Take One (Oct 1976)

older, and me. He took the sexual obsession and gave it to Brando and | became the part of himself that was the adolescent filmlover. | tried to play the part with a little bit of humour. | was thinking also of that slow Brando manner. | wanted to act quickly and accent the stylized gestures because | was not given enough time to analyze the character. The part was a little bit difficult because the audience always wants to get back to the room. Besides, everything is absolutely improvised. We would write it in the morning with Bertolucci. My only frame of reference is that | used to be a film buff. “It was difficult, in another way, for me to work in Bertolucci’s film because Brando refused systematically to work on‘Saturdays. (Maybe he was marching for the liberation of Indians!) Me, | had to work every Saturday so that the crew wouldn't waste time. Maybe the sympathetic thing to say is that there was a clash of styles — Italian, French and American.” Like Last Tango in Paris, Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain deals with the reconstruction of sexual habits; like Last Tango Tango, La Maman takes place mainly in one bedroom. But where Bertolucci’s film is flaccid and improvised, Eustache’s is tightly written and witty, where Bertolucci (with an implicitly Roman Catholic sensibility) deals only with the destruction of the old mores, Eustache, on the other hand, also analyzes for us the new mores that are beginning to replace the old ones. La Maman et la putain more than any other recent French film gives one a sense of new beginnings, fresh departures. At the same time, it is thoroughly evocative of the elements of the styles and concerns of the New Wave that made the films of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette (and Bresson) so valuable during the last fifteen years. Eustache draws a little something from each of his predecessors, but the synthesis he makes is entirely his own. The film is 31/2 hours of intense dialogue (and monologue), which is both rich with resonances of the past and at the same time clearly a very relevant film about the way we live now, the way we make love. As Alexandre, Léaud is caught in a tangle of relationships with three women, just as he was seven years previously in Masculin-Féminin. Godard’s film was, however, an objective, slightly bemused study of people in their early twenties — a generation which Godard explained at the time was like a foreign country to him. Eustache’s film, while it speaks of the same generation, now about 30, is far more subjective and ironic. Most ‘important, moreover, are the tremendous changes which have taken place in the sensibilities of that generation. The new lifestyles have become institutionalized, and the people have been vulcanized by the politics of the intervening years — in America, mainly Vietnam, but in France, the revolution of ’68. Alexandre, in the course of this intense film, proposes romantic marriage to Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten) but is turned down. He discovers Veronika 20 (Francoise Lebrun) to take her place, a woman who as she explains, “Screws a maximum of guys.” All the time, meanwhile, he is living with Marie (Bernadette Lafont). As similar as it is to his previous roles in terms of content, Alexandre is “something completely new and different” for Léaud. He speaks of the film with admiration, even love: “There is always a moment in life when a man asks himself questions about sex, and that’s always interesting because the answers are always different. For myself, | like very much La Maman et la putain. Eustache had written a text that was detailed and extremely beautiful, word for word, and | had to put it back on the screen “Maybe the sympathetic thing to say is that there was a clash of styles — Italian, French and American.” with a kind of natural feeling. He had written the part especially for me, and | fell into my age again — 29 or 30. Anything which had to do with adolescence | had to forget and leave behind. Since there was no improvisation, | found | had to work for the first time in films as | do on stage. The text was written out and | had to give it back. | was trying to be as natural as possible, but | had to follow this very strict line given by the director, although | was still using my own small personal technique, which mainly consists of finding the image of a director and following that. (It usually happens within the first three days of shooting that | can tell where we are going.) Given my preference, | would rather have the director provide some ideas and some words, leaving some room for the actor in between. Most of the time it works like that, but | am full of thanks to Eustache for writing that part for me. It’s more pleasant when you can give back in your own words the author’s ideas, but the tensions we were under were productive here, | feel. Besides the difficulty with the extensive script, there were tensions for other reasons. It was Eustache’s first long feature film and a director in that position has to discover a lot. We were limited by the four-week shooting schedule and we had a lot of problems with the film stock itself which were multiplied by the limitations of the shooting schedule: we were doing shots of four or five minutes each, and retakes would have taken too much time. But with all that, it was like participating in a very intimate adventure. We were all old friends. “At the same time the film is very close to life, and there was a special atmosphere on the set which colored our feeling, which is good, because it gives a special psychological colorization to the film. It was the most difficult work I’ve ever done in my life. It was the true work of an actor. Yet there were no special psychological difficulties for us with the subject of the film because you couldn't get lost in it. We had no time. The only way we could express it was to play it. The film is finally a structure of monologues, and the most important character is words. It’s maybe the first time that you hear women talking the way they really do, and it’s difficult to imagine that a man could understand this the way Eustache did. The film is deeply political without being explicit. There is a sentiment — a sense of loss — that is very political and that exists at the center of the film. Eustache feels that very much. Even though Alexandre is the pivot of the film, | think Eustache was thinking equally about the roles that Fran¢goise and Bernadette play (and about Francoise and Bernadette too). There was never really any attention focused on me, it was always the three of us. And after all, Alexandre is not a brilliant homage to men! | like Bernadette’s character very much. She plays with a special strength and intensity. It is a very noble character and very true. | like the film very much.” There is not much doubt, looking back over the list of Léaud’s films during the past ten years, that he has, with the great help of Truffaut, Godard and now Eustache, become an actor who doesn’t simply serve time on the screen, but rather collaborates actively with his directors. It is no accident that Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage, in which the teacher learns as much as the student, is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Leaud. If he prefers not to direct films himself it is only because he is perceptive enough to know how much important work there is to be done as an actor. As Antoine, Paul, Guillaume, Emile, Claude, Alphonse, Tom and Alexandre, he has created a subtle and various persona that explains much about his generation. In his understanding of that subject among actors, he is almost alone, sad to say. He represents for many of us the actor as surrogate, not portraying a whole gallery of strange, distant and objective Characters (in a way that calls attention to the actor’s art) but rather conscientiously and regularly illustrating our own deeper selves, subjectively holding the analytical mirror up to our own natures. That is really useful and interesting work. For Léaud, “the position of an actor is very difficult because you are always waiting for someone to give you a script. I’m extremely impatient; | have to make a film as soon as | sit still. An actor has to rediscover everything if he -stops working. | haven't any idea what | will be doing in the future; | only hope | get as good films as | have recently.” If he does, we can continue to expect that he will illustrate with wit and a very rough charm the progress of the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola” into their rapidly approaching middle age. [Translated by Catherine Verret and James Monaco]. 2]