So: now i’m watching it 30 years on, 30 years older.
I still rate it highly.
But i certainly don’t feel charmed or infatuated with Pomme (Isabelle Huppert) any more. Vauguely irritated more like.
I identify much more with boyfriend Francoise, it’s his POV i watch from now.
“Don’t you know anything?” he asks her. No she doesn’t. Nor does she have much to say. “What do you do?” Eats apples, sucks ice-creams, peels peaches, collects shells, folds washing very nicely. “Whats your life like?” “Work, then home again” she answers blandly. “Men don’t interest me” she says drably. No, untouched by Eros she is.
When walking her to the edge of cliff he says “I wouldn’t let you fall“. But of course he does, eventually, let her fall. Even becomes instrumental in giving her a push over the edge into her abyss.
Anyway, wants her to live with him back in Paris. She packs her iron.
She’s like an obedient dull little doggie. “You must develop your personality” he says. Yes, i’m thinking, you do – cus you ain’t shown much evidence of one up to now. “You don’t want to spend your life scrubbing old womens heads” he says (yes, she does) Actually, all she’s wanting is to be some nice blokes nice little housewifey.
Dull and bland, passively inhibited. Mousey little doormouse girl. That’s how i’m seeing Isabelle Huppert. Boring person.
That fumbly shy awkwardness between them i found endearing back in the 70’s now looks like flawed and fatal incompatibility. There’s so little connect going on. He asks her a question, she nods, sucks her ice-cream. He asks her a question, she nods, sucks her orange. She’s submissively inert. How vacant she is gets to bother me. I’m no longer finding her innocence sweet or her shy smiles cute – she’s way too witheld. I wouldn’t be bothering with her. But Francoise continues bothering with her, making effort, putting the energy of interact in. Probably cus he wants some nice sex (says my 30 years of hard-boiled cynicism head)
And of course it’s moving in the direction of Tragic, her “tender heart crushed” (as one reviewer has put it) by this, her first – and possibly only – love affair.
He’s studying. She’s chewing bleedin fruit again. “Could you eat your apple normally“? he says. She stops. Goes off to make tea. No mind of her own this girl.
He’s stood looking out at the night; she joins him at the window. He puts his hand paternally on her head, doesn’t even look at her naked body, continues looking silently out the window. Not a word said. She goes and puts her nightie on. Game Over.
They’re worlds, and books, and classes apart. She’s asking him what “dialectic” means, he answers as tho talking to somebody too dull to comprehend, too simple in the head.
“I’ve no idea what you’re thinking; whether you’re happy or unhappy. You’re here and not here. You never ask for anything” he’s saying. The penny has at last dropped.
“We’re too unlike to be happy together. It’s my fault. I should have realized, i shouldn’t have dragged you into this. But i really thought you wanted to change. I was sincere about you. I wasn’t trifling with you“.
He’s wrong there. He wanted her to want to change. According to what he wanted, i.e reading books, studying, having ideas, actually having something to say. They’ve never had much connect in the old conversation department. She’s virtually, and literally, dumb.
And she leaves without a murmur. Allows herself to be dumped without one word of protest. Part of her passive victim act.
“She wouldn’t see what i could do for her” he’s explaning to friends. “Did you try to understand what she could do for you“? they say. No, he didn’t. But probably – like me – couldn’t see her doing much at all – apart from munching and sucking.
We get to the final tragic denoument in the nut-house. She shuffles towards like a little old nutter, with a catatonic glaze over her worn out face. A spinsterish old maid already, her life already over. Gonna be knitting loads of socks.
Cue that hopeless, haunted, blanked look to camera at the end.
And the rolling credits give this summation:
“She was one of those souls that makes no sign, but who must be patiently sought, whom one must know how to see. In bygone days an artist would have seen her as the subject of a genre painting. She would have been a seamtress, or a lacemaker“.
Fair enough. But Francois did more than his fair share of patiently seeking her out; very little of her there. He tried sensitively teasing her out; nothing. He tried giving her – admittedly his – life=of-learning life, stimulating her, transforming her soul. She was passively resistant.
One of those mindless souls that makes no sign; content enough to munch fruit, make tea, get the iron out. Have babies.
As you can see i’m pretty down on Isabel Huppert. It’s not that i think she deserves what she got. It’s cus she’s so, well – boring! A dutiful doormat. Not much life in her to live. Her spirit seeming to be empty, absent, not really alive. Not suprising that Francois couldn’t seed it – he couldn’t see it. Too blanked out with white (maybe she needed to be in an ad for Persil. Lol)
Doubt I’ll want to watch this film again. And yet. I’m grateful i have.
My wizened 2008 self gives it 7.5/10
