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Melodrama is not central to contemporary French cinema, since it is based on irony, and it is hard to draw a playing card between the intentions and the results of most great French directors. But in 1975, the former Cahiers du Cinéma critic André Téchiné, in his early thirties, embedded a wide range of historical reflections in exaggerated romantic passions in a film called Souvenirs d'en France (in this case, The French Provincial), and found his unique melodramatic voice. Over the course of his long career—he has made twenty-five feature films and counting—Téchiné's inspiration has been inconsistent but powerful. Few major directors working outside the studio system display such a wide range between their great work and their less successful projects. Téchiné's approach to his characters is sometimes literal, and his direction matches it. Yet when the tension between his feelings and their expression becomes visible—and when he opens up in both style and content—his films burn with a restrained passion.
Accordingly, Téchiné’s longest collaboration has been with one of the great actresses of restraint and style, Catherine Deneuve, who barely needs to try to project a colossal image and do it with style. They made seven films together, including his 1993 masterpiece My Favorite Season, which will be shown on April 29 as part of a series on L’Alliance dedicated to their joint projects. My Favorite Season was released in 1996, when many of the best French films had trouble finding distribution in the United States; despite positive reviews and a DVD release, the film has been unfairly forgotten. This screening also provides me with a welcome opportunity to revisit it—as I have done several times before its release—since I was entrusted with a small role in its distribution. In short, when Téchiné and Deneuve visited New York in January of that year, the distributor of My Favorite Season invited me to join them for lunch and discuss Téchiné’s proposal to cut the film for an American release. (I liked the film in its original form and shared this opinion; he ultimately left it unchanged.)
I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between story and plot – particularly the difference between the characters’ shared relationships and the events onscreen that give rise to those relationships. Often, critical elements in a story are suggested by glances, gestures, phrases – events of infinitesimal scale but of great significance. In My Favorite Season, which Téchiné co-wrote with Pascal Bonitzer (also a Cahiers alumnus and an outstanding director), the gap between story and plot is thrillingly vast and paradoxical: the story, easily told, develops a solid set of conflicts and decisions in which the family story stands out, but the plot – the onscreen action – is a disjointed constellation of twists and subtleties, dramatic knots and side effects, and, above all, a painfully contradictory dialogue with a superficial formality that becomes more expressive because it is only occasionally broken.
The story is set in southwestern France; Deneuve plays Emilie, a lawyer working in partnership with her husband Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier). She invites her younger brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a neurologist from nearby Toulouse with whom she has not spoken for the past three years, to spend Christmas at the family home in the cozy village where they live. Among the guests are their mother Berthe (Marta Villalonga), who lives with her daughter but is unhappy (she has always openly favored Antoine), and the couple's two children, who are at the university stage (plus their friend). However, Antoine does not get along with his brother-in-law Bruno, and their conflict prompts Berthe to leave Antoine and return to her home. This also causes tension between the spouses. Antoine and Emilie, separated again, are forced to reunite when Berthe suffers from fainting spells and can no longer live alone. As Antoine and Emily look after their mother's well-being, their complex and tense relationship changes the dynamics of the extended family.
Throughout My Favorite Season, the past remains present, the family’s intimate life is saturated with history. Berthe never went to school and cannot read. Her late husband, a manufacturer and salesman of agricultural equipment, insisted that his children be educated, so that they would have the opportunities that he and his wife did not have. He wanted them, Berthe recalls, to be “modern,” and they are, but she is aware of the cost of their modernity: she would like to have a third child, less modern, who would take care of her. History is intertwined with Téchiné’s visual compositions, with his sense of style. In a crucial scene in which the siblings drive their mother to a nursing home, the car ride becomes a sentimental journey. Antoine and Emily sing a song they used to sing on childhood car rides. Bertha, sitting in the back seat and listening, is seen in close-up through the side window, as the reflections of passing trees flicker across her face: fleeting moments merge with the deep
Sourse: newyorker.com
