Couers
***/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sabine Azéma, Isabelle Carré, Laura Morante, Claude Rich
screenplay by Jean-Michel Ribes, based on the play by Alan Ayckbourn
directed by Alain Resnais
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Some time ago, there was a contretemps in the pages of another writing venue of mine, REVERSE SHOT. The estimable Nick Pinkerton had written a rather tepid assessment of Alain Resnais’s Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs): he claimed that its inclusion in the New York Film Festival was an “obligatory slot-filling by one of the ‘Old Masters of the Sixties’ art-house.” NYFF programmer Kent Jones shot back with a dryly-hilarious note confirming such selection criteria, which enthused that the film “had exactly the lack of urgency, the unexceptionable hominess, and the scanty charm we were looking for.” The whole thing was pretty funny, but it illustrated the pitfalls of playing certain critical lines. While Pinkerton is mostly correct that Private Fears in Public Places is a disappointingly inconsequential film by someone who had previously defined styles and moved mountains, this is punishing Resnais unduly: just because you’re not making a masterpiece doesn’t mean you lack any point at all.
Part of the issue might be that the film is based on an Alan Ayckbourn play. Though I’ve managed to let his work pass me by, the reputation on which it rests is divided between ardent admirers and haters disdainful of smug bourgeois triviality. Indeed, the outline of Private Fears in Public Places is mildly structural and vaguely concerns relationships without delving deeply into the implications of either. Six people have romantic/domestic issues within their interlocking lives: Nicole and Dan (Laura Morante and Lambert Wilson) are unhappily-engaged and dealing with Dan’s unemployment and alcoholism; Thierry and Gaëlle (André Dussollier and Isabelle Carré) are a brother and sister with a large (and never-addressed) age gap; and Lionel and Charlotte (Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma) are employer-employee, the latter serving as caregiver to the former’s foul, angry father. With Thierry and Charlotte working at the same real estate office and Lionel tending bar at Dan’s favourite watering hole, the stage is set for crosscurrents and cross-pollinations.
Thus, the film is about loneliness. Nicole and Dan can’t seem to connect, Lionel is trapped behind the bar listening to depressing stories, Charlotte must deal with the hell of Grandpa’s vicious wrath, Thierry suddenly develops a thwarted interest in Charlotte, etc., etc., etc. Sadly, and in Pinkerton’s defense, the film doesn’t play ball with this emotion at all, especially at the screenwriting level: instead committing to the characters’ pain, the script offers well-written but hollow palliatives. Still, were it virtually anybody else–a British director, say, or an American, or anyone in the literal-minded Anglosphere–at the helm, this would’ve no doubt been an orgy of awkwardness and self-congratulation. The film is not only French, but the product of a pretty singular French director–and Resnais does something surprising: he takes the source material at once more and less seriously than it asks to be taken.
The Resnais version is gently but insistently stylized, enough to put things in quotes but pulling well back from a marzipan freak-out like One from the Heart. One reason for this is to mark the director’s belief in the artificiality of the material–that even he’s not entirely taken in by its groping for profundity on a West End vibe. Another is that Resnais is also aware of the reasons audiences turn to this stuff instead of to harder forms of art. He knows they want to be comforted about the emotions being softened in the piece, and while that doesn’t necessarily permit rising to the level we expect of great cinema (certainly not to that of the man responsible for Hiroshima, mon amour), it is an impulse Resnais understands and for which he feels some sympathy. By quietly Sirk-ing up the visuals, he makes it about that impulse, rendering the proceedings far more poignant and resonant than the realist trappings that a standard director would have used to make something, paradoxically, much less convincing.
That, of course, doesn’t make Private Fears in Public Places particularly profound or essential. Those looking for the glory days of Resnais won’t encounter the disappointed horror of Muriel, the twisted-up agony of Hiroshima, or the sheer whacked-out weirdness of Last Year at Marienbad in any substantial manner. But it remains a movie I watched quite unironically, enjoyed without experiencing longueurs and annoyance, and feel entirely satisfied with having seen. It’s far from a masterpiece, but it’s visibly the work of a master–one perhaps worrying about things that are beneath him, yet searching for interesting ways into the material and coming up with an interpretation that’s pleasing whatever its obvious faults. If I won’t be fixating over Private Fears in Public Places, I’ll remember it with pleasure; and with all due respect to an excellent critic like Pinkerton, it’s somehow not “as boring to talk about as staying home from work with a cough and watching ‘Newhart’ reruns.”
THE DVD
Distributed by Genius Products, IFC’s bare-bones R1 DVD release of Private Fears in Public Places does the movie proud. The 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced image is excellent at rendering the soft, lustrous colours of Eric Gautier’s cinematography: nothing is overcooked and everything is soothingly harmonious. Although the Dolby 5.1 track wouldn’t appear to have much to work with, the mix proper captures the sense of room tone, the clink of glasses, and the hum of surrounding citizenry with surprising dimensionality. Trailers for Penelope, My Best Friend, After the Wedding, Snow Cake, and Russian Dolls are the only extras.
120 minutes; NR; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; IFC/Genius
