Le Clair de terre (1970)
Directed by Guy Gilles

Film Review

For his third feature, Algerian born director Guy Gilles presents a mesmerising voyage of discovery for one rootless young man that mirrors his own relentless striving to find himself through his art.  Gilles and the central protagonist of Le Clair de terre (a pied noir named Pierre, played by the director's frequent collaborator Patrick Jouané) have much in common.  Both are men born outside France who feel outsiders in their adopted country.  The ties to their country of origin are far stronger than their ties with France, and it this bond - one that stretches across time as well as space, linking present consciousness with hazy childhood recollections - that contains the key to their identity.  Pierre's physical journey from dreary Paris to sun-drenched Tunis is accompanied by a spiritual journey that Pierre and Gilles take together, to that dark inner place where the truth of who they are will be revealed to them.

Le Clair de terre is an unashamed self-portrait, and this is what makes it so powerful and compelling.  (Gilles originally wanted to make his character's destination Algeria, but permission to film in France's recently liberated colony was denied him, so Tunisia became its substitute.)  Throughout his professional career, if not his entire adult life, Guy Gilles was the perpetual outsider.  He completed his first feature L'Amour à la mer in 1964, just as the French New Wave was on the way out, but hardly anyone noticed.  Over the next thirty years, he made another ten features for cinema and television, but his work was appreciated by only a handful of critics and a very select audience.  Since his premature death in 1993, he still hasn't received the attention he deserves - such is the price any artist must pay if he places authenticity before commercial considerations.

Gilles was always the consummate auteur, unflinching in his determination to capture the true essence of life in his art, and unwilling to make the slightest concession to critics or audiences.  It is the sublime purity of his films that make them so mysterious and beguiling, and none more so than his haunting masterpiece Le Clair de terre.  In this unique piece of cinema, Gilles evokes the terrible yearning that his protagonist feels, the need he has to connect with his past and thereby discover who is - an urge that we can readily identify with.  The film achieves this with an extraordinary degree of sensual and emotional realism, through a skilful marriage of visual and aural montage, against which conventional cinema appears depressingly bland and prosaic.

Gilles' objective is not to show us, as most filmmakers do, how the world appears to our eyes, but how it actually feels to us, through the combined chaotic interplay of all our senses and our imagination - life as it is, with all its confusion and colour, beauty and derangement.  Long static shots burdened with an aching sense of ennui are inter-cut with staccato bursts of fleeting shots (most barely lasting a second).   Some images linger in our mind and fade away like photographs, whilst others flash intermittently with a dazzling vividness, a bold patchwork quilt of the senses that stands at the threshold of comprehension.  This is the sensual experience that Pierre, the protagonist, subjects himself to as he retreats from one world that has grown stale to him and seeks another, the enchanted kingdom over the horizon wherein lie the answers to all of his questions.

An intensely melancholic score composed by the director's cousin Jean-Pierre Stora (spookily reminiscent of Paul Durand's theme to the film La Vache et le prisonnier) and some popular songs of the 1940s, together with crisp background sounds, make up the aural tapestry that blends so perfectly with the visual montage that we feel we are as much companions on Pierre's inner journey as on his physical journey from Paris to Tunis.  On the way, Pierre breaks his journey and shares intimate moments of reflection with acquaintances and strangers, all of whom seem to be burdened, if not imprisoned by their shackles to a past that will never let them go.  A memorable sequence with Annie Girardot brings home how hard it can be sometimes to break free of past misfortunes and move on.  In contrast to Pierre, who resents the fact that his connection with the past is too tenuous for him to face the future, Girardot's emotionally immured widow is so wedded to the past that it has robbed her of any prospect of a future life.

This scene is replayed when Pierre reaches Tunis and strikes up a close rapport with a friend of his long departed mother, a retired teacher portrayed with heartbreaking authenticity by Edwige Feuillère.  Here is another character who is trapped in the past, so much so that she cannot bear to leave the foreign city to which she has grown so attached.  Echoing the curious description of the old bricks of Paris ventured by a tourist guide at the start of the film, she carries the weight of the past on her back, and in doing so she has turned herself into a living monument.  Although her recollections are gratefully received by Pierre, they do not serve his real purpose, and it is only when he shares a convivial meal with the pied noir family of someone he met by chance on the boat trip across the Mediterranean that he begins to gain some inkling as to who he is.  His identity lies not in the past, but in the present, and it is here that he must seek it.  As the film's closing À suivre caption implies, Pierre's journey has only just begun.

Film Synopsis

Pierre Brumeu, 21, lives in Paris and has a strained relationship with his father, a widower who is still mourning the loss of his wife many years ago.  Pierre confides in his friends Michel and Sophie his desire to return to the country where he was born, Tunisia, and bring a tangible reality to his early childhood memories.  With nothing to keep him in Paris, Pierre climbs aboard a train and heads south, before taking a boat to Tunis.  On the crossing, he strikes up a friendship with a French man of his own age, Maurice Garcia.  In Tunis, Pierre meets up with Madame Larivière, a school teacher who was a friend of his mother and still has vivid recollections of the years before she died.  Continuing his journey, Pierre makes his way to the scorching heart of Tunisia and visits Maurice's family, who insist that he joins them for dinner.  Just when he feels he is beginning to reconnect with his past, Pierre receives a letter from Michel informing him that Sophie has drowned herself.  He has no choice but to cut short his visit and return to Paris...