Élise ou la vraie vie (1970) - film review

It is 1957 and France has been at war with Algeria for three years.  Elise, a young woman in her early twenties, live in Bordeaux with her family in a cramped apartment.  Money is short, so, on a whim, she heads off to Paris to seek help from her brother, Lucien.  The latter has no spare cash but suggests that Elise can easily make some money at the car factory where he works.  Sure enough, Elise is offered a job at the factory, as a quality inspector, but the work is strenuous and the workplace, a noisy production line, infernal.  Most of the employees at the factory are North African immigrants and Elise is appalled by the way in which they are treated by their French foreman and co-workers, who are all openly racist.  When one of the workers, an Algerian man named Arezki, is forbidden from leaving the factory floor when he has a headache, Elise gives him aspirin.  To show his gratitude, Arezki makes her a present of two croissants and invites her to have a drink with him to celebrate his birthday.  Elise’s sympathy for the Algerian soon grows into a stronger emotion, love.  A supporter of the movement for Algerian independence, Arezki risks being arrested or expelled from France and Elise becomes increasingly anxious for his safety...

Michel Drach’s adaptation of Claire Etcherelli’s award winning novel Élise ou la vraie vie proved to be one of the most controversial French films in a decade when it was released in 1970.  The lost war in Algeria was a sore point for most French people and consequently racism, of the ugliest kind, was endemic in every stratum of society.  Drach was one of the first filmmakers in France to tackle head-on the issue of xenophobia and to directly reference the war in Algeria.  Predictably the film provoked something of a feeding frenzy in the popular press.  A film in which an ordinary working class French woman falls in love with an FLN-supporting Algerian immigrant was never going to be an easy sell but the film’s notoriety ensured than it did not pass unnoticed.  In fact the healthy box office receipts may have surpassed even Drach’s expectations.

Although he made only about a dozen films and is barely remembered today, Michel Drach was one of the most important militant filmmakers of his day.  His subsequent Le Pull-over rouge (1979) successfully argued the case for the abolition of the death penalty in France and helped galvanise the movement for change which brought an end to capital punishment (decapitation by guillotine) in 1981.   In Élise ou la vraie vie, Drach is just as effective in his condemnation of racial intolerance, without resorting to the strident tones that other filmmakers, notably Jean-Luc Godard, employed in their politically minded films.

In a similar vein to Rainer Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (which tells a similar story of miscegenous love in a bigoted world), Élise ou la vraie vie treats the subject of racism from a humanist perspective, portraying it as a social malaise that demeans the perpetrator more than it degrades the victim.  This is most evident in the shocking sequence in which Arezki, the main Algerian protagonist, is strip searched by French police.  Arezki is humiliated but his persecutors are show to be barely human, a disgrace to both their profession and their country.

Understated yet captivating performances from the leads, Marie-José Nat (Drach’s talented actress wife) and Mohamed Chouikh, bring a subtle poignancy that heightens the authenticity and poetry of the film.  Brutal in its uncompromising realism and lack of sentimentality, Élise ou la vraie vie makes a statement that still resonates loudly, and will continue to do so whilst we allow the scourge of racism to disfigure our society.

© James Travers 2010

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