Le Révélateur (1968)
Directed by Philippe Garrel

Film Review

Up and coming French film auteur Philippe Garrel followed up his debut feature Marie pour mémoire (1967) with what is undeniably his strangest film, Le Révélateur, a silent black-and-white oddity that does its damnedest to defy a literal interpretation but is utterly, and inexplicably, beguiling.  Garrel made the film in Germany with next to no resources towards the end of May 1968, apparently having left France in disgust when the riots, strikes and demonstrations that swept the country earlier that month had failed to culminate in a full-scale revolution.  It is tempting to read Le Révélateur as a protest film condemning a generation that had failed to seize the moment and overthrow an unpopular, authoritarian regime, with the little boy in the film representing hope that the next generation will be more successful.  But even this interpretation, plausible though it is, fails to account for everything we see in the film.  What Garrel gives us here is the nearest thing to a dream experience, which we are free to interpret in whatever way we choose.

The film begins in small room with a little boy spying on a young man and woman (Laurent Terzieff and Bernadette Lafont) whom we assume to be his parents.  Straight away we are struck by the emotional disconnection between the man and the woman.  From their body language and their inability to face one another we see that they have just fallen out.  Perhaps their relationship is over.  All the time, the little boy watches down on them nonchalantly, like a benign and bewildered angel.  Shortly afterwards, the boy is seen walking through a long tunnel, at the end of which he finds the woman tied to a stake and lit from the front by a headlamp.  The boy unties the woman and then we see the party of three walking down a stretch of road after dark.  Again, the separation between the man  and the woman is striking.  The next time the couple are seen rowing with one another it is on a stage, with the little boy watching, as a spectator at the theatre.  The walk down a road bordered by woods continues, but with a greater sense of urgency.  It is now apparent that the three people are on the run, fleeing from some unspecified terror.  Increasingly, the child seems disconnected from his parents and, ultimately, he ends up sitting and watching them as if they were in a film.  The next time we see the man and the woman they are hanging dead from a fence.  The boy continues his cross-country trek at a more sedate pace and arrives at a deserted beach, seemingly happy in his solitude as he nears the water's edge.

The film's ending gives perhaps the best clue as to what the film is meant to be about.  An obvious homage to Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959), it invites us to connect the child with the estranged pre-adolescent in Truffaut's film.  Le Révélateur is then revealed to us as an expression of a child's reaction to the break-up of his parent's relationship.  The gradually increasing sense of detachment between the child and his parents, the splintering of the parent-child bond, echoes what we see in Truffaut's film, but Garrel's approach is more abstract, depicting not real experience but the psychological impact on the child as he becomes aware of his own identity and realises for the first time that he is an autonomous entity, alone in a vast, uncaring universe .   The beautifully stark, dreamlike composition of Garrel's film gives it a disturbing resonance that lingers in the mind long after you have seen it.  Surely no other piece of cinema has captured the pathos, fragility and terrifying mystique of childhood as vividly as this one?

Film Synopsis

A couple and their child are on the run, as if pursued by a war that only shows itself in their faces.  They flee from their house, then run across fields, down roads and through forests.  But the child succeeds in detaching itself from the terror that has taken hold of its parents...