Film Review
When it was finally released in 1963 after a troubled production,
Adieu
Philippine was enthusiastically received by the critics and immediately
singled out as one of the most emblematic films of the French New Wave.
Yet it wasn't directed by one of the established pillars of the Nouvelle
Vague - François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or Jacques Rivette - but
by an unknown, first-time film maker Jacques Rozier, who would always remain
a peripheral, almost forgotten figure of the movement and aesthetic that
his debut film so perfectly epitomised. The importance of
Adieu
Philippine isn't that it encapsulates the French New Wave, but that it
reflects so much of the character of the era in which it was made. With
its spontaneous celebration of youth and life, it vividly evokes the joie-de-vivre
and freedom of the 1960s, but there is also an underlying and unmistakable
sense of melancholia through its discrete allusions to the Algerian War.
As in Agnès Varda's
Cléo
de 5 à 7 (1962) and Jacques Demy's
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
(1964), Rozier's film leaves us with a tragic awareness of the transience
of youth.
Rozier began work on
Adieu Philippine in 1960, backed by the independent
film producer Georges de Beauregard who had previously bankrolled Godard's
first feature
À bout
de souffle (1960).
He envisaged making a film about the war
in Algeria but, this being too sensitive a subject at the time, he was steered
towards a more anodyne story about a young man enjoying his last few months
of freedom in the company of two pretty young girls before taking up his
military service. With minimal resources, Rozier encountered no end
of problems whilst making the film and at the end of a gruelling twelve-month
shoot he was shocked to discover that he had lost the entire soundtrack for
the film.
As virtually all of the dialogue had been improvised there
was no script to fall back on, and so Rozier had to painstakingly reconstruct
the dialogue from scratch, trying to get as near a synchronisation with the
lip movements of his actors as he could. Meanwhile, de Beauregard had
totally lost confidence in the film and sold it back to Rozier, to do with
it whatever he chose. Two years after beginning work on the film, Rozier
was able to present the completed film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962,
where it received a rapturous welcome. Despite the critical acclaim
that came its way,
Adieu Philippine was not a great commercial success
and Rozier would have difficulty financing his subsequent films. His
output as a filmmaker was modest in scale but it reaffirmed his standing
as one of France's most committed auteurs. His later films
Du côté d'Orouët
(1973),
Les Naufragés de l'île de la Tortue (1976) and
Maine Océan (1986) are all significant achievements and mark
Rozier out as an auteur apart.
With its frenzied jump-cutting, exuberant jazz track and euphoric
cinéma
vérité style of mise-en-scène (the entire film was
shot in real locations in natural light with non-professional actors),
Adieu
Philippine positively sizzles with energy and authenticity throughout,
and it genuinely does feel like Rozier has somehow managed to distil the
whole of the French New Wave into a single, one hundred minute feature.
The obvious technical imperfections add to the film's striking impressionistic
feel - Rozier's intention clearly was not to make a polished piece of cinema,
but to seize life as it is, in a similar 'sur le vif' manner to the painters
Monet and Renoir, showing us not just the vitality and insouciance of youth
but also its trepidations and uncertainties. The main characters' sojourn
in Corsica is shot with breathtaking artistry and is devastatingly poignant
as we see all too clearly what it signifies: the last days of youth
slowly fading from view, never to return. The final shot leaves us
mourning the fact that Michel's sweet summer is over - he will soon be on
his way to Algeria, to face the horrible realities of war in a strange and
hostile land. The bitterest adieu of all is the one which we must bid
to our youth.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Jacques Rozier film:
Du côté d'Orouët (1973)
Film Synopsis
Paris, in the summer of 1960. Michel is a young Frenchman who, just
before he is due to start his military service in Algeria, works as a television
studio trainee. This is how he comes to meet two attractive young
women, Liliane and Juliette, two aspiring actresses who, alas, have only
enough talent to appear in the worst kind of television programmes.
To make the most of the summer before he is drafted into the French army,
Michel decides to take a long holiday on the island of Corsica. The
two girls agree to accompany him and share his last few weeks of freedom...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.