MUBI

Bresson enters Nouvelle Vague territory, in terms of the milieu he’s showing us, and a kind of political engagement, although I think his main concern here is free will, or the lack of it, as is slightly indicated by the title. Charles, the main character, wants to reject the society that he sees himself being inexorably pulled into and which Bresson illustrates – very untypically and very strikingly – with newsreel footage of environmental destruction. That film-stock cannot but be angry, it has a stance of its own independently of what characters are given to say about it – which is not a great deal, since, significantly, OTHER students in Charles’ entourage project it to each other, and outside the projection room those students are either more or less co-operative with the status quo (Michel, published author and uncritical swallower of corporate excuses) or preoccupied solely with their private affairs, principally their relationship with Charles. As for Charles, he interprets freedom of action quite explicitly as freedom of INaction, declaring that he wants to push ‘doing nothing’ to its most extreme limit. As such he does, indeed, set himself apart from ‘the flow’, but only by electing an unresistant flow of his own. He has selected a pattern and within that pattern he rarely has to take a decision: when he DOES need to decide – which of his two adoring girlfriends he’ll permanently live with – he’s completely unable to, tells each of them that she is the one, then leaves them to decide his fate between them.

Rather than a post-60s rebel, Charles seems like a throwback to the nineteenth century, although without literary references or the slightest temptation to creativity. His role-model could be the elegant ‘refuseniks’ that Breton and his Surrealist friends admired before the war (Jacques Rigaut et al., characters whose only claim to fame now is that the Surrealists admired them…) or some version of what Rimbaud SAID. (He does advocate making love as often as possible, which is about his only theoretical concession to activity, but when seen en intime he’s usually asleep or otherwise supine). And he’s tempted towards suicide, which he rationalises as a completely free act but which is actually only the logical extension of ‘pushing doing nothing to its extreme’. The only problem being that it does require some decision and quite definitely some action, and, predictably, he doesn’t have the free willpower to do it.

If Charles claims to be driven by no one but himself, nonetheless he can’t decide for himself. On the other hand he exerts immense sway over the other characters, particularly Alberte who seems to have swallowed his posturing whole. She leaves her parents’ house to live with Charles, abandoning HER free-will to HIS well-being, and when he leaves, her first thought is to go back to her parents, certainly not to embark on a relatively independent relationship with an affectionate, but uncharismatic, Michel – who, for his part, seems ready to do more or less what society expects of him and to dedicate his free time to moral support for Alberte which incidentally also means, as a rule, running around after Charles. So neither Alberte nor Michel is free either; but nonetheless Charles’ sway over Alberte is not quite absolute, she will act against his will in his own best interests. She certainly wouldn’t pull the trigger for him. So when fortuitously (or intentionally?) the psychiatrist whom Charles’ friends believe will save him from his suicidal tendencies gives him the solution to his indecisiveness (‘the ancient Romans got a servant or a friend to do it’ .. that’s what the French says, but I prefer the subtitle, ‘a slave or a friend’), he has to turn to his friend Valentin, a good-natured junky, certainly no killer, but by virtue of his habit so completely pliable that he might just as well be Charles’ slave.

So is the conclusion that we’re all being led by the nose to predestined damnation? Frankly, I think it probably is, even though there remain two minor characters, Edwige and the bookseller, the two who project the films of pollution and nuclear disaster, who lie slightly outside the pattern. But they don’t take much other action – and the very fact of projecting a film, after all, is submission to an inevitable outcome programmed in advance. Not to mention Bresson’s usual request to his actors to simply say their lines expressionlessly, and to carry out all actions at the same pace, which creates a very strange impression of mechanical movement, particularly when the script and the situation requires them to hurry and exhort each other to hurry; and a large number of shots of feet and lower bodies as they walk through the streets, which, again, encourage the idea of mechanical movement, as if ‘their feet were just carrying them’. Utterly pessimistic, but leaves a lot to think about. Not likable, but a respectful ‘yes’.

(I take it that it does end very abruptly, aka ‘Winter Light’, with Valentin running off, rather than that the recording cut off prematurely?)