Pourquoi (pas) le Brésil (2004) - film review

The film director Laetitia Masson is in a bad way, both financially and creatively.  Producer Maurice Rey offers her a lifeline by asking her to adapt Christine Angot’s latest novel Pourquoi le Brésil?, which recounts the author’s passionate love affair with a journalist.  But Laetitia has already read the book and is convinced that it is completely inadaptable for the cinema.  Compelled by her financial situation to accept Rey’s offer, Laetitia begins to write a screenplay, but immediately she runs into difficulty.  Unsure how to capture the authenticity of Angot’s novel, she tries to draw on her own experiences in an attempt to understand what attracts one person to another.  Having completed her script, Laetitia faces an even greater obstacle.  The tight budget will prevent her from using the locations that featured in the original novel and, worse, she cannot find an actor and actress to play the principal roles.  The project appears to be doomed...

If you buy a DVD of a film made in the last few years you can be pretty sure that it comes with a complementary feature showing how the film was made.  This will probably not be the case for Pourquoi (pas) le Brésil, since the film itself and its Making Of feature are combined into one piece, the result (part meta-film, part documentary) being one of the most insightful and compelling explorations of the creative process that cinema has given us to date.   The film tells the story of how Laetitia Masson, one of France’s most highly regarded auteur filmmakers, lost her way in trying to adapt a novel by the controversial writer Christine Angot and ended up making a film about the fraught process of making a film when the creative juices stubbornly refuse to flow.

At the time she was offered the chance to adapt Angot’s novel (by producer Maurice Bernart), Masson was in something of a personal crisis.  A substantial bank overdraft and a severe case of creative block had drained her confidence and propelled her into a state of depression.  The director’s grim state of mind is vividly evoked in her film through some harrowing moments of introspection, but what is more striking is her fierce resilience, her determination to hold on and not sacrifice authenticity for commercial expediency.   There is a delicious irony in the fact that by failing to do what she set out to do, and by showing us how she failed, Masson manages to create her most inspired and incisive work to date, a superlative example of auteur filmmaking that serves as a beacon of hope to those who find themselves in her position.

Pourquoi (pas?) le Brésil is a film that is both fascinating and extremely poignant.  Masson’s attempts to sell her ill-thought-out film to understandably sceptical actors (Daniel Auteuil and Francis Huster) are as comical as they are heartwrenching and you can see why selling and marketing do not feature too highly on her CV.  Life ends up imitating art as the turbulent love affair of Angot’s novel begins to infect and potentially jeopardise Masson’s relationship with her husband.   Ultimately, the fiction that the director is trying to create becomes inextricably interwoven with her own life, an effect that Masson achieves by inter-cutting her own story (filmed as a Making Of documentary) with a dramatised account of her own story and filmed sequences from her screenplay based on Angot’s book.  The boundary between reality and fiction is blurred even further by Masson’s decision to cast Elsa Zylberstein as both herself (Masson) and the heroine of Angot’s story. 

What the spectator is given is neither an objective account of how a film is made nor a romantic drama, but an unsettling merging of the two which portrays the experience, not the process, of making a film.  Pourquoi (pas) le Brésil is much more than a Godard-like attempt to deconstruct the art of filmmaking.  What it offers is something far more intimate and revealing, a unique insight into how a writer or film director can become completely overtaken by his work and end up in an existential no man’s land, utterly lost in the labyrinth of creative possibilities.  Sometimes it takes a colossal failure to teach us some fundamental truths about the world and about ourselves.  By failing to make the film she wanted to Laetitia Masson gives us something far more valuable, a rare pearl that exposes the inner turmoil of the dedicated auteur and the complex interdependencies between life and art.

© James Travers 2010

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