Cinema—
Egotist on the loose
Clancy Sigal
Una Partie de Plaisir (Camden Plaza) La Cecilia (The Other Cinema) Much of my psychic life has been spent in west or north London flea pits — the Harrow Road Essoldo, the Globe in Putney, the Westbourne Grove Classic, etc. When any of these ancient movie houses falls victim to urban blight, or the Harry Hyams or Joe Levys of this world (often the same thing), I suffer no less than Sir John Betjeman when one of his cherished Norman churches crumbles into disrepair. To this day I cannot bear to look at .the gaping 'redeveloped' hole where the Tolmer Square cinema, once the cheapest in London, used to be. Therefore, three cheers and a huzzah for Andi and Pamela Engel who have saved one of my favourite doss-houses, the Plaza in Camden Town, by attractively converting it into a clean, no-smoking theatre. Good luck to it.
The Plaza kicks off with a relatively new (1975), compelling Chabrol study in blind male egotism, Line Partie de Plaisir (X certificate). It is being sold as a 'true' story, because Chabrol's boyhood pal and present collaborator, the writer Paul Gegauff, and Gegauffs estranged real-life wife Daniele, play the central parts in a story which, allegedly, is about their marriage. Hand on heart, Chabrol swears that the script is a more or less factual reconstruction of what actually happened when Gegauff, to juice up their relationship, prodded his wife into infidelities which she liked so much she left him. According to Chabrol, Gegauff then used Daniele's participation in the film to (unsuccessfully) woo her back.
But you needn't know all that to appreciate this repellent, riveting film.
Just as there is Hitchcock 'territory', so there is a landscape which Chabrol — a passionate admirer of Hitchcock — has staked out as peculiarly his own. In many of his films, including some scripted by Gegauff, Chabrol icily invokes the atmosphere of bourgeois smugness, especially of provincial middle-class marriage, and of the psychic nauseas it produces.
To love is to play the power game: that is the immutable rule of most Chabrol films. In Une Partie de Plaisir Gegauff, playing (presumably himself) as a weakly handsome, supremely confident but doting husband and father, lives with — but hasn't married — Daniele, a lower-class girl he has moulded into a female version of himself. All decisions are his; she has the right only to be pleased or not about them. For eight years this system has worked, but now ennui compels him to push Daniele into bed with a trendy Arab. This excites Gegauff, that is
until Daniele starts hanging around with the Arab's cocktail philosopher friends and taking their ideas seriously. Gegauff then disintegrates to the extent that his woman acquires autonomy, and there is a conventionally melodramatic ending which is both logical and unconvincing.
The way Gegauff the scriptwriter has of exposing Gegauff the lover-husband strongly reinforces, not contradicts, the suffocating sense of egotism which presumably Chabrol is asking us to analyse. Gegauff (who did Les Cousins and Les Biches for Chabrol) has failed in his elementary duty, which is to give his wife something substantial to do or say in his script. We are told that Daniele is 'liberating' herself, but we never really see it. What we do see is Daniele sitting around cafés with his friends being humiliated and bullied by Gegauff (how the actor-writer must have enjoyed these scenes, at once sadistic and selfcondemnatory!).
line Partie de Plaisir is the husband's final kick in the teeth to Daniele — though I suspect Gegauff probably sees it as a rose tenderly bestowed on her, as the husband in the film places a flower upon the breakfast tray he uxoriously serves her the morning after her night with the •Arab. To this day, ,Gegauff may not understand why she fled from his thuggishness. Still, the picture, .while not top-drawer Chabrol, is an ;auspicious start for the new and welcome 'Camden Plaza.
Who 'owns' a woman is also crucial to La Cecilia (A certificate), a haunting and surprisingly successful first feature by JeanLouis Comolli. Surprising, because it is that rarity, an explicitly political film of ideas which is not a boring tract.
Comolli's story, apparently taken from history, describes how Giovanni Rossi, a nineteenth-century Italian anarchist, persuaded the Brazilian emperor to let him start a utopian, free-love commune at La Cecilia, in Brazil. Eventually, the colony, with a nucleus of nine men, and only one woman, failed — the charismatic founder got bored with his experiment and familyoriented farmers didn't mix well with their bachelor comrades. But, for a while, out of the crop failures and endless debates over Bakunin versus Malatesta, something extraordinary may have happened there.
One of the strengths of Comolli's openhearted film is the straightforward way it raises questions which long ago most of us forgot — or were never taught — how to articulate for ourselves: Does organisation necessarily involve authority? To each according to his work — or his needs? And, crucial here, to what extent is sex private property? (That also, of course, lies close to the heart of the Chabrollian dilemma.)
Somehow Comolli has plausibly conveyed the fiery revolutionary optimism of these 'primitive' Italian anarchists, who are almost literally in love with freedom, without either pedantry or cycnicism. Against all the odds, the single woman, the tactful and strong Olimpia (played a shade too cheerfully by Maria Carta), convinces us when she says: 'I want to be free every day of my life.' And she proves it by doing her share of the work, sleeping with whomever she wants, and consistently affirming anarchist practice in the face of her comrades' macho regressions. There's a funny, touching scene when Olimpia rushes to Rossi, her latest lover, with an urgent personal problem only to discover that (like Gagauff in Chabrol's film) he is too involved with his own sexual difficulties with her even to listen.
La Cecilia is as fragile as the commune itself probably was, in that it's easy to tear it apart with 'realism'. Is it conceivable, even, that nine men and an attractive woman could work together without murderous sexual complications? One part of me says, absurd. Another wonders, is it possible? La Cecilia addresses that possibility.
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