Film Review
The glory years of the French New Wave were all but over when Luc Moullet
made his feature debut with
Brigitte
et Brigitte, an oddball comedy that looks suspiciously like a
mischievous send-up of the Nouvelle Vague and all who sailed in
her. Once Truffaut and Godard had successfully made the
transition from critic to filmmaker, Luc Moullet, a fellow contributor
on
Les Cahiers du cinéma,
was easily tempted to follow suit, beginning with a series of
shorts. Godard described Moullet's first feature as 'a
revolutionary film', which implies he either completely missed the joke
or was just being craftily disingenuous.
Brigitte et Brigitte starts
out as a merciless satire on student life, mocking the ivory-towered
pomposity of students and teachers alike and convincing us that there
is nothing more absurd than an intellectual who is unaware of his own
absurdity. Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer pass the
absurdity test with flying colours, their weird cameo appearances
looking far less ridiculous than the legions of po-faced students who
get caught in Moullet's mocking camera, dribbling over-embellished,
second-hand platitudes with the forced solemnity of a priest
officiating at a funeral.
Not long after their arrival in the capital, the titular Brigittes
(Colette Descombes and Françoise Vatel) go on a sightseeing tour
and give the city's historic monuments a score out of twenty (Notre
Dame Cathedral scores a paltry 10). It is at this point that the
film looks as if it is turning into an attack on the diabolical art of
criticism. Who is to decide what constitutes good art and bad
art? Questioned by one of the Brigittes, a film enthusiast cites
Alfred Hitchcock,
Orson Welles and Jerry Lewis as the three best
American filmmakers. A second film fan (a school boy) places
these three at the
bottom of
his list (numbered 281, 282 and 283 respectively). Another
interviewee blames F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee
Williams for three generations of American delinquency (and
he probably has a point).
The concrete certainty of these 'randomly selected' know-it-alls is
laughable, but is this any different from the opinionated claptrap that
comes out of professional critics (including presumably Moullet
himself)? If there's one thing that surpasses opinions about art
it is opinions about politics. Arriving at university, the
Brigittes soon discover that students divide evenly into gauchistes
and fascistes, each group equally convinced of the superiority of
its political standpoint. Those who cannot commit either way are
cut out of the democratic process. Confronted with voting, one
Brigitte cannot make up her mind whether to vote left or right and ends
up being unable to cast her vote. Better to be certain and risk
being wrong than end up without a voice.
Brigitte et Brigitte is such a
difficult film to pin down that it could be almost anything you wanted
it to. Devotees of the French New Wave will most likely cherish
it as a prime example of this exciting era of French cinema - made on a
micro-budget, wildly subversive and intellectually stimulating.
Those who are not particularly enamoured of the Nouvelle Vague can
equally enjoy it as a scurrilous send-up of this hideously overblown
era of French cinema - the best parody of a Jean-Luc Godard film that
fifty-three francs and twenty-seven centimes can buy (I'm not sure
exactly how much the film cost to make, but it clearly wasn't much more
than that). Love the New Wave or hate the New Wave,
Brigitte et Brigitte is an
eccentric comedy delight that has fun creating waves of its own.
And if you think this film is strange, wait until you see Mollet's
next film, the even more perplexing
Les Contrebandières (1968).
© James Travers 2015
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