result in a sexual encounter had Louis not been involved with the logistics of imminent travel.

     On his way to the train itself, he again spots the boy, and when Lucie becomes terrified at having lost one of their members, Louis quickly volunteers to go back in search of her, obviously to seek out the mysterious boy once again.

     In fact, he does reencounter him, this time on the train itself. After sitting for a while with François he rises to seek out the boy, discovering him in a train aisle, where he tells him a strange story that seems almost stolen from Alain Resnais’ L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961)—one of the many film associations I make throughout are obviously not unintentional. As the two furtively embrace and kiss, he tells Bruno, whose name he is now told, that he has seen him once before, three years earlier at the same station, Gare d'Austerlitz, almost to the same day. It’s possible, the boy responds, since he often travels from Paris to his home in the south of France. Louis suggests they go for a coffee, or jokingly asks, “should we retire the men’s bathroom for a quickie.” They eventually choose the latter, kissing, embracing, and Bruno pulling down his pants, but allowing Louis only to stroke his ass without actually having sex.

      This brief encounter clearly effects Louis, and when he returns to his seat next to François he tells him “I love you.” His lover responds, “We’ve been together too long for such declarations.” And when Louis asks if he still agrees with their original commitment to being completely honest with each other, François hands him a handkerchief which, he jokes, his mother sends him in large quantities. “She thinks I’m too sensitive. Everyone knows I’m not.” He pauses before delivering the zinger, “So don’t use kid gloves. I’m listening.”

    Louis goes on to describe the boy, admitting that “I love him.”

    “Has it been going on long?”

    “No, just since the station. I’ve known him for ages. But we never met or spoke.”

    “Are you kidding?”

    “It’s sudden, I’m crushed.”

If this appears to be a slightly surreal conversation, it almost immediately turns even stranger as François inquires:

 

             “Did he tell you he was HIV positive? [Pause] Bruno.

             Because he didn’t tell me. He told me long after.”

 

Shocked by his lover’s intense knowledge of the boy, he also discovers that he didn’t find out until six months later.

    “Then it wasn’t a fling? It was a real affair.”

    “Since about a year. Didn’t Jean-Baptiste tell you?”

    Louis turns toward François, rising to say, “You’re a scumbag.”

    During their conversation, the train has made an unscheduled stop at La Souterrane, and Louis gets off and enters the station, Bruno soon joining him. When the train is finally ready to move on, Louis does not reboard, while Bruno does, making it apparent that the boy is still in some sort of relationship with François. As the elder later asks the boy: “Was I such a bastard because I left, or because I stayed.”

    Previously, we have seen Claire (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) in the bathroom popping a pill and stuffing several boxes of pills into her coat pockets. When she enters the main car to speak to her husband, Jean-Marie (Lucien’s son if you recall) he will not even speak to her. We soon learn that because of her drug addiction the two are breaking up, and she has refused to even answer his letters with regard to property rights and other matters. The two rightfully are furious with each other with seemingly no means of reconciliation.

     What Jean-Marie doesn’t know is that apparently Claire has given up drugs, and the pill she has just popped, and the others stuffed inside her coat are to help relieve her body from the complications of her being pregnant. She is afraid that if she were to tell him, he would even doubt that it was his child. Throughout the rest of the voyage the two glower and snip at one another, and because of their broken relationship Jean-Marie has grown so bitter that he delivers the spiteful eulogy of which I’ll soon report. Certainly, there seems to be no hope for their reunion, particularly since Jean-Baptiste has long warned his pupil about the dangers of a woman like Claire, obviously resenting that his nephew has chosen to marry a woman.

     Also on board is that obnoxiously charming girl and her mother Catherine (Dominique Blanc). We only discover their reason for traveling with the others as they all see, out the window, Elodie’s father Thierry (Roschdy Zem) speeding by in a station wagon carrying the coffin of Jean-Baptiste to take the body from Paris to his designated burial plot in Limoges. Thierry is clearly another of Jean-Baptiste’s many male lovers, but not through his tutelage, but rather through meeting the artist after he had a serious heart attack and was hospitalized in the institution where Thierry worked as night nurse. When the frail man finally was released, Thierry, as he himself describes the event, carried the body home in his arms and nursed him to health, obviously developing a relationship to him so close that Jean-Baptiste eventually came to describe Thierry and Catherine’s daughter Elodie as his granddaughter, and accordingly, bequeathed her his part of the Emmerich estate.

     Thierry, as we gradually begin to discover, is a kind of wild man who picks up a hitchhiker—who understandably is a bit wary of riding in a car with a corpse in the backseat—tossing him out of the car when the driver discovers that he has to take a detour. Later, Thierry, who since it is later intimated provides drugs to Jean-Marie, may himself be on drugs, spinning off the road steering the car to a rest in the middle of a wheatfield. The car eventually arrives in Limoges via a tow truck.

     As we slowly untangle their relationships over the first frenetic hour of this film, we realize, as Lisa Nesselson observes in Variety, “There’s not a happy camper in the bunch.” This ensemble, she asserts, “makes the average Woody Allen film seem like a picnic for the well-adjusted.”

     The first thing Jean-Marie does upon the group’s arrival in Limoges is visit the impossibly gargantuan cemetery in order to visit his mother’s grave, the only woman we feel that he was ever truly able to completely offer love. There he encounters his father who admits his own faults, particularly his ineffectual attempts to offer his wife something that might take the place of Jean-Baptiste’s attentions. Lucien is now even afraid in facing the group of mourners, that they might blame him for his wife’s suicide, as Jean-Marie has already made clear to others, he does. Yet here, actually confronting the man he has hated for so many years, Jean-Marie assures him that his mother was a manic-depressive and that everyone knew that fact.

      Yet only an hour or two later, Jean-Marie, speaking to the small band of would-be grievers blames all of them, including himself, for letting down Jean-Baptiste, for not living up to his expectations. Obviously still furious with his own failed marriage and stung by the artist’s condemnation of it, he virulently expresses viewpoints that we know and further discover to be completely false:

 

                  "He [Jean-Baptiste] wouldn’t have wanted to be a father. 

                  I wonder whether anyone wants to be a father. He didn’t want any children."

      Of course we know, as he has recently discovered, that Jean-Marie is about to have a child, like it or not. And there is a stranger, a somewhat attractive woman at the gathering at the grave, who Claire soon uncovers is Frédéric, Jean-Baptiste’s son who is in the process of transitioning into Viviane. She is likely the off-spring of Jean-Baptiste and Jean-Marie’s mother, of whose existence Jean-Marie is evidently unaware. So Jean-Baptiste did indeed have a child as well, who should have obviously been his heir instead of the girl he pretended was his granddaughter.

     The battle ground is set up for a violent encounter between the two sexually confused married bi-sexual men, both bitter for their own failed marriages, and also both now fighting for the right to inherit what Jean-Baptiste has left them—although it is really in Lucien’s hands who has told Catherine that he does not intend to contest his brother’s will. In the midst of the battle Thierry slugs his wife as she attempts to intervene, upon which she warns him that if he ever strikes her again she will take her daughter and leave him. Jean-Marie, having attacked nearly everyone in sight, goes running off for rest of the night.

     Viviane seems the most rational being still standing, and as Lucien—hearing that she is a “shoe freak”—offers her a pair of new shoes from the enormous stock that still remains in his house, the  two actually seem to gently engage one another in a romantic interlude that would, if carried further, strangely, perhaps without either of them knowing, reverse the actions of Jean-Baptiste stealing away his son, by him stealing the heart of his now step-daughter. The relationships here are so convoluted and incestuously perverse that we can hardly imagine their actualization, and fortunately the plot carries their mutual admiration no further.

      Despite all the fury, Thierry eventually makes up with Catherine. Returning early the next morning, Jean-Marie is told by Claire that she is planning to leave him with his unborn child; but still feeling love for one another they quickly find themselves in each other’s arms and soon after engaging in sex.

      Having made his way to Limoges, Louis has been trying to telephone, and finally reaching the house talks to François with Bruno listening in on another phone. He restates his intense love for Bruno and attempts to convince his lover that since they both love him they should take him under their care as a kind of son. François scoffs at the idea, and when Louis repeats that he cannot live without him, the self-declared “insensitive” man queries Louis if he truly believes he will be able to care for Bruno as the inevitable begins to happen. But Louis is implacable and is certain, if nothing else, about his love for Bruno.

    Unpredictably, François, the man who as the Variety critic posited, is the “one serene presence...whose cynical acceptance of every possible chamber in affairs of the heart allows him to glide above the fray,” at film’s end is only one left without someone else. As he witnesses from the taxi Louis and Bruno hugging in the hotel window, sees Claire and Jean-Marie walking together along the street, and watches Thierry, Catherine, and their daughter driving off, the art historian returns to Paris almost as a villain, a man who because he has been unwilling to fight for love, to shed tears into those dozens of handkerchiefs he is sent by his mother, will have no one but himself to blame for his lonely nights ahead.   

    Director Patrice Chéreau died in Paris on October 7, 2013 from lung cancer at 68 years of age. He was not buried in Limoges, but in the great Paris cemetery Père Lachaise. The film above was not much appreciated by US viewers, despite the fact that it won the Best Director and Best Actor César Awards. I loved the film so much that although I wrote the piece above based on a DVD viewing from Netflix, I also ordered my own copy so that I might watch it over a regular intervals for the remainder of my life.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2021 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Wrik Mead | Cupid / 1998

the arrow strikes its sender

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (director) Cupid / 1998

 

Critic Tom Waugh describes Toronto filmmaker Wrik Mead’s over twenty animated miniature narratives as “perverted pixilations,” based on a process he uses to make real actors appear as animated figures moving in an artificial manner that suggests they might be robots or slightly out of sync representations rather than realist figures in a naturalist narrative.

      And indeed the central figure of his 1998, 3-minute work Cupid, for example, does appear to be queer, in the older definition of that word, as much as he seems to be slightly confused and out of place.

     The beautiful young boy flanked by feathery white wings is obviously in a bar, drinking along with the other customers. He moves in choppy, short motions, picking up and putting down his stein of beer as he looks around the room for victims. We see what appears to be a woman quickly pass in the foreground and, quite explicably, he pulls one of his arrows out of quiver and shoots it into the air. We do not see where it lands or even if it has hit its target, we only vaguely hear the whiz of its trajectory, presumably into flesh.

     A man passes, and again Cupid shoots an arrow he has pulled from his quiver. And once more we have no way of knowing whether it has resulted in any love-making event. But then love in a bar, and this appears to be a gay bar or, at least a sex bar, is always such an “iffy” thing. Even when the heart leaps with joy at the visage of another, the sensation of love is not always, in fact may seldom be, returned.

    After a few more sips of a beer and the passing of a rather large, bare-chested man whom our Cupid also determines is worthy of one of his arrows, he shoots once again. Only this time, apparently, the victim is having nothing to do with the affair. He pulls it from his body, and lobs it back at its sender, the arrow striking just above Cupid’s heart.

   A few drops of blood appear and drip down his chest. Cupid’s eyes grow bleary, a sweet smile appearing his face. Yes, he has obviously been smitten—but with whom?

   Slowly from his crotch a large appendage appears jutting up from his pants. What appears to be a very large erection, however, does stop there, but grows and grows, twining itself like an anaconda snake around his mid-riff, appearing to constrict him so intensely that he falls out of sight, apparently knocked down by a kind of narcissistic love or simply by an arousal so exceptional—he has, after all, presumably never before been struck down by love—that he is immobilized, a victim of his own medicine.

     And suddenly we realize something we might never before have thought about. The beautiful boy Cupid has never been allowed to be struck down by love, but now perhaps, having had it withheld for so very many centuries, may be destroyed by its embrace: his own now impossibly long tube of endless desires linking him to those in love from the very beginning of time.  Like Narcissus, pretty boy Cupid, is struck down finally by his own pent up desires for sexual release.

     And finally, we must ask, does this represent the end of traditional love?

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Stan Brakhage | Dog Star Man, in a Prelude and Four Parts / 1961-1964

a voyage to nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (director) Dog Star Man, in a Prelude and Four Parts / 1961-1964

 

Often describes as his early masterwork, Stan Brakhage’s five-part Dog Star Man is exemplary once again at how humor and would-be epic forces are intertwined in his films.

     The 25-minute Prelude, with its to layers of superimposed imagery, might almost be read as an abstracted guide to the work’s later parts, as startlingly beautiful images of landscape, animals, humans, clouds, and planetary systems shift in and out of recognition, some of the frames scratched and half-erased, others presented with narrative straight-forwardness.

    The earliest of these images, in fact, are derived from a simple narrative act. As Fred Camper describes the situation in the Criterion liner notes to By Brakhage: “Unemployed and living in his wife’s parent’s home, Brakhage had asked them what he could do, and they suggested that he cut wood.”

    What follows is almost something out a Chaplin film, as the director, looking something like a mountain man, takes up an ax and a dog and sets out in a snow-bound landscape to find some wood to chop. The figures, fighting to climb hills, struggling through the deep snow, and becoming increasingly exhausted in the task—the dog, meanwhile, often bounding about him with unabated energy and delight—and never actually accomplishes his goal.

    At first, his actions, set against the raw, mostly black-and-white images of natures, seem ridiculously comic, as if he were a city boy suddenly facing the forces of the harsh natural world. But after a while, the comedy begins to shift into both a recognition of the beauty of the landscape of individual trees, wood, and stars set against the lone human’s near Herculean tasks that can never fully be accomplished, we see the film in more epic terms. The clown becomes a more sympathetic figure, who Brakhage increasingly portrays as an exhausted being who finds it more and more difficult to walk or, at moments, even to stand. A bit like a Samuel Beckett character, this would-be woodsman, starts out on his voyage as a kind of smug fool before we recognize that he has become a sort of existential hero, a man who can’t go on, but will continue nonetheless.

     After the 25-minute first part, the 5-minute second part, again with two layers of images, almost appears to represent the woodsman’s life passing before his eyes. A child, filmed at his birth, quickly morphs into images of animals, planets, sun, and moon. And Part Three, 7 minutes in length, with its three layers of images, quickly sorts through our hero’s sexual fantasies, which, after all, were the cause, in part, of the family history we saw of Part Two.

    Finally, Part Four, with four overlaying sets of pictures, depicts the lost figure’s symbolic end, depicting a kind of cosmic deconstruction.

   If there is a loose narrative logic to this work, it is the constant retransformation of all recognizable images into the abstraction that dominates. Some of the Prelude and later parts are so simply startling in their abstract beauty that they almost take our breath away. But like a quickly shifting kaleidoscope, they each break apart, recombining and regenerations further and further pictures and patterns. By the end, we are nearly as worn out and wearied by natures as is this failed mountain man.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).