Les Doigts dans la tête (1974) - film review

Chris, a baker’s boy, is dismissed by his employer when he turns up for work late.  He loses not just his job but also his home since the room he lives in is provided as part of his meagre salary.   Through his friend Léon, he meets a trade union official who tells him that his dismissal was unlawful and that he is entitled to compensation.  Whilst waiting for his employer to pay him the money he is owed, Chris barricades himself in his room with Léon, his girlfriend Rosette and a Swedish girl Liv.  Chris’s employer, however, has no intention of paying up and threatens to call the police unless his hot-headed former employee leaves his room...

With this, his first full-length film, director Jacques Doillon evokes not only the memory but also the spirit of the popular uprisings which shook French society in May 1968.  Les Doigts dans la tête accurately reflects the burgeoning disillusionment of a generation of young people with a society which failed to take them seriously.  As the film demonstrates, it is not just a case of teenage angst or adolescent rebellion, although these no doubt provided the impetus for the anti-authority (specifically anti-De Gaulle) backlash seen in 1968 and the years that followed.  At the time, young people were not accorded the same working rights as older citizens, and they were generally maltreated by a generation that clearly resented the freedom and quality of life they appeared to have.  Those who had endured the hardship of the last world war, the humility of the Nazi Occupation and the bitterness of the long years of austerity that followed were ill-equipped to cope with the prosperity and societal changes of the 1960s, and the result was an inevitable rift between the generations.  Doillon’s first film succinctly encapsulates the nature of this rift and does so more pointedly than any film of the French New Wave (which was perhaps the most potent manifestation of France’s cultural renaissance in the 1960s).

With its rough-and-ready, naturalistic presentation and young cast of inexperienced actors, Les Doigts dans la tête has a characteristically Nouvelle Vague style and authenticity which Doillon would bring to all of his subsequent films (allowing him to remain one of French cinema’s true auteur filmmakers).  Adopting a raw social realist style tinged with ironic humour, the film offers a portrayal of adolescence which is convincing and sympathetic, and also richly nuanced.  The characters are not the familiar shorthand stereotypes but complex, enigmatic and generally unfathomable individuals, of the kind that we encounter every day in our own lives.  There is something deeply tragic in the film’s portrayal of the schism that exists between two generations who appear to find mutual coexistence virtually impossible, and yet there is also a great deal of humour which prevents the film from being too preachy or ponderous.  The relationship between the four young characters is constantly evolving, and, in the end, they end up erecting barricades not just against the outside world, but between each other as they discover their own differences, reminding us that adolescence is not only a period of confusion and trauma, but also one of parodox and contradiction.  Although it was made more than four decades ago, Les Doigts dans la tête remains just as relevant today as it was in the mid-1970s, perhaps even more so at a time when the gulf between the generations has never felt greater and youth disenfranchisement is in danger of becoming the most pressing social malaise of our age.

© James Travers 2003-2011

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