JEALOUSY: FATE OF A MAN
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India, JURY MEMBER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India
The specialist master Philippe Garrel is a leader of serious and sociological cinema where issues are raised for debates. His new film JEALOUSY, shown at IFFI, Goa, India 2013, highlights the exhilaration of love, the exaltation of art—funny pillars of the modern French psyche it is claimed. "Jealousy" is a cruel, ironic palimpsest that informs of Paris onto passions of past decades—and does so with a pat black-and-white palette by the seventy-nine-year-old cinematographer Willy Kurant ,the early highlight of whose remarkable career was the romantically threadbare, black-and-white Paris in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film "Masculine Feminine". The theme marked by clinical interpretation, puts on emphasis of choices that contemporary life renders all the more misunderstood psychic turmoil revealing the city's topical losses, as well as its gains. Interestingly Garrel plays Louis, a struggling actor with a role in a start-up stage production that he enjoys but that barely pays. He leaves his girlfriend, the pale office worker Clothilde, in a primal scene that Charlotte, their young daughter, sees through a keyhole. In a plain twist the film shows Louis's new lover is another actress, the impulsive and frogged voiced Claudia . The director films the early days of their new romance with a thrilling, manic vigor; one long tracking shot of a mercurial simplicity, showing Louis and Claudia striding through the street as the busy backdrop seems to sweep past them and captures a secret moment of paradise that tends never to end. The tight framing of that shot also filters out the rest of the world, which, nonetheless, quickly impinges on their idyll. The new couple live in a cramped garret in a raw corner of town. Despite leaving Charlotte's mother, Louis continues to see his daughter often and happily, even pinch-babysitting in Clothilde's apartment when she comes home late from work—but he hardly contributes to her upkeep, since he himself is barely getting by. Garrel told me that, in 1968, it was possible to survive in Paris on three or four francs a day. In "Regular Lovers," he suggested the emotional toll of the self-inflicted bohemian poverty of that era, and in "Jealousy" he returns to the subject with an even more blunt and bitter self-deprecation. A strange thing happens in the movie: the action seems to spiral downward, to settle toward a sodden stasis. As I watched the film, I sensed that the drama was losing energy; it turned out that the characters were losing energy, that the lack of money became a lack of energy. "You don't love someone in a void," Claudia says, but that's exactly what the couple have created around them—and, especially, what Louis imposes on her. In one painfully telling scene, Claudia arrives home and happily tells Louis that she has been offered a part-time job as a clerk in an archive. Louis tells her that she shouldn't abandon her acting career so soon, even though she hasn't been cast in a role in six years. He sees her choice as one between money and art; she longs for a more comfortable apartment and a less constrained daily life, but it is, above all, a dynamic principle that she lacks—the daily round of interactions and discussions, of busy-ness that arises in business. And, after following a downward slope in the movie's first half, Claudia rises again in the second as, despite Louis's injunction, she finds a way to reconnect with life. In short "Jealousy" is a story of generations. Olga Milshtein, who plays Charlotte, is an extraordinarily poised and dialectical child actor, and her scenes with Louis are filmed with a great grace of tenderness. We are given to understand Charlotte's father is an artist and the child is as conservative as any—dependent on order and stability, and aspiring to the normative and unified family that she lost—and, paradoxically. Garrel is a filmmaker of generations. It narrates about a 30 year old man's tragic life being betrayed by his present lover who means a lot to him. His earlier has left him and in his trial to face life with a chin high up. As a theatre actor the protagonist struggles hard his entire life to stand up to cruel situation and being frustrated tries a suicide. It fails him and he continues to change his pattern of life to a better scape of living. But is it a dream or a reality to be realized with gusto. Garrel's desire to spruce up the actor's life by giving the benefit of doubt stays. But the film end in a hospital with his sister by the cator's side. Thus the film is nothing but a fate of a man, an actor that stands smothered by social circumstance. A good film and won crowds at IFFI, Goa, India.
