Tags : Cinelogue

If Chabrol is indebted to Hitchcock here it’s more subtle than in his later “suspense thrillers” where even a layman could note the similarities. Here, Hitch can mostly be seen through the combination of sly sexuality and mysterious danger—its cast is a study in the allure of carnality as it relates to both sex and death. Rita has chosen the safe route, and Henri is a steadfast, if utterly boring, suitor. When she defends her choice all she can really say is that he’s well read, well educated, and comes from a good family. Jane wants something wilder, and in Marcel she has a man who’s leading a secret life…

Holding to the perimeters of the room, the camera finds vantage points in the rafters, low on the floor, and even within the fireplace. As Robain and Stéphane sit, the camera adopts their position and glares upwards at the towering shape of Vernon. The low-angle lighting accents the angles of his face and finds a magnificent counterpoint in the soft-lit features of Stéphane – a countenance that surely ranks alongside Maria Falconetti’s in the annals of cinema.

Here, Varda takes Faulkner’s conceit from The Wild Palms further, transposing his quintessentially literary form to the mutant canvas of film with two strands that are both arguably non-narrative. First, there is her almost ethnographic documentation of the lives and travails of the local fisherman and their families, all of whom are portrayed by real inhabitants of La Pointe Courte but who often times “perform” for Varda rudimentary mini-narratives. After a credit sequence in which Varda’s camera is poised on the interior of a log, a gentle wind seems to blow it upstream and into the back streets of the village, incidentally settling into this initial mode. Secondly, there is the boldly distinct story of Lui and Elle, played by relatively established theater actors Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, in which the two middle-aged lovers visit Lui’s old hometown (La Pointe Courte) and feverishly contemplate the state of their relationship, wondering if any life remains in it.

Saying the film is a masterpiece would be a mistake. In a sense, it’s much more interesting than that. If cinema were a map than La Pointe-Courte would be a crossroads in the centre of European cinema; a linking point between post-war realist movements and the more avant-garde, stridently intellectual cinema that typified the art-house fare of the 1960s. Indeed it goes further than that, the cats that fill the corners of so many frames and the rough, rural location effectively harks back to earlier French gems such as the poetic-realism of Vigo’s L’Atalante…