Le Livre de Marie (1984) - film review

Le Livre de Marie is a French film first released in 1984, directed by Anne-Marie Miéville.  The film stars Bruno Cremer, Aurore Clément, Rebecca Hampton, Copi and Valentine Mercier.  It has also been released under the title: The Book of Mary.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.

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Anne-Marie Mieville’s The Book of Mary is not an introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (aka Je vous salue, Marie, 1985), though the two films are combined into one presentation.   One (Mieville’s) describes Mary’s childhood and the other (Godard’s) her youth.   While both films are dedicated to a depiction of the Virgin’s life as if she were a child of European democracy, Mieville’s short film is, semantically and stylistically, a separate work.  The director’s task is to trace in Mary’s childhood the influences and complexes which could make possible her unconscious belief in the Immaculate Conception as an archetype which formed her soul and shaped her biology according to the archaic idea of birth as reproduction through parthenogenesis.

Both Mieville and Godard depict the social and psychological aspects of a culture that can breed belief in the reality of the Immaculate Conception.   Art becomes an existential experiment, a scholarly investigation into the psycho-socio-cultural context of this image/idea/belief.  Mieville’s film shows that even with highly intelligent parents (whose personalities are emotionally sculpted by the exceptional actors Bruno Cremer and Aurore Clément) and a democratically refined environment, culture is not immune from stimulating in people strong irrational beliefs which have the power to override the fallen rationality of the factual life.

The film’s diagnosis is that the psycho-socio-cultural pedagogy of solipsism in perceiving the world emotionally poisons children, harms human mutuality and destroys or weakens human capacity for intimacy.  The implication of Mieville’s verdict on modern democracy is that solipsistic beliefs like the Immaculate Conception will override reality again and again, until people are ready to participate in mutuality and true psychological democraticity.  Mieville’s film elaborately describes six aspects of solipsistic pedagogy which transforms Mary the girl into a woman who became one of the most glorified icons of Western culture.  Mieville’s virtuosity as a director and thinker in visual images might render you speechless, were her film not so challenging and inspiring.
 
Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read an essay about Mieville’s film and also articles on films by other great filmmakers including Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bresson, Pasolini and Antonioni.

© Victor Enyutin (Seattle, US) 2011  

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