Mathieu Amalric's Barbara is showing exclusively from February 24 – March 25, 2019 on MUBI in the United States.
Dear Jeanne Balibar,
I have seen you but I remain doubtful about whether you have seen me. Well, actually I have heard you at first. Your trembling voice somewhere between seduction and fear, your beautiful songs. I hesitated a long time to write to you. It gave me courage that you have dealt with men who hesitate a lot in your films.
It is a bit hard to approach you. You always seem to be surrounded with friends. You work with them over and over again. There are different groups I saw you with. Some women and some men appear next to you all the time, but actually you very often make it seem as if you appeared next to them. I have the feeling that following you like I have done is really a way to learn about everything that went right and wrong in French cinema since I was born. Yes, it is true, I don’t like all the films you are in. You appear in prestige productions, Cannes openers, series, good or bad French comedies, you work with so-called auteurs, true auteurs, outsiders and mainstream darlings. Always when I grew tired of a certain tendency in French cinema and went on to explore new territory, you were already there. But then, who is Jeanne Balibar? There is something in your acting that breathes freedom even when in chains. Maybe it is because of that Jacques Rivette introduced you behind bars once, just as he did with Anna Karina so many years before. In your strongest films you are a Rivette actress. Cheeky and self-paced, tender and intimidating: free.
They should all let you off the hook. How great you are when you seem to lose yourself, when you are out of control, when you are not acting. You once said that you prefer films without actors and that’s why you liked your experience in being filmed as a singer by Pedro Costa. Isn’t it funny that in the film you acted the least you seem to become pure fiction? It is the only film in which I perceived you as larger than life. The light of Mr. Costa makes you look like the moon. But it would be too easy to elevate you. The film also showed me how much you work. It is always like that. Something in your acting speaks of a diva, otherworldly, erratic grace and something else hints at the most down-to-earth, normal human being. Your intonation is special. You make me hear every word as if it was for the first time.
I once heard you say, sitting at a table in a club in one of those rather twisted and crooked positions you sometimes seem to feel very comfortable in, that people don’t change. You change. All the time. I know that clothes are very important to you. I can tell from the way you play around with them. Like with the scarf at the Russian party together with Pierre Léon. Or when you were wearing a uniform as a stewardess. Like Jackie Brown. Actually, that day I saw you in a uniform was also one of the few occasions when I saw you right at the beginning of a film. Very often directors hide you, make you a ghost we have to wait for. Raúl Ruiz did it. Olivier Assayas, too. Since Fyodor Dostoevsky waited a long time in his The Idiot to properly introduce Nastasya, a woman everybody talks about all the time, I found it very fitting you were acting as Nastasya. Well, but back to your costumes. When you met this famous writer, Françoise Sagan, you were standing in front of a cloakroom, you dropped your bag out of surprise and I understood immediately that what you do is connected to what you carry, what you wear. The first time I saw you, you put a pair of very special hairpins into your hair. They made you look like the devil with horns. It made me a bit afraid. You sometimes do that. There is even a red spot on my back which grows larger and larger since I observed you describing paintings.
Like me, you seem to be very nervous. Maybe it is all an act. You sit with gloves in my backseat and smile. Suddenly you climb into the trunk. I never know what to expect of you. When you were being Barbara you told me that you sing fast so that you don’t have to cry. They lyrics are too sad to sing them slowly. Sometimes I see the same resistance to tears in your smile. As if you can cry with a smile. But then you also use your smile. It can be deeply honest. It can be manipulative. It can be crazy. Sometimes you transform into people that are not honest. There is a dark side to you. I don’t know. It is just what I observe from a distance. You suddenly scream. It makes me silent. You do cry, but not much. I think your tears hide in your movements. However, I have seen you cry. Most of the time you cry on your own. I can’t come closer then. There are tears that belong to everybody and tears that belong to somebody alone. Yours belong only to you.
It all sounds rather melancholic. It is not. You make me laugh a lot. Lets watch horse races together, lets throw water into our faces! Lets go to the Take Away Theatre. Once I followed you through Triest. You were searching for an answer. Why has a certain writer never written. Have you found the answer yet? When I was in Triest a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t see you. Maybe you were on that beach where only men are allowed to. How afraid they are of you! Another time you were in Lisbon. They let you sleep in a hotel for students only. You seem to end up at places where you are not allowed to. We could sit under a tree and talk to each other. Trees never forbid us to be there.
You like music a lot. It not only shows in your singing and playing different instruments in your films but also in the way your movements feel like dancing. Once I even saw you dancing while you were sitting on the floor. Somehow you oppose my notion of acting as something that comes with restraint. You seem to climb up and down invisible letters inside yourself all the time. Ungraspable! Expressionistic but natural. I hope you don’t fall.
Perhaps you think by now: What a strange person writes me a letter like that. Somebody who really watched all my films? Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I only watched a few. Maybe I am acting myself right now as I am writing to you. Maybe you imagine me as someone like Mr. Léon (him again!) sitting half-naked in red lights in front of my computer. It is not necessarily true that you can find out about me through my writing. I saw you try something like that once. You got lost. Maybe I haven’t even written this letter. It can go on like that all the time. We can see who is in control and never really see us as who we are. I saw you doing it until you disappeared to find God and death. I hope you will at least open my letter.
I admit, I have some strange fantasies. I thought you were my mother once. So I left my mother and visited your house. You wanted me to be your son. It was just a whim, I think. I am not sure you remember. I heard you sing to another child of yours. You were standing in the middle of books and calmed everything down. It is understandable that you don’t want anybody to scream in front of your baby. At least until you scream yourself.
I know you live in Germany. I am writing to you from cinema but of course, there is a lot of theatre in your life. I can’t say much about it. I have never seen you on stage except that time Mr. Rivette put you there. You almost missed the curtain call. I was not sure if you were acting or just being again. I know you speak German. You also talked about the reasons for it. You talked about how your family was killed in Auschwitz and how your surviving grandfather wanted you to learn the language. To reconcile with Germany, with humanity. As a German, I think, (and I really shouldn’t write more about it because it is not possible for me) that this is the most necessary use of this language with the exception of the poems of Paul Celan. Wer bist du für mich, Jeanne Balibar?
Of course, this can’t be a serious letter, it is a fiction, a playful imagination or just a different mode of writing about your cinema. Once I heard you sing out loud emails. I considered to do the same with this letter. Yet, I didn’t. There is no real reason for me to write to you. Except that I admire your acting and find you to be an auteur du cinéma. And just while I was thinking about how to explain in what manner an actress can be an auteur for me, I read that you are working on a film as director again. I will see it.
Je suis libre tous le jours. I hope you are fine, not fine, fine, not fine, fine, not fine…
Play again, Jeanne.
Sincerely,
Patrick
PS: Don’t change.
