Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/20/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor.

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters.